by The People’s History of the Grand Valley
World War One was a massively unpopular war. President Woodrow Wilson campaigned to keep America out of the killing fields of Europe. But in 1917 we joined the war. Only 73,000 men volunteered to go fight and a draft was quickly instituted. The Sedition and Espionage Acts were passed to silence women, socialists, pacificist Christians, and Wobblies (members of the Industrial Workers of the World, I.W.W.) speaking out against the war.
Hundreds of newspapers and magazines were forced to close, 900 outspoke anti-war leaders would be imprisoned for speaking out against the draft and the war. Vigilante groups were encouraged and sanctioned to terrorized and spy on dissidents.
In Grand Junction, this repression was led by the owner of the Daily Sentinel, Walter Walker.
Walker disrupted a meeting of the Socialist Party in early February 1917, as they held a mass anti-war meeting, two months before America declared war.
Walker championed the Loyalty League, Home Guard and the American Defense Society. A December 8, 1917 front page article reported on an ADS letter that encouraged the creation of a Vigilance Corps in Grand Junction, to “classify all residents” as loyal, disloyal, doubtful, and unknown, and weather those citizens were Alien Enemy, Pro-German, or Anti-government, and to “send this list to the police department and the local representative of the department of Justice.”
When the Colorado National Guard was sent to the front the state encouraged local governments to raise and train a Home Guard.
The Home Guard’s first local action was the detention and deporting 18 Wobblies fruit-pickers at gun-point from Palisade, in August of 1917.
The local Home Guard then defended the people of Grand Junction against words.
In September 1917, the first group of draftees were sent off to war. That same day the Socialist paper The New Critic published a sharply written anti-war editorial:. “To make the world safe for democracy? NO! To make the world safe for the money lender. To feed the flies!”
The article was a bridge too far for Walker. Walker, began beating the drum against the anti-war socialists. His father, in his role as the local post-master, denied The New Critic postage rights. Later the Home Guard showed up armed at the offices and shut down the paper by threats of violence.
In April of 1918, the Home Guard seized books from the International Bible Society now called Jehovah’s Witnesses for their pacifism and burned them.
The Loyalty League tarred and feathered E.E. Cole the principal at the Appleton School in April of 1918. That same month vigilantes painted M.O. Douglas’ house yellow as a sign of cowardice or disloyalty, and threatened him with lynching if he didn’t “square himself and become a 100 per cent American.”
Dalton Trumbo addressed this in his novel “Eclipse,” set in slightly fictionalized Grand Junction: “You can remember that not so long ago the Ku Klux Klan marched down Main Street at night, all ghostly with a fiery cross…. It was still the Loyalty League…. the organized mob risen from its grave to snoop and tyrannize once more. And it will come up again and again for ever and ever! If there isn’t a good cause like a war, then it will parade for a poor cause. It will always be a cause with ideals so high that no mere law can restrain the execution of its judgements. And it will always be based on hatred and fear. Tomorrow it may come again…. who knows?”
The Revolutionist 