World War I and Urban Order: The Local Class Politics of National Mobilization

Abstract

In World War I and Urban Order Adam J. Hodges examines aspects of the wartime experience in Portland, Oregon, focusing on how local elites collaborated with federal authority and attempted to channel federal power to achieve a variety of prewar desires for political and social control. According to Hodges, these efforts, occurring in similar ways nationwide, established long-overlooked precedents for the surveillance and repression of labor and political activism in the United States. In Portland, local and federal officials were primarily concerned with keeping relations peaceful in the shipyards, but they also dealt forcefully with radicals, the enemy alien population, and the city's vice industry. Their collaborations obtained mixed results and often displayed surprising levels of restraint and ineffectiveness. But Hodges presents government intervention in overwhelmingly negative terms, as inspiring a “policing” of the workplace and home; neighbors who “spy” on each other; shipyard workers who have no choice but to submit to a federal agency's “paternal protection”; and labor activists, German nationals, and prostitutes who are harassed, arrested, and interned.