Woodrow Wilson's War at Home |
History
Woodrow Wilson's War at Home
Silencing "Fighting Bob" details how the government targeted anti-war critics like Sen. Robert La Follette.
Brandan P. Buck | From the May 2026 issue
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(Illustration: Collection DocAnciens/Wikimedia Commons/Eric T. Chester)
Silencing "Fighting Bob": The Attack on Antiwar Progressives During the First World War, by Eric T. Chester, NYU Press, 216 pages, $24
When Sen. Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette Sr. opposed American entry into the Great War, the Wisconsin Republican warned that intervention abroad would carry consequences at home. What he did not anticipate was that he himself would be the target of a government-organized propaganda campaign designed to end his political career.
Eric T. Chester's Silencing "Fighting Bob" reconstructs how that campaign unfolded—and how it extended far beyond a single senator during the fraught months between the debate over intervention and the height of U.S. mobilization in 1918. By illustrating the reach of wartime state power, this unsettling work of history resonates in an era of both continual foreign interventions and renewed domestic dissent.
Organized into four chapters, the book examines the federal government's campaign against three left-leaning social groups and one progressive politician. Drawing on press coverage, speeches, pamphlets, and private correspondence, Chester reconstructs what he describes as "open and covert operations directed at suppressing progressives and the social democratic left." The book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on repression during the First World War, a period when American civil liberties contracted with remarkable speed.
The book unfolds as a story of two sides in a domestic propaganda war: those targeted by the federal government and those who carried out the targeting, principally through the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a wartime propaganda agency established by executive order, and the Bureau of Investigation, a forerunner of today's FBI. Each chapter centers on a specific target of federal pressure: the largely antiwar Jewish community of New York's Lower East Side, the People's Council of America for Democracy and the Terms of Peace (PCA), the........