Odd Wisconsin Archive
On the evening of March 31, 1918, Prof. E.A. Schimler, a language instructor at Northland College, was kidnapped by a mob of masked men. They took him to a lonely spot outside Ashland, stripped him naked, roughed him up, covered his body with tar and feathers, and left him to fend for himself. Schimler limped back to his boarding house in Ashland, where friends helped him get to the YMCA to clean up.
Prof. Schimler was a U.S. citizen who had come to this country when he was 14 year old. He attended Dartmouth College and taught school in the U.S. before spending six years in Germany. After returning to the U.S., he joined the language arts faculty at Northland College in September 1917, and college officials reported there was no evidence of him being disloyal to America in either words or actions. His torture was simply an anti-German hate crime like many that occured in Wisconsin during World War One.
Anti-German sentiment ran high during the war, fueled in part by a virulent propaganda effort carried out by the state and federal governments. Despite the state's large German American population, America's entry into the war with Germany unleashed a torrent of hysterical conformity; anything and anyone with ties to Germany became vulnerable to charges of disloyalty.
At the urging of federal officials, the State Council of Defense and the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion joined forces to suppress anti-war opinion through persuasion, propaganda, intimidation, and harassment. Public sentiment in Wisconsin went from largely anti-war in early 1917 to overwhelmingly pro-war 18 months later in what the episode's historian described as a triumph of public relations. Even libraries, which are usually champions of intellectual freedom, kow-towed to the pressure from governments and public opinion. After the war, the rapid expansion of new mass media such as radio, cheap magazines, and, ultimately, in the 1950s, television, gave those who controlled the channels of communication greater power than ever before in human history. Governments and media magnates possessed unparalleled ability to control society by shaping voters' beliefs, desires, and standards of value.
As Aldous Huxley pointed out in 1932, the greatest threat to freedom may not come from dictatorial governments that suppress dissent by force, but rather from governments which manipulate the media effectively. With proper guidance, citizens in supposed democracies will love and honor their oppressors, willingly give up their own freedoms, and join together to persecute minority voices. Wisconsin came very close to this in 1918-1919. Opponents of the war paid a heavy price in their public and private lives, and innocent by-standers such as Prof. Schimler were subjected to harassment and persecution.
In his case, local authorities displayed more wit than courage when they sarcastically reported "that the mob were very liberal in the use of tar and also had on hand a lot of feathers." A $100 award was posted for information leading to the capture of the kidnappers, but no record of their arrest has been found in the newspapers.
For more on this sad aspect of our heritage, see the World War One section of Turning Points in Wisconsin History, where you'll find the newspaper account of Schimler's kidnapping. You can also view posters and pictures from World War One at Wisconsin Historical Images.
:: Posted in Curiosities on March 31, 2008
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