The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  to keep clear of any disloyalty; keep clear of any one who counsels or advises it. Indeed, anyone, native, naturalized, or alien, who knows of such disloyal plans, purposes, or schemes is already on dangerous ground, although he may not himself have done a thing; for as your friend I should tell you that there is not only treason which consists of overt acts, but there is a lesser treason which consists in knowing of treason by others against the United States and not making it known. . . .

  It is not necessary for me to tell you the many forms treason may take, for treason will always find a hundred different secret ways in which it can give aid and sympathy to the enemy. But right can take but one plain course. Be loyal, true, straight and square to the Government, and you will be sure you are not committing treason. . . .

  My advice to every foreign-born man who comes to me will be: Put a flag at your door, another on your coat, and above all keep one in your heart.

  That was probably more flags than the typical native-born American even owned, but then again, immigrants felt—were made to feel—that “being American” required much more of them than it did of those who were fortunate enough to have been born on American soil. To the immigrant, it was portrayed as a state of grace that they had to work hard to achieve, and then to maintain; and the government, which fostered this aspiration, wasn’t shy about exploiting it, too, most brazenly when it came to selling bonds. “Remember Your First Thrill of American Liberty” beckons one poster for the Second Liberty Loan of 1917, over a scene of immigrants up on deck, catching a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. “YOUR DUTY—Buy United States Government Bonds.” Another, featuring an image of a family—the man’s archaic cravat and the woman’s headscarf identify them as immigrants, although the ship behind them doesn’t hurt—orders: “Remember! The Flag of Liberty—Support It!” That flag fills the top right corner of the poster; the father, clearly moved, holds his exotic-looking hat over his heart and gazes earnestly into the distance. (There’s a son, too, who looks like a bit of a dullard: immigrants!) And then there’s the poster for the Third Liberty Loan featuring an eagle, a couple of flags, a couple of howitzers, and these words:

  ARE YOU 100%

  AMERICAN?

  PROVE IT!

  BUY

  US GOVERNMENT BONDS

  Immigrants had to prove it, and prove it, and prove it again. “What Kind of an American Are You?” demanded a 1917 song by Lew Brown and Charles McCarron; the sheet music’s cover, with its scowling Uncle Sam pointing a craggy finger right in your face, features the question that was now on every native-born American’s mind: “What are you doing over here?” (Interestingly, the song’s composer was the Teutonically monickered Albert Von Tilzer; but since he was the younger brother of Harry Von Tilzer, one of the most successful pluggers and music publishers in American history, and since he, Albert, had written the music for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” I guess he got a pass.) We welcome ev’ry stranger, and we help him all we can, the song declares, and now that we’re in danger, we depend on ev’ry man. That’s certainly fair enough, though the song takes it a few steps further when it demands:

  If the Star-Spangled Banner don’t make you stand and cheer,

  Then what are you doing over here?

  As another song title declaimed: “Loyalty Is the Word Today—Loyalty to the U.S.A.”

  That one was written by Dee Dooling Cahill, in collaboration with composer J. E. Andino, whose name must have seemed suspiciously foreign to many. Of course, many of the nation’s pluggers were immigrants—a much greater proportion, even, than the American population as a whole, which was 15 percent foreign-born in 1910, and even more so by 1917. There are no such statistics for the denizens of Tin Pan Alley, sadly, but judging from what I’ve seen and read, I wouldn’t be surprised if something very close to a majority of them were immigrants themselves. This makes sense, in its way: The typical plugger lived in a city and was largely self-educated; many of them were men and women whose access to more “conventional” middle-class professions was blocked in some way or other. And the more immigrants who were able to make a good living writing and selling songs—and thus attain a high profile for having done so—the more who flocked to that little, increasingly overcrowded stretch of West Twenty-eighth Street.

  The apex of American songwriting was occupied (some would say still is) by an immigrant who had come over from Russia in 1893, at the age of five. Legend has it that little Israel “Izzy” Baline’s shtetl had been burned to the ground by Cossacks, forcing the family to seek refuge across the ocean. Whether that’s true or not—that sort of thing did happen, and not rarely—there can be no doubt that the family fared much better on the Lower East Side of Manhattan than they had in the Russian Pale of Settlement. As Jews in Russia, they had virtually no civil rights to speak of, and could essentially be slaughtered with impunity; in Manhattan, they might be called Kikes and Sheenies by their gentile neighbors, might have to toil twelve-hour days in overcrowded sweatshops and come home to overcrowded tenements, but at least their lives were protected by the law. They could even become American citizens, and own property, and vote.

  I don’t know if, as an adult and the world’s most famous and successful songwriter, Izzy Baline—now going by Irving Berlin—thought about that fact every day. Certainly, no immigrant was ever prouder to be an American. Given how many odes he wrote to his adopted country, and how many of them he just gave away for little or nothing, I don’t think you can make a case that he was a patriot for profit. His war, though, was an unusual one. Drafted at the age of twenty-nine, Berlin was sent to Camp Upton, in the town of Yaphank (pronounced “Yap-Hank”) on Long Island, along with thousands of other immigrants from the city of New York; unlike all of them, though, he was plucked from the infantry and made the center of a special troupe whose objective was not to get the scalp of Mr. Kaiser Man, but to put together a musical revue. This he did: Yip-Yip-Yaphank, a Military Musical Mess debuted on Broadway the following year. It featured a number of songs that have long since been forgotten, including “Kitchen Police,” “I Can Always Find a Little Sunshine at the Y.M.C.A.,” and “You Can’t Stay Up on Bevo,” perhaps the only ode to nonalcoholic beer ever written. The show’s breakout hit was “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” which is ironic considering that Berlin struck a deal with the Army that enabled him to ignore reveille and awaken when it suited him.

  He also wrote a great many war songs beyond Yip-Yip-Yaphank, including “For Your Country and My Country,” which informs Americans of every background: It’s your duty, and my duty, to speak with the sword not the pen. Other songs, though, were aimed specifically at Berlin’s fellow immigrants, perhaps none of them more blunt than 1917’s “Let’s All Be Americans Now,” the chorus of which ends with: You swore that you would so be true to your vow / Let’s all be Americans now—that vow, presumably, being the oath of citizenship. It’s the second verse, though, where things really get pointed:

  Lincoln, Grant and Washington, they were peaceful men each one,

  Still they took the sword and gun,

  When real trouble came;

  And I feel somehow, they are wond’ring now,

  If we’ll do the same.

  I’m sure there are other interpretations, but when I hear these words, nearly a century after Berlin wrote them, I feel strongly that the “we” in that last line is not the American people as a whole, but he, Israel Baline, and his fellow immigrants. I think he really believed, palpably, that America had saved his life, that without it some Cossack would have long ago split open his head; he was deeply grateful to his adopted country for every day of life it had given him, and believed fervently that his fellow immigrants—Jew or gentile, Irish or Russian or Greek or Hungarian or Italian or Pole or whatever—should feel the same, and act on those feelings.

  And maybe, rich and famous and acclaimed though he was, he felt, too, what every immigrant surely felt on some level: that other Americans, native-born
Americans, were disinclined to regard them as real Americans, but rather as Micks or Wops or Sheenies or Bohunks or Polacks—and that, to compensate, they would have to do more than just their bit. No matter that nearly 20 percent of the Army’s doughboys were foreign-born; Berlin, I suspect, would have liked that figure to have been 80 percent. Let’s all be Americans now.

  He, at least, was subtle. Other pluggers, many of whom had made a good living writing “ethnic” songs before the war, were not. Some of their fruits, like “The Army’s Full of Irish,” are actually somewhat complimentary toward the groups they mock; others, like “When Tony Goes Over the Top”—well, not so much. The Tony in question is an immigrant from Italy, a barber who shaves and cuts-a the hair. When the war caught up with him in America, though, He said skabooch, to his Mariooch, he’s gonna fight “Over There.” (I’m guessing his Mariooch is the woman he married, and skabooch is another form of “See ya!”)

  Tony’s a real live one; when he goes over the top, He no think of the barber shop. Rather, He grab-a-da gun / and chase-a-da hun / And make ’em all run like a son-of-a-gun. No need to question his loyalty; With a fire in his eyes / He’ll capture the Kais’ / He don’t care if he dies. And: With a rope of spagett / And-a big-a-stilette / He’ll make-a the Germans sweat. It almost sounds as if the songwriters—Alex Marr, Billy Frisch, and Archie Fletcher—actually admire Tony. Sure, he talks funny and carries a switchblade; but in the trenches, he’s a real corker. An American.

  Almost:

  When Tony goes over the top

  Keep your eyes on that fighting wop.

  It wasn’t until years after I first stumbled upon this song that I connected it to the fact that the very first World War I veteran I interviewed back in 2003 was, in fact, an Italian immigrant. Named Tony.

  He was gone by then.

  I had the opportunity to interview three immigrants who served in the American military during World War I. The first, of course, was Anthony Pierro; the other two, men who had never met and who lived hundreds of miles apart, came from very similar backgrounds and had surprisingly similar stories to tell. I met the first of them, Stanley Lane, in late August of 2003, about six weeks after I had first interviewed Mr. Pierro; he was living then in a pleasant nursing home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He’d been born Samuel (or, more accurately, Shmuel, or Szmul) Levine in Warsaw, Poland, on October 1, 1901, which fact makes him the youngest of all the World War I veterans I interviewed. He and his mother, Sarah, and his brothers, Edward and Oscar, sailed to America on the Mauretania—the Lusitania’s sister ship—arriving in New York in April, 1908. His father, Bernard, had come across earlier, settling in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, setting up shop repairing shoes and saving his earnings until he had enough to bring over his wife and young sons. It’s a common tale, except that Hell’s Kitchen was not the Lower East Side; it was, rather, a predominantly Irish and Italian neighborhood. “Where all the longshoremen lived,” Stanley Lane explained to me ninety-five years later. The Irish and Italians didn’t pick on the Jews, he said, or at least not on him; “I was only a kid,” he recalled, “and they didn’t bother me.” Even so, he told me, when it came time for him to attend school—one block up and another to the east—“my mother would walk us . . . because if you went from one block to the other, the kids might bother you. ‘Hey, what block are you from?’” Their apartment, he said, was a tenement—a third- or fourth-floor walkup without heat, or hot water, or electricity. “Gaslights on the stairways,” he recalled. “Open flames.”

  Nearly a decade later, the family had moved up to the Bronx, and Samuel Levine, then a teenager, had left school and “was working as a shipping clerk for a dress manufacturer named Jacobson . . . He only made wedding dresses, so he had a sort of a national reputation.” He was making eight or nine dollars a week—good money back then for a boy his age. (“The average only made about five.”) The office had a nice view, too; “We overlooked the armory of the 612th National Guard of New York,” he recalled. That armory, on Lexington Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Streets, is still there, and is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful in the city, and quite possibly the country. In 1913, it was the site of a now-legendary art show that marked the debut of modern art in the United States.

  The 612th—the “Fighting 612th,” as it was then known—was an old unit. For World War I, it was absorbed into the 42nd Division, known as the “Rainbow Division” because, at a time when most Army divisions—like the YD—were regional in composition, the 42nd contained units from twenty-six states. Its nickname was coined by a young major named Douglas MacArthur. The Rainbow Division went on to become famous fighting at the Marne and Château-Thierry, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne.

  Back to Samuel Levine, working at a wedding dress factory on Lexington Avenue and gazing out the window at that armory. “We could see the roof,” he recalled, “and they had just come back from Mexico, and they were lounging around the roof and we could see what they were doing there all of the time. I don’t know, somehow it must have interested me. I used to read novels by Bret Harte, and people like that. They wrote about all the western stories, about the guides who, you know, went around with the settlers and showed them where to live and all that. That sort of thing interested me somehow. I read all those novels. And later on in that period, some kid or friend of mine enlisted—I guess he couldn’t enlist somehow in the American Army, but he got into the Canadian Army, and he was only fifteen years old. And I heard about it. So I said, it’s a pretty good idea. I just walked into the recruitment office in New York, and it was no problem. They didn’t ask me anything. And I enlisted there.”

  I asked him how old he was at the time; “I was exactly sixteen,” he said. It was October of 1917. No one at the recruiting station had asked to see his birth certificate, or any other proof that he was old enough to serve.

  “And what did your mother think about that?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t tell them, see,” he said. “When I enlisted there in that office, they sent me directly from there to Fort Slocum, where all the recruits went, so I didn’t have to go home and tell them anything.”

  Straight from the recruiting office to boot camp, without a stop at home? I found that pretty surprising, and turned to Mr. Lane’s son, Bruce, who was sitting nearby, to see if his face betrayed the fact that his father might be embellishing the tale a bit. It didn’t.

  Fort Slocum, on an island in Long Island Sound just off the coast of New Rochelle, New York, was only the first stop. As a volunteer, he was allowed to choose which type of unit he wanted to serve with. Having read all that Bret Harte, he said he wanted to be a horse soldier. The Army sent him to Fort Oglethorpe, in Georgia, to serve with the 22nd Cavalry. “Had you ever ridden a horse before?” I asked him.

  “Never saw one before,” he said, and smiled. He really took to riding, though, and shooting. But then the Army sent the 22nd Cavalry down to China Spring, Texas, and converted it to an artillery unit. Samuel Levine was made a signalman—“I was supposed to handle the radio and the flag, the semaphore; I could do all of that, you see”—which he enjoyed pretty well, too. Then the Army shipped them all back east, to Fort McClellan, near Anniston, Alabama, and Samuel Levine never got any closer to France, at least not in that war. He stayed in the Army for the rest of his career, more or less, serving through World War II—when he did make it overseas—and the Korean War, and rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He spent most of that career as Stanley Lane, having changed his name in 1930; in the peacetime Army, he told me, he’d felt he had to in order to move up.

  Sam Goldberg, on the other hand, never changed his, at least not after he got to America. His American name—bestowed upon him by his father when, at the age of seven, the son came across from Lodz, Poland—was Samuel Benedict Goldberg. Or, as he pronounced it when I asked: “Sam-ewe-elle, Ben-eh-dic-T, Gol-D-ber-G.” The man had the best diction of anyone I have ever met, and he was 106 years
old. Back in Lodz, his name had been Shmuel Baruch Goldberg, or, as he pronounced it that day in May, 2006: “SHMU-elle, Bar-OUKKKH, Gol-D-ber-G. And don’t laugh at it,” he continued—for the record, I hadn’t—“because all the Jewish kids I met when I came to Rhode Island thought, ‘Oh, Benjamin wasn’t good enough for him.’ But Shmuel Baruch”—and here he spelled it out for me—“the dictionary said that Baruch was ‘Benedict.’” Baruch means “blessed” in Hebrew.

  His mind was no less crisp than his tongue; he had, it seemed to me, near-total recall. He knew the precise date the family had arrived in America (December 27, 1907), the name of the ship that brought him over (the Cunard Line’s Campania), every address at which he’d lived in America—from Newark to Hartford to Atlanta and, finally, Rhode Island, where he was still living when we met—precisely how long he’d lived at each one, every employer he’d ever had, how long he had worked for each of them, and how much they’d paid him. It was, truly, a thing to behold. He had lots of memories of life in Poland, too, though not many of those seemed terribly positive. (Russia didn’t hold the patent on pogroms.) He remembered his father’s iron shop, in Newark (“In those days, they made fire escapes . . . There were no fire escapes in this country at that time. Then all of a sudden every city got an ordinance: fire escapes. Too many people were being killed jumping out the window. And if you opened an iron shop and made fire escapes, you had it made.”), his stumbles in learning English (“A couple of months after we arrived there, I got a hold of a penny or two and five or six of the kids my age, we went to the candy store and they picked what they wanted and I said, ‘I want for two cents these,’ and they laughed. And I said ‘Well, how do you say it?’ And they said, ‘I want two cents’ worth of these.’ Well, after that, I wasn’t talking Jewish.”), and the time President Taft came to town (“I saw him personally dedicate the statue of Abraham Lincoln. I didn’t get too close, but I was looking over.”).