 On a summer day in 1915 a commercial attaché for the German embassy fell asleep on a train, only to awaken with jolt to realize he was at his stop. In his haste to depart, the diplomat left behind his briefcase – stuffed with all the details of Germany’s clandestine spy ring against the United States and plans to cross America’s northern border to wage mayhem against British Canada. An American agent tailing the German made the correct decision to grab the case rather than continue to follow his target. This is just one of the engrossing stories in The Triumph of Fear, a new book by Patrick Eddington, senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute. Eddington traces the trajectory of rising government surveillance from the Spanish-American War under William McKinley to the Cold War under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Along the way, Eddington details how the interception of telegrams and the passage of the 1917 Espionage Act set the legal and institutional basis for today’s surveillance state and the government’s digital spying on the American people. The contents of the diplomat’s briefcase proved the Woodrow Wilson administration was right to be paranoid about Germany’s intentions. But almost all of Germany’s covert actions were conducted by German agents and nationals, not by sympathetic Americans. This did not keep President Wilson from tarring Americans who objected to the U.S. entry into the war or who opposed the draft by peaceful, political means as traitors. President Wilson said: “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty in the very arteries of our national life … to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.” In service of this all-out war on dissent, Wilson secured passage of the Espionage Act, which continues to give the government broad powers to prosecute Americans for being perceived as helping hostile powers. One official warned “postal employees to be on the lookout for material that might ‘embarrass or hamper the government.’” Before long, the government had created an informal, national network of snitches, a milder version of the later East German Stasi apparatus. The precursor of the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had been reading telegrams from Western Union and major communications providers since the Spanish-American War. Few Americans of stature objected. One of them, Sen. Robert LaFollette, the progressive Republican from Wisconsin, warned Americans that “private residences are being invaded, loyal citizens of undoubted integrity and probity arrested, cross-examined, and the most sacred constitutional rights guaranteed to every American citizen are being violated.” The courts were no bulwark against this trashing of the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Charles Schenck for mailing leaflets to draft-age men asking them to take political action to oppose the draft. Before long, the government felt free to deport anarchist Emma Goldman and put Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate for president, in prison for opposing the war. Eddington writes: “The American national security state, created in peace and vastly expanded during war, would now become a permanent feature of national life, complete with enduring, draconian national security laws.” If you want to know how we got here, Triumph of Fear is an entertaining read and an essential one. It also casts a mirror on the current state of surveillance and speech. Today, as in the Wilson era, we are challenged to separate explicit calls from violence from controversial speech. Today, as then, the government warrantlessly inspects Americans’ movements, associations, and statements, but with infinitely more precision and more data than could be reaped just by reading telegrams. Comments are closed.
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