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Native-born Americans quickly concluded that all such men were slackers. ”26 Like other recent immigrants, Jewish Americans struggled with the issue. For decades, Jewish immigrants had been associated with radical movements; in many of the nation’s anticonscription organizations, Jews did play prominent roles. Many Americans concluded that all Jews were draft dodgers. ” In response, leading Jewish Americans went to great lengths to distance themselves from antiwar radicals. The American Jewish League supported the formation of a separate Jewish battalion in the hope that enthusiastic military service would cultivate mainstream acceptance, and the National Council of Jewish Women tried to combat suspicion with eager voluntarism.

Across America, citizens’ leagues rounded up socialists, striking workers, and suspected prostitutes, and during the war vigilant citizens engaged in acts of political violence that they believed were part and parcel of the war effort. But home-front vigilantism had as many critics as participants. Wartime critics of mob violence began to undermine the authority of voluntarist coercion through their appeals to the rule of law, as they expressed new notions of rights and imagined a state that monopolized political violence.

Intervention loomed, they tried to assemble a coalition with other opponents of war. On Capitol Hill, they knocked on the doors of Southern and Western populists, most of them Democrats, politicians who consistently opposed centralized state power, particularly when it was concentrated in Washington corridors and East Coast banks. 9 Woodrow Wilson’s thoughts on the matter are difficult to discern. In March 1916, with war raging in Europe, he appointed as his secretary of war Newton D. Baker, a forty-five-year-old progressive reformer who not only had never served in the military but also was a proclaimed pacifist.