Ep 3 | How Woodrow Wilson Used WWI to Become a Dictator | The Beck Story

On Sunday, July 16th, 1916,

three men scurried across a railyard darting between warehouses and along a wharf in almost total darkness.

One of them crept into the maze-like facility on foot.

The other two arrived in a rowboat.

They needed the cover of darkness,

though it wouldn't stay dark for long.

The three men worked quickly and efficiently.

They knew exactly which storage sheds, boxcars, and barges to visit with their wire, so-called pencil bombs, and sticks of dynamite.

This stealth operation had been planned for over a year.

They had to be precise in their mission.

They were not likely to get another shot at this.

Getting inside the massive 25-acre shipping facility known as Black Tom Island was the easy part.

There were only eight guards, and on that July 9th, there were more concerned with surviving mosquito attacks than any sort of sabotage.

The hard part would be getting back out of the facility in time.

The complex on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor was no ordinary train depot because this was 1916 and the Great War had been ravaging Europe for two years.

The United States was officially neutral in the conflict but was selling countless tons of munitions to Great Britain and France.

Black Tom Island was the distribution hub for most of the munitions and gunpowder heading from the U.S.

to Europe.

It was quite possibly the largest arsenal in the world outside of the European war zone.

As the three men went about their task, the warehouses, train cars, and barges surrounding them held 2 million pounds of small arms and artillery ammunition.

One barge alone held 50 tons of TNT and 25,000 detonators.

Part of the reason so much firepower was stored there was due to a lack of cargo ships.

German U-boats constantly torpedoed Allied ships in the Atlantic.

In turn, the British Navy blockaded Germany so it couldn't benefit from the same trade with the U.S.

American trade with Britain and France had grown almost 300% since the start of the war, but U.S.

trade with Germany was now only 10% of its pre-war level.

The three men scattered along the mile-long pier and lit small fires.

Then they fled, much faster than they had arrived.

It didn't take long for the guards to notice the fires.

Some of them immediately sent for the Jersey City Fire Department.

The rest of them wisely ran for their lives.

The time was 2.08 a.m.

Dozens of train cars, warehouses, and the entire pier exploded almost in unison.

The massive blast was felt as far away as Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Scientists later assessed the explosion to be the equivalent of 5.5 on the Richter scale.

Almost all of the windows within a 25-mile radius were shattered, including Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Every building in Jersey City within a mile radius of the blast was destroyed.

The dynamite filled over 80 train cars, blew a crater in the island so deep it was below sea level and water gushed in, creating a giant pond.

In the end, at least five people were killed, including a 10-week-old baby in Jersey City who was knocked out of its crib by the explosion.

There were perhaps hundreds of additional victims because the barges at Black Tom Island were were a haven for vagrants and immigrants.

Suddenly at 2.40 a.m., a second blast rocked the island.

The debris shower from the combined explosions lasted two hours.

Firefighters ducked behind the railing of their boats and blindly aimed their hoses at the island to avoid the tornado of shrapnel.

Artillery shells and other munitions continued exploding for days.

Total damages were estimated at $20 million, the equivalent of over half a billion dollars today.

The explosion on Black Tom Island was the most destructive terrorist attack in the U.S.

until September 11, 2001.

Shrapnel from the second major explosion was embedded into the right side of the Statue of Liberty, which faced Black Tom Island.

The force of the blast actually pushed Lady Liberty's torch arm against her crown.

The resulting damage to the internal framework of the statue's arm closed it off to visitors.

Prior to the Black Tom Island terrorist attack, people used to be able to climb all the way up to the torch.

But that part of the Statue of Liberty has been closed to the public ever since that night.

Throughout the wild explosions on Black Tom Island that night, the light inside the torch never went out.

But it is symbolically appropriate that Americans' access to Liberty's torch was cut off at a time when the Oval Office was occupied by President Woodrow Wilson.

In 1916, the Bureau of Investigation, as it was called before it became the FBI, only had a total of 260 agents spread across a few offices.

After the Black Tom Island disaster, the Bureau quickly labeled it an accident.

Their immediate assumption was the lack of safety protocols by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which owned the depot on Black Tom Island, and by the National Dock and Storage Company, which operated the complex.

Within 24 hours, top officials from both companies were arrested.

But then, authorities changed their mind.

and brought in the Black Tom Island security guards for questioning.

Investigators suspected that the smudge pots the guards had lit to help keep mosquitoes away that night had started the fires that blew up the munitions depot.

But investigators were never able to connect the dots from the smudge pots to the explosions.

Strangely, the authorities seemed over-eager to dismiss the possibility of sabotage.

Even though just one day after the Black Tom Island disaster, the New York Times published a list of 42 mysterious explosions at American munitions factories and chemical plants that had happened since the start of the war.

And many of these factories and plants just happened to have war contracts, making essential weapons for the Allies.

In other words, there was a whole catalog of reasons to suspect foul play at the time of the explosion of the largest munitions depot in the U.S., chock full of weaponry waiting to be shipped to the Allies in Europe.

Yet the Woodrow Wilson administration seemed unwilling to even consider German sabotage as the cause.

Turns out, Team Wilson was not nearly as aloof as they appeared.

Wilson was well aware of German sabotage efforts early on.

In fact, more than a year before the Black Tom Island explosions, Wilson ordered the Secret Service to investigate several incidents and spy on German diplomats in the U.S.

In 1915, two Secret Service agents were tailing two German diplomats in an elevated train in New York City.

One of the Secret Service agents managed to snatch the briefcase of one of the diplomats.

The briefcase turned out to be a treasure trove of documents naming various German agents in the U.S.

and revealing specific plans for sabotage in America to wreck U.S.

efforts to assist the Allies.

The documents even detailed outlandish plans like trying to buy the right aeroplane company and to be able to withhold the use of its patents to Britain and France.

Also, in 1915, the Bureau of Investigation caught a German agent named Werner Horn, who had bombed a bridge between Maine and Canada.

And U.S.

agents investigated and arrested two more Germans who were working to blow up the Welland Canal, a major shipping point between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.

Eventually, the U.S.

would learn that Johann von Bernstorff, a German ambassador to the U.S., was actually the German government's chief of espionage and sabotage for the Western Hemisphere.

He had a $150 million budget.

and used it for everything from forging passports for German agents, to gun running, to building time-release bombs that were placed on Allied cargo ships that would later explode as they crossed the Atlantic.

The Wilson administration was clearly aware of what the Germans were doing and planning to do in America.

President Wilson even wrote this to his close personal advisor, Edward House.

I am sure that the country is honeycombed with German intrigue and infested with German spies.

The evidences of these things are multiplying every day.

By 1916, war-related sabotage investigations made up for almost 30% of the Bureau of Investigations caseload.

Yet President Wilson's Attorney General, Thomas Gregory, cautioned the Bureau to limit its investigation of German activities, using the excuse that federal laws weren't robust enough to prosecute what the Germans were doing anyway.

Evidently, The Wilson administration didn't want to dig into the clear-cut evidence of German sabotage efforts on U.S.

soil because it would jeopardize Wilson's entire reelection effort.

After all, Wilson's 1916 presidential campaign was built around the slogan, quote, he kept us out of war.

Woodrow Wilson could not risk getting into an unpopular war during an election year because he needed all the help he could get.

to stay in the White House.

He had barely been elected in the first place, earning less than 42% of the popular vote in 1912.

He almost certainly would have lost that election had the former president Theodore Roosevelt not decided to run as a third candidate under the Progressive Party banner.

Roosevelt ultimately split the Republican vote, causing both he and the incumbent President Taft to lose out to Wilson.

the former president of Princeton University, whose only political experience was being governor of New Jersey for two years.

In that 1912 election, Wilson, a Southerner, only won popular majorities in the 11 states that had been part of the old Confederacy.

And remember, at that time, those states had almost completely disenfranchised black voters.

So, in the aftermath of the Black Tom Island explosions, President Wilson completely downplayed the event, calling it, quote, a regrettable incident at a private railroad terminal.

He said that with full knowledge of the extent of the German sabotage and terrorist attacks being carried out in the U.S.

Wilson's last newspaper ad on the day before the election in 1916 read, you're working, not fighting, alive and happy, not cannon fodder.

As in 1912, Americans were still not totally sold on President Woodrow Wilson.

The incredibly tight election came down to the results in California, which Wilson carried by just 3,420 votes.

Wilson's Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, did not concede the race until California finally announced its official results over two weeks after Election Day.

Wilson was the first U.S.

president to be re-elected with fewer electoral votes than he won in his first run for president.

It wouldn't happen again until Barack Obama's re-election in 2012.

Wilson's refusal to root out and stop the German sabotage and terrorism campaign ended up costing more American lives.

In January 1917, before Wilson was even sworn in for his second term in office, a fire, once again started by a German agent, suddenly erupted in a shell-packing plant in Kingsland, New Jersey.

The massive plant had half a million artillery shells on hand and 1,400 workers who fled in an understandable panic.

Here's how the New York Times report at the time described the scene.

Quote, Thousands of these missiles were flung aloft, and for minute after minute, the sky rained red and golden fire, illuminating the darkening meadows with a weird glare that threw into relief the tiny figures of fugitives racing, tumbling, falling across the marshes in a mad scramble to get from beneath the hail of molten metal.

Just 11 days after that disaster, President Wilson gave his peace without victory speech to the U.S.

Senate, in which he floated the concept of an international league that would keep the peace going forward.

In Wilson's mind, world peace needed to be scientifically managed by a body of government experts, and he would nominate himself to design such a league.

We would only go to war if and when the expert Professor Wilson told Americans that it was time to do so.

When Wilson was sworn in for his second presidential term on March 5th, 1917, he dropped major hints that the expert was about to change his mind on the whole, he kept us out of war thing.

In his speech that day, Wilson said,

The tragic events of the 30 months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world.

There can be no turning back.

Our own fortunes as a nation are involved, whether we would have it so or not.

Less than a month later, Wilson asked Congress to declare war, saying, quote, the world must be made safe for democracy.

So much for being alive and happy and not cannon fodder, huh?

In the same message to Congress, Wilson also admitted.

One of the things that has served to convince us that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very outset of the present war, it has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of council, our peace within and without, our industries and our commerce.

Indeed, it is now evident that its spies were here even before the war began.

Wait, wait.

Now he was admitting German spies were in America blowing up stuff.

What happened to Black Tom Island being just a regrettable incident at a private railroad terminal?

By saying it's now evident that spies were here all along, Wilson framed it as this was some late-breaking discovery.

But of course, it wasn't.

He didn't want to expose the threat before, because it would have wrecked his re-election.

Just eight days after Wilson gave that speech, German agents struck again at an ammunition plant in Eddystone, Pennsylvania.

A series of explosions there killed 133 people, most young women working at the plant.

And this just helped back up Wilson's decision to lead America into war after all.

It's fitting that Wilson said we would make the world safe for democracy, not America.

That distinction would become painfully evident.

In fact, Wilson said, I am an advocate of peace, but there are some splendid things that come to a nation through the discipline of war.

When progressives call something splendid, it usually doesn't go well for liberty.

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In 1916, the New York artist named James Montgomery Flagg drew the magazine cover for an issue of Leslie's Illustrated Weekly.

The focus of this special edition issue was military preparedness.

The cover image was a very stern-looking Uncle Sam pointing his index finger straight ahead at the reader.

The caption on the cover said, What are you doing for preparedness?

Less than a year later, the United States joined World War I and the federal government wanted to draft James Montgomery Flagg's rendition of Uncle Sam into action.

Flagg forked over his painting's copyright to the U.S.

government.

The original caption was replaced with a new one that read, I want you for the U.S.

Army.

The government cranked out 4 million recruitment posters featuring featuring flags Uncle Sam that were plastered all across the country.

It's one of the most famous images in our nation's history.

James Montgomery flagged his own face as the reference for Uncle Sam, giving him a taut, slightly worn face, a bushy, furrowed brow, and pursed lips.

The face is intimidating with urgent, concerned expression.

This Uncle Sam clearly meant business.

As the posters went up all over the U.S., the intense stare and accusatory finger of Uncle Sam was virtually inescapable.

His eyes seemed to follow the observer from every angle, and that front and center finger was always pointing at you.

It was an appropriate projection of the new federal government under the direction of President Woodrow Wilson.

He meant business too.

The I Want You poster is an iconic symbol of one of the most dangerous times in American history, when the stringent progressivism of Woodrow Wilson discovered the ultimate playground of wartime.

Just one week after Congress declared war, President Wilson signed an executive order creating the Committee on Public Information.

The CPI's job was to coordinate propaganda and censorship for the federal government during the war.

Wilson and his close personal advisor, Edward House, had discussed forming something like the CPI for months before the U.S.

joined the war, as they had tried to figure out the best way to steer and control public opinion.

Wilson and House were influenced in these discussions by progressive journalists Walter Lippmann, George Creel, and others, who helped convince them to use the mainstream media rather than just trying to censor it.

Wilson would later say that during wartime, it is legitimate to regard things which would in ordinary circumstances be innocent as very dangerous to the public welfare.

Wilson appointed George Creel to head the CPI.

Creel was a die-hard progressive.

He was a journalist for most of his career in Kansas City and Denver, except for a short stint as police commissioner in Denver.

During that stint, Creel took guns and nightsticks away from his policemen.

Creel would fit right in with today's left-wing defund the police activists.

Under Creel's leadership, the Committee on Public Information was what one historian described as a veritable magnet for political progressives.

The CPI issued what it claimed were voluntary guidelines for the press.

These were supposedly to help patriotic editors who just wanted to do their part to support the war effort.

But of course, editors who chose not to follow those guidelines would have their loyalties called into question by the government.

One of CPI's main goals was to shape how the war and related issues were covered in the U.S.

press.

Part of its strategy was to bury newsrooms in official government press releases.

In less than two years, CPI's news division cranked out over 6,000 press releases, averaging 10 per day.

These were written as straightforward news articles.

Editors often ran these articles without any changes in their publications to head off any suspicion by the Justice Department and Post Office that they were insufficiently loyal.

These government-written news stories appeared in at least 20,000 newspapers every week.

Shortly after declaring war, Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy Act, which required all newspapers to file daily copies of their war-related news with their local postmaster.

Once the government was convinced of the newspaper's loyalty, it received a permit to continue publishing.

The law gave the president power to revoke any permit, quote, at his discretion.

So editors were even more inclined to publish the CPI's articles if they wanted to maintain their publishing permit.

The CPI was a massive operation with 14 separate departments, departments including news, syndicated features, advertising, and film.

The CPI employed journalists, artists, cartoonists, graphic designers, filmmakers, novelists, and short story writers.

A weekly bulletin for cartoonists was issued giving a rundown of announcements and other information the government wanted help with in disseminating to the public.

One of the biggest innovations of the CPI was its four-minute men.

This was an army of volunteers who memorized short speeches provided to them by the CPI, of course, and then they made these speeches whenever and wherever they could find an audience.

The four-minute part of the moniker referenced the time it took to change film reels in a movie theater, four minutes.

So while an audience waited for the next reel to begin, they could hear a four-minute men speech about supporting the war effort.

The four-minute men were given their speeches and talking points by the CPI's Division of Civic and Educational Publications, which was headed by a University of Minnesota history professor.

Almost 50% of the speech material mentioned or directly quoted President Wilson.

It was an unprecedented scope of publicity for a president.

It allowed Wilson to skip the press and communicate his agenda directly to the public.

One historian noted that these constant mini-speeches being given across the U.S., quote, came as close to approximating a presidential radio speech as was possible before network radio.

At the end of the war, George Creel estimated that 75,000 four-minute men had delivered 750,000 speeches to 315 million people.

Creel was so hands-on with the CPI's massive propaganda effort, and the CPI was so successful with its operation, people joked that there were now four branches of our government, executive, legislative, judicial, and Creel.

In the years after World War I, promoting government propaganda was referred to as Creeling.

George Creel was clearly in love with his influential position, saying that he wanted to make every American feel, quote, a compulsion from within to support government policy.

He said his ultimate goal was to create, quote, no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America's cause that weld the people of America into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.

Perhaps the most egregious product that the CPI put out was publishing a daily government newspaper called The Official Bulletin.

It was distributed at every post office, military base, and many other government offices.

One historian noted that the official bulletin is, quote, the closest the United States has come to a paper like the Soviet Union's Pravda or China's People Daily.

The Official Bulletin's masthead said, published daily under the order of the President of the United States.

The Woodrow Wilson administration was, in several ways, a turning point in American history.

Its efforts to control American speech through the CPI permanently damaged America's trust in their government.

As bad as the CPI was for American liberty, it was soft tyranny compared to the full crackdown that was in store.

Woe be to the man or group of men, Wilson said, that seeks to stand in our way.

End quote.

The presidential oath of office is short, to the point, and it ends with the promise that, to the best of their ability, the president will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Basically, the president has one job.

to be the guardian of the Constitution.

Here's the major thing that is left out of every school textbook about Woodrow Wilson.

He was the first U.S.

president to disparage the Constitution and the separation of powers, which he considered outdated barriers to his agenda.

But there were plenty of warning signs about his anti-constitutionalism before he became president.

For example, when he was still president of Princeton University, he gave a speech titled, Our Elastic Constitution.

He thought the Constitution was a relic and that it was time for America to evolve beyond it.

He later wrote, All that progressives ask or desire is permission.

In an era when development, evolution is the scientific word, to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.

In other words, let the experts evolve the Constitution.

Wilson believed government should be run by the experts only,

calling American public opinion a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.

More than a year before the U.S.

entered the war, his annual message to Congress, Wilson urgently requested legislation to suppress disloyal activities.

The very next day, Wilson's cabinet asked Attorney General Thomas Gregory to work on drafting such a law.

Congress received the draft of the law later in 1916, but it didn't move on the bill until after the U.S.

declared war a year later.

Ostensibly, the Espionage Act was supported to protect American military operations and root out enemy spy operations, but it went much further than that.

The law and later the Sedition Act that amended it aimed to shut down any criticism of the federal government under the guise of the government needing leeway to wage a successful war effort.

These laws shredded our First Amendment rights.

Together, the Espionage and Sedition Acts provided punishment of up to 30 years in prison and $20,000 in fines for those who, quote, willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the U.S.

government, Constitution, military, or flag.

In theory, those laws were there to help protect America's war effort.

In practice, the Wilson administration used them to fixate on and target regular Americans rather than the enemy.

Sound familiar?

The same spirit infuses the rhetoric from the current progressive White House.

This is President Biden in a speech before the 2022 midterm election.

Too much of what's happening in our country today is not normal.

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.

MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose.

No right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

They promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country, our nation of fear, division, and of darkness.

MAGA Republics have made their choice.

They embrace anger.

They thrive on chaos.

They live not in the light of truth, but in the shadow of lies.

The Biden administration, through the Justice Department, has targeted multiple pro-life activists, including sending 20 FBI agents to arrest pro-life activist Mark Hoke at his home in 2022.

Hoke was accused of violating the FACE Act because he shoved a pro-abortion activist who was harassing Hoke's 12-year-old son.

In January 2023, Hoke was acquitted of all charges.

He's now suing Biden's Justice Department.

In a letter to a Democratic congressman from North Carolina, Woodrow Wilson reiterated his need for censorship power through the Espionage Act, saying it is, quote, absolutely necessary for the protection of the nation and that it is imperative that powers of this sort should be granted.

Wilson also said publicly that disloyalty to America's war effort, quote, must be crushed out and that disloyal Americans had sacrificed their right to civil liberties.

Wilson had full support for his unconstitutional stance from the Justice Department.

Regarding Americans who didn't support the U.S.

joining the war, Attorney General Thomas Gregory said, quote, may God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.

There was a lot of resistance to Wilson's overreach with the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

Major newspapers across the nation, including the New York Times, spent days sounding the alarm about the unconstitutional censorship and power grab.

Many members of Congress also voiced strong objections, but war fever was a more powerful force.

The laws were passed and the Wilson administration was off to the races.

It was a total coup for the progressive expert philosophy that American rights are not unalienable, but instead flexible depending on the circumstance.

The experts were simply pressing pause on First Amendment rights, but supposedly just for the duration of the war.

One of the worst aspects of the espionage and sedition laws is that they allowed unprecedented coordination among President Wilson, the Postal Service, and the Bureau of Investigation.

This created the culture of domestic surveillance in the U.S.

that has never gone away and continues to this day to be abused.

In 2023, a court found that the FBI violated the surveillance program rules pertaining to the infamous Section 702 program.

The court ruled that FBI analysts used Section 702, which does not require a warrant, to access information about hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans.

It is a perpetual menace that can be traced back to the Wilson administration.

Wilson's Postmaster General, Albert Burleson, and Burleson's Solicitor General, William Lamar, banned mailing privileges for those publications that they or others in the government deemed insufficiently loyal.

Within the first month after the Espionage Act was passed, Burleson had already banned 15 so-called socialist publications.

Shortly after Congress passed the Espionage Act, Burleson sent a letter letter to local postmasters directing them to keep a, quote, close watch on unsealed matter, newspapers, etc., containing matter which is calculated to interfere with, to embarrass, or hamper the government in conducting the war.

Burleson instructed local postmasters to forward any suspicious material that they found to Washington.

The postmasters flooded the national office with material that they deemed unmailable.

Eventually, after so much First Amendment abuse had already taken place, reporters finally got Burleson to comment on the criteria he used to place a magazine or newspaper on the banned list.

Burleson said no publication was allowed to, quote, say that this government got in the war wrong, that it is in it for wrong purposes, or anything that will impugn the motives of the government for going into the war.

They cannot say that this government is the tool of Wall Street or the munitions makers.

That kind of thing is a false statement, a lie, and it will not be permitted.

Burleson's Solicitor General, William Lamar, admitted that the law left room for interpretation, but he and Postmaster Burleson used every inch of that room.

Lamar said they had often had to resort to, quote, the old adage of reading between the lines.

Isn't it not only sensible but fair to take into consideration the known attitude of the writer, also to consider the circumstances and the environment of the readers to whom such writing is addressed?

It's an incredible George Orwell 1984-level philosophy, and yet it was embraced by the progressive experts of the day and upheld by the progressive-dominated Supreme Court.

In Schneck v.

United States, one of the most famous Espionage Act cases brought before the Supreme Court, the justices ruled unanimously against a man named Charles Schneck who had published and mailed leaflets critical of the U.S.

military draft.

It was a landmark case because the court tragically decided that free speech rights are not absolute.

In his majority opinion, Uber Progressive Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

famously said, We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendant, in saying all that was said in the circular, would have been within his constitutional rights.

But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it was done.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

The question in each case is whether the words were used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

It is a question of proximity and degree.

When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its efforts that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.

One year after the Espionage Act passed, in a memo to local postmasters, Albert Burleson gloated, quote, only about a quarter of the papers which applied for a permit have actually been licensed.

Some papers, finding that there was no prospect of their obtaining a license, rather than remain under the implied stigma of disloyalty, have suspended publication.

Others, more openly obnoxious, have had their second-class mailing privileges revoked.

Ultimately, the post office deprived over 400 periodicals of mailing privileges under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

At that time, not being able to use the mail for even one issue could be a death sentence for a publication.

To many Americans, that level of censorship in the United States is outrageous, completely unconstitutional, and a severe cautionary tale.

But for modern-day progressives, it's something to aspire to.

Last year, Senate Democrats proposed the Digital Platform Commission Act, which would feature five expert commissioners appointed by the president, of course, to regulate misinformation and hate speech on the internet.

So, Scott, what would this commission do?

It would, John, regulate, police, maybe license this very fast-growing industry, make sure that it's safe, but also accessible to people.

Wait, did you hear that?

According to a CBS News reporter, it would regulate, police, license,

and keep you safe.

Classic progressive buzzwords.

Experts in their never-ending quest for more control.

I hope you love this series of podcasts as much as I do.

I can't wait for you to hear the whole series.

But history teaches us to have at least a little bit of skepticism for the so-called experts and what they tell us at any given time.

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Robert Prager frantically gathered pieces of wood, tile, and debris that were scattered around the basement and made a pile.

He laid flat on the floor, raking the debris on top of himself, desperately trying to be invisible.

He could hear the crowd approaching outside.

A terrifying torrent of yells and chants.

He had already escaped the rabbit mob once that night.

Could he do it again?

The 45-year-old Prager's nightmare began earlier that evening when he attended a socialist meeting in Maryville, Illinois.

While he was there, he allegedly made remarks that were critical of President Wilson and deemed disloyal to the United States.

Word of Prager's heresy spread like wildfire through the town, and someone told him a mob was forming.

Prager raced back to his home in nearby Collinsville, but the mob would not be denied.

Around 300 men showed up on Prager's street where they found him in front of his house.

The mob grabbed Prager, wrapped him in a large American flag, and thrust two smaller U.S.

flags in his hand.

He was marched downtown barefoot, forced to kiss the flag over and over.

The Collinsville police managed to rescue Prager from the mob and took him to jail at City Hall for his own protection.

Prager admitted to the police that he was born in Germany, but swore that he was American heart and soul and was working on his citizenship papers.

Two hours later, the mob reformed, even larger this time, at least 350 strong.

Ignoring the Collinsville mayor, who implored them to disband and go home, the flag-waving mob marched toward the City Hall.

The handful of police officers guarding Prager rushed him into the basement.

That's when he tried to hide himself under the pile of debris.

The mob reached the steps of City Hall and demanded Prager be handed over to them.

Prager squeezed his eyes shut and prayed.

Then he heard a horrible roar, made more terrifying by the violent battering sound.

The mob was smashing through the doors.

While the U.S.

Post Office played government censor, the Bureau of Investigation, under Director Alexander Bulaski, placed the people who sent and received these banned publications under surveillance.

Americans have long associated the shady FBI tactics of wiretapping, bugging, and tampering with mail, among others, with the long reign of Director J.

Edgar Hoover.

And he indeed perfected and expanded those tactics, but he first learned them during World War I as a young agent working under Director Bulaski.

Working with the Bureau of Investigation, General Thomas Gregory's Justice Department was relentless in its prosecutions under the Espionage and Seditious Acts.

A New Jersey man was arrested in Newark for simply saying in public, quote, I can't see how the government can compel troops to go to France.

It was up to me.

I'd tell them to go to hell.

That statement got him a five-year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine.

And the government prosecuted thousands of similarly petty cases.

After the war was over, Assistant Attorney General John Lord O'Brien admitted, quote, Immense pressure was brought to bear throughout the war on the Department of Justice in all parts of the country for indiscriminate prosecution of dissenters and wholesale repression and restraint of public opinion.

The Justice Department charged 2,168 Americans with violating the Espionage Act.

1,055 of those were convicted.

That conviction rate undoubtedly silenced countless others who were not on board with Woodrow Wilson's agenda.

The Attorney General Thomas Gregory bragged about the Bureau of Investigation's ability.

We have the incredible ability to investigate hundreds of thousands of complaints and to keep scores of thousands of persons under observation.

We have representatives at all meetings of any importance.

How is that possible with such a small bureau staff of agents at the time?

Well, it wouldn't have been possible without the American Protective League.

In a cabinet meeting, March 30th, 1917, President Wilson approved the establishment of a quasi-governmental organization called the American Protective League, the APL.

It was the brainchild of Albert M.

Briggs, a Chicago advertising executive.

He pitched his idea to the Justice Department of creating a volunteer group of investigators to help out with spying on possible German agents.

According to Briggs, the APL would, quote, enforce patriotism and stifle dissent.

Once Wilson gave the green light, the APL was started in Chicago and eventually moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C.

Attorney General Thomas Gregory apparently had no constitutional qualms about this communist-sounding volunteer vigilante force.

He said they would simply be, quote, keeping an eye on disloyal individuals and making reports of disloyal utterances.

You could find yourself under suspicion by the APL just for playing German music, or checking out a German book from the library, or hoarding food, or buying goods on the black market.

Soon, the APL had an army of over 250,000 volunteer agents in over 600 U.S.

cities.

They all snooped on their communities, reported on so-called suspects, and helped arrest innocent Americans.

APL members often sifted through people's mail and trash, and then tipped off Bureau of Investigation agents to the troublesome content.

The APL used criminal tactics, but it was okay because they were doing it for the protection of their country.

APL agents tapped phone lines, they placed bugging devices in offices, they regularly broke into homes to search for and even photograph evidence.

In 1919, after the war was over, Emerson Hough, the APL's official historian, wrote an over-the-top tribute book documenting the glorious history of this patriotic group.

In it, he boasted of how APL agents broke into houses and pilfered evidence, quote, thousands of times and has never been detected.

He described how all you had to do was break into an office.

You just had to find, quote, the agent of the building who was wearing a concealed APL badge.

Then he could get a janitor to open any office for you.

Huff waved off legal concerns, saying, trying to get search warrants just slowed up the process.

The APL was the perfect government collaborator because they were like a ghost team.

They often passed physical evidence to the Bureau of Investigation who could accept it because their own agents hadn't technically participated in gathering the evidence.

But regular citizens would have no recourse to defend themselves since it was impossible to know who in the APL had stolen the evidence.

APL agents reported fellow Americans all the time without any evidence.

Listen to part of this this official APL letter to authorities about a suspect in California.

Quote, It has been reported to this office that a man named Carl A.

Rink is very pro-German and is hoarding food.

He drives a Hudson Super 6, which has a trailer attached, and it is claimed that he uses this trailer in collecting supplies, which he hoards.

He has his house stored with provisions.

For instance, it is claimed that he has several sacks of flour stored behind his piano.

Also, several sacks of sugar sugar and beans.

This information has come to me through a reliable source, and

while I have not had it checked up, I consider it worth an investigation.

End quote.

APL members actually had the option to purchase for 75 cents an official APL badge which said American Protective League Secret Service on it.

Later, the Treasury Department, which housed the real Secret Service, complained complained to the Justice Department and President Wilson about the APL using Secret Service on their badges.

They didn't want people to confuse the APL with the actual Secret Service, but ultimately, the APL was allowed to continue running around with their toy badges because they were indispensable to the Justice Department.

The APL had no technical legal authority to carry weapons or arrest people, but local police forces, lacking in manpower, often looked the other other way and even encouraged APL agents to arrest suspects.

The largest single APL operation came in on September 1918 in what was known as the Slacker Raid.

It happened in New York City.

2,000 APL agents, hundreds of New York City cops, 35 Bureau of Investigation agents, arrested 75,000 New Yorkers accused of dodging the military draft.

There were no warrants, just men stopped on the street and forced to show their draft papers.

Out of the 75,000 arrested, only 1,300 ended up being true draft dodgers.

For all the illegal spying activities and arrests of Americans based on hearsay and suspicion, The APL also assaulted and harassed countless others, including documented cases of Americans getting beaten, whipped, tarred and feathered, kidnapped, dragged behind cars, having their heads shaved, being painted yellow, homes and churches being burned down, being shot, and lynched, all without any legal consequence to the APL.

Ultimately, the federal government arrested around 175,000 Americans for little more than criticizing it.

The Attorney General Thomas Gregory was thrilled with the APL results, saying, It is safe to say that never in its history has the nation been so thoroughly policed as at the present time.

The Attorney General even wrote the foreword to Emerson Hough's history of the APL.

Quote: I am frank to say that the Department of Justice could not have accomplished its task and attained the measure of success which it did attain without the assistance of the members of the League.

Your reward can only be the expressed thanks of your government.

As the head of the Department of Justice under which the American Protective League operated, I render you such thanks with sincere pleasure.

The work of your organization will long be an inspiration to all citizens to render their full measure of service to their country according to her need, without reward and with abundant zeal.

The Wilson administration triggered an avalanche of anti-German sentiment that that swept the nation in both government prosecution and vigilante persecution.

German-American immigrants fared the worst.

Under the guise of the war effort, the federal government seized over half a billion dollars worth of assets and private property owned by German-Americans.

These seizures were overseen by the Alien Property Custodian.

Yeah, believe it or not, that was an official title.

Wilson appointed A.

Mitchell Palmer to the position.

After the war, Palmer became the new attorney general.

The federal government also sent around 6,000 men and some women to internment camps.

None were charged with any specific crime.

They were sent to the camps under the authority of the presidential arrest warrants.

and apprehended by U.S.

Marshals.

Once there, they remained in custody of the U.S.

Army.

One German-American man found himself in one of the primary internment camps in Georgia after the Bureau of Investigation searched his home and found a poem that he had written.

The Bureau's report on the man said, quote, he is very bright in his writings, and he might cause trouble if released.

Sounds like a very American reason to inter someone indefinitely.

And yet this was the wartime mentality of Woodrow Wilson and his followers.

When World War I was over, the government took its time releasing the internment camp prisoners.

The last one wasn't released until April 1920, a year and a half after the war ended.

The German-American internment during World War I ended up being a trial run by progressives, because 22 years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would do it again, but this time on a much larger scale, this time to Japanese Americans.

The mob burst through the doors and into City Hall.

They easily brushed past the four police officers on duty.

Robert Prager could hear the mob clamoring through the floor above him, frantically searching for him.

There was no escape now.

He could only hope that in their mad rush they might somehow overlook him, hiding under the pile of debris in the basement.

Prager heard the terrible stomp of boots on the stairs.

Suddenly, several strong hands ripped him from beneath the debris.

The mob dragged Prager out of City Hall and marched him a mile outside of town.

The bloodlust parade came to a halt beneath a sturdy tree.

Someone bellowed at Prager, whether he had anything to say.

In broken English, he replied,

Yes,

I would like to pray.

Prager fell to his knees, prayed a lengthy, desperate-sounding petition in German.

His choice of language did not help his cause.

The mob allowed him to scrawl a few lines and some paper to his parents who lived in Germany.

Dear parents, he wrote, I must this day, 5th of April 1918, die.

Please pray for me, my dear parents.

This is my last letter.

Your dear son, Robert Paul Prager.

A noose fell over his head, and he was suddenly yanked 10 feet into the air.

When Prager was dead, the mob slowly dispersed, leaving two men to guard the body.

The guards warned anybody who tried to approach that they would meet the same fate if they attempted to cut down the corpse.

What was Prager's horrific crime to merit such a savage, brutal, spontaneous death penalty?

He had made, quote, disloyal remarks.

Just two months later, 11 men were accused of murdering Robert Prager, stood trial.

The jury only needed a few minutes to reach their verdict.

Not

guilty.

A newspaper report from the time noted that as the verdict was read, a parade of men who had recently been drafted marched past the courthouse.

They marched behind a band playing the tune that had become sort of an unofficial anthem of America's entry into the Great War, a song called Over There.

Born in Stanton, Virginia, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson from a very early age imbued everything he did with moral purpose.

Turned out our only president with a PhD knew how to connect with the masses.

He never spoke down.

He always raised the audience to his level.

This had a magical effect, especially on the uneducated, because they felt better about themselves for having heard him and understood him.

That was a clip from a puff piece about Woodrow Wilson that aired on CBS Sunday morning.

It's typical of the mainstream historical coverage of the Wilson years.

A century later, progressives still carry a lot of water for Wilson.

Sure, he was a dedicated racist, and he believed in eugenics, and his wife illegally acted as president after he had a stroke.

But he was so smart.

He believed so much in democracy and he had a brilliant plan to make war extinct if only those foolish Americans had followed his expertise.

That's generally the message about Wilson presented in our history textbooks as well.

Wilson's wartime constitutional abuses are rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Most Americans have never heard of the American Protective League, even though it was a massive secret police force that was greenlit by President Wilson and fully endorsed and praised by his Attorney General.

In his superb 2008 book, Liberal Fascism, journalist Jonah Goldberg says, quote, Woodrow Wilson was the 20th century's first fascist dictator.

Goldberg points out that more dissidents were arrested under Wilson's wartime administration than under Mussolini during the entire decade of the 1920s.

Even a brief examination of the evidence makes Goldberg's statement hard to argue against.

The Espionage and Sedition Acts gave the Woodrow Wilson administration cover for the most severe restriction of First Amendment freedoms in U.S.

history.

Essentially, all types of protests, no matter how benign, were made punishable by law.

Sending and receiving mail was subject to the will of the post office.

American spies blanketed the nation, reporting to the Justice Department and carrying out vigilante justice on their neighbors with no legal repercussions.

This sounds like aspects of the old Soviet Union or Communist China today.

But from 1917 to 1919, it was the reality in America.

This national nightmare was thoroughly driven by progressive ideals, primarily the belief that experts in government knew best how to keep Americans safe.

The domestic surveillance tools that the Bureau of Investigation first used during World War I, the methods were perfected and expanded under J.

Edgar Hoover's decades-long direction.

Technology, coupled with the terror threats of post-9-11 America, brought the Patriot Act and a new level of domestic surveillance.

Now, artificial intelligence is changing the game again,

and the technology is moving way too fast for lawmakers to keep up.

An American facial recognition company called Clearview AI created an application that can take a photo of a person and link it to all other public photos of that person.

Clearview's database has over 3 billion photos that they claim to have scraped from millions of websites.

A New York Times report says Clearview's database, quote, goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

That same report says that this Clearview AI technology includes, quote, programming language to pair it with augmented reality glasses so users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw.

The tool could identify activists at a a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway revealing not just their names, but where they lived, what they did, and all of those whom they knew.

Police departments across the nation are already using ClearView AI.

So far, in most jurisdictions, police and prosecutors are not required to disclose when facial recognition is used to identify a suspect.

If we think the Constitution is strong enough to protect us from this kind of technology in the hands of progressive government experts, we have not learned the lesson of America during World War I.

Three years after the end of World War I, the U.S.

and Germany formed the Mixed Claims Commission to investigate various wartime damage claims to commercial and private property.

It took the Mixed Claims Commission 17 years to officially determine that the German government was indeed responsible for the Black Tom Island explosion in 1916, the most damaging terrorist attack in the U.S.

until September 11, 2001.

Two of the three German saboteurs were eventually caught and spent time in prison.

The third was never caught.

He returned to Germany and 20 years later worked as a Nazi intelligence agent until the Soviets captured and executed him.

The Mixed Claims Commission required the German government to pay $50 million in damages to the U.S.

for the Black Tom Island attack.

Germany finally made its last payment in 1979.

One of the American investigators in the Mixed Claims Commission was a Harvard Law School graduate.

His name was John McCloy.

He was on the commission for 12 years, and in 1941, President Roosevelt named him the Assistant Secretary of War.

In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was John McCloy who helped design the policy that sent over 100,000 Japanese Americans to the internment camps.

FDR had been an Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I.

Both he and John McCloy were well-versed in German sabotage, the internment of German Americans, and Woodrow Wilson's progressive regime of surveillance and expert control.

The attack on Pearl Harbor gave them permission to revive the Wilson regime, but on a much grander scale.

At an Oval Office meeting about the plan to strip Japanese Americans of their constitutional rights and force them behind barbed wire enclosures for the next few years, Roosevelt turned to McCloy and winked as he said,

We don't want another black tom.

We constantly rely on experts to make decisions for us.

Because even eyewitnesses and experts can get it wrong.

The experts do get things wrong.

You have to seek out sources from other points of view and then critically examine their motivations and credibility as well.