We’ve walked this road before or how Woodrow Wilson trampled free speech long before Trump’s efforts

I got a history lesson Sunday night at the Seattle premiere of Suffs, but it may not have been the one its creators had intended.

The Tony award-winning musical focuses on the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote. In the process, it introduces us to the First Amendment curtailing policies of Woodrow Wilson, the first southern Democrat elected to the White House since the Civil War.

Wilson campaigned in 1916 on keeping America out of the war in Europe. However, on 01 April 1917 he reversed course. What followed was the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918.

Woodrow Wilson’s administration, both before and after Wilson was disabled by a stroke, did things that [President] Trump would like to do. Under the sweeping provisions of the Espionage Act, passed by a compliant Congress, it closed down some 75 newspapers and magazines and put hundreds of Americans in jail solely for things they wrote or said (emphasis added).

Alice Paul and suffragists of the National Woman’s Party began protesting outside the gates of Wilson’s White House in 1917 to pressure him to endorse an amendment granting women the vote (suffrage). Under Wilson’s crackdown on dissent, police arrested the protesters.

By the fall of 1917, more than a hundred women had been arrested and imprisoned on charges of obstructing traffic and unlawful assembly, ostensibly because they attracted large and often hostile crowds to witness their demonstrations.

Wilson was “sentenced to seven months in prison for picketing at the White House on October 22, 1917.”

Two weeks later, on November 5, Paul began a hunger strike at the District of Columbia Jail to protest the refusal of prison officials to grant her and her fellow suffrage inmates the status of “political prisoner.” Panicked by the prospect of Paul’s martyrdom while under their care, officials for the District Jail had called in noted psychiatrist William Alanson White, the head of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane, to evaluate her sanity, and to determine whether she should be fed by force…

Held incommunicado in the “psychopathic ward” at the District Jail, Paul experienced the horrors of forcible feeding three times a day. At the same time, the last picket line of the campaign resulted in the arrests of forty-one women, including the wives of prominent Washington men, who were tried en masse and shipped off to the workhouse. The new prisoners intended to adopt Paul’s strategy of demanding to be treated as political prisoners, but quickly found that the officials at Occoquan had no patience with the niceties of such theoretical discourse. An organized mob of prison guards and prisoners attacked and beat the prisoners and dragged them off to their cells, leaving one on the floor having a heart attack, and another chained to the bars over her head. Later known in the annals of the NWP as the “Night of Terror,” the violence brought to bear against the women both terrified them and strengthened their resolve not to cooperate with prison authorities (emphasis added).

Pause for a moment and think about current events. Arrested in DC, shipped to the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia. Force fed. Beaten. It should sound familiar.

Wilson also sent troops into Mexico and started the first Red Scare.

How many news media outlets has Trump sued or threatened to sue? What about illegally deciding not to fund NPR? And his attacks on the First Amendment post-Charlie Kirk’s murder?

Trump, who blamed the political left for Kirk’s murder before authorities had identified a suspect, told reporters Sunday his administration has launched a probe into unnamed figures in response to Kirk’s murder.

“They’re already under major investigation — a lot of the people that you would traditionally say are on the left,” the president claimed. “They’re already under investigation.”

[…]

While speaking with reporters, Trump also again downplayed right-wing extremism by solely blaming the political left for violence in the country.

“If you look at the problem, the problem is on the left. It’s not on the right,” the president said. “When you look at the agitators, you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag-burnings all over the place — that’s the left. That’s not the right.”

His statement about right-wing extremism is a lie.

Trump’s blustering doesn’t have the cover of a world war, although he’s trying to create one with his unlawful attacks (there was another today) on boats in international waters.

Today’s political environment is a direct reminder of George Santayana’s quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If an underfunded group of women could arrange a protest in two months in 1917 that upstaged Wilson’s inauguration, bringing together 5,000 women from across the country and a half-million spectators (before cellphones and transcontinental flights) … then we should be able to drown out Trump. Let’s build on the courage of the women who came before us.

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