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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
By Adam Hodges, University of Houston—Clear Lake
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.
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Albert Hilker, a Prussian coppersmith and recent immigrant who had served in the German infantry, would certainly have been banned from working in the war production plants on the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, if not for his trade. He made copper elbow joints for the Northwest Process Company and stubbornly refused, out of craft pride, to allow others to do the finishing on his joints. The company could not do without his skills but badly wanted to maximize production by speeding up and dividing the elbow joint work. After being leaned on by management, Hilker quit. Desperate to regain his services with full cooperation, the firm had him taken into federal custody as an "enemy alien" who deliberately sabotaged essential war production by slowing down the pace of work. U.S. Attorney Bert Haney interviewed him and afterward felt "confident that he will cooperate hereafter in getting out material." Hilker was in a strong position due to current high demand for his skills and could easily have left for another firm in Portland or any other war production center in the nation. However, as an enemy alien, he needed a permit to leave the city and most metalworkers in Portland labored on or near the waterfront, which also required a pass.2 |
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If Hilker had proved stubborn to Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, they would have had every right to intern him as a Prussian saboteur. During the war, federal-local partnerships used internment, or the threat of internment, on the local level and in response to regional conditions to eliminate threats to war production and troop recruitment and deployment. Urban elites in the West welcomed the help to stabilize rapidly growing cities and industrialize their economies. This confluence of interests produced a partnership that was replicated elsewhere in lesser measure during the war, particularly in the South, where there was active resistance to expanded federal power over state and local affairs.3 |
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Unfortunately, the history of mobilization and attendant partnerships to establish order on the local level during World War I has been largely undeveloped. Scholars have tended to examine the national implementation of particular programs or waves of repression, or even just internal wrangling in Washington, despite heavy federal reliance on state and local administrative resources and also dramatic regional differences that complicated uniform policies. Internment, or the threat of internment, was the most powerful policing tool that these partnerships had access to during the war because it circumvented formal legal proceedings. It has received little attention and none on the local level, where decision making on the fates of individuals took place in response to regional conditions.4 |
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