Enemies, enemies everywhere
Wilson and Nixon torched the Constitution. Trump is, too.
We imagine this scene to be the norm on the streets of Russia or China or somewhere in a tinpot dictatorship. A harmless woman leaves her home to meet friends for dinner. In this case, the woman is Muslim and she is going to iftar to break the Ramadan fast. As soon as she hits the sidewalk, she’s confronted by masked, plainclothes government agents who grab her phone and cuff her wrists behind her back. She’s terrified. You can hear the terror in her voice moments before she is disappeared.
This is Donald Trump’s America.
Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, is a doctoral student at Tufts University. She is among a half dozen or so foreign-born learners attending prestigious U.S. universities who’ve been kidnapped by federal immigration agents for the thought-crime of criticizing Israel’s war of national destruction on Gaza.
These students have committed no real crimes. Their rights to free expression and due process have been shredded as the Trump administration crushes dissent on Israel. Ozturk wrote an op-ed critical of a country whose leaders were indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Ozturk’s crime is having an opinion.
Yet Secretary of State Marco Rubio disingenuously suggested that Ozturk and other pro-Palestinian students, who are exercising their constitutional rights to speak their minds, are some kind of threat to American interests under an obscure McCarthy-era law. It authorizes the Secretary to deport immigrants who endanger U.S. foreign policy interests.
“We revoked her visa,” said Rubio. “Let me be abundantly clear. If you apply for a visa right now anywhere in the world – let me send this message out – if you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student and you tell us the reason you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds,” – a sarcastic reference to Ozturk’s activism – “but because you want to participate in movements involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa.”
There is to date no evidence Ozturk vandalized buildings or harassed Jewish students. If you believe these arrests are about national security, foreign policy, antisemitism, or “pro-Hamas” subversives, you’re not paying attention.
A gulag in El Salvador
As federal officers were hunting students who, in President Trump’s imagination, engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” the administration was defying a federal judge’s order to turn around deportation flights of suspected gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
The Venezuelans were shackled and deported without a hearing under the Alien Enemies Act, which has never been invoked during peacetime. It then came as no surprise when news media reported that some deportees had no criminal record. A few may have been mistakenly targeted for scary-looking tattoos. A federal appeals court says the flights must stop – for now.
The administration’s gross disregard for the Constitution, civil liberties, and basic decency was expected. Donald Trump may not be an ideologue, but he’s made plain his view that criminal aliens are destroying American society. He promised to deport all undocumented immigrants. Trump shows no indication that he recognizes any legal restraints on his behavior, emboldened as he was by the U.S. Supreme Court in its historically disgraceful ruling in Trump v. United States.
This ongoing assault on the foundations of liberal democracy – whatever the Department of Justice may claim about the law being on its side – is not unprecedented. It is part of an American tradition of political repression, which usually manifests during times of acute national stress or, maybe more accurately, manufactured hysteria about internal enemies and feared invasions.
Repression under progressivism
In Friday’s episode of History As It Happens, the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin and I revisited America’s ugliest period of repression. It occurred at the height of the Progressive era, when social and political reformers believed they could harness the energies unleashed by rapid industrialization and waves of immigration to mold a better society.
Indeed, even before U.S. involvement in a European war loomed, reformers sought to enlighten and educate – to Americanize – the masses of “hyphenated Americans” in the cause of patriotic unity, to dispel radical ideas imported by an unwashed proletariat. But these efforts soon turned to repression, and the Woodrow Wilson administration took a blowtorch to the Bill of Rights.
Michael Kazin is a distinguished scholar of American political and social movements. His 2017 book War Against War documents the crackdown on peace activists and socialists who were tossed in jail and had their publications shut down.
“Whenever the party in power argues that free speech is a threat to national security, you have repression. Sometimes, people are put in jail or deported if they’re non-citizens. And often the population is egged on to hate them and use vigilante justice against others,” Kazin says.
Allow me to introduce another book here. Historian David M. Kennedy’s Over Here: The First World War and American Society penetrated the country’s deep layers where fear, suspicion, and paranoia festered, waiting to be triggered by official sanction. “Hyphenated Americans” who were tolerable during peacetime now threatened to undermine the war effort by their very presence in the country. The hunt for subversives was arbitrary, and vigilantism obliterated due process.
“In one of the war’s most infamous cases of vigilantism, near St. Louis in April 1918, a mob seized Robert Prager, a young man whose only discernible offense was to have been born in Germany. He had, in fact, tried to enlist in the American Navy but had been rejected for medical reasons. Stripped, bound with an American flag, dragged barefoot and stumbling through the streets, Prager was eventually lynched to the lusty cheers of five hundred patriots. A trial of the mob’s leaders followed, in which the defendants wore red, white, and blue ribbons to court, and the defense counsel called their deed ‘patriotic murder.’” (Kennedy, Over Here, p. 68)
The jury took 25 minutes to arrive at a verdict: not guilty. As Kennedy details, all immigrants were now suspected of disloyalty, and local patriotic organizations pressured them to conform. But rather than call for mass deportations, “the 100 percent Americanizers… set about to stampede immigrants into citizenship, into adoption of the English language, and into an unquestioning reverence for existing American institutions.” (Kennedy, Over Here, p. 68)
In the meantime, Congress enacted the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Because of these pernicious laws, as Kazin and I discussed on another podcast last March, simply speaking out against the war could land you in prison. Police hauled off the socialist Eugene V. Debs for denouncing the draft during a speech in Canton, Ohio.
The Palmer Raids
Deportations would come later. After the war, a Red Scare convulsed the country. However, communists and anarchists were not phantoms. An anarchist blew up the Washington home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1919. Socialists and communists were involved in hundreds of strikes, including a general strike in Seattle.
Congress pressured Palmer to move against foreign radicals. In November 1919, the “Palmer Raids” swept up hundreds of suspected subversives (anarchists and communists). In January, thousands more were arrested. People were dragged away without warrants.
As Kennedy writes, “Palmer concentrated his efforts on aliens because they could be deported through a purely administrative process mandated by the Alien Act of 1918. He thus avoided the formal indictments and public trials that would have been necessary had he prosecuted radical citizens under the Espionage or Sedition acts,” (Over Here, p. 290).
Mere membership in a radical organization could result in a deportation order. Of the thousands snatched in the Palmer Raids, fewer than 600 were deported.
The parallels with the Trump administration’s crackdown are inescapable. The federal government is exploiting existing laws (of dubious constitutionality) to kick immigrants out of the country, due process be damned. Simply associating with the pro-Palestinian cause is enough to be disappeared into the dungeon.
“There’s a sense,” says Kazin, “that America has let in too many people with different views that are undermining the national culture and, as they claim, undercutting American wages and working conditions. This is a kind of racial-ethnic nationalism as opposed to a more liberal civic nationalism, which is what most liberals and progressives support. That is, everyone should have the same rights. No one should be seen as an enemy or hostile to American ideals because of where they come from.”
The Red Scare petered out by mid-1920. Palmer’s reputation was damaged when the communist revolution he predicted for May Day never materialized. Most deportation orders were cancelled. Courts ordered those wrongfully arrested to be released. Sanity returned. I wonder how and when Trump’s trampling of the Constitution will end.
Listen to Michael Kazin discuss the Palmer Raids here, and subscribe to History As It Happens so you never miss a new episode.
Enemies lists
On the subject of enemies, real or imagined, the historian and researcher Ken Hughes of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center appeared on Tuesday’s episode to talk about the time a paranoid conspiracy theorist occupied the White House.
Donald Trump publicly campaigned on retribution. Sometimes he named names such as Joe Biden or Letitia James. Sometimes he spoke of a mysterious cabal of radicals, Marxists, and communists. Whoever preoccupies Trump’s deranged mind, he doesn’t hide his feelings.
The paranoid conspiracy theorist who attempted to keep his enemies list secret was Richard Nixon. In August 1971, White House counsel John Dean typed a memo explaining the purpose of the president’s initial list of 20 enemies: to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies” – “persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration.” Paul Newman? Leonard Bernstein? Who knew?
Ken Hughes is a master researcher of the White House tape recordings of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. His two books, Chasing Shadows and Fatal Politics, are among my favorites on the subject of Nixonian malfeasance. In our podcast conversation, he delved into why Nixon is important in the Age of Trump.
“The enemies list is unfortunately all too relevant. The enemies list was one way Richard Nixon tried to weaponize the federal government against people who got in his way politically,” Hughes says.
“These were not people who had declared Richard Nixon their enemy. These were people whom Richard Nixon considered his enemies. Typically, they were people who posed some political challenge or political threat to him. His efforts behind the scenes to mobilize the vast investigative and prosecutorial power of the federal government against people on the basis of politics were a major part of Watergate.”
Like Trump today, Nixon was consumed with personal demons – or personal grudges that he conflated with matters of national interest. To oppose Nixon was to oppose what was best for the country, because Nixon identified his political survival with that of the nation during the trials of Vietnam and Watergate.
“Watergate was a scandal about a president who was supposed to be a servant of the people, trying to use his power secretly to become the people’s master. It was a complete violation of the spirit and the letter of the Constitution, which demands the president execute laws passed by Congress and obey them himself,” Hughes says.
In the aforementioned Trump vs. United States, the Roberts court ruled that a president enjoys criminal immunity for “official acts” – essentially carte blanche. Hughes says Nixon’s criminal behavior in Watergate, including the creation of ‘the plumbers,’ may have fallen under this rubric.
“Nixon, as an official act, pardoned Jimmy Hoffa. He did it for an entirely corrupt reason. He did it in return for support from the Teamsters union. Nixon’s use of the Internal Revenue Service against political targets – that was an official act. But he did it for political reasons, targeting the head of the opposition party, Larry O’Brien… Nixon got O’Brien tied up in an audit during the presidential campaign of 1972,” Hughes says.
President Trump has yet to attempt to prosecute any major political figures. He is using federal power to threaten national broadcast networks. He cowed Columbia University by withholding federal funds. He has unleashed Elon Musk to eviscerate parts of “the deep state.” Trump’s campaign is out in the open. It is cruel and authoritarian by design. Yet in contrast to the Watergate era, when congressional Republicans eventually dumped Nixon, today’s GOP cheers it on.
I promised to share Hughes’ essay for The Conversation. Read it here.
What’s next?
In next Tuesday’s episode, the National Security Archives’ Peter Kornbluh and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi will take a deep dive into the JFK files.
The National Security Archive is unaffiliated with the federal government. It is a non-profit research organization located on the campus of George Washington University and dedicated to the declassification of secret government documents.
Read Kornbluh and Jimenez-Barcardi’s article about some of the key disclosures in the release of 80,000 unredacted documents, of which many are only loosely related to President Kennedy’s assassination.
Next Friday, I will speak to University of Exeter historian Marc Palen about the time an American president tried to make Canada a state by imposing punitive tariffs. Now we know why President Trump seems to admire William McKinley!