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CHAPTER XI
THE SLACKER RAIDS

Even had Mr. Bryan’s famous prophecy come true, that a million armed men would spring up over night and so end at once any trouble America might presumably experience in going to war, there still would have existed a vast deficit in our Army, which at the time of the Armistice had more than two million men armed and on the soil of France, almost as many in training, and ten times as many listed as army material if needed—although, to be sure, they had not sprung up either armed or equipped, as perhaps France or Great Britain could testify. The new draft ages of 18 to 45 swept in a vast additional army under the latest conscription act, although the first registration, those of 21 to 31, had set on foot our first American forces—as fine soldiers as ever stood on leather.

A great many phrases are made in time of war about war itself, and most of these come around to the ancient recruiting sergeant’s inviting motto recounting the glory of dying for one’s country. The Napoleonic wars were fought on the death-or-glory basis; but Napoleon got his troops by rigid conscription. We fought this war on a more sober basis of necessity. Most of us who are old enough and wise enough to study human nature and world politics knew that commercial jealousy, and not any abstract theories about democracy and the rights of man, lay basically under this war, as they have lain under most other wars. And the boys of the world—youth being resilient, of high pulse and low blood pressure, and believing, as youth always does, that nothing wrong can happen to youth and hope—were called on once more to fight the wars of the world, as the boys always have been asked to do.

Youth and middle age volunteered, old age itself volunteered, but the truth became obvious that our volunteer army would not spring armed over night in sufficient numbers. In fairness, we passed our draft acts, euphonically termed “Selective Service Acts,” it being intended that this action should bring America to its focus, and should put under arms warm and lukewarm lovers of our flag alike. As it seems to this writer, that originally was unfair only in that it made the maximum service age too low. It cast the burden of the war on the boys, the young men, most of whom had never felt hate against any country, and knew little about the causes of this war; for soldiers often do not really know why they fight.

Under the weak American pacifist propaganda, there lay much human nature and very much more of shrewd German propaganda. Germany always has had this country sown with spies and secret agents, as we have shown, and always has counted very largely on the German-American loyalty to the flag of Germany. That very able spy, Prince Henry of Prussia, brother to that now very contemptible but once very arrogant coward, William Hohenzollern, carried back to his royal brother the most confident reports regarding potential German forces in America. He was especially well received in Milwaukee and Chicago, where he was met and welcomed by officials not unmindful of the value of the German vote.

We find all these influences enlisted to aid and abet any natural reluctance of boys to go to war, boys of the noblest and bravest souls, who none the less had mothers to weep over them, sisters and sweethearts to hold them back. So there became apparent, in more cities than one, the truth that a great many young men had not registered, had not filled out questionnaires, were deserting, or were in some way evading the draft.

Very naturally, an intense feeling grew up against these draft-dodgers and slackers, a feeling based on the fair-play principle. If one man’s son must go, why not the next man’s, especially as that next man might be a secret pro-German trying to protect his blood as well as his property? But the blood had really nothing to do with the real question between the government and the man needed with the colors. The law was the law, and it played no favorites after the exemption boards were done. The fit man of proper age must show himself.

Orders went out, in the summer of 1918, from the Department of Justice to throw the net for slackers. That meant the immediate mobilization for police duty not only of many soldiers and sailors, many policemen and all the force of the Bureau of Investigation, but also of the entire personnel of the American Protective League. With the exception of the I. W. W. cases, the aid the Chicago division of the League gave in the great raids of July 11, 12, 13 and 14, in 1918, was its most important single contribution to the welfare of the country. The New York slacker raids (of a certain publicity), those carried on also in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and many other cities, were all so similar in method, that the story of the Chicago raids will describe them all.

The big slacker drive in Chicago meant the mobilization of the entire League membership, and over 10,000 men were enlisted from this organization alone as operatives in the slacker search. These men interrogated over 150,000 suspects, and seized over 20,000; and they inducted into the army, as willing or unwilling patriots, around 1,400 young men of that one city who otherwise would not have served. At one time they had herded on the great Municipal Pier over 1,100 men, all of whom had to pass the night there. Countless motor cars and wagons carried loads under guard. A big tourist motor-bus was requisitioned also, and all the street cars were packed. Hundreds of men were crowded over night in the rooms of the Bureau of Investigation in the Federal Building. The courts and jails were jammed. Vacant store-rooms were filled with prisoners. Mothers, wives, sweethearts, sisters, brothers and babies made the Federal Building an actual bedlam when they rallied to the attempted rescue. But the grist ground on through, and the guilty were found and dealt with. Most of the young men were glad enough to exchange a bed on a stone floor for one in an Army tent. No doubt, most of them made good soldiers afterwards. They were rather passively than actively disloyal—and all of them were young.

No announcement was made of the plans of the Government. The word was passed silently that at a certain hour the hunt would be on. Once begun, it was prosecuted with energy and system. All the current ball games were visited, and the crowds were told to file out at a gate, where each suspect was asked to show his registration card. Motion picture shows were treated in the same way, the perfect districting and subdividing of the League’s force making all this synchronous and smooth. Cabarets and all-night places of all sorts were combed out. All the city parks were patrolled at night, and many a young man was taken from his young woman companion in that way. Members of the League even donned bathing costumes, and swimming out among the bathers at the beaches, plied their questions there! They took in over one hundred slackers out of the wet in that way.

At a thronged boulevard crossing in the loop district, every motor car was stopped. A. P. L. operatives met every incoming railway train and were at the gate of every train leaving the city. Countless homes and shops were visited. Sunday picnics in the suburbs were inspected, every theater and public building, every “L” road station and steamboat landing was investigated and guarded by men who made but one remark: “Show me!” On one night of the four, 7,000 men in a short time were gathered, held and taken to the police stations. Factories, stores, saloons, the open streets, all yielded up their toll—many innocent, many loyal, many negligent, many culpable and many disloyal evaders who were trying to dodge the draft.

In a vast wave, the vigilantes of Chicago, whose existence was suspected by almost none of these, swept out into the open. The guilty and the lukewarm alike, the innocent and ignorant conscript and the veiled enemy alike, got the largest and swiftest lesson in Americanism this country ever had had up to that hour. It showed a certain element that under the careless American character there are vast capacities for self-government and a stern respect for law and government. Many a pro-German has known in his soul since last July that about the most uncompromising autocrat he ever met was a simple man bearing not a scepter but a little badge.

In general, the raids met with no resistance, and though there was confusion there was no disorder. The people took it well, as might have been expected. Loyal Americans would not object, disloyal ones dared not. The general working out of the widely-scattered raids was admirable. As to the rapidity and thoroughness of the League’s work, it never has done better anywhere, because by this time it had grown into a well-drilled and perfectly-organized body of constabulary. As covering the public attitude of this city towards the raids—similar raids were met with worse receptions in other cities—a great daily, the Chicago Tribune, printed the following editorial comment:

There are two distinct points of view as to the slacker raids, so called, and criticisms as well as praise have come to the A. P. L. for its part in them all over the country. Naturally, no miracle was wrought in human nature. The families of the men who were hid or shielded were no more loyal after their men were taken than they had been before. The conscientious objector experienced no stiffening of fiber in his flabby soul. But even these would have felt otherwise towards the slacker drives had they known all the truth. Ask the men themselves who were inducted into the army what they think about it now. Nine-tenths of them will say that they are ashamed that they had to be asked twice to go into the army. The other one-tenth is the better for having gone, whether or not they will confess so much. As a saving influence, a mere reclamation enterprise, the slacker raids were a vast agency for the public good. They were not man-hunters, but man-savers, these men who conducted the raids.

Just one instance of this truth must serve for all the many communities who engaged in this work and who caught, in all, perhaps, a half million men for examination, and held a tenth of all they caught. It is only a little anecdote, but it makes the best answer possible to all the critics of the Selective Service Act.

A gentleman came into the National Headquarters with certain papers in the way of reports, and announced that he was the Chief of the Akron, Ohio, Division. He offered the usual apologies—by this time more or less familiar at the book desk—that he had been able to do so little when he had wanted to do so much in the work of the A. P. L. “But there is one thing that I wish you would put in this book,” he said, “to show people what this League has done in the remaking of men. I don’t care whether you say another thing for Akron, but I want to tell this story of a man we saved.

“A young woman came to my office and complained of her husband. ‘I am almost desperate about Joe,’ she said to me. ‘He drinks and drinks, and hangs around the saloons. He hasn’t given me a cent in eight months, and I don’t know what to do. I—I love him. I don’t want him to go. But do you think the army would do him any good. He doesn’t do anything for me and our baby.’

“‘The army will see,’ I said to her. So I went and found her husband—in a saloon, drunk, shabby, dead to all pride and all ambition, about as poor-looking material for a soldier as you ever saw. ‘That’s Joe,’ said his wife, when I brought them together in my office.

“Well, I sent Joe to jail to think things over. When he was in his cell, his wife took him in a tray full of good things to eat, some hot coffee, and all that sort of thing. I went with her. ‘You see,’ I said to him, ‘how much your wife is doing now for your support—more than you have done for her in a year. What do you think about it now?’

“Well, he was inside the draft age, and we sent him into the Army. We saw to it that his wife got her share of his pay—the first support he had given her in many months.

“I forgot about this case, so many others came in. The days went by until not so long ago. After the armistice was signed and just before I came down here, some one knocked at my door. There came in a smiling young woman, neatly dressed, a neatly dressed baby in her arms. And with her was a tall, grinning, brown-faced, hard-bitten, well-set-up young man, in the uniform of the United States Army. He had a sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. I did not know any of these people.

“‘That’s Joe,’ said the young woman. Then I remembered it all. It made me feel rather funny—I couldn’t really quite believe it.

“‘He does not drink,’ said the wife. ‘I am so glad he went into the Army.’

“Well, maybe you think I’m not glad of my share in remaking a man like that. It paid me for all my work and worry in the League. I believe that our Division would have made good if it had not done anything more than just what it did for Joe.”

One does not know of any better summary of the slacker raids than that conveyed by this simple little story from one chief out of very many hundreds.