On the Origins of the Police — Part 3
Leading up to World War 1 there was an explosion of radical activity by trade unionists and Black people began to move to urban cities where they faced more racism from the white populace, right wing unions, and racist police. However, the police also repressed popular unionization campaigns and the working class as the industrialization sparked a militant union movement despite its chauvinism.
The period following the “2nd American Revolution” or the Civil War saw the rise of a more modern form of policing as well as the proliferation of white vigilante terror against Black people and those who stood against racism and police state terror.
Industrial Capitalism
Following the Union victory in the Civil War, Northern industrialists seized on this opportunity to make use of the cheap labor pool in the South. The South was a place where labor was weak because of backwards attitudes towards Blacks and the chauvinism which drew them into alignment with the plantation elite rather than fighting for their own class interest against the bosses. White Labor was complicit in its own forestalling of progress and was used by the ruling elite to beat back the gains of Blacks, which benefitted all of Southern Society such as eliminating laws restricting voting based on land and class, free public education, and giving land to the tillers.
The Northern victory represented the victory of one mode of production over another, of the Northern industrialists over the Southern planters unleashing the industrial capacity of the North. Cities that had only tens of thousands grew to the hundreds of thousands at the don of the 20th century due to the influx of new immigrants as well as Southern Blacks seeking to escape white terror and vigilante violence. “The heavy industry that accounted for the most intensive expansion was concentrated in this region: iron and steel in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Buffalo, and Youngstown; rubber in Akron; machinery in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, and Detroit. By 1900, 8 of the country’s largest 15 cities were in this region” of the Northeast and Midwest.
Industrialization was characterized by large scale immigration, producing cities that were mainly occupied by foreign born immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Many of them were semi-skilled and brought their children. By 1900 the major cities proportions of industrial workers were overwhelmingly immigrant, rarely was it less than 60% immigrant labor occupying industrial labor jobs.
The unstable capitalist economy of booms and busts forced people into regular periods of unemployment. Wages were obscenely low forcing whole families to work to maintain a marginal standard of living. Moreover, housing conditions were depressing where large families were crowded into small airless rooms with poor sanitation. It was these conditions that shaped the growing industrial working class.
The police during this time were mainly employed to force “Protestant ethics” onto the new immigrants and keep them confined to their “own” communities. In addition, Labor spies infiltrated budding working class formations and there were armies of strikebreakers being formed by private corporations tied to industrial giants like the Rockerfellers and Carnegies. Workers also formed themselves into a variety of fraternal organizations, ethnic self-help groups, and political action or discussion groups. Many immigrants were bringing anarchist, socialist, and communist ideologies to the mix when they arrived and this influenced their labor militancy and class consciousness.
Police at this time began to modernize in lockstep with industrialization. They carried guns and clubs and made frequent arrests for minor offenses. They walked ten to twelve hour beat patrols which allowed them to nearly completely structure urban social activity. Moreover, their discipline and coordinated activity backed by local ruling class politicians gave them the capacity for overall socialization beyond what their numbers account for.
Capitalists turned to the police to handle aspects of the reproduction of the working class as a class that needed to be subservient to industry and business. The post-Civil war period was characterized by the expansion of local capitalists devoting substantial resources in order to control and direct various elements of the state apparatus for their ends. Urban public expenditure in 1905 for example was as follows: education (24%), police (14.2%) (excluding money for corrections), health (9.5%), fire (8.5%), charities and corrections (6.6%). The police at the beginning of the 20th century had become more than just slave catchers, they were 1,000 man departments that were spread out throughout cities with power to patrol many city blocks several times each day and possessed military capabilities to deal with the unrest of the working class and oppressed. Police were six to ten times larger than they were in 1865 across urban cities.
World War 1
The Russian revolution took place in the turmoil of World War 1. The war started in 1914 and lasted until 1918. This was a war in which two blocs of imperialist great powers fought each other. One bloc included Great Britain, France, and the U.S. (and Russia was part of this alliance); and the other was led by Germany with its allies. They were fighting for global supremacy, particularly control over the oppressed colonial regions of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
This was monstrous, mechanized, modern war. Combatants were gassed, torpedoed, mined, bombarded by unseen artillery, machine-gunned. Slaughter on a scale unseen before in human history… 10 million dead, and another 20 million wounded.
When Russia entered the war, all the major parties in Russia and most of the major parties in Europe supported the war in the name of patriotism… all except the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin. It took an internationalist stand, training people to see how this war was not in the interests of oppressed humanity and calling on people in the imperialist countries to rise up in revolution and defeat their own governments.
World War 1 intensified all the suffering in society. Some 1.5 million Russians died in the war, and three million were wounded. People were going without food. The war set off a “crisis of legitimacy” in Russian society… and a revolutionary climate took hold. Workers rioted and struck for better conditions. Women took the streets. Many soldiers refused to suppress the protests, and mutiny spread. The Tsar was overthrown.12
But the new government did nothing to change the fundamental conditions facing the masses of people… and it made secret deals with the British and French imperialists to keep Russia in the war.
The Bolshevik Party led by Lenin was prepared to act and lead as no other force in Russian society was. It had grassroots strength and organization in factory committees, in the armed forces, in the soviets. These were the illegal, anti-government representative assemblies of workers contesting for power in the big towns and cities…. The Bolshevik program and vision resonated widely and deeply in a society in crisis, upheaval, and looking for direction. The Bolshevik Party led the masses of people to see through the various maneuvers of this new regime. It formulated demands for “land, peace, and bread” that spoke to overriding needs in a situation of horrible suffering and privation — but which no other party would speak to. And in October, Lenin and the Bolsheviks led the masses in an insurrection. This was the October Revolution.
The first decree took Russia out of the war and called for an end to the slaughter, and called for a peace without conquest or annexation. The second decree empowered peasants to seize the vast landholdings of the tsarist crown, the aristocratic landholding classes, and the church (which itself owned large tracts of land).
The revolution moved quickly to take important measures. It abolished the whole church- sanctioned system of marriage that codified male authority over women and children. Divorce was made easy to obtain. This was very important in providing women with greater social freedom. Equal pay for jobs was enacted. Maternity hospital care was provided free; and in 1920 the Soviet Union became the first country in modern Europe to make abortion legal. Pretty closely connected to this in spirit was the fact that the Soviet Union legalized homosexual relations.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which included 12 large national republics and 25 autonomous regions (and many smaller districts and other units). The new central government recognized the right to autonomy — this meant self-government, in republics and regions.
In a 1917 decree, all minority nationalities were granted the right to instruction in native languages in all schools and universities. Many minority nationalities that had no written languages were supplied with scripts. The Soviet state devoted considerable resources to the mass production of books, journals, and newspapers in the minority regions, and the distribution of film and encouragement of folk ensembles. Books were being published in over 40 non-Russian languages.
Anti-War Movement
At the outbreak of the war, American peace societies counted among its ranks the likes of business tycoon Andrew Carnegie, social reformers Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, several university presidents and future Secretary of War Newton Baker. As scholar Roland Marchand explains, the pre-war peace movement was “an affluent, prestigious and ‘practical’ reform [movement];” however, this changed in the four short years between 1914 and 1918. The small, elite and establishment peace movement of the early war years was overcome by the mass working-class and increasing radical anti-militarist and anti-capitalist movements of the later years. Driven by increasingly dire economic conditions and angered by wartime conscription, the American anti-war movement of 1917–1918 rose to near-revolution-like levels before being suppressed by aggressive government repression.
In the U.S., opposition to the European war cut across political and class lines. In 1914, nearly every sector of American society advocated for a policy of neutrality. Early on, President Woodrow Wilson declared, “There is such a thing as a nation too proud to fight.”[21] Prominent pacifist and liberal organizations soon rushed to echo the call for U.S. neutrality. The establishment peace societies centered in the Midwest and East Coast rushed to form new organizations to spread a message of amity. The most important and largest organization for this cause was the American Union against Militarism (AUAM). The AUAM grew out of the Henry Street Peace Committee — prominent pacifist group made up of elite social reformers.[22] The new secretary of the AUAM, Roger Nash Baldwin, the prominent social worker and noted Progressive, remarked that AUAM’s membership at the beginning of the war was “so much more prominent nationally than [those] in any other peace organizations.”[23] From the beginning, the was meant to be a big tent organization that brought together Progressive liberals, trade unions, and church groups in opposition to U.S. involvement in the war.
Although the early efforts of anti-war organizations such as the AUAM introduced the possibility of a united coalition of peace activists, the rhetoric and diversity of the anti-war activists was clear at both the national and local level. Even though the various political factions in the country were largely united in favor of U.S. neutrality, the arguments against the war differed widely between establishment groups and left-wing radicals. For national peace organizations like the AUAM, opposition to the war centered on “pacifist and civil libertarian principles.”[24] But for more radical, left wing organizations which included the Socialist Party and IWW, opposition to the war was grounded in Marxist and class-conscious principles of anti-militarism.
The socialist locals, IWW unions and militant farmer organizations all expressed their opposition to the war in class-based terms. Unlike national organizations, radical opposition to the war was viewed as a fight against capitalist exploitation and oppression of the working-class.
Anti-union campaigns were carried out with an iron fist. IWW meetings were broken into and leaders were brutalized. In 1917 local police aided the Justice Department in raiding IWW headquarters in eleven cities and arrested hundreds of union leaders for allegededly interfering with the draft for World War 1. Red squads which were special arms to deal with communist and left wing organizing continued their repression. In 1919 they carried out raids on a range of leftist organizations. They arrested over 4,000 and deported almost 1,000 people. Local police supported the “American Protective League” whose goal was to combat espionage, sabotage, round up draft dodgers, and spy on immigrants. Many of these “volunteers” were just off duty cops.
In April of 1921 organizers with the IWW which organized across races and genders had their meeting halls raided and had its supporters arrested and beaten with ax handles. Men, women, and children were victims of this violence. Identified leaders were driven to the desert, out of town, beaten unconscious and abandoned. Although many victims could identify their attackers, no charges were ever filed.
In June 1924, a vigilante mob, organized by the police attacked IWW halls with clubs and guns destroying furniture, beat men and women, tarred and feathered leaders, and scalded several children with hot coffee.
Sedition Act & Espionage Act
The Sedition Act of 1918, enacted during World War I, made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States” or to “willfully urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of the production” of the things “necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war.” The act, along with other similar federal laws, was used to convict at least 877 people in 1919 and 1920, according to a report by the attorney general. In 1919, the Court heard several important free speech cases — including Debs v. United States and Abrams v. United States — involving the constitutionality of the law. In both cases, the Court upheld the convictions as well as the law.
The Espionage Act had a legitimate purpose: to try to stop the real threat of subversion, sabotage, and malicious interference with the war effort, including the controversial reinstatement of the draft. It’s context that’s worth recalling asDemocrats and Republicans alike clamor to use the law against Assange
On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war on Germany and for the next nine weeks it engaged in robust, contentious debate about the proper scope of an espionage bill. Some elements were struck from the first drafts. Originally, the White House wanted to censor the press, but Congress — reflecting fierce resistance in the newspapers — killed the provision. A provision to let the postmaster general regulate the mails remained, but was narrowed to restrict suppressible materials to those urging treason or lawbreaking that would hinder the war effort. A ban on efforts to “cause disaffection” in the military was replaced with a more closely tailored prohibition on efforts to cause insubordination, mutiny, or disloyalty — that last word used, as it was in Wilson’s speech, to mean disloyal action, not private sentiment. Overall, the act wasn’t meant, as it has often been represented, to stifle antiwar dissent, but to address particular wartime problems that officials had good reason to worry about: draft avoidance, sabotage, espionage.
Nonetheless, the Espionage Act was deeply problematic. Above all, its wording, even in its softer version, left far too much room for aggressive prosecutors and overzealous patriots to interpret it as they wished. (Things got worse the next year when Congress passed more draconian amendments that came to be called the Sedition Act; that law outlawed statements during war that were “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive … about the form of government of the United States.” Unlike the Espionage Act proper, though, the Sedition Act was repealed when World War I ended.)
The resulting crackdown on antiwar groups under the Espionage Act — and the shame it brought to Wilson and the nation — is widely known. Postmaster General Albert Burleson, a reactionary and intolerant Texan considered by Edward House to be “the most belligerent member of the cabinet,” denied use of the mails to publications like the left-wing Masses and scared many others into silence. Around the country, meanwhile, the U.S. attorneys in Thomas Gregory’s Justice Department prosecuted socialists, pacifists, and German-Americans on flimsy grounds. Many people were arrested for crimes of mere speech. Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was prosecuted for making a movie about the American Revolution that depicted the British — now a U.S. ally — in an unfavorable light. The socialist leader Eugene Debs was thrown in jail for aspeech that defended freedom of speech. Of 1,500 arrests under the law, only 10 involved actual sabotage. To the dismay of progressives, moreover, not even the Supreme Court stopped the prosecutions. In March 1919, the liberal icon Oliver Wendell Holmes, coining his famous “clear and present danger” standard, led the court in upholding three dubious Espionage Act verdicts, including the conviction of Debs.
Laws regulating demonstrations, meetings, and leafletting granted the police broad powers to determine when, where, and what speech would be allowed. It thus became the explicit function of the police to suppress the free exercise of political speech.