Hell, Yes

by Harry Siegel

The only person to return with dispatches from three separate guided tours of hell was also the only cartoonist to be tried, twice, under America’s Espionage Act. That same man was also the only person charged with such crimes during the Great War to have a Liberty Ship named in their honor during the Second World War. 

Art Young and his journalist colleagues at The Masses, a socialist magazine published from 1911–1917, were tried in 1918 on charges of conspiracy and interfering with enlistment. According to the Liberator's account, “the prosecution's evidence of conspiracy consisted solely of the open publication by these men of their opinions about the war and about the principle of con-
scription, and the rights of conscientious objectors, in a magazine which they owned and published without profit for the sake of individual expression.”

After a single holdout hung the jury, they were retried later that year. In that trial, Young was asked to explain a drawing he'd published in the magazine the previous year, months after President Woodrow Wilson—who’d won reelection on the slogan “he kept us out of war”—abandoned neutrality, signed America’s first national security and secrecy laws, and sent American soldiers for the first time to fight in Europe because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” 

If war is hell, Young testified, who but Satan would be the conductor?