[86]Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary, in the same Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, has a fine summary of the “Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States (1918–23).” He enumerates the new Supreme Court interpretation of the free-speech clause of the first amendment to the Constitution, by which a “clear and present danger” justifies its violation; the state laws on syndicalism or sedition or anarchy; the attacks on the right of labor to strike; the use of the Department of Justice of the United States to repress radical economic movements; the mob violence increasingly widespread and regular; and the national organizations engaged in repression, such as the National Civic Federation, the National Security League, and the Better American Federation. The material is too wide in range and too full of important instances to be even cursorily examined here. The trend, however, was definitely a part of the post-war attitude of the American mind, the breaking up into violently opposing groups, each claiming to assert the true American spirit. The same attitude of repression appears in the churches in the form of heresy trials and an aggressive Fundamentalism. It appears in the form of legislative acts to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the state universities of several Southern states (most of which failed of passage). Dr. Ward feels that the Mob attacks, lynchings and prosecutions involving the use of free speech reached their peak at the end of 1922, declining rapidly in. 1923. Interference with meetings by public authorities and private groups reached a peak at the end of 1921, fell sharply in 1922, and then went up again to a midway point in 1923.... [87]We have a manifest abatement of post-war repression, but that experience has left us a heritage of repressive laws and ordinances and a technique of administrative illegality all ready to be used on due occasion. It has also strengthened our lynching habit of mind, with its determination to enforce its type of goodness, and our traditional demand for conformity already overstimulated by the increasing standardization of life. The occasions for the use of those qualities and instruments of repression are increasing rather than diminishing. Attempts were made during the height of the anti-Russian and anti-radical movement to connect Jews with Bolshevism in Russia and with radicalism in the United States, so that this movement also has its anti-Semitic phase. Thus anti-Semitism is bound up with the Ku Klux Klan, with the immigration bills, with the economic repression,—it is an integral part of the group reaction from national unity, and appears in every phase of the post-war group reactions. CHAPTER VII. ANTI-SEMITISM