How a World War I Crackdown Predicted ICE — SkimNews
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- The Dissidents — Backderf's new graphic novel has largely invented dialogue but research drawn from Adam Hochschild's American Midnight and contemporaneous accounts; it follows fictional cartoonist Joe Hertle at the Newspaper Enterprise Association, who loses his leg below the knee to a trolley car in a riot, and reproduces art by John Sloan, George Bellows and Harry Ryle Hopps's "Destroy This Mad Brute" poster.
- The Masses — the Greenwich Village socialist magazine that ran from 1911 to 1917 and published John Reed's dispatches on the Bolsheviks; after the Espionage Act of 1917 the U.S. Postal Service refused to deliver it as interfering with conscription, and it reconstituted as The Liberator, which carried the reporting that became Ten Days That Shook the World.
- Woodrow Wilson — signed the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act of 1918, screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House and then permitted the expansion of government office segregation after promising Black leaders moderation, and started the Bureau of Cartoons to censor editorial cartoonists, with a guidelines pamphlet cover by James Montgomery Flagg.
- American Protective League — a consortium of violent vigilantes operating under Wilson's approval and color of law that raided businesses and arrested pacifists and conscientious objectors at its own discretion, and during one three-day period in 1918 ran draft-card checks throughout New York City, detaining supposed dodgers and people who simply forgot to carry their cards.
- Art Young — charged under the Espionage Act and put on trial; Robert Minor was imprisoned abroad by the U.S. military for organizing French railway workers to strike and narrowly avoided execution, while conscientious objector Maurice Becker was held and tortured at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth.
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the modern counterpart in Backderf's telling, set beside the 2024 Republican National Convention's "mass deportation now" signs and DHS's other militarized enforcement arms, Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Patrol, with the book closing on Emma Goldman's deportation.
- Wall Street Journal — ran an unsigned front-page editorial on April 6, the day the United States formally entered the war, warning that "militant pacifists are earnestly reminded that there is no shortage of hemp or lamp-posts," and the review notes the paper recently published a letter under the headline "The Iran War Isn't Deranged."
Why it matters: The book's sharpest charge is legal, not rhetorical: Wilson's approval let the American Protective League run draft-card checks across New York City for three days in 1918, detaining not only draft dodgers but men who forgot their cards. For readers of today's ICE enforcement, the review's point is that present crackdowns have a documented American precedent rather than being a new phenomenon.
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