The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America

Christopher Capozzola

On July 26, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson condemned mob rule. Almost four months had passed since Robert Prager, a German American coal miner, had been lynched. Wilson was angered that the enemy German press had used the killing of Prager in its wartime propaganda, and he felt increasing pressure from civil libertarians at home. In a widely reprinted proclamation, Wilson insisted on the rule of law. He claimed that "no man who loves America, no man who really cares for her fame and honor and character, . . . can justify mob action while the courts of justice are open and the governments of the States and the Nation are ready and able to do their duty." The mob spirit, Wilson averred, was irreconcilable with American democracy.	1
I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of right than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior.1
In the early twentieth century, there was far less consensus about the nation's "standards of law and of right" than Wilson suggested. During and after World War I, Americans debated the place of extralegal violence in American political life. Through words and actions, they negotiated the boundaries of legitimate political coercion. These ongoing debates shed light on the relationship between voluntarism and state authority in twentieth-century American political culture.	2
Woodrow Wilson's proclamations notwithstanding, violence has been a persistent feature of American political life, especially in the tumult of World War I. Political violence claims a central place in many narratives of the American past. To read them is to learn that violence is as American as apple pie, a point that would not have been lost on the crowd that strung Robert Prager up on the branch of a lone huckleberry tree on the outskirts of Collinsville, Illinois, and then dropped his body three times, in the words of one participant, "one for the red, one for the white, and one for the blue."2	. . .