At the end of this past academic year, Columbia University called in police to suppress peaceful protests in support of Palestine and in opposition to US complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza. Over one hundred students were arrested. Observers were quick to point out the similarities between this crackdown and an earlier one that took place on Columbia’s campus fifty-six years ago in response to the Vietnam War.
Police arrested 700 protesters in 1968, and 130 students and four faculty members were injured. It is tempting to see that year, which shares an identical calendar with 2024, as the lone precursor to the present. But the university’s militant opposition to antiwar activists has a much longer history that goes all the way back to 1917. Then the university’s trustees, with the approval of Columbia president Nicholas Butler, fired antiwar professors as the authorities arrested, hauled off, and imprisoned Columbia students who opposed the war and the draft. In response to the firing of his colleagues, Charles Beard, the university’s most popular and famous professor, resigned in protest over suppression of free speech, making the events a national scandal.
The Coming of the War
How had it come to this? In 1912, another Ivy League college professor and former president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, had become president of the United States. He was a conservative Democrat and a racist advocate of segregation who had a progressive domestic economic agenda, most famously his support for and signing of the Revenue Act of 1913 that established the income tax. After World War I had broken out in August of 1914 in Europe, Wilson ran for his second term on the slogans “He Kept Us Out of War” and “America First,” won the election, and took office in 1916.
A month later, however, Wilson broke off relations with Germany, claiming he wanted no conflict, but it was clear he intended for the United States to join the Entente (England, France, Russia, Italy, and Japan) and fight the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria). In response, the Socialist Party of America (SPA), which at that time had over 80,000 members, and whose presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, received almost one million votes in 1916, issued a powerful denunciation of Wilson, opposing US entry into the war.