Academic Christopher Capozzola writes in 2010:
* One thing we know is that the word obligation was very much on their minds. During World War I, when Americans discussed their relationship to the state, they used terms such as duty, sacrifice, and obligation. The language was everywhere: in congressional debates about entry into war, on the posters of military recruiters during the conflict, and even in the parades that marked the war’s end. Political obligations energized, mobilized, and divided Americans during World War I.
* Looking at the history of a liberal society like the United States, it might seem that Americans have never really had to think much about their political obligations, let alone act on them. In the later wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, liberal individualism, an economy of consumption, a nationalized culture, legally protected civil liberties, and an expanded federal state all played more prominent roles in public life. But even so, throughout American history, a citizenship of obligation has always coexisted with one of rights…
* Americans’ sense of obligation came from many places: political traditions of republicanism that valued the common good over individual liberty, utopian visions of community, Christian beliefs that made of duty a virtue, paternalist notions that legitimated social hierarchies and demanded obedience to them.
* In the years before the war, voluntary associations—clubs, schools, churches, parties, unions— organized
much of American public life. Such groups provided social services, regulated the economy, policed crime, and managed community norms. Schooled in this world of civic voluntarism, Americans formed their social bonds—and their political obligations—first to each other and then to the state. Indeed, in the absence of formal federal institutions, these voluntary associations sometimes acted as the state. They organized public life and helped Americans feel a sense of collective identity, and they also carried out much of the practical work. Americans of the early twentieth century thus owed allegiance to an overlapping array of authorities, of which Uncle Sam’s federal government was only one, and perhaps not even the most important.
* As the state made ever stronger claims on its citizens, wartime events prompted one of the twentieth century’s broadest, most vigorous, and most searching public discussions about the meanings of American citizenship.
* Movements against mob violence did much to erase the vigilantism and lawless violence that characterized nineteenth-century American political culture, but they also helped wipe away the era’s vibrant political culture of associational life. They effaced the multiple authorities of prewar life—and thus diminished the multiple loyalties that operated there. Increasingly, Americans articulated their political obligations not to many things but to one: the state. When they imagined government rather than people as the source of rights, Americans unwittingly handed over to the state an array of coercive powers over matters previously governed by voluntary associations.
* That progressives—the people who brought America direct election of senators, direct taxation, initiative and referendum, and a philosophy of participatory democracy—should have turned away from “the people” is ironic but not surprising. As angry wartime crowds silenced pacifists, labor radicals, and small-town ministers, the idea of appealing directly to the people and locating democratic legitimacy in their associations lost some of its luster.
The state—even the seemingly tyrannical state of the 1920 Palmer Raids that civil libertarians despised—appeared the better option in a devil’s bargain. Progressives’ faith in “the people” became, for many, a postwar fear of “the mob” and “the crowd.”
* An inauspicious beginning this was, indeed, for a century of civil liberties, as books were burned by librarians, suffragists were beaten by women, and conscientious objectors harassed by men of the cloth. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that for much of the early twentieth century, rights talk was only that—talk. Civil
liberties would never be sustained by the rich institutional networks of everyday life that undergirded the culture of obligation, and so the lived experience of rights proved far weaker than the culture of obligation that preceded it. Bereft of institutions at the local or national level to create and nourish a meaningful culture of
rights, American political culture limped into the 1920s with a contested and fractured sense of the obligations of citizenship but with no real alternatives in place.
* On the home front, Americans proudly called themselves vigilant citizens and believed that they were doing work much needed—and explicitly requested—by the national government. In that assumption, they were not wrong. Leading public figures, drawing on long-standing traditions equating citizenship with obligation, did call on Americans to stand vigilant during the war. Appealing to habits of voluntary association, they supported the organization of vigilance movements nationwide: committees of safety, women’s vigilance leagues, home guards. The government depended on the voluntary work of such groups for the success of the nation’s war mobilization effort. “This country,” boasted Justice Department official John Lord O’Brian just two weeks after Prager’s killing, “is being policed more thoroughly and successfully than ever before in its history.”
* As long as Americans have claimed the right to rule themselves, they have also insisted on the authority to police each other. In the early republic, they tied vigilance to concepts of popular sovereignty, but vigilance was also a political practice whereby collective policing by private citizens contributed to community defense.
* These days, some Americans wish for obligations, hoping to renew among Americans a sense of commitment toward our fellow citizens. Ninety years, they tell us, have put rights, and not obligations, at the center of our political life. Individualism has corroded our common culture and our civic associations; we even bowl alone.
* From such a perspective, the sense of voluntarism and obligation in the political culture of early twentieth-century America must astound. People sacrificed, fought, and even died because of commitments to a common political life that Americans seem no longer to share. They created those obligations in their everyday institutions, places where they expressed their understandings of citizenship and fairness, of membership and belonging, where they came to consensus about their obligations in face-to-face meetings. It must have been
comforting to see a familiar face at the draft board hearing or on the doorstep selling Liberty Bonds, to be able to negotiate the terms of political obligation in the lodge or club; it must even have been somewhat reassuring to those who registered as enemy aliens that they could do so at the local post office.
