I can recommend the new book “The League: The True Story of Average Americans on the Hunt for WWI Spies,” by Bill Mills. It’s a bit dry, but I just finished “Waiting for Sunrise,” novelist William Boyd’s thriller about spies during World War I (the hero is manipulated into spying for the British and at one point has to crawl around No Man’s Land, trying to go missing without actually getting lost). So my perspective might be a little off in that regard.
Certainly I had never heard of the American Protective League — volunteers willing to work for free, skulking around after their fellow citizens, sneaking into their homes, trying to grab them off the street. All you had to say was, I heard him talking trash about President Wilson, and you could get the guy who was flirting with your wife hauled off to jail.
It’s appalling. Americans have a fundamental right to be obnoxious loudmouths.
But I also was not aware of the terrible toll on American industry from saboteurs, and I now take a very dim view of the Wobblies.
Read “The League” — or “Waiting for Sunrise” — and tell me what you think.
WW1HA 
Appreciate this!
LikeLike
I’m glad, Basil! Which one do you plan to read?
LikeLike
I don’t know yet…The 11th Battle of the Isonzo (“Caporetto”) sounds interesting, or the Battle of Jutland…
LikeLike
Jutland is certainly a seasonal choice, since the anniversary just passed.
LikeLike
Great. I agree.
LikeLike
Wm. Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise is hls his best effort. Doesn’t hold a candlo to either of his earlier farces An Ice Cream War about the First World War in East Africa, or A Good Man in Africa which punches holes in western fiplomatic pomposity in the post-colonial era. The latter book was turned into a more than respectable film starring Sean Connery, John Lithgow, Lew Gossett, Jr., and Dianna Rigg..
I am familiar with the America Protective League, a product of hyper-partriotiic paranoia generated by the Creel Committee and other propaganda efforts by the Wilson administraton driven by almost irrational fear that millions of newly arrived Euopean immigrants would not support the war effort.
LGS
LikeLike
Also, re the APL, these were older men who couldn’t enlist and thus needed a way to feel important.
LikeLike