World War I

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WORLD WAR I

The United States entered World War I on a note of Wilsonian idealism, but the shattering experience of wartime mobilization ended the era of progressivism. Broad federal powers, previously used to further domestic reforms, were expanded to meet the demands of international conflict. These changes accelerated the trends toward national centralization and executive authority. Thus, ironically, woodrow wilson, who had been elected on a platform of firm but limited government control, brought Leviathan to the nation.

With little in the way of precedents, Congress and the President were pressed to extend national government control to a vast new range of complex subjects. The result was multitudinous delegations of power to President Wilson, designed to allow the executive branch to develop programs to meet the changing requirements of a fluid war situation. The breadth of this legislation was startling. Acts to achieve wartime economic mobilization and efficient use of natural resources were augmented by a selective service act vesting the President with authority to raise an army by conscription. Espionage and sedition legislation afforded power to punish dissenting expression that might impede the war effort. The Trading with the Enemy Act gave the government power to control trade with enemy nations and to become an alien-property custodian for the duration of the war. The same measure authorized censorship of all communications by mail, cable, radio, or otherwise with foreign countries, and gave the postmaster general almost absolute censorship powers over the American foreign-language press. More sweepingly, the act empowered the chief executive to take over and operate the rail and water transportation systems of the country, along with the telegraph and telephone systems. In creating a modified executive dictatorship for the war period, these actions also raised complex constitutional questions, the answers to which reflected crisis pressures.

The lever food and drug control act of 1917 is a case in point. One of the most important war measures, it authorized broad federal control of the domestic economy, a sphere of regulation traditionally reserved to the states. The law gave the President virtually unlimited discretionary power to license the manufacture and distribution of food and related commodities, to take over and operate mines and factories, to regulate exchanges, and to fix commodity prices. The measures precipitated a bitter debate in Congress. Critics called it a violation of the tenth amendment and thus of states ' rights, but Congress enacted it on a theory of the war powers and on the argument that the industries controlled were affected with a public interest. During the war, the act was not challenged in court. In United States v. L. Cohen Grocery Co. (1921) the Supreme Court voided the price-fixing provision, which failed to specify what constituted unjust process. By concentrating on the detailed phrasing of only one section, the Court implicitly accepted the broad grant of power. Indeed, it did not reach the issue of the government's authority to regulate prices under the war power. The Court thus recognized that the requirements of modern war left little federalism in wartime.

Another example of expanding federal power and increased executive authority was presidential seizure and governmental operation of the nation's rail networks. As early as 1916, the Army Appropriations Act had authorized the President "'in time of war … to take possession and assume control of any system of transportation." After Wilson took over the railroads in 1917, Congress passed the Railway Administration Act of 1918, providing for government operation of the rails and compensation of their owners. The Court upheld this executive seizure in Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. North Dakota (1919), Chief Justice edward d. white invoking Congress's war powers, which, he argued, reach as far as necessary to meet the emergency. The Court also approved the government's takeover of telephone and telegraph lines in a series of cases argued with the railroad suit, notably Dakota Central Telephone Co. v. South Dakota (1919).

The wartime period also brought the long crusade for prohibition to a successful conclusion. The Lever Act, under the mandate of preserving scarce food resources, authorized the President to limit or forbid the use of foodstuffs for production of alcoholic beverages. Beginning in December 1917, Wilson issued a series of war proclamations that in effect established near total prohibition. Congress joined in, passing the Wartime Prohibition Act in November 1918, prohibiting the manufacture or distribution of alcoholic beverages until the war came to a formal end and demobilization had been completed.

In the meantime, Congress had approved the eighteenth amendment, which the states ratified in January 1919, although not without an attack on the constitutionality of the amendment, the first time such action had taken place. Subsequently, a case reached the Supreme Court, Rhode Island v. Palmer (1920), where a large number of "wet" attorneys submitted briefs against the measure. The Constitution, they contended, had not created an unlimited amendment power, and ordinary legislation should not be made part of it. Thus, the Eighteenth Amendment had exceeded legitimate amending limits. Second, they argued that Section 2 altered traditional lines of authority by giving both Congress and the states concurrent enforcement powers, thereby undermining the federal system. The Court brushed aside these and other arguments, seeing no radical invasion of the original police power of the states.

The Overman bill came before Congress in early 1918 and provoked substantial resistance to further expansion of presidential authority. The measure was inspired by a desire to introduce some order and flexibility into the chaotic welter of wartime bureaus, commissions, and other special agencies, and to straighten out overlapping jurisdictions that were creating administrative confusion. The measure gave the President a blank check to reorganize the executive agencies "as he may deem necessary, including any functions, duties, and powers hitherto by law conferred on any executive department." The act was to remain in force until a year after the close of the war. By its terms the President could reassign any function, no matter where it had been lodged previously, even if Congress had specifically given that responsibility to a particular agency. The bill imposed no checks on presidential discretion and provided no standards for evaluating the executive's conduct.

The constitutionality of the measure elicited vigorous debate. Supporting senators argued that the bill was a necessity and that it was limited, for the President could create no new functions but merely transfer those already in existence. But critics argued that the bill could not be justified by the war power, for many departments and functions unrelated to the war might be affected by its terms. Republican Senator Frank Brandagee of Connecticut denounced the bill as an attempt to force Congress to "abdicate completely its legislative power and confer it upon the executive branch of the government." The measure passed in the senate in late April, with the majority senators overlooking constitutional doubts. A bitter Brandagee then offered an ironic amendment, providing that "if any power, constitutional or not, has been inadvertently omitted from this bill, it is hereby granted in full." The Overman Act, like the Lever Act, demonstrated that ordinary restraints upon delegation of legislative power to the President had been shelved for the duration of the war. The Supreme Court was not afforded an opportunity to pass on the act's constitutionality.

President Wilson wisely did not exercise the tremendous authority delegated to him by this measure and previous ones. Instead, he used ordinance-making powers to establish a series of commissions, boards, bureaus, and government-owned corporations to carry on wartime functions. These agencies included the Office of Food Administration; the Office of Fuel Administration; the National War Labor Board, for handling labor disputes during the war; and other agencies to deal solely with aspects of wartime transportation. The War Industries Board had complete authority over all war purchases and eventually came to exercise almost total control over all industry.

Wilson also created, by executive order, the Committee on Public Information, whose principal responsibility was to "manufacture" public sentiment favorable to measures necessary to the conduct of the war. Run by a flamboyant journalist, George Creel, the committee operated as a loosely knit, ever-changing, but always powerful organization spreading information and propagating beliefs for the American people. With no authority beyond the executive order that created it, the committee worked alongside the Food Administration, the Fuel Administration, and many other agencies, pouring out publicity and propaganda to promote the war effort. It also worked with the Post Office Department to restrict circulation of news and propaganda, in the process imposing a type of informal censorship.

The civil liberties implications of the Committee on Public Information were troubling to a number of liberal Americans, yet it faced no court challenge to its actions. Other governmental restrictions on individual freedoms, however, did elicit legal challenges. The Selective Service Act was the first. As opponents of the war questioned its constitutionality, lower courts expedited various draft cases, permitting an early test case in the Supreme Court. In the selective draft law cases of January 1918, a unanimous Court found the constitutional authority to impose compulsory military service in Congress's powers to declare war and to "raise and support armies." Pushing aside states' rights challenges and a charge that conscription was "involuntary servitude," forbidden by the thirteenth amendment, the Court also shrugged off a challenge that the measure's conscientious-objection exception violated the first amendment because it amounted to an establishment of religion. Thus sustained, the act was administered at the local level through "neighborhood" civilian draft boards, the government hoping thereby to create the illusion that the process was democratic and free of national control.

While conscription curtailed the freedom of those drafted, the freedom of critics of the war was constrained through other legislation. Although Congress adopted no general censorship law, it did enact two statutes limiting press and speech freedoms. The espionage act of 1917 drafted to "outlaw spies and subversiveon expression that might disrupt the war effort by causing disobedience in the armed forces or by obstructing recruitment and enlistment. The Justice Department prosecuted more than 2,000 cases under the 1917 act, and a comparable number of prosecutions were brought under similar state laws. Congress's sedition act amendment (1918) broadened the scope of punishable criticism, providing criminal penalties for eight offenses, coming generally under the concept of seditious libel, or unjustifiably criticizing the government, its officials, and its policies. Again the act was enforced broadly to silence public criticism.

Test cases on the two measures had to await the postwar period. In schenck v. united states (1919), oliver wendell holmes, jr. , spoke for the court in sustaining the espionage act, finding the expression of a socialist party leader presented a clear and present danger to recruitment. However, in abrams v. united states (1919), when the Court sustained the amended Sedition Act, Holmes dissented, contending that the defendant's expression had not met that standard. The Court sustained all federal and state curtailment of unpopular expression, leaving a restrictive set of precedents to govern interpretation of the First Amendment. But criticism of this behavior and of the Palmer raids spawned a civil liberties movement, which in subsequent years became a central feature of American constitutional development.

Paul L. Murphy
(1992)