08/15/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
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Hey, welcome back to the show, y'all.
We got Sheldon Richman on the line.
He's the Vice President of the Future Freedom Foundation and the editor of their monthly journal, The Future of Freedom.
That's at fff.org slash subscribe.
And welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing just fine.
Always glad to be with you.
I hope you're doing fine, too.
I am.
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today and appreciate you writing about World War I because even though it was a long time ago, a hundred years, we're right around the anniversary now of the beginning of it.
And even though it pales in comparison in death toll and in printed words about it compared to World War II, it is generally agreed it's the genesis of World War II, even if it's not very well understood itself.
And so you've got a couple of articles here.
The latest one is Liberty in America during the Great War.
So I guess I'd like to start with that because that's another very important untold story of the revolution within the forum here in America during the Great War.
But then we could also talk about your article from the eighth, the hundredth anniversary of the Great State Crime.
You can mix it all together and answer however you want.
But I guess I'll just ask it really broadly.
Would you please tell us about your theses here and the points you're trying to make?
And then also I'll go ahead and note now that later on in the show, in fact, sooner or later, I don't care.
We'd like to take y'all's calls for Sheldon Richmond, too, about World War I and or pretty much any of the other wars or whatever y'all want to talk about.
The number here is 512-271-4836.
So if y'all want to start lining up, that's OK.
So go ahead, I guess.
And first of all, talk about what the war meant for the form of the government here in the United States.
So it was really a watershed.
That can be a cliche.
A lot of things are called watersheds, which may not be.
But I think World War I really deserves it.
It changed the world, the United States as well, so completely.
And we still suffer consequences today.
And if anybody wants evidence, just look at the front page of almost any newspaper.
The Middle East is still writhing under the decisions that were made mainly by the British and the French in 1915, 16, 17, 18, 19, and in the early 20s, when they created countries just by drawing lines in the sand, literally, without regard to who they were grouping together in these new artificial countries, despite the fact that there might have been differing sex, ethnic groups, tribes, et cetera, and also dividing those entities with these artificial lines so that you would have a single tribe, part of a single tribe on two sides of a border that Churchill or somebody drew.
So we still haven't gotten over it, and I think it'll be quite a while before we do.
In the United States, Murray Rothbard has a classic essay called World War I is Fulfillment, The Intellectuals in Power.
And he points out how the progressives, certainly the Eastern progressives, it's hard to talk about the progressives, because there really were subdivisions.
The Midwestern, Western progressives were different from the Eastern progressives in many ways.
And when Wilson publicly changed his views on the war, don't forget, he gets reelected in 1916 with the boat by bragging that he kept us out of war.
So when Wilson becomes pro-war in 1917 and decides America has to get into it, he might have always believed that, but told the public in 1916 that we wouldn't be getting involved, but maybe he always wanted to.
But once the election's behind him, 1917 comes along, and he decides, no, we need to get into it.
Now, things have happened, too.
Germany starts up again.
It's submarine warfare.
Wilson was taking the position that even if civilians are on ships with, Americans are on ships loaded with munitions, I almost said with musicians, but with munitions, they ought to be able to have absolute safety on the high seas.
And so this is one of the ultimatums he threw at Germany when Germany was using unrestricted submarine warfare, which I'm not defending.
But the point is, Wilson was looking for a way to get into the war and was backing England quietly, and so taking a consistently anti-German stance.
And so when Germany restarts the submarine warfare, and also there's this Zimmerman telegram which is exposed where the Germans were in contact with the Mexicans saying, if Mexico helps out and America loses the war, then Mexico can get some of its territory back that was taken, I guess Texas mainly.
So I guess you would be living in Mexico right now, Scott.
Which is, I think it's worth emphasizing there that that's the thinnest pretext for war in the last hundred years, too, including Korea, Vietnam, you know, baiting Saddam into invading Kuwait and the rest of them.
Oh, Germany is going to help Mexico reconquer the Southwest, huh?
Yeah.
Give me a break.
I mean, that is the dumbest pretext, that is the stupidest Gulf of Tonkin resolution I've ever heard of in my life.
So it was enough for Wilson to be able to stir up a war fever.
I don't think it took a whole lot of persuasion for the American people to get on board.
The book I relied on for the current article that runs today about civil liberties during the war was written by Donald M. Kennedy.
It's called Over Here, subtitle, First World War and American Society.
And his first chapter is about the winning of the American mind for war.
And it doesn't seem like it took a lot of fighting to win the American mind for war.
Americans are, you know, we like to think of them as sort of, you know, keep to themselves exhalationists in spirit, but it doesn't take much to win them over.
So I don't think Wilson needed much.
The intellectuals, as Rothbard points out, especially the progressives now, were against the war in 1916.
But when Wilson turned around, they they backed Wilson.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I think I remember was even in House's papers that he had negotiated our entry into World War One back in 1915 before the reelection on the slogan he kept us out of war.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Scott Horton Show.
It's fundraising week.
I rarely do this only when I really got to stop by Scott Horton dot org slash donate if you like the show and you want to hear more of it.
We're going to start taking calls for our guest, Sheldon Richman, in just a couple of minutes here at five one two two seven one forty eight thirty six five one two two seven one forty eight thirty six.
Right now we're talking about World War One.
We can also open up to broader subjects here, but we're talking about how Wilson lied us into war and Sheldon was describing some of the effects that that policy had, for example, in turning the Middle East over to the British and the French for one thing.
And then we were talking about progressive and really popular support for the war, whether they were lied into it or not, they were happy to be kind of like at least half of Americans back in 2002.
But anyway, so in the article today, again, at FFF dot org, is liberty in America during the Great War consequences for individual freedom and advances in state power here at home.
But you know what, Sheldon?
The front was way the hell over there between France and Germany.
So what does that have to do with liberty here at home anyway, really?
Other than the people being conscripted to go fight, obviously.
Well, once Wilson decides that he can now take the country into the war, he doesn't have to worry about re-election or anything, the progressives in the East, like John Dewey, jump on board.
I guess they had been critical of getting in, but when Wilson came around, they came around.
One of the great voices who was of that group, who then broke, is the great Randolph Bourne.
You know, who coined the famous phrase, war is the health of the state.
He condemned Dewey, who was sort of a mentor of his, and others like Herbert Crowley, the whole New Republic crowd, by the way, that were beating the drums for war.
And he analyzed, you know, what a bad mistake they were making.
And history proves him right, and the progressives wrong.
What happened at home was, and this is where the whole idea of 100 percent American arises, I think the national security state begins before World War I.
It doesn't begin after World War II.
I think that's setting it way too late.
The administration, and not just the administration, this was true of the grassroots as well, without direct links to the administration, wanted to stamp out any dissent.
Anybody who was talking about how the war was not constitutional, or how the draft was not constitutional, got cracked down on.
The attorney general, Thomas Gregory of the United States, boasted that he had hundreds of thousands of people in the American Security League, I think it was called, who were out there helping the overworked feds sniff out any sign or any utterance of disloyalty.
People were charged.
This is when we get the Espionage Act, which Obama, of course, is still charging whistleblowers under.
We get that in 1917, and it is used against speech.
The postmaster general is using wartime laws, censorship laws, to exclude magazines from the mail, or remove their second class mailing permit, which hampered magazines.
Even the New Republic, at that point, objected to what the administration was doing, even though they were pro-war.
There was an all-out effort to stamp out anybody openly questioning the war or conscription.
Of course, the conscription came in 1917.
Eugene Debs, most famously, perhaps, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
He didn't serve it because Harding pardoned him, but Wilson sentenced him to 10 years in prison for making a speech.
He didn't urge anybody to violate the law, like the draft law, so he didn't even do that.
I'm not saying that would justify imprisonment, but he did not do that.
He simply critically analyzed the war and the draft, and he was sentenced.
The Supreme Court upheld the sentence, including the great civil libertarian, and of course, I'm using that sarcastically, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Brandeis.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, during this era, in looking over espionage cases in 1919, right after the war, when they were reviewing cases that finally went up to them, that's when Holmes devises the clear and present danger test.
If speech, which otherwise would be perfectly fine, he said, or perfectly legal, presents a clear and present danger to objectives of the country, or the administration, or the government, then Congress has the right to limit it, and stop it, and suppress it, and therefore, they upheld cases where people were sentenced to prison merely for publishing or writing.
It changed America.
The war changed America just as it changed the world.
Rothbard's famous essay goes on to point out that progressives got into ...
The government, of course, takes over the economy, essentially, when there's a world war going on.
Thank goodness that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.
It's already heavily enough in the economy, but when we look at the two world wars, it basically nationalizes the whole economy.
First claim on everything, manpower as well as materials.
This happened in World War I, and it gave progressive types hands-on experience running bureaucracies, price administration boards, war industries board, all kinds of stuff, and they loved it, and they wanted to keep this thing going.
Now, a lot of them didn't like war, and they thought you could have the moral equivalent of war.
This is where this expression comes from.
William James, actually, before World War I, but William James says, look, there are good things about war, the solidarity, and the uniformity of thought, we're all pulling together, but isn't there a way we could do this without war?
Progressives were ...
It's not that they loved war, they liked the collectivism that war gave us, and they liked the power that they got, because they got to run important bureaus.
They were hoping that once the war ended, they could still have all of that, although it wouldn't be for the sake of war, it would be for the normal course of running the economy and running the society.
It definitely changed America, just like it changed so much of the world.
Yeah, and really set the precedent for so much to come.
The whole New Deal is just a replication of the same thing.
That's right.
Those same guys dream come true.
This is another thing that Rothbard points out.
When the New Deal comes in with Roosevelt, a lot of those people, like Bernard Baruch, come back.
They had neat jobs during World War I, during the 20s with the return to normalcy, and Harding and Coolidge, you didn't have that.
There was no big, huge rollback, but there was no growth in it, really, and there might have been some marginal rollback under Coolidge, let's say, Harding didn't live that long.
Once the New Deal came along, all those kinds of bureaus could be recreated, and that was the precedent for World War I.
A lot of the same people came back to run them, saying, oh, good, great, we weren't out of work for too long, we're back in the saddle.
Right now- Definitely.
I'm sorry, hold it right there for just a sec.
We're about to have to go out to take this break, and I want to mention one more footnote here.
I know he's a friend of yours.
Joseph R. Stromberg has this.
It's such a great piece.
It's called, Remembering with Astonishment, Woodrow Wilson's Reign of Terror in Defense of Freedom, and it's also at archive.lourockwell.com.
You can search that up.
Just put, Remembering with Astonishment and Stromberg, it'll come right up, I guess.
And now, hold it right there, everybody.
We're talking with Sheldon about his new article, Liberty in America During the Great War.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
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Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
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