America’s variant of a police state emerges from the Espionage Act of 1917, carried into law to accommodate President Woodrow Wilson’s wish to cleanse the world of its impurities. The self-glorifying son of a Presbyterian minister captivated at an early age by delusions of spiritual grandeur, Wilson engineered America’s late entry into World War I in order that he might play the part of savior statesman.
Wilson never doubted it was America’s duty to save the world, and during his eight years as instrument of divine will in office as president of the United States, he sent American troops to Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico “to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” In the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, Wilson dispatched troops briefly to Russia to defend its people against the communism proscribed by Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state, as “the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived,” refuge of “the criminal, the depraved, and the mentally unfit.”
The Fourteen Points of good behavior that Wilson brought to the Paris Peace Conference pledged America to consequences foreseen by John Quincy Adams, who spoke as secretary of state in 1821 against sending the U.S. Navy to dismantle Spain’s colonial empire in Colombia and Venezuela. America, he said, “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Were the country to embark on such a foolish adventure,
she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.
So it has come to pass. America, the dictatress of the world, no longer the ruler of her own spirit, which passes out of the hands of its people and society into the safekeeping of the state.