Crowd justice, then and now
In 1918 a silencing campaign was launched against Frank Klingberg, a professor at the University of Southern California. He was accused of being pro-German. Klingberg was eventually allowed to give a planned lecture, but all it took to ruin the careers of five teachers elsewhere in California were their German surnames and unproved accusations of disloyalty to the United States.
Around the same time, several professors in the University of California system were dismissed for “pro-German tendencies.” Another was fired because his declaration of loyalty to the U.S. had been insufficiently fervent. “The cause for this dismissal is your unsatisfactory attitude toward the present war,” an administrator wrote.
The war, of course, was World War I. Having myself written a book about that conflict’s impact on Alaska, I was asked by a journal to review a new book on the war’s impact on California. Alaska and California are very different places, but the war’s effects in both were basically the same. Some of these were inspiring — the way, for example, that people grew food in private gardens so more farm produce could be shipped overseas.
Other effects were less uplifting. One of these was the widespread abridgment of basic liberties, perpetrated, as usual, in the name of justice and safety. The result, Diane North writes, was “an atmosphere of mistrust and dissension in homes, workplaces and classrooms” that “changed the nature of relationships” and drove citizens to tattle on and intimidate one another.
A kind of insanity set in. Throughout the country, study of the German language and German culture was banned. Sunday schools established by immigrants that operated in German were made illegal. In some places, churches were prohibited from singing German hymns. It must have been an awkward time for Protestants who, before the war, had identified with a German named Martin Luther.
Only a few years before the U.S. entered the war in 1917, German research universities had set the standard for research and intellectual life. German philosophy and music had been the stuff of high culture. Among
former president Theodore Roosevelt’s credentials was fluency in German. But, in an instant, everything flipped. A global crisis stoked fear, fear stoked hysteria, hysteria stoked mistrust, and mistrust stoked moves against the basic rights of a minority deemed insufficiently committed to the program. Government, popular culture, media and churches quickly came to sound exactly the same.
Presumably, many within American universities could see the danger and irrationality of what was happening. They could see that basic Enlightenment ideals were under assault—most obviously, the claims of the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment. Plenty of professors knew that the witch trials of history had destroyed many more innocent people than witches. They knew that the radical phase of the French Revolution had employed the language of freedom for the purpose of repression. But, North writes, “an element of fear and a noticeable failure of common sense” prevailed, and the University of California “lacked the moral courage” to prevent the fervent from intimidating faculty, staff and students into submission.
Fast forward five years. I wonder what the pastors thought when they looked back — when they recalled their lofty 1916 sermons about the courage of David and Esther, only in 1918 to acquiesce without a whimper to the demands of activists out to snuff difference. I wonder what the professors thought — those who had stood silently by as intellectual freedom withered. I wonder what the neighbors thought — those who did nothing as their fellow citizens were maligned. I wonder what the accusers thought—they who had reveled in political righteousness wielded for the destruction of others.
Particulars change, themes in human nature don’t. And so, among the flood of disgraces reported each week from the country’s universities comes news that a professor faced protest at Middlebury College in Vermont because he wanted to argue that slavery was not the core of the American Founding, as partisans supported by the New York Times insist. Or we could mention the student throng screaming obscenities outside the home of Northwestern University’s president because he’s not in favor of abolishing the campus police department. Or we could consider the persecution of a professor at Portland State University who argues that, on the whole, the British Empire did more good than harm.
Or we could visit college campuses across the land and talk to independentminded professors who fear becoming the targets of social media campaigns. Who fear getting on the wrong side of what’s OK to say, a box that seems to get smaller each day. Who watch in dismay as an anxious professional class knits intellectual straightjackets for itself and the young, all the while — like the beasts in Orwell’s Animal Farm — singing songs of justice, goodness and truth.