7.6: Political Dissent on the Homefront

Political Dissent on the Homefront

As soon as the war began, governments on both sides moved quickly to portray the war effort as a success and to eliminate any sign of dissent. Britain censored mail sent by soldiers at the front to their families, instituting standardized postcards that allowed men in the trenches to choose from a menu of statements but not to write anything specific about their experiences. Society became completely focused on the war effort, and governments reorganized the economy around war production. The state also rationed food and strictly controlled the media (which at the time meant the press) to silence dissent and present news of the war that boosted the morale and resolve of the population. 

The British were even quicker to stifle dissent in their empire. By 1914, Indians were still just dipping their toes into mass nationalism and British statesmen were not sure if they would willingly support Britain’s war effort. These fears intensified when the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of Germany. The British Indian Army was disproportionately Muslim and many doubted whether they could be convinced to fight against the Ottoman Empire, which claimed to be the leader of global Islam. Those fears proved unfounded when the major Indian nationalist organizations, including the Muslim League, agreed to work with the British in return for vague promises that they would be rewarded with some manner of self-rule when the war ended. Even armed with this support, the British-Indian government nevertheless passed the Defence of India Act in 1915. This was a preventative measure meant to curb any potential nationalist or even revolutionary action that could harm the British war efforts. The Act gave the Governor-General of India the ability to detain or jail individuals without trial or even a justification, to restrict Indian’s (already limited) freedom of speech and assembly, and even curtail their ability to travel. 

To stifle dissent in the U.S., the government passed the Espionage Act in June 1917. Woodrow Wilson declared the act was designed to prosecute those who had “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life…to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.” Although Wilson implied that the people he intended to target were “born under other flags,” most of the people prosecuted, like labor leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, were American citizens. Wilson also suggested that labor unions’ actions to defend worker rights during wartime would be considered an attack on America. The law was expanded with the Sedition Act of 1918, which prohibited any forms of speech that could be considered “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” As the Russian Revolution was taken over by the Bolsheviks, U.S. concern shifted from draft resistance to socialism, and a “Red Scare” gripped America. Hundreds were arrested, deported, and jailed under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. By 1919 even the authorities realized they had gone too far, and the U.S. Attorney General convinced President Wilson to commute the sentences of 200 prisoners convicted under the acts.

With a large proportion of the male working population fighting in the war, women were needed to take up positions that the men had abandoned on the homefront. Women on all sides served as nurses and medics but also worked in more agriculture and industry to keep the economy going while men were away fighting while ensuring that the armies would be adequately supplied. Many governments promised equal pay, although most did not make good on their promise. But women gained greater political influence and achieved the right to vote in the U.S. and many European countries almost immediately after the war’s end as a result of their contributions to the war effort and concerted political activism.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): "Female workers arranging and packing fuze heads in the Coventry Ordinance Works. September 1917," Horace Nicholls, CC BY-NC-SA.

Review Questions

• How did the ongoing Russian Revolution and the growing prominence of the Bolsheviks influence U.S. government policy?
• Why might the clamp down on dissent have been more severe in British India than in Britain itself?