The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  Those 370 Allied ships weren’t even there to see it; the armistice allowed the German Navy that small dignity. “The Fleet, my fleet, is brokenhearted,” Admiral Beatty said afterward. Even Ernie Pusey, one of the most gentle-natured people I have ever met, felt that way, as I learned toward the end of our visit, when Rose handed me a letter he had written to his sister Helen on November 21, 1918:

  The German ships surrendered to us today so we went out about twenty five miles to meet them. Sorry we had to greet them in such a peaceful manner. What they really deserved was a twelve inch salvo. I guess you know what that is.

  Despite the disappointment Admiral Beatty and Fireman Pusey and countless other seamen felt at the time, the fact is that, in successfully carrying supplies and munitions through U-boat-infested waters, in ferrying two million doughboys to France, in keeping the German fleet bottled up in harbor and conducting a blockade so effective that it literally starved Germany into submission, the Allied naval forces made an indispensable contribution to winning the war. Still, they never seemed to get even the little bit of credit that that old Tin Pan Alley song asked for. Even the French, who have done more than anyone in recent years to commemorate the efforts of those who fought and won the war, made service on French soil a requirement for receiving the Légion d’Honneur. So Lloyd Brown and Ernest Pusey never received it; William Cotton did so only because he went ashore at Brest to buy supplies for the Oklahoma’s commissary.

  I own hundreds of pieces of sheet music from World War I, hundreds of songs about every imaginable aspect of America’s war experience. Exactly two of those songs mention the Navy.

  We’ve already discussed the first. The second is one I first heard on a 1918 Columbia blue-label 78 I picked up, in a lot of a hundred or so, at a flea market in Memphis in the early 1990s. “Over There,” it starts off—borrowing, as so many songs back then did, from George M. Cohan—we hear of heroes who’ve been fighting for you and me. / Ev’rywhere, we see our soldiers, decorated for bravery. / Tho’ we are proud of them you bet, / Don’t let that make us all forget:

  On the sea, we’ve other heroes, too,

  On the sea, our sailor boys in blue;

  With their swift Destroyers, “Submarine Annoyers,”

  They’ve been tried and true;

  God bless them!

  Now this war is over, “Over There,”

  We’ll have to take our hats right off to Jack;

  Tho’ the Army is the clover,

  ’Twas the Navy took them over,

  And the Navy will bring them back!

  At the end of its second verse, the song, “The Navy Will Bring Them Back!” pleads: We knew our boys were bound to win / But why not count the Navy in? I don’t know much about Yeoman Howard Johnson, USN, who is credited as the song’s lyricist; I don’t know if he, or any of the other Americans who served at sea in that war, ever got an answer to that question. For sure, no one ever had to ask it during the next war.

  8

  A Vast Enterprise in Salesmanship

  THE WAR WAS BIG BUSINESS, not just for munitions plants and textile mills and Tin Pan Alley, but for just about everyone who could figure out a way to plug into it somehow. Doughboys, or at least their images, were recruited to sell untold numbers of items—pretty much everything you can imagine, including Cream of Wheat cereal, Wrigley’s chewing gum, Yale padlocks, B. F. Goodrich tires, FTD flowers, Palmolive soap, Swift’s Premium bacon, Hupmobile motorcars, Parker fountain pens, Gem razors, Colt firearms, Kodak film, Alvin silverware, Covert truck transmissions, AT&T telephone service, and just about every brand of near-beer then in existence. Showing a doughboy getting excited about a particular brand of silverware was probably a bit of a reach; about any kind of near-beer was just ridiculous.

  In almost every regard, though—beauty, eloquence, audacity—it’s hard to top a full-page, full-color advertisement that the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey, manufacturer of both phonographs and records, ran in certain magazines in 1918. The central illustration features a sturdy Victrola IX in a dugout, resting atop its own shipping crate, around which sit a bunch of doughboys, cigarettes and smiles, at ease. Some are still wearing their helmets; one is smoking a pipe and cleaning his rifle. The dugout in the drawing looks quite nice, not a shelter clawed out of the dirt so much as a cozy (not to mention clean and dry) basement rumpus room. And a large one, at that, because there is space enough behind the Victrola for about a dozen elaborately costumed characters. The text, titled “Cheering Our Boys in France,” explains:

  Caruso is singing in the trenches in France tonight. Alma Gluck is there, too, and John McCormack and Geraldine Farrar and Galli-Curci and all the glorious golden voices. The violin of Heifetz and Zimbalist, the piano of Paderewski are heard. Sousa’s Band is there and the pathos and laughter of that sturdy, fighting Scotsman, Harry Lauder.

  Thousands of miles from home in a land torn by battle, our boys yet listen to the spiritual voice of Art. Through the Victrola, the mightiest artists in all the world sing to them the hymn of victory, cheer them with their wit and laughter, comfort and inspire them.

  “A singing army is a victorious army,” says General Pershing. The great artists of the world are on the firing line, rallying our hosts about the banner of Freedom.

  Now, I seriously question whether anyone actually lugged a forty-some-odd-pound Victrola IX (with no carrying handle) to France, much less into a dugout. And I’m not sure Galli-Curci and Alma Gluck and Heifetz and Paderewski would be the choices of a group of overtired, underfed men squatting in the mud. But I don’t doubt that the ad, which ran in American magazines, sold quite a few Victrolas back home, along with a good many Sousa and Zimbalist and John McCormack and Harry Lauder records. And a lot of “Keep Your Head Down, Fritzie Boy,” too. So you can add Victor phonographs and records to that list of products. And while you’re at it, add the many newspapers and magazines in which all of it was advertised, too.

  But with the exception of the manufacturers of war materiel, printing presses probably did the biggest business of all during the war. They churned out sheet music, of course, and posters, and notices, and handbills, and leaflets, and Liberty Bonds, around the clock. But none of that kept them nearly as busy, I imagine, as did publishers—not simply with the aforementioned newspapers and magazines, but with mountains of books, and booklets, and pamphlets. If World War I produced a bottomless well of sheet music, it also generated, in the nineteen months Uncle Sam was at odds with the Kaiser, enough books to fill your local public library. And probably the one down at the high school, too.

  Most of them went out of print shortly after the armistice, and were never reissued, a fact that conceals the tremendous amount of influence they exerted during those nineteen months. If you want to know what people were thinking on the Home Front in 1917 and 1918, just stroll through the stacks of the great World War I library and pull a few choice titles off the shelves.

  Face to Face with Kaiserism, by James W. Gerard. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1918.

  The title page identifies the author as “Late Ambassador to the German Imperial Court, Author of ‘My Four Years in Germany.’” It’s quite an understatement. Not only had James Watson Gerard served as the American ambassador to Germany, he had done so from late 1913 to early 1917, meaning that he had arrived there less than a year before the war began, and was recalled when the United States severed diplomatic ties with Germany as a prelude to declaring war on it. As an ally of Tammany Hall, Gerard had been elected to a seat on New York State’s Supreme Court, and then worked hard to elect Woodrow Wilson, a fellow Democrat, to the presidency in 1912; more important, he donated a lot of money to Wilson’s campaign. Diplomatic posts are often the reward of choice for this kind of largesse, and a few months later, Wilson offered to appoint him minister to Spain. Gerard held out until the title was upgraded to ambassador, then accepted, but before he had the chance to leave for Madrid, Wilson decided to send him to
Berlin instead. Perhaps Wilson had discovered that Gerard had initially backed Theodore Roosevelt for the party’s nomination; the president must have known that Spain would be a much easier post, with much better food.

  As soon as Gerard returned to American soil—and maybe even before that—he set to work on his memoir, My Four Years in Germany, which would be published by Doran later that year. It reads, in part, like a diary: He spends a lot of words recounting the mundane functions of an ambassador in Edwardian Europe—ceremonies, conferences, tours—in part, I imagine, to give the reader a sense of what it was like to be an American in Germany just then, and in part to glorify his own memories. But the rest of the book is an analysis of Germany—its people, its government, its national character—and, let us just say, when Gerard ceased being a diplomat, he ceased being diplomatic. After spending so many years in Germany, he didn’t seem to come away with anything good to say about the place or its people. Actually, from the beginning, he pretty much takes the stance that it and they are fit for nothing but to be destroyed. “We are warring against a nation whose poets and professors, whose pedagogues and whose parsons have united in stirring its people to a white pitch of hatred, first against Russia, then against England and now against America,” he writes in the book’s foreword, and ramps it up from there. (In the very next paragraph, he warns, with remarkable prescience: “Russia may either break up into civil wars or become so ineffective that the millions of German troops engaged on the Russian front may be withdrawn and hurled against the Western lines.”)

  Gerard outlines his assessment of the enemy on the same page:

  We are engaged in a war against the greatest military power the world has ever seen; against a people whose country was for so many centuries a theatre of devastating wars that fear is bred in the very marrow of their souls, making them ready to submit their lives and fortunes to an autocracy which for centuries has ground their faces, but which has promised them, as a result of the war, not only security but riches untold and the dominion of the world; a people which, as from a high mountain, has looked upon the cities of the world and the glories of them, and been promised these cities and these glories by the devils of autocracy and war.

  You won’t find a single “on the other hand” on any of My Four Years’ 330 or so pages. Gerard is just relentless: He hates every last thing about Germany and its people. There’s their educational system:

  The teachers in the schools are all government paid and teach the children only the principles desired by the rulers of the German people. There are no Saturday holidays in the German schools and their summer holidays are for only three to five weeks. You never see gangs of small boys in Germany. Their games and their walks are superintended by their teachers who are always inculcating them in reverence and awe for the military heroes of the past and present.

  And their culinary preferences:

  Many of the doctors who were with me thought that the heavy eating and large consumption of wine and beer had unfavourably affected the German national character, and had made the people more aggressive and irritable and consequently readier for war. The influence of diet on national character should not be underestimated. Meat-eating nations have always ruled vegetarians.

  And let’s not even get into their notions of fun. Though he does:

  In connection with court dancing it is rather interesting to note that when the tango and turkey trot made their way over the frontiers of Germany in the autumn of 1913, the Emperor issued a special order that no officers of the army or navy should dance any of these dances or should go to the house of any person who, at any time, whether officers were present or not, had allowed any of these new dances to be danced. This effectively extinguished the turkey trot, the bunny hug and the tango, and maintained the waltz and the polka in their old estate.

  And, as a friend of such notable American Jews as Henry Morgenthau Sr., ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and Adolph S. Ochs, owner of the New York Times, Gerard is offended by German anti-Semitism. “Jews are not admitted to court. Such Jews as have been ennobled and allowed to put the coveted ‘von’ before their names have first of all been required to submit to baptism in some Christian church,” he tells us. “Jews have not much chance in government service.” The only reason, he speculates, that Germany’s POW hospitals are “in as good condition as could be expected” is “the fact that so many doctors in Germany are Jews. The people who are of the Jewish race are people of gentle instincts. In these hospitals a better diet was given to the prisoners.”

  It was certainly true back then that, in America, Jews could and did serve at very high levels in the government and diplomatic corps; Ambassador Morgenthau was evidence of that. Even so, the United States was far from devoid of institutionalized anti-Semitism in those days. So, for that matter, were America’s allies Great Britain and France, while in yet another ally nation, czarist Russia, Jew-hatred was much worse—and more violent—than in Germany. And I’m no expert on the history of American education, but I suspect that the life of a schoolboy wasn’t all that different in the United States at the time. (Except for the Saturday thing, of course; those Teutonic fiends!) And the United States wasn’t exactly a nation of abstemious, teetotaling vegetarians back then, either, though Americans did enjoy a good bunny hug.

  The book-buying public of 1917 didn’t have much interest in second-guessing Gerard; America was at war with the Germans, and he had lots of juicy stories to tell about them. There’s the one where, during a party, the German colonial minister “planted himself some distance away from me and addressed me in German saying, ‘You are the American Ambassador and I want to tell you that the conduct of America in furnishing arms and ammunition to the enemies of Germany is stamped deep on the German heart, that we will never forget it and will some day have our revenge.’” Well! That’s not very festive. The Kaiser himself tells Gerard, “America had better look out after this war,” and “I shall stand no nonsense from America after the war.” I guess he thought he was going to win.

  The most despicable thing about Germany, though, as far as Gerard is concerned, is that they despise America. “I believe that to-day all the bitterness of the hate formerly concentrated on Great Britain has now been concentrated on the United States,” he declares. We must crush them, he warns Americans, or they will crush us.

  He wasn’t the only one who believed that sort of thing back then. In September, 1914, with the war scarcely a month old, Walter Lippmann, a prominent American liberal intellectual and one of the founders of the New Republic, wrote to a friend, “If Germany wins . . . the whole world will have to arm against her—the U.S. included, for Germany quite seriously intends to dominate the World.” By 1917, a great many books were being published about this country America was now at war with; I am perhaps most fond of one written by a journalist named D. Thomas Curtin, who managed to make his way into wartime Germany before the United States entered the conflict, then returned to write a memoir and analysis he called The Land of Deepening Shadow. Though its title is by far my favorite thing about it, the book itself is an entertaining read. Curtin is no fan of Germany—the title should tell you that much—but he at least has some pity for its people, whom he sees, to an extent, as victims:

  Unhealthy-looking little men are these German boys of from twelve to fifteen during the war. The overwork, and the lowering of their diet, has given them pasty faces and dark rings round their eyes. All games and amusements have been abandoned, and the only relaxation is corps marching through the streets at night, singing their hate songs and “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles.”

  Doesn’t sound very relaxing. Of course, their teacher can spice things up for them in the classroom . . . can’t he?

  Years before the war the Government corralled him for its own. It gave him social status, in return for which he would do his part to make the citizen an unquestioning, faithful and obedient servant of the State. As soon as he enters on his duties he becomes a civil serva
nt, since the universities are State institutions. He takes an oath in which it is stipulated that he will not write or preach or do anything questioning the way of the State. His only way to make progress in life, then, is to serve the State, to preach what it wishes preached, to teach history as it wishes history taught.

  Guess not. Surely, though, the church is a good foil to this program of indoctrination: