1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  In August, in response to a plea from the pope for considering a negotiated peace, Wilson laid out his view of Germany itself in a single blistering sentence:

  The object of this war is to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government, which, having secretly planned to dominate the world . . . chose its own time for the war, delivered its blow fiercely and suddenly, stopped at no barrier either of law or mercy, swept a whole continent within the tide of blood, not the blood of soldiers only but the blood of innocent women and children and also of the helpless poor, and now stands balked but not defeated, the enemy of four-fifths [of] the world.20

  His secretary of state hailed the statement with these fulsome sentiments: “You have again written a declaration of human liberty . . . You are blazing a new path, and the world must follow, or be lost again in the meshes of unrighteous intrigue.”

  Unfortunately, the path Wilson was blazing also burned through the country’s 8.3 million–strong German American community with ugly and, eventually, fatal consequences. Groups such as the APL began to target German American churches, schools, societies, and newspapers as tools of the Kaiser. There were also public calls to toss out German-language instruction from schools and to ban “all disloyal teachers.” Some states banned the teaching of German in private and public schools alike. One publication stated, “Any language which produces a people of ruthless conquistadors such as now exists in Germany is not a fit language to teach clean and pure American boys and girls.”

  Another semi-vigilante group, the American Defense Society, advocated the public burning of German-language books and campaigned to change the names of cities, streets, parks, and schools in America to the names of Belgian and French communities destroyed in the war. Germantown, Nebraska, became Garland, in memory of a local boy killed in the fighting in France. East Germantown, Indiana, became Pershing; Berlin, Iowa, changed its name to Lincoln. A Michigan congressman even introduced a bill that would have required such name changes nationwide.

  Germanophobia soon grew to ridiculous levels. The names of German foods disappeared from restaurant menus. Sauerkraut became “Liberty cabbage”; hamburger became “Liberty steak.”

  There was a campaign to exclude the work of German composers such as Beethoven and Bach from the repertoire of American community orchestras. In July 1918, South Dakota even prohibited the use of the German language over the telephone.21

  This last rule reflected a fear of German espionage that, it is worth bearing in mind, was very realistic. In 1915, the Secret Service had unearthed a covert industrial spy network operating at the behest of a German commercial attaché named Heinrich Albert. In 1916, bombs set by German agents exploded in two factories in New Jersey. Both blasts were efforts to interrupt the flow of munitions and raw materials to the Allies, when America was still neutral.22 But with the coming of war for the United States and the steady drumbeat of anti-German propaganda, people were seeing German spies around every corner and under every bed—especially German American beds. President Wilson himself raised the issue in his Flag Day speech on June 14, 1917: “The military masters of Germany have filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and have sought to corrupt the opinion of our people . . . [These persons] seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles.”23

  With a commander in chief handing out a general license to hunt for spies, it’s not surprising Americans responded. German American churches were especially singled out as agents of German imperialism, since so many maintained close ties with their denominations in the mother country. So were German American publications. With the passage, on October 6, 1917, of the Trading with the Enemy Act, which aimed to curb any commercial transactions with Germany, all German-language newspapers in the United States were required to give English translations of anything they printed about the government.24 Many newsstands refused to carry German-language papers; paperboys refused to deliver them. Meanwhile, in just a year, the number of German-language publications in America plummeted from 537 to 278.25

  Likewise, harassment of individual German Americans became commonplace. Employers would get anonymous phone calls asking if they still had “that German spy” on the payroll. Someone seen reading a German-language newspaper or book on a train or trolley would garner insults or even get spat upon. Just having a German surname could be enough to start the American Protective League on its own private investigation into a person’s background and business. When a German American vacationing in Florida was caught unprepared by a cold snap and exclaimed within hearing of witnesses, “[D]amn such a country as this,” he was arrested for having violated the Espionage Act.*

  Not surprisingly, acts of violence increased dramatically during the winter months, reaching a climax in the spring of 1918. In Pensacola, Florida, a German American was severely flogged by a citizens’ group. He was forced to shout, “To hell with the Kaiser,” and then was ordered to leave the state. In Avoca, Pennsylvania, an Austrian American was accused of criticizing the Red Cross. A group of vigilantes tied him up, hoisted him thirty feet in the air, and blasted him with water from a fire hose for a full hour. In Oakland, California, a German American tailor was nearly lynched by a local organization called the Knights of Liberty. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, where IWW members had been tarred and feathered, a German American resident received the same treatment, was lashed fifty times, and was forced to leave the city. Several Lutheran pastors were whipped for having delivered sermons in German.

  The worst case was the fate of Robert Prager, on April 5, 1918, in Collinsville, Illinois. Born in Germany but having immigrated to America in 1905, Prager strongly identified with his adopted country. He immediately applied for citizenship and tried in vain to join the navy. Instead, he wound up with a job in a coal mine in southern Illinois. At the time, a rumor was circulating in the town that German agents were going to blow up the mine with miners still in it. Several local German Americans came under suspicion and were forced to publicly declare their loyalty and to kiss the American flag.

  Although he had been in the country since 1905, Prager was soon a target. After work on the evening of April 3, a group of drunken miners seized him and paraded him through the streets of Maryville. They denounced him as a German spy and told him to leave town. Prager refused, and instead posted around town copies of a statement he had typed up, declaring his loyalty to America but also voicing a complaint that the local union was denying him membership and thus keeping him from earning a living. That was a mistake—his fellow miners turned on him in defense of their union as well as their country. The next day, April 4, they searched out Prager, stripped him down to his underwear, and then frog-marched him, barefoot and draped in the American flag, through the streets of Collinsville. At the center of town, the furious mob demanded that he sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Prager admitted he didn’t know the words, but he desperately broke into another patriotic song as the crowd jeered and grew uglier.

  Now the Collinsville police intervened. They managed to extract Prager from the mob and take him to the police station, where they hid him in the basement. The angry crowd simply followed them to the station, swarmed in, and dragged Prager back outside. Someone suggested he deserved a good tarring and feathering, but no one could find the right materials. So, they decided that the next best thing was to tie him to a tree, where he stood helpless in the headlights of three automobiles.

  Then, out of the darkness, someone came forward with a noose made from a towrope and looped it around Prager’s neck. According to witnesses, one of the crowd, a veteran named Riegel, shouted, “Come on, fellas, we’re all in on this, let’s not have any slackers here,” as fifteen men rushed forward to grab the end of the rope. With a collective heave, they hoisted Prager into the air.

  Prager kicked and twisted on the rope, but to everyone’s disappointment, he failed to die. The
y lowered him to the ground—not to release him, but to try again. Before they did, though, they gave the hapless German immigrant permission to write a good-bye letter to his parents. He begged to be allowed to pray, asking forgiveness for his sins. Then, once again stating his loyalty to America, he shrugged aside his captors and strode back to the tree and the waiting noose. As more than two hundred persons looked on, Robert Prager said his last words: “All right, boys, go ahead and kill me, but wrap me in the flag when you bury me.” Then, yanked into the air by the neck, he died.26

  The lynching stunned the nation. Theodore Roosevelt denounced it in no uncertain terms, as did Henry Cabot Lodge. As for Woodrow Wilson, it took until the end of July for him to issue a statement in which he decried “the mob spirit which has recently . . . shown its head among us” and said that lynching was “a blow at the heart of ordered law and humane justice.” He also drew a direct parallel between the lynching of Prager and the behavior of Germany, which “has made lynchers of her armies”—words that would seem aimed to intensify hatred of German Americans rather than to defuse it.27 Indeed, many defended the mob, saying they had been forced to do what they did because Congress was failing to punish disloyalty, including disloyal utterances (something Prager had not in fact made). Bowing to the ensuing pressure, Attorney General Gregory asked for requisite changes to the law. Congress responded by amending the Espionage Act with the Sedition Act, which now made it a crime even to utter statements deemed disloyal or to give aid and comfort to the enemy.

  As for the Prager case, twelve persons were eventually charged with his murder. The trial took three days. The defense presented its case in six hours, and concluded with the spurious argument that Prager was a suspected German spy and that the lynching had been justifiable under “unwritten law.” After deliberating for forty-five minutes, the jury found all the defendants “not guilty.”*

  There is no doubt that Woodrow Wilson was unforgivably silent on the mass persecution of German Americans thanks to the war fever he and his fellow Progressives had stirred up. It is also true that his Republican opponents took a similarly strong stand on the need for unity and suppression of dissent. Theodore Roosevelt supported banning teaching the German language from schools and applauded the IWW “deportation” in Bisbee, although he roundly condemned the lynching of Robert Prager.28 Yet the men who were the fiercest advocates of suspending normal civil liberties and who took the most draconian actions in that regard—Attorney General Gregory; Postmaster General Burleson; and, later, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer—were also among the most foursquare Progressives of Wilson’s camp. Their actions highlight the curious self-righteousness of the American Progressive mind, and the belief among Progressives that their views once arrived at were beyond criticism; as with Wilson, opposition itself became a sign of disloyalty, even of evil.29

  This was even more so in wartime, when the desires of the individual by necessity normally have to yield to the needs of the whole, but with Wilson’s own Hegelian twist: that achieving such national unity is a sign of a world-historical leader.

  “Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise,” Wilson had written as far back as 1890. “Once and again one of those great influences which we call a cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward, with a sort of gentle majesty, as champions . . . Masses come over [to] the side of the reform. Resistance is left to the minority, and such as will not be convinced are crushed.”30

  Wilson clearly saw himself as such a man, one of “strenuous mind and high ideals” coming to the nation’s rescue in a time of crisis and war, a man who spoke of “a new principle for a new age” and who was leading “a great, free, democratic nation” to its destiny. (Another was Abraham Lincoln, whom Wilson saw as his model war president.) Bringing the country together as a global force for good was also clearly Wilson’s ultimate goal in mobilizing the nation for the war—the crusade, almost—to come.

  The one problem was: it wasn’t working.

  AS THE FALL of 1917 moved on into winter, mobilization wasn’t moving anywhere.

  The U.S. Shipping Board had spent half a billion dollars but hadn’t built a single ship. A similar Aircraft Board had spent even more and hadn’t launched a single plane. The War Industries Board had turned out to be nothing more than a title and a suite of offices; it couldn’t sign a contract or revise an existing one held by the War Department or the navy. Stories were coming out from army training camps of high rates of sickness, absenteeism, and shortages of everything from food and medicine to weapons and ammunition.31

  It was turning out that much of the administrative machinery Wilson had put in place to organize mobilization was faulty and badly conceived. It was also split by personal feuds and rivalries. The Shipping Board, for example, was bogged down in an argument between a member of its board, William Denman, and Gen. George Goethals of the board’s Emergency Fleet Corporation over what kinds of merchant ships to build. Should they be made of steel, which was more durable but in demand for other war materials, or of wood? The argument went back and forth. Then Goethals, who favored steel and felt he was losing the argument, turned to the newspapers for support. The Hearst syndicate ran a series of exposés of how Denman, who favored wood, was poised to profit from his connections with certain California timber businesses. It was a less than edifying spectacle, and in the end, Wilson had to ask for the resignations of both Denman and Goethals—and not a ship was built.32

  No one was more disgusted, or frustrated, by how things were going than Henry Cabot Lodge. He blamed Wilson’s failure to get the country mobilized for war months or even years before, as well as incompetence in the present. “The utter failure in making preparation,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “and the wanton waste of the time which has elapsed since the beginning of the war in 1914 have thrown us into the war with the work of years to be done in a few months.”

  Another major problem was Wilson’s approach to contracts with private business. “The primary object of the administration,” Lodge said, “appears to be to cut all the industries down to the barest living profit, and yet to the earning of our industries, both agricultural and industrial, we must look for our taxes and our loans.” He concluded bitterly, “[W]e cannot carry on a war against American business and a war against Germany at the same time.”33

  From Lodge’s point of view, a good example of the chaos was what was happening with the manufacture of machine guns. The army had decided to stop making the Lewis gun, a British design, and to substitute an American-made design from gun maker John Browning. That was on June 17, Lodge told Roosevelt; six months later, not a single gun had been manufactured. “The English are using 70,000 Lewis guns at this moment,” Lodge reported. “[The army] could have turned out Lewis guns with great rapidity. Apparently our War Department thinks it is better to have no guns unless they get what they deem to be perfect. To my commonplace mind,” Lodge added sarcastically, “some gun is better than no gun.”34

  The problem of trying to do too much in too short a time with too many rules and regulations extended across the whole range of war matériel. Even though U.S. industry had been supplying the needs of the Allies almost since the war began, those needs had largely been raw materials, explosives and ammunition, and foodstuffs. Most companies had no experience making artillery pieces, machine guns, naval guns, army trucks, tanks, or airplanes, let alone in quantity. Even Detroit, the vaunted center of the fast-growing and innovative automobile industry, Wilson’s equivalent of Silicon Valley, made no sizable contribution to the mobilization—certainly not by comparison with its later contribution in World War II.35 Henry Ford, for example, had promised thousands of tanks coming out of his new factory at River Rouge. The war ended long before any were made.

  This failure left its mark on the U.S. war effort right down to the end of the war. Real weapons tended to be made by European firms; American soldiers would go into action using British-made machi
ne guns, while being supported by American artillery officers firing French-made mortars and guns and American pilots, such as Eddie Rickenbacker, flying French-made airplanes. Indeed, three out of every four planes flown by the U.S. Army Air Service would be French built.36 Meanwhile, by the end of November 1917, eight months after Wilson had declared war, there were only 125,000 American troops in France instead of the one million he had promised—and of those, only two divisions were truly ready to fight at the front. Henry Cabot Lodge summed up the general feeling in Congress when he said, “We cannot beat the Kaiser by standing silently by Wilson.”37

  Then came the railroad debacle.

  In July, Wilson had created the Railroad War Board to oversee the shipment of strategic materials around the country. The trouble started when the board ordered the tagging of certain items, creating tie-ups and bottlenecks that virtually shut down the railroads on the East Coast. By the fall, chaos gripped the nation’s railroads, its economic lifeline but also the lifeline of the entire war mobilization effort. The various railroads said they wouldn’t cooperate; the unions threatened to strike. Cars carrying food, fuel, industrial supplies, and raw materials were stalled across the country. Coal cars carrying the fuel that powered 90 percent of America’s factories and electric plants, and most Americans’ homes, choked the railroad sidings and marshaling yards of every major city. It was looking to be a very chilly winter.38

  For months, the crisis continued as the country’s ability to keep Americans clothed, fed, and warm—let alone to supply and equip its rapidly growing armed forces—seemed in doubt. Finally, on the day after Christmas, Wilson used the authority he’d been given by the Army Appropriations Act on August 29, 1916, to nationalize the railroads. The U.S. Railroad Administration was set up, with Wilson’s son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, as director general of railroads. Only streetcars and suburban commuter rails were exempt from the sweeping executive act.