The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  10/7/1918: Sick.

  10/8/1918: Sick.

  10/9/1918: Sick.

  10/10/1918: Sick.

  10/11/1918: Carried out of the hospital this morning. Weak as the deuce.

  Even if you’ve never been weak as the deuce, or anything “as the deuce,” you’ve got to appreciate that kind of archaic slang. I picked up a fair bit of it in the course of interviewing a lot of men and women whose vocabularies were three generations older than mine, but perhaps the strangest little bit of argot I collected was one I encountered in a letter that Corporal Howard Verne Ramsey of Company C of the 302nd Water Tank Train wrote to his mother from France on November 3, 1918. In its penultimate paragraph, he bemoans his lack of stationery:

  I’ve sure got to Hooverize on paper as we are unable to get any at the Y.M.C.A. I brought this sheet from the states with me.

  Yes, I know, these days we remember Herbert Clark Hoover as the thirty-first American president, a man whose ineffectual dithering in the face of the Great Depression set the stage for the advent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. But a decade or so before all that, during World War I, Hoover became famous, and universally admired, as the man who saved Europe from starvation.

  War, you see, is not good for farming. Land tends to get ruined once people have been fighting over it for a while, especially if those people are digging trenches and firing off hundreds or thousands of artillery shells a day. And the men who would ordinarily work that land are off somewhere in uniform, hunkered down in a trench on someone else’s farmland. Oh, and the enemy has probably captured a lot of it, too, so you couldn’t even get to it if you somehow managed to escape that trench. All of which added up to a severe food shortage in Europe.

  Enter Mr. Hoover, a man of humble origins who had initially attained wealth and prominence as a mining engineer. Working as both an independent consultant and a lecturer, he had already earned a reputation as a man possessed of excellent organizational skills by the time war broke out in Europe, whereupon he was asked to help coordinate the safe return of more than one hundred thousand Americans who were then trapped across the Atlantic. I guess that project gave him a taste for large-scale humanitarian efforts, because as soon as he finished it he started an organization called the Committee for Relief in Belgium. Belgium, of course, had been occupied by Germany since the very beginning of the war; before the invasion, the small, highly urbanized country had only been able to produce about 25 percent of the food it consumed, importing the rest from neighboring countries. The Germans cut off those imports, and confiscated most of Belgium’s homegrown food for its own consumption, which left the Belgians pretty hungry. Hoover and the CRB successfully imported nearly six million tons of food into Belgium, feeding more than nine million Belgian civilians—no simple task, considering that the Germans were deeply suspicious of the organization’s motives, and the British feared that improving conditions in occupied Belgium, and thus easing tensions there, only helped the Germans in the end. Any man who could manage to appease both of them simultaneously must have been tremendously talented. And perhaps masochistic.

  When America entered the fight, President Wilson recalled Hoover from London, where he’d been living since before the war, and put him in charge of the newly created United States Food Administration. The United States was larger in area than all of the European combatants (except for Russia) combined, and had plenty of fertile farmland that was unsullied by trenches and shell holes. Surely, America could feed Europe, or at least its allies, until the war was over and they could start planting again. There were only two challenges: seeing to it that Americans were OK with shipping their wheat overseas so someone else could eat it; and making sure that nobody on either end of the transaction got gouged in the process.

  That second objective was relatively easy; the USFA just instituted price controls across the board. Asking Americans to sign off on shipping their own food overseas—effectively, to take food off their own plates—would prove more complicated. For one thing, it had never been done before; sure, Americans had curtailed their food consumption during the Civil War and the Revolution—but not voluntarily. The memories of those experiences were far from pleasant. And this war wasn’t even being fought on American soil; it’s one thing to cut back because your farm has been burned by the British, but quite another to do so on behalf of foreign civilians you can’t even see. Sure, conserving would benefit soldiers, too, even American doughboys. But there is a natural human tendency, in anxious and uncertain times, to hold fast to what you have. Overcoming that, Hoover understood, would take some doing.

  And so he launched one of the greatest public affairs campaigns in American history, designed not only to make Americans less uneasy about parting with their edible bounty—and, just to be clear, eating less so others might have something—but to make them actually feel good about it, and righteous, and proud to be doing so. They commissioned America’s most renowned artists and illustrators, and produced dozens of posters attacking the issue from every angle. “Don’t waste food while others starve!” implored one poster featuring an illustration of a gaunt mother cradling a baby as two emaciated children clutch at her skirts, all against a backdrop of a destroyed cathedral. Another pictured a corpulent plutocrat sitting at a table, smoking a fat cigar while harried servants carry off trays of half-eaten entrées; “Sir,” it implored, “don’t waste while your wife saves. Adopt the doctrine of the clean plate.” “Eat less, and let us be thankful that we have enough to share with those who fight for freedom,” advised a poster set in a brimming storehouse; an identical backdrop was employed for the message: “This is what GOD gives us. What are you giving so that others may live? Eat less wheat, meat, fats, sugar. Send more to Europe, or they will starve.” That was direct.

  “Eat more corn, oats and rye products—fish and poultry—fruits, vegetables and potatoes, baked, boiled and broiled foods,” declared another poster, in what sounds like a pretty good diet plan; it almost makes you wonder if the USFA was doing the right thing in sending American wheat, meat, sugar, and fats Over There. One poster showed a bunch of lean doughboys—obviously not too much sugar or fats in their diet—charging over the top, bayonets fixed. “They are giving all,” it proclaimed. “Will you send them wheat?” Posters urged households to observe “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays,” women to plant “War Gardens,” children to cultivate “US School Gardens,” and immigrants to do their bit, too. “Food Will Win the War,” proclaimed one poster, under a scene of new arrivals crowding on deck to catch their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty (under a rainbow, no less). “You came here seeking freedom. You must now help to preserve it. Wheat is needed for the allies—Waste nothing.” And just to make sure that even recent immigrants got the message, versions were printed up in Italian, Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian, and Lithuanian, too.

  “Hunger breeds madness,” Woodrow Wilson once said, and that quote emblazoned a number of posters; so did offerings from General Pershing, Belgian Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, the late President Lincoln, and eighteenth-century Polish generals Kosciuszko and Pulaski. The most effective entreaties, though, were neither subtle nor high-minded. “Blood or Bread” declared one poster, featuring an illustration of a shirtless doughboy cradling a wounded comrade in his arms. “Others are giving their blood. You will shorten the war—save life if you eat only what you need and waste nothing.” As corporations have taken to saying these days: Do more with less.

  Hooverize.

  It worked. Americans ate more fish, more corn, more potatoes, more fruit; less meat, less wheat, less sugar and fats. They grew their own vegetables, put less on their plates, ate leftovers more often. And Herbert Hoover and the USFA sent $7 billion worth of food across the ocean. Yes, a dozen years later, many Americans would be reduced to living in Hoovervilles. But in 1917 and 1918, they were eager, and honored, to Hooverize. I don’t know that Howard Ramsey was among them, but he did it nonetheless.
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  Mr. Ramsey had been born on April 2, 1898, in Rico, Colorado, a mining town in the western part of that state. Rico scarcely exists anymore, but in 1898 it was a thriving concern, big and lively enough to support Charles Allen Ramsey’s dental practice. Charles had been born in Iowa (or, as his son Howard pronounced it, “Ioway”), his wife, Eva, in Kansas (pronounced the regular way). “They came to Colorado in the covered-wagon days,” Howard Ramsey told me when I first met him, on October 19, 2003. We were at his daughter Coral’s house in Portland, Oregon. Mr. Ramsey lived nearby, in a private home that the owners had converted into a very small assisted-living facility. I was surprised to learn that; he looked about seventy-five, thirty years younger than he was, and seemed quite robust to me. Certainly, talking to Howard Ramsey was no different than talking to any adult, except that, like every other centenarian I met, he was a bit hard of hearing. He had a very high forehead, and full, puffy white hair behind it; wore eyeglasses so large they could have served as safety goggles, and a white, short-sleeved shirt with two pockets on the chest. Our entire conversation that first day—more than two hours of it—took place at Coral’s kitchen table. Her father sat up straight, spoke easily and in a deep voice. His discharge papers said he stood five feet ten and a half inches tall, but he seemed taller than that to me.

  “They used to take the kids close,” he said of that covered-wagon trip. “The kids who could walk, they would let them walk . . . they’d make them walk close to the covered wagons on account of the Indians. They wouldn’t let the kids wander anyplace.” Mr. Ramsey wasn’t sure why, exactly, his parents’ families had migrated to Colorado, but apparently they weren’t interested in working in the mines. His father, he told me, “went to barber college after he had four kids. Then he was a barber for a while, and then he went to dental school. He went to dental school for four years when he had four kids. So he became a dentist, and he was a dentist ever after.” Howard grew up the third of four children—the oldest was his sister, Hazel, then his brother Erle, and a younger brother named Charlie—in a big house right in town. “’Course, the town wasn’t much of a town,” he said with a chuckle. “It had one main street, and that’s about it. It had a hotel at one time, but the hotel burned down. That took care of that.” After his first year of school, the family moved to nearby Telluride, which was then just another mining town, if a somewhat larger one. (In 1889, Butch Cassidy had robbed the bank there, so at least it could boast that much.) At fifteen he moved with his family to Portland; after he graduated from high school, in 1916, they all moved again, to Salt Lake City, where Howard went to work driving a taxi.

  His discharge papers actually list his occupation as “chauffeur,” a term a bit fancier than “taxi driver,” but I don’t think he would have minded either title. He’d always loved cars, ever since his father had bought one back in Rico. “We had the first and only car in that little town,” he told me.

  “What kind of car was it?” I asked.

  “A Winton Six,” he said. “It was like a . . . let me see, a Pierce-Arrow, the Winton, and the Packard. Those were the three major cars. The big cars.” The Winton, he explained, “was a five-passenger car, with two extra seats in the back they added, so that made it a seven-passenger car . . . And everybody in this little town at one time or another had a ride.” Eventually, Howard learned to drive on that car; and later, while driving a taxi in Salt Lake, he learned about the war. “We were right near Fort Douglas, you know,” he explained, “and so Fort Douglas was all war . . . and we used to pick up a lot of soldiers, you know. They’d be in town visiting a friend, and they’d take a taxi to get back to the fort.” On June 19, 1918, he and a friend from work, a fellow named Harry Cleveland, went to a recruiting station in town and enlisted. Or tried to, anyway. “We went up to sign up, and we was underweight,” Howard recalled with a smile. “They wouldn’t take us. So we went down into town, and we bought a bunch of bananas, and ate these bananas, and drank a lot of water.” He laughed. “Then we went back, we weighed in, and we waited.

  “We passed,” he said.

  Good thing, too; the Army needed men who knew how to drive. “Nobody drove in those days, like we do today,” Corporal Ramsey explained to me eighty-five years later. “You know, driving was an exception.” They were assigned to the 302nd Water Tank Train—Howard to Company C, Harry to Company D. “So after we get in the service, here were these, all these company guys, not hardly one of them could drive. We taught them how to drive, you know,” he said. “We taught whole units how to drive.”

  The 302nd Water Tank Train is one of the most interestingly named outfits I have encountered. If you’re wondering what, exactly, a water-tank train is, so did Howard Ramsey’s mother; he took pains, in his letter of September 23, 1918, to explain it to her:

  A Water Tank Train or motor supply train consists of 75 men and a Captain and a Lieut. 77 all-together. A train consists of 33 trucks making 33 drivers, each driver is a corporal. 33 assistant drivers who are 1st class privates. 1 truckmaster and one head mechanic who are 1st class Sergeants. 3 assistant truckmasters and 3 assistant mechanics who are all Sergeants. The extra man I think is what is called a signal man. This is about all I know about it.

  They drove trucks—“white trucks”—fitted with enormous water tanks. “We carried water to the front,” Mr. Ramsey told me. But that was months later, after they got to France. In between, the Army sent them to Camp Holabird, in Baltimore, for more training, and then across the Atlantic on the Leviathan, where, unfortunately, his experience was not entirely unlike Reuben Law’s on the Corona. They even landed at the same port. “At Brest,” he recalled, “sits a high hill. And here’s everybody, half-sick from the flu—well . . . they were sick either from the flu or the seasickness—and they had to carry their packs and walk up this hill. And I’ll never forget that. A lot of guys, they didn’t make it. They just collapsed on that side of that hill. I’ll always remember that. I carried somebody’s pack for him so that he could still walk. We weren’t there too long. We had, all these—two, three hundred died on the ship, so they had to all be buried there.” Fortunately, Howard Ramsey had remained healthy through it all. “I didn’t even get seasick,” he said. “I got to wandering around one time, and I got to this part of the ship where these sick guys were, and they got me out of there.”

  Surprisingly—or perhaps not—there was no hint of this in his first letter home from France, dated October 8, 1918:

  We left in the afternoon. For the first few days we had a very quiet sea. Just like a lake. Very few got sick. The last days was very rough. The ships rolled and pitched. A few now got sick. But Harry and neither one felt a touch of it. Not even a headache. We got magazines and found a dandy place on deck and read out loud to each other and ate candy. . . . We were up on deck most of the time watching the flying fish and nothing but water everywhere. We sure had swell eats. I was on K.P. several times and believe me the sailors sure know how to cook. I ate enough pie to sink a ship. It was sure a swell kitchen. The trip was very uneventful as we didn’t see a thing.

  Not a syllable about influenza. I’m not sure if the Army forbade it, or if he just didn’t wish to worry his family. He shared all kinds of other information—so much that some Army censor had to black out the date, time, and location of his arrival in France. They did, however, allow him to discuss the weather:

  It was raining when we landed and we had to march here, to our temporary camps. It was dark and the cobblestone road was full of holes. We stumbled and slipped along wading in mud and stepping in water holes.

  We didn’t get to see any of the town. The streets are narrow and the houses average three stories. But the lights were out and the shutters up. Occasionally we would see a gray haired woman in a window waving. . . .

  Today I have just been laying around. There has been a few French girls and boys around selling nuts and grapes. They look human and we have been practicing our French on them. I have a sheet of French words I ha
ve been studying. Harry and I know about a dozen words and its fun to say Hello goodbye etc. But I think as a Frenchman I’d be a failure. I went to the canteen and got this paper and some American Bull Durham. I’ll soon have to be using centimes and francs instead of dollars and cents. But mother I think I’ll like it here. So I had better close for this time and I will write you as often as I find time. Give everyone my love.

  If it sounds like Howard Ramsey’s war was pretty easy, perhaps it was, at least compared to some others’. According to his discharge papers, he didn’t arrive at the front until October 16, just twenty-five days before the armistice. He told me he drove a water-tank truck to the front lines exactly once; “then,” he said, “they took our tank off and put seats on there, so I carried officers after that.” But though, again, he rarely mentions it in his letters home (he begins that November 3 note with, “It is awful hard to write having nothing to write about”), he was, he told me, often in harm’s way during those twenty-five days. The 302nd Water Tank Train was stationed just to the rear of the trenches—there was only a “pile of dirt” separating them, he recalled—and billeted, he said, “in abandoned houses and things like that.” And “oh, yeah, they got shelled,” he added. “All the time, when we was on the front, these shells were landing all around us.”

  “Did any of them ever get close to you?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah, they did. Maybe in the next block, or across the—they were all over.”

  “This was in daytime, or at night, or both?”