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“Enemy Aliens” and “Silk Stocking Girls”: The Class Politics of Internment in the Drive for Urban Order during World War I1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Adam Hodges
Adam Hodges
Affiliation:
University of Houston—Clear Lake
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Extract

This article focuses on the two national internment programs developed in the United States during World War I from the vantage point of Portland, Oregon, and argues that they unfolded locally. Both the male enemy aliens at risk of internment and the girls and women who experienced confinement due to sexual activity tended to be poor. Authorities deemed that they were, or were likely to become, radicals or prostitutes—but that they were not to be prosecuted as such. Officials could banish or track them more easily as threats to the war effort, rather than as threats to urban social stability and economic development. Scholars of the home front have ignored the evolution of local-federal partnerships to track or intern these two groups and have so far failed to establish how local perceptions of the dangerous poor shaped cooperation with wartime federal authority.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , October 2007 , pp. 431 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2007

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References

2 Bert Haney to Thomas Gregory, Jul. 15, 1918, Oregon Historical Society (OHS), mss. 1704 [Portland U.S. Attorney], box 7, vol. 32.

3 On the South during the war, see “Federal Power and Southern Resistance during World War I: A Roundtable,” Journal of American History 87 (Mar. 2001): 1335–96Google Scholar.

4 Political scientist Marc Allen Eisner has argued that the federal government engaged in “compensatory state building” during World War 1 to make up for its lack of ability- to administer a national war effort. However, he focused on efforts to append corporate resources and did not address shifts in federalism that redressed the lack of federal-level mobilization capacity. , Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the limits of the Modern Order (University Park, PA, 2000)Google Scholar; Two fine books by William Breen focus on federalism during the war, but they take on the daunting task of attempting to describe federal interaction with every region in the country, and the police powers of the state are largely beyond his scope. , Breen, Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilisation, Wartime Federalism, and the Council of National Defense, 1917-1919 (Westport, CT, 1984),Google Scholar and Labor Market Politics and the Great War: The Department of Labor, the States, and the First U.S. Employment Service, 1907-1933 (Kent, OH, 1997)Google Scholar.

5 The only study of enemy alien regulations is article-length with a nationwide scope: Nagler, Jörg,c “Victims of the Home Front: Enemy Aliens in the United States during the First World War” in Minorities in Wartime: Nationaland Racial Groupings in Hurope, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars, ed. Panayi, Panikos (New York, 1993), 191–215.Google Scholar The most comprehensive survey of the war barely mentions German immigrants at all: Kennedy, David, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1980).Google Scholar The classic survey of civil liberties struggles during the war largely ignores enemy aliens: Murphy, Paul, World War I and the Origins of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; and even a study of contemporar y enemy aliens does not examine German Americans during World War I, although nearly half the volume is devoted to historical context: Cole, David, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York, 2003).Google Scholar A focus on popular rather than systematic federal persecution in the ethnicity literature is evident in the volume, classic John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Natirism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1955),Google Scholar and also still in Frank Van Nuys' more recent Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (Lawrence, KS, 2002).Google Scholar Two books focusing on German Americans are valuable resources, but make crucial omissions: , FrederickLuebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I (DeKalb, IL, 1974)Google Scholar did not explore federal manuscripts or delve much into registration, tracking, or internment; Kazal, Russell, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton, 2004),Google Scholar ignores the centrality of class position in determining the fate of enemy aliens. Most of the limited work on venereal disease internment that does acknowledge class has privileged the role of the federal Commission on Training Camp Activities and ignored the primacy of local initiative: Brandt, Allan M., No Magic Bullet: A Social of Venereal Disease in the United States United States Since 1880 (New York, 1985), ch. 2Google Scholar; Hobson, Barbara Meil, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York, 1987), ch. 7; andGoogle ScholarBristow, Nancy K., Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

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19 Report of H.P. Malone, Dec. 6, 1917, file 43436, reel 394, “Old German Files,” RG 65, NA—College Park; Newspaper clipping, July 17, 1918, folder 2031, box 10, RG 165, War Department General and Special Staffs, National Archives [NA], Seattle.

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23 Portland U.S. Attorney, OHS, mss. 1704, box 7, vol. 33. Also, Reames to Gregory, Jan. 10, 1918, vol. 31, and Haney to Gregory, Apr. 5, 1918, vol. 32, in box 7.

24 Haney to Gregory, Aug. 30 and Nov. 8, 1918, OHS, mss. 1704, box 7, vol. 33.

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26 Reames to Gregory, Sep. 20, 24, and Oct. 11, 18, 1917, OHS, mss.1704, box 6, vol. 30; Haney to Gregory, Mar. 22, 1918, box 7, vol. 32; Reports of problems with German newspapers in Portland appear up to Haney to Gregory, Mar. 29, 1918, box 7, vol. 32.

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30 Reames to Gregory, Aug. 6, 1917, OHS, mss. 1704, box 6, vol. 30.

31 Reames to Gregory, June 14 and July 10, 1917, OHS, mss. 1704, box 6, vol. 30; Newspaper clipping, Feb. 27, 1918, folder 2112, box 11, RG 165, NA—Seattle.

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33 Division of Venereal Diseases to Oregon Social Hygiene Society, Nov. 25, 1918, file 235.4, folder “1918-19,” box 90, entry 42, RG 90, NA—College Park; David Robinson to George Baker, Oct. 11, 1920, Robinson to Baker, Jan. 25, 1921, file 235.7, folder “1921”; Rupert Blue to Baker, Aug. 28, 1919, folder “1918-19.”

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35 Ordinance for the Control of Venereal Diseases.

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40 The parole records are spread chronologically through vols. 7-9, OHS, mss. 1541; Case No. 11, The Cedars Report, Aug. 30, 1918, and Case No. 28, OHS, mss. 1541, vol. 7.

41 The Cedars Report, Sept. 13, 1918, and Case No. 6, July 19, 1918, OHS, mss. 1541, vol. 7.

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