TRATA EN EL DESPLAZAMIENTO DE TRABAJADORES

In April of 1917, Woodrow Wilson committed one the swiftest about-faces in U.S. presidential history. Abandoning the staunch antiwar platform of his 1916 presidential campaign, he went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany.250 Members of the House and Senate overwhelmingly supported the

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This is a passage from President Woodrow Wilson’s War Address to U.S. Congress, April 2, 1917. See “Full Text of the Address by the President to Congress,”

Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1917, I1.

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Scholars have debated the reasons Wilson abandoned his anti-war position after the 1916 presidential election. As David M. Kennedy shows, Wilson publicly justified his request for war as a defense of the nation’s neutral rights (seemingly violated by German submarine assaults) and an opportunity for the U.S. to vanquish autocracy in Europe and mold a lasting peace based on democratic principles and collective, global security. Left-leaning scholars, however, have taken Wilson’s public claims to task. Richard Hofstadter, for example, argues: “This was rationalization of the flimsiest sort [… Wilson] was forced to find legal reasons for policies that were based not upon law but upon the balance of power and economic necessities.” Expanding upon Hofstadter’s thoughts, Howard Zinn believes that Wilson, and the pro-war statesmen, bankers, and capitalists who supported Wilson’s call for war, were motivated by purely financial

President’s idealistic call to make the world “safe for democracy” and plunged the U.S. into the Great War. The battle cries on Capitol Hill, however, did not necessarily express the sentiments of the American people. For three years Americans had received a relatively uncensored (if distant) view of the Great War in all its terror and mass murder, and many had come to see the conflict as a senseless, apocalyptic, and strictly European affair that the United States could (and should) stay out of. Recognizing the antiwar streak that coursed through public discourse and consciousness, and comprehending the obvious incongruity between his pre- and post-election stances, President Wilson helped develop a series of wartime laws, policies, and agencies that made citizen (and non- citizen) support for the war effort a matter of compulsion, not choice. Establishing an unprecedented national draft,251 a powerful propaganda and media censorship bureau, and a Justice Department bent on prosecuting dissenters, the Wilson Administration attempted to control the hearts, minds, and bodies of every American. Within months, the

considerations: “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to

create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955), 277-9; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3-12; and Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States,

1492-Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 359-64.

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Throughout American history, compulsory military service has emerged periodically in various forms. During the Revolutionary War, state governments assumed the colonies’ authority to raise short-term militia forces through conscription, if necessary. During the Civil War, the North adopted a Federal draft in 1863, but permitted men to hire a substitute or pay a commutation fee of $3000 to avoid service. Roughly eight percent of Union troops were draftees—the rest were volunteers. World War I was the first war in which the United States relied primarily upon conscription; there were no loopholes for men of age who wished not to fight (as there had been in the past). See John Whiteclay Chambers II, “Conscription,” in ed. John Whiteclay Chambers II, The

Oxford Companion to American Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

people of the United States were legally and rhetorically transformed (through language, law, and force) into subservient, expendable cogs of the national war machine. And by November of 1918, roughly 117,000 American men would die “over there,” on the other side of the Atlantic.

Utilizing rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke’s heuristic dichotomy of motion and

action to analyze Wilson’s address252 and the nation’s subsequent war effort, this chapter offers a rhetorical analysis of the U.S. government and military’s wartime project and its profound effects upon Americans. In A Grammar of Motives,253 Burke builds his analysis

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Considered one of the most important political speeches of American twentieth century history, Wilson’s 1917 war address has received considerable attention from historians and presidential rhetoric scholars. Producing works too numerous to engage or list exhaustively here, scholars have analyzed the speech from various perspectives. Some have engaged it through the spectrum of “the presidency and the rhetoric of foreign crisis.” Others have engaged it as an act of the presidential “selling of war.” Others have examined its deployment of rhetorical devices. Still others have viewed the speech as an articulation of Wilsonian Progressivism. Admittedly, I do not adequately account for this scholarship in this dissertation, but I intend to as I turn my dissertation into a book manuscript. My hope is that my analysis of Wilson’s speech, and the subsequent national war effort, through Burke’s heuristic concept of motion/action will supplement this already vast and excellent body of work. For examples of this scholarship, see Katherine H. Adams, Progressive Politics and the Training of America’s Persuaders (Mahwah, N.J.: L. Eribaum Associates, 1999); Denise M. Bostdorff, The Presidency and the

Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Karlyn

Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds

Done in Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Richard Ellis, Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1998); Wayne Fields, Union of Words: A History of Presidential

Eloquence (New York: Free Press, 1996); Amos Kiewe, ed., The Modern Presidency and Crisis Rhetoric (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994); Robert Alexander Kraig, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost World of the Oratorical Statesman (College Station: Texas A&M

University Press, 2006); Eugene Secunda and Terence P. Moran, Selling War to America:

From the Spanish American War to the Global War on Terror (Westport, Conn.: Praeger

Security International, 2007); and, David Zarefsky, “Presidential Rhetoric and the Power of Definition,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34.3 (2004): 607-19.

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A canonical text for contemporary rhetorical scholars, this book explores human motives and the forms of thought and expression they take. As Burke puts it:

of human motives on his distinction between motion and action. Motions are events and behaviors that do not intentionally carry symbolic content. Exemplified by the realms of the natural world and “scientism” (which assumes that change is the result of purely physical, autonomous processes), motion is demonstrated by the rolling ocean wave, the bee pollinating a flower, the billiard ball rolling across a table, or a twitching human eye. But if that same eye twitch were actually a wink, it would be considered an action, a purposive human behavior that intentionally carries symbolic content. In other words, action is “motion with intent,” endemic to the realms of human affairs, ethics, and symbolism. Where motion implies inevitability and necessity, action implies agency, choice, and awareness of a behavior’s potential consequences. As they pertain to rhetoric, motion and action are useful conceptual frameworks for understanding, describing, and debating pressing social issues.254 And most importantly, people routinely characterize instances of motion as instances of action, and vice versa, in order to shift attitudes, blame, and responsibility.255

“What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An

answer to that question is the subject of this book.” Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of

Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), xv. Burke expands upon his

discussion of motion/action in Dramatism and Development (Barre, MA: Clark University Press, 1972).

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A familiar example of this application of the framework of motion and action is the longstanding Christian debate regarding man’s free will under an omnipotent, providential deity. If God has predetermined all human behaviors and fates, then humans have been set in motion by powers beyond their control. If, on the other hand, God has given man free will to “respond to His grace,” then humans could be viewed as agents of

action who are aware of the potential consequences of their behaviors and choices.

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An obvious contemporary example of the rhetorical alchemy that allows people to identify instances of action as instances of motion (and vice versa) is the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Whereas environmental groups claimed that BP was ethically, legally, and financially responsible for the environmental disaster because the company had deliberatively chosen cheaper and riskier deepwater drilling procedures to

This chapter provides a comprehensive exploration of what I term Wilson’s “project of motion” (which, given Burke’s theory, was itself a project of action). Beginning with the President’s war address to Congress, I examine the wartime laws, policies, and agencies the Wilson Administration and the American Expeditionary Forces used to constrain and suppress U.S. citizens’ and soldiers’ abilities to act and express themselves freely.256 Uncovering the motives behind this wartime project and the forms of thought and expression that were built around them, I show how prominent governmental, military, media, and cultural figures strategically cast instances of action as instances of motion (and instances of motion as action) to shape public attitudes, enforce draconian laws and policies, shift responsibility and blame to alleged evil enemies (both foreign and domestic), and construct and propagate national war aims. Inevitably, U.S. belligerence entailed the destruction of American life on a grand scale— a horrifying consequence and colossal material transformation that required appropriate and timely rhetorical compensations from the government. A controversy in late 1917 surrounding the treatment of the bodily remains of the nation’s first casualties revealed the dormant anxieties and dilemmas that lurked just below the surface of the domestic war effort; for the first, Americans realized that their fallen soldiers would not return to

save time and money (and thus cast the event in terms of action), BP denied that it had

any knowledge of the potential hazards of its methods and argued that (in the words of BP-apologist Senator Rand Paul) “sometimes accidents happen” (and thus cast the event in terms of motion).

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I do not mean to suggest that the government’s wartime project ended what had been a utopist period of democracy in which citizens had enjoyed and exercised the freedom to express themselves as autonomous members of society. Realities such as racial segregation and the persistence of women’s disfranchisement belie such a notion. Nor do I mean to say that the censorship and the suppression of free expression were unique to the American experience in the Great War, as similar things occurred during previous American wars.

the homeland for some time (if ever). Ultimately, soldiers who were drafted and sent to fight, kill, and die in foreign nations on the other side of the world (as well as their families), had little say in the matter. During the period of American belligerence, families of the dead were encouraged to view their profound and devastating losses as necessary sacrifices for the national war effort and the fight to make the world “safe for democracy” (rather than for independence from tyranny, the preservation of the Union, or the natural resources of distant colonial territories in Asia). At the same time, public expressions of grief and anger were effectively forbidden by the government’s wartime project of motion—thus, relatives of the dead were forced to keep their personal sentiments under wraps.

As we will see in the following chapters, this wartime suppression of emotion and expression that could be conceived of as undermining the war effort would give way to an explosion of symbolic action after the war, as Americans forcefully began demanding explanations and compensations for the premature deaths of their men. In time, the U.S. government would learn to appropriate the sentimental and domestic vernacular of angry and grieving families into its own official rhetoric so that it might satisfy the needs of the American people and justify the nation’s participation in the war. In the years following the Great War, the U.S. government would incorporate this sentimental vernacular into a series of commemoration projects (most notably, the establishment of a network of American military cemeteries throughout Western Europe) that, in combination, would reframe the national war effort as a project of action in which the American people— united around a shared set of principles and beliefs—had freely and willingly sacrificed their lives and their loved ones for the good of the world.