The following are excerpts from the author’s speech to the 10th annual Meeting the Challenge Labor Conference, which was held at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in March 2002. (The complete text can be obtained by writing to Meeting the Challenge Committee c/o Peter Rachleff, History Department, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota 55105, and enclosing $2.00 for postage.) The conference was endorsed by a wide range of local trade unions.

On September 11 of last year some 3,000 people were killed as a result of murderous aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the northeastern part of the country, thousands of working men and women of all races and many nationalities still suffer every day from the loss of loved ones, of jobs, and of their dreams for a better future as a result of those attacks.

We are often told that September 11 changed everything in America…But the closer we look, the more we see that has not changed. The economic crisis that has cost so many jobs in both manufacturing and service industries had already gathered plenty of steam months before the bombing attacks.

The President and Congress have proclaimed a War against Terrorism. What does that mean to the struggles and hopes of working people?

Our country went through a lot of wars in the last 100 years: two huge world wars, a bloody three-year war to suppress the Philippines’ independence struggle after 1900, marine occupation of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua during the 1910s and 1920s, and then since 1945 there came Korea and Vietnam — both long and bloody — and also the swift assaults on Grenada, Panama, and Iraq, to name only the best known [wars or military actions since World War II]. But the War on Terrorism is different. This time Congress gave the President war powers, but it did not even name the country we were going to war with. Bush publicly targeted any country which supports or shelters terrorists. And only one member of Congress (Barbara Lee of California) even raised a question about it.

Past Wars Brought Attacks on Liberties

What does a state of war without limits in time, space, or objectives mean for working people and their movement? The first thing to remember is that every war in this century has seriously undermined the civil liberties that are our country’s pride and joy. That was true whether our government’s objectives were clear and noble or hidden and rotten. Freedom of speech, freedom to organize, freedom from police surveillance can disappear quickly in wartime. They disappear quickly — but it can take a long time to win them back after the war itself is over.

World War I, proclaimed as a war to make the world safe for democracy, was especially hard on democracy at home. Soon after Congress had declared war on Germany and Austria it enacted an Espionage Act. That law made it a crime to publish any reports that could be construed as aiding the enemy. It also passed a Trading with the Enemy Act, which gave the Post Office authority to censor the foreign language press and to bar from the mails anything that appeared to oppose the war effort. One of the papers banned from the mails in 1918 was the Minneapolis Socialist weekly New Times. Also in 1918 these laws were amended by the Sedition Act. It outlawed any negative remark about the government, the flag, or even military uniforms. In New York the editor of the Yiddish-language Daily Forward (soon to be banned) summed up the situation when he wrote:

War! The United States Attorney-General of free America has decreed: “Keep your mouth shut.” And America shut up. Even my woman neighbor’s baby, which used to cry all night, is now quiet.

The Justice Department then authorized a privately funded organization of 250,000 civilian volunteers, called the American Protective League, to ferret out disloyal words and deeds in every factory and neighborhood of America. Back in 1918 the Ford Motor Company joined the Protective program with such enthusiasm that it had more than 100 operatives supervised by three managers at the huge Highland Park plant, all assigned to spy on their work mates. Think carefully about these volunteer spies: President Bush indicated in his State of the Union Address that he wants to bring back a Citizens Corp of neighbor-watchers, as part of his “war on terrorism.”

The official historian of the American Protective League boasted at the end of the war that his league had kept America safe by instilling “fear of the silent and stern hand searching out in the dark and taking first one then another German or pro-German away…It was fear that held our enemy population down,” he wrote, “fear and nothing else.”

The Military Intelligence Division of the War Department initiated extensive surveillance and wiretaps throughout the country, focusing their attention especially on radical workers’ organizations, African Americans, and the foreign-born. Police surveillance in the U.S. was stricter than anything found in France, where the war was actually being fought. More than 2,000 people were arrested under these laws, and 1,055 sentenced to jail. Most famous among them was the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, who stayed in jail until 1923.

Widespread Opposition to World War I

Repression was especially open and brutal in World War I because so many people opposed it. Keep in mind that 13 per cent of the U.S. population in 1917 had been born abroad. If we add Americans with foreign-born parents to that number, the number rises to 34 per cent of all residents in 1917–18. And by far the largest single group among them were then of German ancestry. The years between 1921 and 1965 were the only time in our history that immigration was reduced to a trickle. In our own times immigration is again a central feature of working people’s lives — as everyone here knows. Once again today the proportion of our population born abroad is again approaching that of 1917 — and once again immigrants are being treated by the Attorney General as individuals who pose such a special danger to the country that the Bill of Rights and due process of law should not apply to them. That makes the experience of World War I important for us to remember today, even though it was very different from the “war” we now face.

We like to think that everyone then marched happily to the tune of “The Yanks Are Coming.” But in fact there was enormous opposition to the declaration of war in 1917, and in those days the news media reported different points of view. (Try to find that today!) Fifty members of the House of Representatives voted against the war declaration (including 4 of the 9 Congressmen from Minnesota), as did six Senators. Tens of millions of working people either had family in Germany or other enemy countries, or (unlike World War II) felt at least some sympathy for the German cause. The Socialist Party opposed the declaration of war, and it was then at the peak of its strength. It held the mayor’s office in Minneapolis. It campaigned vigorously to bring the carnage of the Western and Eastern Fronts to an end, and to resist the oppressive measures here at home. And it protested that working people were forced to pay the heavy price of the war. It demanded that the government “conscript wealth.” Jewish, Polish, Finish, and Ukrainian immigrants despised our new ally, Tsarist Russia, as their bitter oppressor. All up and down the Great Plains old-time Populists regarded the financiers of the British Empire as their main enemy. In Oklahoma white, Black, and Creek Indian farmers took arms together and seized local courthouses in revolt against the draft.

Moreover, the spring and summer of 1917 saw the biggest strike wave in American history down to that time. Strikers shut down basic extractive industries like lumber, oil, and copper in the months after the U.S. government had declared war. Five cities had general strikes in 1917 and early 1918: Springfield, Illinois; Waco, Texas; Billings, Montana; and Kansas City, Missouri. The fifth city was Minneapolis, which AFL unions shut down for half a day in sympathy with striking streetcar workers.

Federal authorities made special efforts to keep the strike movement and the anti-war movement from converging. They often arranged sympathetic hearings and concessions to unions, while they attacked revolutionaries and peace advocates ferociously. They knew very well that, by the middle of 1917, workers in France, England, Germany, Russia, and Italy were also staging large strikes and that huge numbers of people in the cities and countryside of Europe had become convinced that the only way to end the misery of the war was through social revolution. To prevent similar developments in the U.S. the government rounded up 166 leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, in the fall of 1917, tried them for sedition, and shipped them off to jail. Thirty-two states followed suit by enacting “criminal syndicalism” laws — making it a crime to strike for political purposes or to advocate “crime, sabotage, violence or other unlawful methods of terrorism.” Minnesota was one of the first to do so. Some of those statutes were used again during the 1930s , while scores of Wobblies imprisoned under their terms during the war stayed in jail for as much as 20 years.

End of War Did Not End Repression

Here is the main thing to remember: the end of the war did not end the repression it had unleashed all across America. Although the sections of the Espionage Act dealing with censorship by the Post Office were repealed in 1921, the rest of the law remained on the books and was upheld by the Supreme Court. The wiretapping of telephone calls not only remained a common FBI practice, but was actually expanded during Prohibition in the name of fighting gangsters. Only after Prohibition was repealed did Congress in 1934 make it illegal for police to tap phone conversations.

World War II and Cold War: Repression Renewed

But six years later, war clouds loomed over the country again. At the Republican convention of 1940 Minnesota’s own Harold Stassen gave the keynote address. In words that would sound all too familiar to us today, he denounced the New Deal for hobbling industry “by bureaucratic interference and dreamy-eyed government delays at every turn while the army and navy plead in vain for the release of restrictions so they can speed up defense,” and he added that President Roosevelt had exposed the country to a “fifth column of traitors.” Congress passed the Smith Act, which was quickly used to imprison the Trotskyist leaders of the Teamsters here in the Twin Cities. And President Roosevelt himself authorized the Attorney General to listen in on activities of persons he suspected of being spies or subversives.

Not even the surrender of Germany and Japan could bring that surveillance to a halt. On the contrary, President Truman ruled that with the Cold War “domestic security” was in danger, and he unleashed wholesale FBI use of wiretaps on suspected activists — ranging from Communists to Martin Luther King, Jr. Popular anger over police surveillance of civil rights struggles, while Ku Klux Klan bombers destroyed African American churches and homes without fear of imprisonment, played a major role in inducing the Supreme Court to rule in 1967 (at last) that government taps constituted illegal search and seizure. But less that two years later Congress made bugs and wiretaps legal once again, in response to President Nixon’s campaign against crime and violence in our streets. His attorney general (John Mitchell) authorized phone-tapping surveillance by federal, state, or local police against anyone who agitated against the war in Vietnam.

Once again the Supreme Court stepped in. In 1972 the Court declared Mitchell’s wiretaps illegal. By this time huge public protests against police surveillance had been unleashed by leaked news reports of the COINTELPRO program started by the FBI in 1967 to disrupt America’s left-wingers and Black nationalists by provoking them into killing each other, and also by revelations that city Red Squads were tapping thousands of citizens’ phones and that government officials were using wiretaps for all sorts of personal reasons. Henry Kissinger even had taps placed on the phone of Nixon’s speech writer William Safire, and Nixon had his wayward brother Donald tapped. In 1984 some 3,000 citizens of my home town, New Haven, finally won compensation for illegal wiretapping by the police in the 1970s.

But even then there was no secure and happy ending for the Bill of Rights. The 1990s saw a new wave of terrorist bombings — some by foreigners, others American super-patriots: the World Trade Center in 1993, Oklahoma City in 1995, the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. President Bill Clinton asked Congress to restore police authority to bug and tap. Congress refused.

Then came September 11. Attorney General Ashcroft now had clear sailing for what he had always wanted. With one lone dissenting vote in the Senate (Russ Feingold ofWisconsin) and an overwhelming majority in the House, Congress enacted [the U.S. Patriot Act —] the most sweeping authority in American history for police to search homes, scan computer use, bug phones, and also to indefinitely detain suspects who are foreign citizens without trial or even charges. The much-publicized Senate provision that these police powers will expire in 2005 actually applies to only a small portion of the act. An indefinite war against an unspecified enemy has brought with it authorization for an Attorney General, famous for his contempt for civil liberties, to do whatever he wants for as long as he wants, as long as he can call it “fighting terrorism.”

Working People Always Fought Back

To help you and me chart our course in response to these new threats, it is important to remember how hard it has always been to get back freedoms taken away in wartime. But it is just as important to remember how working people fought back, and shaped their own plans to improve American politics and society.

Let’s take a few minutes to go back again to Minnesota and World War I. I have said that the state’s business leaders used wartime agencies and wartime public fears to drive home a fierce attack on working people. But right next door in North Dakota the Nonpartisan League won control of all the major governmental bodies between 1915 and 1920, and it instituted the most democratic state government this country has ever seen. Although the League declared its support of the war effort and sold Liberty Bonds, it also demanded “conscription of wealth” and made North Dakota a haven for persecuted peace advocates and socialists from other states.

The Nonpartisan League entered a full slate of state-wide candidates in the 1920 primary elections — again most of them in the Republican primaries. Led by the moderately reformist farmers’ champion Henrick Shipstead, who filed for Governor, the League came close to victory in his battle for the Republican candidacy in a race that left hardly anyone even bothering to take part in the Democratic primary. Two years later (in 1922) Shipstead was elected to the U.S. Senate on the slate of the new Farmer-Labor Party. For the next twenty years serious electoral battles in Minnesota would be those between Farmer-Labor and the Republicans.

The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party

The new party had grown out of the Working People’s Nonpartisan Political League, formed by the State Federation of Labor at its 1919 convention with leaders like Susie Stageberg of Red Wing and St. Paul’s own William Mahoney. It worked in partnership with the farmer-based Nonpartisan League but pushed toward a new party — a party dedicated to defending First Amendment freedoms and the workers’ right to organize, winning the eight-hour day, and public ownership of railroads, telephone service, packing houses, grain elevators, and natural resources. The Working People’s League declared that it wanted to end the control of domestic and foreign policy by “autocratic selfish private interests,” and to put government in the hands of those “who work by hand and brain.”

Farmer-Labor entered its own candidates in the state elections of November 1922, and it drew about a quarter of the votes cast. The Minnesota party also aligned itself with the new national Farmer-Labor Party in the presidential elections. The national movement had its main base in the new party formed by the militant and creative Chicago Federation of Labor during its major organizing drives in steel and meat packing. The Chicago Federation underscored the link between struggles for democracy at home and those of workers in other lands by endorsing struggles of rank-and-file workers to control their industries in Europe and America, pledging support to the battles of people in Mexico, Ireland, and India to free themselves from the control of foreign capital, and demanding that workers’ representatives be sent to the upcoming peace congress in Paris (and here I am quoting the Chicago platform) “pledged and organized to enforce the destruction of autocracy, militarism, and economic imperialism throughout the world, and to bring about worldwide disarmament and open diplomacy, to the end that there should be no more kings and no more wars.”

The Citizens Alliance in Minnesota and business leaders around the country had a forceful and effective answer to these efforts by working people to curb big business and strengthen democracy. Business organizations crusaded to “save our country from foreigners.” They charged that aliens were genetically incapable of appreciating America’s constitutional government and free enterprise. State and federal governments competed with each other to round up and deport subversive aliens during the postwar Red Scare. Although the public roundups largely disappeared after 1922, the number of individuals deported continued to rise quietly throughout the 1920s and reached a grand climax with the expulsion of 365,000 Mexicans between 1930 and 1933.

Union Growth in Wartime

Just as the federal government was determined to stamp out radical and antiwar sentiment, so it was also anxious to preserve industrial peace and keep production going. Its agencies during both world wars moved in quickly to settle disputes. In fact, workers learned that if they walked out, someone from Washington would be there by nightfall, trying to negotiate a settlement — just as they did during the 1917 Twin Cities streetcar strike, despite the loud protests of the Citizens Alliance and the Public Safety Commission. Most noteworthy of all, the federal commission set up in 1917 to administer the country’s railroads instituted the eight-hour day, abolished piece work in repair shops, and helped union membership grow to some 90 percent of the entire work force in rail. Only the racist barriers of most railroad unions kept the level of organization on the railroads from reaching 100 percent.

As soon as the war ended the railroads were returned to private hands, federal labor agencies were shut down, and business everywhere simply ignored pro-labor wartime decrees. By the summer of 1920 the war boom had given way to depression — for almost two years heavy unemployment stalked the land. Now the boss held the whip hand. Business unleashed an all-out attack against the labor movement, crushing unions in mass-production industries. The depression year 1922 witnessed some of the biggest strikes in the country’s history — in coal, in textiles, in meat packing, and on the railroads. In every case workers fought under the worst conditions trying to save their earlier gains. In every case unions were beaten to a pulp, and the Open Shop era returned in the context of the crusade against foreigners. Now working without unions was given the glorious new name: The American Plan.

World War II proved both similar and different. When war orders boosted the economy, workers flocked into unions. Between 1940 and 1947 close to 85 percent of the millions of workers given a chance to vote chose unions.

Lessons

So, what have we learned? Back in 1917 the pacifist Randolph Bourne wrote: “War is the health of the state.” Have you noticed that Bush has stopped bellowing about “big government”? The powers of the government to shadow, police, and direct the everyday life and activities of working people have grown formidably every time our country has gone to war. Workers have won back democratic rights only partially and only over many long years of hard battles. Business and government leaders have rallied American citizens to beware of neighbors who were not born here — saying those aliens do not and cannot appreciate our great way of life. The internment and expropriation of everyone of Japanese ancestry in 1942 provides the extreme case of the oppression that has resulted from such campaigns, but by no means the only one.

But we have also seen that working people have stood together in battles to protect and even—as in the case of the March on Washington Movement and the Farmer-Labor Party — to expand democratic rights and participation during crises. At the very least they have rallied — as they did with the demand to “conscript wealth” — to prevent the whole war burden from being placed on the backs of working people, while the rich and powerful only magnified their own wealth and power. And we have seen that major wars provided the setting for dramatic expansion of labor organization — only to face powerful conservative campaigns to roll back that expansion when the war economy was shut down.

“War on Terrorism” Is Different

Finally, everything I have said today should remind us that, for all the similarities to past wars, the unbounded and undefined “war on terrorism,” which has unfolded since September 11, is in important ways very different from anything that has come before…

More important — and more fundamental — is the whole shift in business strategy since the early 1970s. Corporations now routinely relocate operations around the world in an insatiable quest for cheaper labor. Right after World War II, when business and government integrated the new industrial unions into the economy and strategies of the Cold War, more than one-half of all the value added by manufacture in the entire world was produced within the United States. That was the material basis not only of the success of the industrial union movement, but also of the limited welfare state that the movement helped create. Think of how different the world economy had become by 1995. The World Bank then did a study which revealed that 78 percent of the workers engaged in manufacturing in the whole world are employed not just outside of the United States, but outside of all the rich industrial powers of Western Europe, Japan, and North America.

Globalization and “Market Forces”

The shift of investment capital out of this country is the flip side of the resurgence of immigration, and even sweatshops, in the United States. As one recent immigrant put it neatly: “We are here because you are there.” Certainly any immigrant knows what that means.

And here is the final lesson of our times. Our government now proclaims that the best answer to any problem will be created by “market forces.” What we must remember is that markets are crafted by force — and always have been. Government decrees and appropriations, the lending power of international capital, international treaties, and, in the last analysis, bombers, missiles, and helicopter gunships not only provide international business operations with protection, but also shape their possibilities of expansion — like the projected American oil pipeline from Kazakhstan through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. That was true before 1945, when the great industrial powers carved up the world between them into colonies and spheres of influence. It is true today, when the military might of the U.S. is used to make the entire globe safe for multinational corporations.

NAFTA’s Not About “Free Trade”

Washington tells us every day that the hope of the world lies in expanded free trade. But we are learning the hard way that NAFTA [the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement] and the pending Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) are not by any means just about shipping goods back and forth between different countries. Did you see the Bill Moyers show back in February about chapter 11 of NAFTA — the stealth chapter of the treaty? It defines regulations adopted by any government in our Hemisphere to protect environment, health, or labor in a way that might reduce a company’s profits as illegal taking of corporate property. It authorizes corporations to sue the government for millions in alleged loss of profits — any government!

For example, when California ordered discontinuing the use of PTBE, a gasoline additive that was getting into water supplies and causing cancer, the Canadian company that makes the additive sued the government of California for $970 million in compensation. The case is being tried in a secret, offshore special tribunal created by NAFTA. Corporations can now put their headquarters in tax havens like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands, run production in Minnesota, Guatemala, and Brazil, and sue any of the governments of any of those places in a NAFTA court for any loss of profits allegedly caused by the laws enacted by governments the people of those countries elected.

Three Imperatives

All these thoughts add up to three things.

First, we must rededicate our labor movement as a social movement directed to strengthening democracy in the workplace, government, and social life, and turning them toward people’s needs.

Second, we have sung, “Solidarity Forever,” but solidarity is now more important than ever — solidarity among working people of all kinds, and solidarity across national boundaries. We are all in the same boat.

Third, as we confront the menace of terrorist attacks, we must listen to the wise voice of Congresswoman Lee: “We are grieving. We need to step back and think about this thing so that it doesn’t spiral out of control.”