Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America - Hardcover

Feldman, Jay

3.91

35 ratings by Goodreads

9780375425349: Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375425349 ISBN 13: 9780375425349

Publisher: Pantheon, 2011

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A vital, engaging, and sometimes troubling story of modern America’s struggle to live up to its ideals.

In this ambitious and wide-ranging history, Jay Feldman takes us from the run-up to World War I and its anti-German hysteria through the September 11 attacks and Arizona’s current anti-immigration movement. What we see is a striking pattern of elected officials and private citizens alike using the American people’s fears and prejudices to isolate minorities (ethnic, racial, political, religious, or sexual), silence dissent, and stem the growth of civil rights and liberties.

Whether it’s the post–World War I persecution of radicals; the Depression-era deportations of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans; the World War II internment of 112,000 ethnic Japanese along with thousands of German and Italian aliens; the Cold War campaigns against Communists, gays, and civil-rights activists; or the Vietnam-era COINTELPRO operations, we see how economic, military, and political crises have been used to curtail the rights of supposedly subversive minorities.

Much of the story can be laid at the feet of J. Edgar Hoover, but Feldman goes deeper to show how these tendencies have been part of a continuous vein that runs through American life. Rather than treating this history as a series of discrete moments, Feldman considers the entire programmatic sweep on a scale no one has yet approached. In doing so, he gives us a potent reminder of how, even in America, democracy and civil liberties are never guaranteed.

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About the Author:

Jay Feldman is also the author of the critically acclaimed When the Mississippi Ran Backwards. He is a widely published freelance writer whose articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Gourmet, The New York Times, and many other national, regional, and local publications. He has written for television and the stage, and is the author of the novel Suitcase Sefton and the American Dream. His Web site is www.jfeldman.com.

Prologue: Against the Wall

On the night of April 4, 1918, nearly a year to the day after the United States entered World War I, a harrowing spectacle was unfolding on the streets of Collinsville, Illinois, a small market center and coal�mining community of four thousand, located twelve miles across the river from St. Louis. Trailed by a roused and swelling crowd, a forlorn, barefoot figure wrapped in an American flag hobbled along in the cold night air. An occasional catcall rang out in the dark, and the threat of festive violence loomed heavily. The man at the head of the discordant parade stumbled frequently as the march made its way up the main street of Collinsville toward city hall.

The unfortunate leading this unsettling procession was Robert Paul Prager, a thirty-year-old German immigrant and, by some accounts, a radical Socialist. Born in Dresden, Prager had immigrated to the United States in 1905, at the age of seventeen. He bounced around the Midwest for several years, working as a baker, serving fourteen months for theft in 1913–14, and eventually finding his way, in 1915, to the St. Louis area, with its sizable, well-established German-American population. He worked for a time in a coal mine in Gillespie, about forty miles northeast of St. Louis, then headed to Collinsville in the fall of 1917, where he took a job in Lorenzo Bruno’s bakery.

According to Mrs. Bruno, Prager was extremely intelligent and an outstanding worker, but “a certain peculiarity in his makeup . . . made him quarrelsome with people who did not agree with his ideas on ways of doing things.” Despite his ready inclination to apologize once his temper had cooled, Prager’s argumentativeness led to his being fired early in 1918.

Turning to the only other work he knew, Prager got a job on the night shift at the No. 2 mine owned by the Donk Brothers Coal and Coke Company in Maryville, four miles from Collinsville. The leadership of United Mine Workers of America Local 1802 accepted him conditionally until his application for UMWA membership could be reviewed.

It was here that things started to go seriously wrong for Prager. Looking to improve his lot, he thought to become a mine manager. In late March, he approached the mine examiner John Lobenad and, informing Lobenad of his desire to advance, questioned him about a manager’s responsibilities. One of the areas he asked about was mine explosions, and exactly how an explosion could cause the greatest damage. Lobenad’s suspicions were aroused, and when rumors—utterly unsubstantiated—suddenly began circulating about a supply of blasting powder vanishing from the mine, some of the six hundred miners at Donk No. 2, including the Local 1802 president, Joe Fornero, concluded that Prager was a German agent bent on sabotage.

In the hypercharged winter and spring of 1918, the mere suspicion of harboring pro-German sentiments, let alone actively working for Germany, was enough to invite the attention of federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies, as well as a myriad of quasilegal vigilante organizations. Since entering the war, the federal government had whipped the American public into a froth with a calculated program of propaganda issued by the Committee on Public Information.

Headed by the newspaperman George Creel, the CPI utilized every available medium to sell the war to an initially skeptical citizenry. The committee’s job, as Creel wrote, was “to drive home to the people the causes behind this war, the great fundamental necessities that compelled a peace-loving nation to take up arms to protect free institutions and preserve our liberties,” and “to weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.” As the New York World’s editor Frank Cobb later wrote, “Government conscripted public opinion as they conscripted men and money and materials.”

Creel and his associates—including some three thousand historians recruited for pamphlet writing—did their job only too well, cultivating a hatred for everything associated with Germans and Germany. The press enthusiastically took up the chant. As one New York newspaper would put it, “Scrutinized historically, and presented baldly, the German cannot be but recognized as a distinctly separate and pathological human species. He is not human in the sense that other men are human.” Promoting anti-Germanism and love of country, the CPI infected the American public with a virulent strain of patriotism tinged with a streak of potent xenophobia. All dissenting voices on the war were, by implication, disloyal and therefore pro-German: pacifists, Wobblies, Socialists, anarchists, Mennonites, Irish-Americans, and above all, German aliens and German-Americans were some, but not all, of the tainted and suspect.

Throughout the country, scores of Germans came under attack. On December 22, 1917, Charles H. Feige, who had been taking photographs near the border in El Paso, tried to cross into Mexico and was shot and killed by a soldier, who assumed he was a spy. Six days later, an Evangelical Lutheran pastor, the Reverend W. A. Starck, and another man barely escaped being hanged in the public square of Audubon, Iowa, before deputy sheriffs intervened.

On January 5, 1918, one Maximilian Von Hoegen was beaten, suffered a broken nose, and was forced to kiss the American flag in Hartford, Connecticut. The following week, Philadelphia police rescued a man named Paul Beilfuss from a lynch mob.

By the spring of 1918, the nation was in a patriotic frenzy. Reports of German spy networks and espionage filled the newspapers, with wildly exaggerated numbers of German agents supposedly operating in the country. On March 1, citing the Department of Justice as his source, the international president of the Rotary Club informed a Chicago audience that at least 110,000 German agents were operating in the United States. The number was never confirmed.

The next day, a Denver “squad of loyal Americans” tied Fred Sietz, by a rope around his neck, to a truck and paraded him through the streets. They delivered Sietz, who had refused to kiss the flag, to the office of The Denver Post, where he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital in serious condition.

On March 3, the senator and future president Warren G. Harding, speaking at a large patriotic meeting sponsored by the Maryland Council of Defense, offered his opinion that the only place for Germany’s “miserable spies . . . is against the wall.”

The violence escalated into the first week of April. On the second, in La Salle, Illinois, 150 miles from Collinsville, Dr. J. C. Bienneman was dunked in a canal, made to kiss the flag, and ordered to leave town. The same day, Rudolph Schwopke was tarred and feathered in Emerson, Nebraska, for allegedly refusing to contribute to the Red Cross. Two days later, a group of men waiting to be called for the draft shaved the head of seventy-two-year-old H. C. Capers in Sulphur, Oklahoma.

Such was the climate in which Robert Prager’s fellow miners deduced that he was a German agent intent on blowing up the Maryville mine, and union officials denied his application for membership. On April 3, a group of miners seized Prager and, employing the ritual widely practiced on anyone suspected of disloyalty, compelled him to kiss the flag. They accused him of being a German spy, led him to the outskirts of town, and harshly warned him not to come back. The Local 1802 president, Fornero, and another union official, Moses Johnson, escorted Prager back to Collinsville, where they asked the police to place him in protective custody; without charges being filed against him, however, the police declined. The union leaders then took Prager to his rooming house and asked him to meet them the following day at the sheriff’s office in Edwardsville, the county seat.

Instead, Prager composed a one-page document titled “Proclamation to Members of Local Union No. 1802” and, ignoring the miners’ admonition, returned the next day to Maryville, where he posted a dozen carbon copies of his handbill around town. “I have been a union man at all times and never once a scab,” wrote Prager, “and for this reason, I appeal to you . . . In regards to my loyalty, I will state that I am heart and soul for the good old U.S.A. . . . and also declared my intention of U.S. citizenship, my second papers are due to be issued soon if I am granted. I am branded by your President [Fornero] . . . a German spy which he cannot prove.”

In fact, if Fornero and the others had taken the trouble to investigate, they would have discovered that Prager’s loyalty could hardly be questioned. In the previous year, he had registered, as required, both for the newly established draft and as an “alien enemy” (any noncitizen from a country at war with the United States), and had even volunteered for the Navy but been turned down on account of his glass eye. Moreover, he had indeed, as he noted in his flyer, applied for citizenship and was awaiting his second papers.

Prager’s “proclamation” had the opposite effect from what he intended. The miners who had turned against him were further infuriated by his attack on the well-liked Fornero.

That evening, a group of miners left a Collinsville bar shortly after nine and walked to Prager’s rooming house, where they ordered him to leave town immediately. He agreed, but then the crowd demanded that he come out into the street.

“All right, brothers,” Prager said, “I’ll go if you don’t hurt me.” One of the men promised not to harm him.

Once he was outside, Prager’s shoes, socks, and outer clothing were f...