Unlocked: America's forgotten collapse into fascism
Yes, it happened before and the similarities are frightening.
In 1917 Americans wanted peace, but President Woodrow Wilson wanted a third term. He was unpopular and had barely won re-election. As a Democrat and a progressive, the idea of Wilson was appealing, but he’d broken many promises he never really intended on keeping. Black leaders W. E. B. Du Bois and Monroe Trotter had initially supported Wilson. He seemed to be the one candidate who could be pushed on matters of race, but Wilson’s immediate re-segregation of the Federal Government revealed the truth.
Born a Southerner nearly a decade before the end of the Civil War, Wilson spent those formative years being served by the Black man enslaved in his home. Believing white supremacy was the natural order, Wilson worked diligently throughout his careers as an academic, administrator and politician attempting to force Black people back into subjugation.
Wilson aimed his racism at anyone who wasn’t visibly white. However, if you were visibly white and willing to work on behalf of white supremacy, Wilson would gladly support you. His support also worked to further divide marginalized groups. This can be seen in his backing of the 19th Amendment as well as in his nomination of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. The first Jewish person to hold the seat, Brandeis was also a eugenicist who spent his nearly 23 years on the bench avoiding civil rights cases. Brandeis was also instrumental in gaining Wilson’s support for the Balfour Declaration, injecting their particular and evolving brand of white supremacy into US foreign policy.
Wilson’s reelection slogan “He kept us out of war” was true up to that point, but implied one more promise he was about to break. WWI was destroying Europe and Americans wanted no part of it. But Wilson’s mission to expand white supremacy could not be denied, so he called up his old friend, newspaperman George Creel. Together, they created the Committee on Public Information that fought for, as Creel put it, “the minds of men, for the ‘conquest of their convictions.’” The Creel Committee created America’s first large-scale, nation-wide propaganda effort and it helped to turn just enough of the US population from disinterested to blood-thirsty in no time.
The Committee focused on Germany and their military dictatorship, hoping to strike fear in the hearts of good, white Americans, but it wasn’t quite clever enough. Mostly it was just the rich elite who wanted in on the war. More than 40 different peace groups helped most Americans see through the propaganda. Then came the Espionage Act.
As described by the Free Speech Center, “The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited obtaining information, recording pictures, or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
A clear freedom of speech issue, the government was sued, but in Schenck v. The United States the Supreme Court declared the Espionage Act constitutional. Soon films were seized by police. Newspapers were confiscated by the Post Office. Newspaper editors were arrested. Wilson’s political rivals were arrested. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for a speech that “obstructed recruiting”.
Americans were scared and then it got worse. Dozens of violent, white, right-wing vigilante groups formed across the country, breaking into homes, robbing and arresting people. There were the Knights of Liberty and the American Defense Society and the Boy Spies of America. The Bisbee Workman’s Loyalty League and the Citizen’s Protective League illegally kidnapped and deported 1,300 people. The 250,000-member American Protective League — an official auxiliary of the Department of Justice — arrested more than 50,000 “slackers”—men thought to be dodging the draft or not buying enough war bonds or who were just generally not publicly patriotic enough.
It shouldn’t have to be said that this lawlessness included mass white-on-Black violence. Hundreds of Black people were killed and thousands displaced during the East St. Louis Massacre of 1917. Hundreds more were killed during the dozens of white-on-Black attacks across the country throughout the summer of 1919. At least 50 Black people were murdered during the Ocoee Massacre of 1920.
The Land of the Free had collapsed and it may have disappeared forever had it not been for a pandemic. The latest strain of influenza had been killing its way around the world and Wilson chose to ignore it. He never said a public word about the pandemic and in April of 1919 he began to cough so violently, his doctor thought he’d been poisoned. Influenza had him. Soon Wilson would suffer a series of strokes, severely paralyzing his left side and leaving him partially blind. Then he was besieged by a near-fatal urinary tract infection.
In January of 1920, after recovering from the UTI, the pandemic got him again. Wilson’s wife Edith kept him hidden from the public and his staff. Wilson refused to step down from the presidency and served out his remaining months in seclusion.
Without Wilson at the helm, many vigilante groups dissolved, their memberships frequently absorbed by the Ku Klux Klan—a group that’s rebirth had been aided largely by Wilson. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge released those convicted under the Espionage Act, the last of whom was set free in 1923. Wilson died the same year, thankfully, along with his desire for a third term and a tyrannical, lawless, officially white supremacist United States.
Wilson’s death, however, only slowed his influence. The KKK swayed countless elections, leading to innumerable racist laws and even nation-wide installations of a white supremacist form of city government—originated by Wilson himself—that has replaced democracy in thousands of cities and towns across this country.
We like to think that history just magically repeats itself, but the truth is that white supremacy is a closed system in which only so many outcomes are possible. And while Wilson’s reign was over a century ago, the loop is smaller than it seems. For example, on Memorial Day, 1927 a thousand klansmen joined forces with New York City’s growing fascist movement and incited violence across the city. It ended with the arrest of only seven men, one of which was Fred Trump, father of President Donald Trump.
It has been reported that armed militia groups are being federally deputized, aiding in the current occupation of Washington DC and round and round we go.