The Story of San Diego’s Vigilante-In-Chief: Ralph Van Deman and His Dangerous Legacy
From the first Red Scare to the present, our basic democratic rights have never been something we can take for granted
Hate is in the air. It has become a central driver of our politics and culture. We cannot love America, it seems, without demonizing all that is not “America.” Indeed, if one tenet in the Trump Bible stands out above all others it is clearly “loathe thy neighbor.”
In a recent New York Times piece, Charles Homans (who is following Trump across the country documenting his current speeches) observes that the former President has taken to the “vermin” theme. It has, in fact, become a touchstone in his stump speeches, as this excerpt reveals:
And today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. And it is growing every day. Every single day.
The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.
Our threat is from within.
Homans claims that such rhetoric has never been used by any former presidential candidate, but that is clearly false if one knows anything about the unpleasant underside of American history.
The fact is that this kind of demonization of immigrants and radicals is an American stock-in-trade. Politicians of old, like President Theodore Roosevelt, argued that America should be a “nation” rather than a “polyglot boarding house,” as Adam Hochschild reminds us in American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.
Hochschild also shows how deeply racist and antisemitic rhetoric along with Anglo-Saxonism and eugenics were woven into our politics. It was so glaringly ugly at some points that even Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, Thomas Marshall, quipped after the brutal torture and lynching of IWW activist Frank Little that, “A Little hanging goes a long way.”
Thus, the dehumanization of our fellow Americans has an extensive history.
America’s Empire of Paranoia
Hochschild documents that the numbers of people imprisoned during the first Red Scare was chilling. This was a moment when the weaponization of fear and hateful rhetoric led to the thoroughgoing repression of the labor and Civil Rights movements that included censorship, barring public assembly, banning political parties, and jailing activists of all stripes, particularly those on the labor left. In fact, when President Calvin Coolidge freed the last 36 remaining American political prisoners in the early 1920s, it was the first time in seven years that “no American was in federal prison because of something he or she had written, said, or believed.”
Between 1917 and 1921, at least 462 Americans were imprisoned for over a year for such offenses. The number of those who did less than a year in prison was, according to a lawyer cited by Hochschild, “simply too great to document” as were the very large yet undocumented numbers of dissidents jailed at the state and county levels.
And much of this would not have been possible without the father of American military intelligence, Ralph Van Deman, who cut his teeth in the Philippines where he learned to make good use of intelligence, much of it gathered by torture, to suppress opposition to colonial rule. From there, he brought his skills home, built a large intelligence network, and set about using it against domestic enemies.
Those enemies included the striking miners in Bisbee, Arizona and Civil Rights activists like W.E.B. Du Bois and others. Van Deman successfully fought them by passing intelligence to strike-breaking local authorities and vigilantes, using it to aid in the mass arrest of activists in Arizona, and by pushing to censor newspapers that supported the rights of Black Americans elsewhere. All of this was part of his systemic effort to undermine the basic democratic rights of those he deemed to be “un-American.” Subject to the wildest of conspiracy theories, hostile to labor, deeply racist and antisemitic, Van Deman was successful in building what Hochschild calls in an extensive Mother Jones article, “America’s empire of paranoia.”
Like many other rabid rightwing reactionaries of this period, Van Deman landed in San Diego where he continued his labor of loathing deep into his golden years. As Hochschild notes in American Midnight:
Ralph Van Deman, who built up his enormous Military Intelligence apparatus in 1917 and 1918, retired from the army in 1929. Settling in San Diego and supported by wealthy sympathizers, he opened a private intelligence bureau. With his own network of agents, he traded information with district attorneys, county sheriffs, police Red squads, the FBI, and employers eager to break unions. His vast collection of scurrilous data on subversives relied on the same system of file cards he had first developed to track Filipino nationalists. “It was the rare Red,” declared the San Diego Union on the general’s death in 1952 at 86, “whose appearance in this area was not duly noted.” Van Deman did not hesitate to pass on the results of his surveillance to politicians who shared his suspicion of liberals and leftists of all kinds. One of those he helped was a young Californian running for Senate in 1950, Richard M. Nixon, who won that race by smearing his opponent as a communist sympathizer.
Van Deman’s pernicious influence lasted long past his death as his connections to intelligence officials across the country spread his network’s reach far and wide. As the New York Times reported in 1971:
The general's files were split after his death, the major portion being taken over by the Army and used by Federal agencies, until 1968, to check on possible subversives. Another portion went to a private library in San Diego, where they were used, until 1962, to screen applicants for California State Jobs . . . The portion of the Van Deman files that remained in California was given to the San Diego Research Library set up in 1952 by three of General Van Deman's associates: Maj. Gen. George W. Fisher of the California National Guard; Col. Frank C. Forward, commander of intelligence operations of the California Guard, and Alfred Loveland, a San Diego businessman. They continued to add information to the files . . .
In 1962 California's Attorney General, Stanley Mosk, had the research library files seized on grounds that material from them had been used “by unauthorized persons for political purposes.” Mr. Nixon, then campaigning against Governor Brown, protested that the legislature should look into the allegedly illegal seizure.
After the San Diego Research Library threatened a court suit, the files were returned. They went into a vault in the San Diego Title Trust and Insurance Company, of which Colonel Forward was an officer.
Colonel Forward was asked recently whether the papers were still in San Diego. “Yes, you can assure that they are,” he said, “but I can't tell you where.” Asked who was in charge of them, he replied: “I am not at liberty to talk about that.”
Hence, America’s Finest City, like it or not, is part of this inglorious legacy of repression, from the brutal suppression of free speech in 1912 to the red baiting of the 1930s through the era of McCarthyism to the bashing of political activists and unions from the 1960s to the early days of our endless war on “terror” to the present.
How far we have progressed beyond those dark days is not now or ever will be a settled matter. We are writing our own history, day by day, year by year, in how we treat the powerless, how much free speech we tolerate, how free our press is (even from market forces), how open our public spaces are, how much policing and surveillance of our fellow citizens we allow, and more.
Back to the Future?
While Senate inquiries into the FBI’s COINTELPRO program in the 1970s led to some pushback and reform of the government’s ability to spy on and infiltrate domestic political organizations, federal legislation in the wake of 9/11 has done much to restore the government’s right to surveil American citizens and infiltrate and disrupt activities deemed suspicious or dangerous to American interests.
Last week in my column on Eugene Debs and the first Red Scare, I noted that the government repression of free speech and civil liberties during that period of American history holds many lessons for us today. It appears we are averse to learning them.
As the American Prospect recently reported, the United States may very well go back to the future when it comes to repressing those perceived by some to be domestic enemies:
When the renewal of a key section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was being debated in this Congress, one of the pieces of evidence from reformers for the abuses in the system was that the law had routinely been employed to spy on protesters in the U.S. Despite the fact that FISA’s Section 702 is intended to be about collection of intelligence on foreign subjects, U.S. persons would often get vacuumed up in the dragnet. And the FBI was caught querying FISA databases to get information on protesters, most recently during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Despite these concerns and after a bitter debate, Congress passed and President Biden signed a reauthorization of FISA Section 702 with new and expanded powers for surveillance. Just days before that bill became law, Columbia University president Nemat Shafik testified before a congressional hearing on antisemitism. This set off the encampment protests at Columbia, the ensuing crackdown by the NYPD, and now the spread of demonstrations to college campuses across the country . . .
Through Section 702, the government is not permitted to directly “reverse target” a protester’s communications, only a foreign target. What intelligence agencies and the FBI have routinely done, however, is conduct a warrantless backdoor search using general terms on protesters—like “Black Lives Matter”—through a giant database of communications it has gathered legally through Section 702. In this instance, the FISA Court did deem these practices to be an overreach of government authority, though the enforcement against them is extremely limited.
With protests over the war in Gaza raging across American college campuses, it is dismaying to observe how many not just on the right but in ostensibly more tolerant circles have taken to unnuanced and/or wholly inaccurate condemnation and demonization of protesters, embracing calls to crush dissent, limit speech, and engage in the kind of surveillance in the service of suppressing the right to peaceful protest that has led to some of America’s most shameful moments.
Whether or not you disagree with the message or tactics of the protesters is not the point here. What is at stake is the fragile, ever-contested existence of our basic democratic rights. If we cannot at least agree that Americans have a right to protest, even if we disagree with them, then we may well be headed into yet another, perhaps even darker, American midnight.
If you missed seeing American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs at the Digital Gym on Sunday, May 5th, there’s another showing on Saturday, May 11th at 7PM, also at the Digital Gym! For tickets go here.