American Experiment (229 page)

When the end finally came, it was quick. October 30: The Turks surrender to the British. November 3: Sailors of the German fleet mutiny over orders to sortie for a final suicide battle; they kill a number of their officers and refuse to leave port. On the same day, Austria accedes to terms laid down by Italy. November 7: Foch dictates his terms to the German peace commissioners. November 9: The Reichstag proclaims a republic in Germany, overthrowing the Kaiser. November 10: Wilhelm flees to the Netherlands, Ludendorff to Sweden.

On the morning of November 11, the armistice was signed at Foch’s
headquarters, a converted railroad car near Compiègne. Just before noon, the guns fell silent from the English Channel to the Swiss border; it was the first moment of calm in over four years. In, the tangle of the Meuse-Argonne, corpses of German and American boys continued to rot side by side. Gas still wisped from shell craters along the Somme. Trench scars still defaced the landscape around shattered Verdun; they would still be there decades later.

There was no quiet in New York City on November 11. News of the armistice reached the city at 3
A.M.
and within minutes the air-raid sirens were blaring. Ships in the harbor replied with their foghorns. Factory whistles added to the cacophony. Throughout the day, people swarmed in the streets, slapping each other on the back and echoing cheers. Impromptu parades snarled traffic. Society matrons, news vendors, shipwrights, and stenographers all rubbed elbows in the joyous throngs. There were cheers for Wilson and for the doughboys, catcalls for the Kaiser, good-natured denunciations of food rationing. Underlying the immediate relief over the war’s end was a dim realization that while America was untouched, or even stronger, because of the conflict, Europe lay on the edge of—as one paper put it—“Disaster … Exhaustion … Revolution.”

War has its own trajectory and momentum. It gorges on heavy industrial goods and starves others; accelerates certain economic trends and diverts or suppresses others; levels some class barriers and creates new ones; sharpens national loyalties and stifles diversity; summons new leadership and bypasses old. In early 1917, America lay slack, loose-jointed, divided in loyalty, hazy in ideology amid the mobilized great powers. Some eighty years earlier, Tocqueville had observed that an “aristocratic nation” that did not succeed quickly in “ruining” a democratic one ran the risk of being conquered by it. He also warned that a protracted war would “endanger the freedom of a democratic country.” Would Americans conquer autocracy only to be conquered by it?

For a time after the April 1917 declaration, Americans had appeared to remain passive, as though confused or even disgruntled. Even the leadership seemed uncertain; when a senator was told that $3 billion was needed to send an army to France, he reportedly exclaimed, “Good Lord! You aren’t going to send soldiers over there, are you?” Fighting a war 3,000 miles away seemed almost incomprehensible.

Then the momentum of war took over. Americans rallied around their flag, their soldiers, their commander-in-chief. They burst into patriotic
song; people who had been singing the pacifist song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” six months later, as Ernest May remarked, were singing George M. Cohan’s stirring “Over There.” Americans knit sweaters for soldiers overseas, volunteered their services to hospitals, the Red Cross, the YMCA, the Salvation Army. Children collected peach stones to be converted into charcoal for gas masks. Hosts of people came out of retirement for war work. Families observed meatless and even wheatless days. Fidgety boys were told, “Chew your food.”

Above all, Americans seemed ready to part with their money for the cause. War bonds, sold at immense rallies sparked by celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks, Geraldine Farrar, and Ignace Jan Paderewski, went by the hundreds of millions of dollars. Voluntary purchases of Liberty and Victory bonds, war savings certificates, and “thrift stamps” reached $23 billion, according to May, from a population with an average annual income of less than $70 billion. Americans accepted a jump in the federal personal income tax from a 1-to-7 percent to a 4-to-67 percent graduation, on all incomes over $1,000. It was a time for patriotic self-discipline.

Under Wilson’s direction a young California newspaperman, George Creel, established the most powerful propaganda agency the nation had known. His Committee on Public Information mobilized artists like Howard Chandler Christie and James Montgomery Flagg to design war posters for liberty loans and recruiting, including Flagg’s famous “I Want
You
for the U.S. Army.” Creel organized the nation’s orators into a 75,000-strong army, the “Four Minute Men,” who carried the Administration’s messages to millions of Americans in grange halls, lodge meetings, schools, synagogues, churches, movie theaters, and he drafted novelists such as Mary Roberts Rinehart and hosts of historians and other scholars. Creel not only mobilized the mind of America; he opened offices in world capitals to relay his war news and Wilson’s war messages to millions of Europeans and Asians, especially Chinese.

As the voices of war were piped out of Washington and amplified by the media, the attitudes of millions of Americans focused and hardened and fortified one another in an orgy of Americanism and chauvinism. Before the war, the United States had developed a “crazy quilt anti-radical pattern,” in William Preston’s words, that closed the nation to aliens if they advocated certain radical doctrines, and provided for the deportation of aliens within five years of entry if they were guilty of certain “wrong” beliefs. At this time, while the repression had not touched great numbers of persons, it had ominous potentials. “The vague terminology of deportation legislation, the removal of time limits, the withering away of due process in immigration procedure, the bureaucratic ignorance of radical
ideology, and the administrative mind conditioned by its dealings with defenseless undesirables” had come to characterize Washington’s practices by 1917.

As war hysteria mounted during that year, the people and their leaders turned their jingoism and their fear against the more defenseless targets—immigrants, aliens, radicals, pacifists, German-Americans. In the rising paranoia, local epidemics were blamed on German spies contaminating the local water supply. A high Red Cross official warned that hospital bandages were being poisoned by plotters. Armed uprisings were rumored in Milwaukee and other German-American centers. Violinist Fritz Kreisler was barred from playing a concert in East Orange, New Jersey. Brown University revoked a degree given earlier to the German ambassador to the United States.

The juiciest target of all was the IWW, which had publicly and provocatively stuck to its stand against “war and capitalism” following America’s entrance. In the popular mind, the Wobblies stood for radicalism, aliens, strikes, industrial sabotage, threats to private property, and everything else that was opposed to 100 percent Americanism. Vigilantes in Arizona mining towns shipped hundreds of Wobblies and suspected sympathizers out into the desert. Western governors, reflecting logging, mining, and farm interests, petitioned the Wilson Administration to intern in remote camps Wobblies suspected of treason or of hindering “the operation of industries, or the harvesting of crops necessary to the prosecution of the war.”

Who would hold out against the war hysteria? Not the federal government, which finally opposed internment but called for increased state vigilance and state suppression of IWW propaganda. Not the religious leadership, which typically showed little Christian tolerance: a Congregational minister called the Lutheran Church in Germany “not the bride of Christ, but the paramour of Kaiserism,” and another favored hanging anyone who lifted his voice against American entrance into the war. Not judges, who often denounced Wobblies from the bench, or juries—the designated defenders of citizens against their government—who often came in with anti-Wobbly verdicts within an hour of retiring. Not the AFL leadership, which despite its own experience with antilabor bias in the courts seemed only too pleased with the persecution of the IWW.

Early in September 1917, federal agents swooped down on the Chicago IWW headquarters, seizing membership lists, leaflets, buttons, books, office equipment. The authorities seemed intent on destroying the IWW leadership. The following June, two weeks after a deliberately provocative speech by Eugene Debs in Canton, Ohio, a federal grand jury indicted him under the Espionage Act of 1917, which provided heavy penalties for
persons aiding the enemy, obstructing recruiting, or causing disloyalty, and under the May 1918 sedition amendment, which banned “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” against the American form of government, the Constitution, the flag, the armed forces, or necessary war production.

In court, Debs invoked the memories of the “rebels of their day” like Tom Paine and Sam Adams, of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison and other fighters for justice. “You are teaching your children to revere their memories,” Debs told the jury, “while all of their detractors are in oblivion.” Promptly found guilty, Debs affirmed on sentencing his “kinship with all living beings.” As the impassive judge stared down at him, he said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal class, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” The judge condemned those “who would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in defending herself against a foreign and brutal power.” His sentence: ten years in jail.

“Once lead this people into war,” President Wilson was reported to have said before American entrance into the conflict, “and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life.” Given this insight, why did not Wilson himself swing his presidential influence more strongly against the intolerance of 1917–19? He had been raised in the tradition of civil liberty and free speech. Liberty for him, as for millions of Americans, was the very linchpin of democracy. To a people who feared government and repression, the Bill of Rights was the essence of the Constitution. Once again from the crucible of war, however, liberty emerged as a misty symbol for most Americans and their leaders rather than a concrete guide to public and private action.

For some Americans, the worst wartime loss of liberty was their right to take the swig of their choice. By 1917, twenty-six states had prohibition laws; about half of these were “bone-dry.” Converted into a win-the-war measure by the Anti-Saloon League, a constitutional amendment banning the “manufacture, sale or transportation” of intoxicating liquors won congressional approval by the end of that year, and passed the required number of states during the following year, just in time to serve as a welcome-home present to the doughboys returning from the vineyards of France.

Not only did Prohibition constitute the kind of governmental intrusion into personal life that Americans had fought since the days of the
Mayflower.
It was also
a federal
intrusion. But many a lawmaker who had declaimed for years about states’ rights and individual liberty swallowed
without a murmur an act that challenged all the ancient war cries about individualism, personal choice, family responsibility, and local option.

Amid the jingoism and intolerance and repression of the war to save democracy, some Americans fought a heroic battle at home that would produce a vital step in the democratization of American life and politics. This was the battle for woman suffrage.

Not since Civil War days had a body of Americans faced such an intimidating set of political and intellectual problems as had the suffragists during the progressive years. Not only did they confront the most impossible problem of all—how to gain the right to vote without having the vote itself as a weapon to gain it—but they had to conquer a political system loaded with booby traps, minority checks, devices of delay and devitalization, group and individual vetoes. They had to work with Southerners who were anti-Negro, with Californians who were anti-Oriental, with Northerners who were anti-immigrant, with businessmen who were antilabor.

And by now the women leaders were politically bone-tired after seventy-five years of almost ceaseless struggle. Again and again in their letters, they refer to their fatigue, the overwork that was making “physical wrecks” of women, the racking journeys by train and trolley and auto, the late-night speeches and conferences. Elizabeth Cady Stanton talked of the “wrangles, pitfalls, and triumphs” of the suffrage leaders.

“Have I not served out my sentence,” Anna H. Shaw asked in 1914, at the age of sixty-seven. “Has the cause any right to ask more of me? Why may I not go home, home, the one quiet spot in all the world, and with my books and trees and flowers and birds, rest away from all antagonisms, and fruitless misunderstandings.” But Anna Shaw would labor for another five years, then die of pneumonia while on one more speaking tour.

Despite the decades of grinding battles, some women leaders believed that victory was just a matter of time and persistence. Women continued to move into factory jobs; perhaps more importantly, they were entering professional and office positions long reserved for men, while a few more men were taking “women’s jobs” such as cooking and baking. Industrialization, along with its human evils, was generating money and leisure that freed some women to confront such evils. Women leaders were highly conscious of these trends. “Little by little, very slowly, and with most unjust and cruel opposition,” sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman had written in 1898, “at cost of all life holds most dear, it is being gradually established by many martyrdoms that human work is woman’s as well as man’s.”

By the turn of the century, these leaders had to confess failure in their campaign for the vote, save in a handful of states. By 1913, through this state-by-state approach, women could still vote for only seventy-four presidential electors. The problem facing women strategists was not only political but intellectual and moral: To what extent should they be concerned with the rights of blacks, immigrants, illiterates, factory workers, and Indians, rather than exclusively the right of women, to vote—never forgetting that each of those groups included women? One advantage of the state-by-state suffrage strategy was that it let legislatures decide suffrage issues on the basis of local attitudes. But the moral price was high, as lawmakers yielded to regional biases.