World War I was if anything more pointless than the Mexican-American War. The best that could be said of American involvement in the conflict is that it helped bring seemingly ceaseless bloodshed between European nations to a quicker close. But the war itself was fought for no great principle. It was not a fight against tyranny; Germany was a constitutional monarchy, much like Great Britain, and the Allies counted Czarist Russia among their ranks. It was not redressing any unprovoked invasion. It was a tragic unfurling of alliances that claimed 10 million lives and laid the groundwork for both Stalinism and Nazism.
And for the crime of opposing US entry into that morass, dozens saw federal prison time, mostly under the Espionage Act of 1917. In World War I alone, Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, Rep. Victor Berger (Socialist-Wisconsin), Jehovah’s Witnesses leader Joseph Franklin Rutherford, activist Kate Richards O’Hare, anarchist Emma Goldman, and German-American businessman William Edenborn all served time behind bars for their opposition to the war. Berger was denied his seat in Congress for his conviction, one of the few times a duly elected American politician was barred from office for having the wrong opinions.
Outside the United States, World War I resisters suffered even more. More than 20,000 Britons refused the draft, and of those more than 6,000 were sent to prison and endured “hard labor, a bare-bones diet, and a strict ‘rule of silence,'” as the writer Adam Hochschild explains. Those who refused to fight upon making it to the front often faced death. The British and French armies shot 320 and 700 men, respectively, for refusing to kill.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member