Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U. S. Justice Department's Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent

by William H. Thomas Jr.

Overview

Things No Longer There is a lovingly crafted collection of personal stories about the author's struggle toward enlightenment while losing her eyesight. It is also, more broadly, about invisible landscapes places of the heart that linger long after they have disappeared from the world outside. In these ten brief tales and one novella-length intimate drama, Susan Krieger takes us on a series of adventures in vision, a journey both inward and to various parts of the country. We travel with her as she goes birdwatching before sunrise in the New Mexico desert, learns to walk with a white cane, revisits an old love, returns to a summer camp of her youth, and reflects on the nature of blindness and sight.
Krieger's touching memoir explores the ways that outer landscapes may change and sight may be lost, but inner visions persist, giving meaning, jarring the senses with a very different picture than what appears before the eyes. This book will reward both the general reader and those interested in disability studies, feminist ethnography, and lesbian studies."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299228903
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	10/08/2008
Series:	Studies in American Thought and Culture Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	803,113
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

William H. Thomas Jr., an independent scholar, received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He lives in O’Fallon, Illinois.

Table of Contents

Contents
 
Illustrations      
Acknowledgements     
 
Introduction                 
1. Setting the Stage      
2. Methods and Ideology         
3. Policing the Clergy   
4. Policing the Left       
5. Policing Wisconsin   
6. Vigilantism   
Epilogue          
 
Appendix: Biographical Information of Justice Department Investigators in Wisconsin    
Notes  
Bibliography    
Index    

Editorial Reviews

“Thomas has dug deeper than any previous scholar into the records of the U.S. Justice Department during World War I, and unearthed a new history of what it meant to be an obedient citizen in wartime.”—Christopher Capozzola, author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen



“An important and timely book. . . .An invaluable contribution to our understanding of the history of the FBI and of the pernicious legacy of national security policy on the right to dissent.”—Athan Theoharis, Marquette University, author of The FBI and American Democracy


“Thomas . . . reveals that actual prosecution was merely the tip of a very large iceberg of political browbeating. . . . Recommended for all libraries.”—Library Journal

“[A] timely addition to the discussion of the US government’s responses to critically important times.”—Choice

“A cautionary tale about what can happen to our freedoms if we take them too lightly.”—Dave Wood, Hudson Star-Observer

“Unsafe for Democracy raises important questions about the role of the state in modern society [and] draws a direct line between the embryonic surveillance-and-suppression state of the 1910s and the more sinister elements of the national security state of our own time.”—Journal of American History

“Unsafe for Democracy poses in a modern idiom the question Abraham Lincoln asked: ‘Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?’. . .Thomas has produced a book that both adds to our knowledge of this troubling episode in American history and invites thoughtful consideration of such questions.”—Journal of American History

“A well-researched, richly detailed account of the US government’s illiberal and covert wartime activities. . . .What the book does suggest, and quite powerfully, is how war can cause a country to jettison its core principles and, in so doing, undermine the values that compelled it to fight in the first place.”—Jonathan Rosenberg, The International Historical Review

From the Publisher

During World War I, the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) were used to prosecute men such as the socialist Eugene Debs for subversion. Thomas, an independent scholar, argues that in fact such high-profile trials were only a small part of the government's effort to suppress dissent. Thomas details how Justice Department officials, including the relatively new Federal Bureau of Investigation (pre-J. Edgar Hoover) took an active role in monitoring citizens and routinely sent agents to interview suspects. Those who were deemed to be insufficiently patriotic were threatened with legal action. Thomas's focus on the process of intimidation is an important addition to the historical literature, as it reveals that actual prosecution was merely the tip of a very large iceberg of political browbeating. Of particular interest is the author's analysis of how agents conflated certain ethnic groups, such as Jews, with political subversion, and how African American opposition to Jim Crow laws was considered pro-German sedition. While Thomas's assertion that the war years marked a kind of rehearsal for later FBI attacks on dissidents during the Red Scare is probably true, it is less well documented than the rest of the book. Recommended for all libraries.
—Frederic Krome

Library Journal

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