New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  As never before, New York in 1914 was the national capital in every sense but the political, and its international influence led people to call it an “imperial” city. Wall Street, Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and the Statue of Liberty had become catchphrases around the world. But to many Americans in 1914, New York City was also a kind of national litmus test, the most vivid case study of the policy of unrestricted immigration that had filled the metropolis and the country with the peoples of Europe. Almost one third of the nation, and 40 percent of New York City’s five million people, were foreign-born. For many Americans, New York seemed the crucial laboratory for gauging whether immigration was forging a unified people in whose hands democracy was safe or instead a patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods blighted by conflict and degeneration. For many, especially among the native-born, the line between optimism and alarm was often perilously thin. Even liberals bent on preserving a tolerant society feared that national unity was a fragile affair, only preserved by keeping European conflicts at bay. To the German ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, Wilson explained that the nation must stay neutral, or otherwise “our mixed populations would wage war on each other.”8

  But Europe wouldn’t let New York alone. The belligerents, recognizing the city’s pivotal role in American finance, industry, and opinion making, immediately sought to enlist hearts and minds on the Atlantic’s western shore. From his headquarters in London’s Wellington House, Sir Gilbert Parker, head of the American division of the newly formed, top-secret War Propaganda Bureau, wrote letters and sent pamphlets across the Atlantic to thousands of “influential and eminent people of every profession” to build “a backing for the British cause.” Parker’s men also fed their version of the war to the principal correspondents of the New York papers and press services, most of whom used London as their base for covering European news, thereby guaranteeing that the British perspective would be read throughout the United States. Such efforts intensified as the summer’s illusions of quick victory gave way to the deadlock of trench warfare along a Western Front occupied by three million soldiers and stretching from the Swiss border to the English Channel. Exaggerated reports of German atrocities against Belgian civilians, disseminated from Wellington House, filled the headlines of New York’s dailies. By May 1915, when a German U-boat sank the English liner Lusitania, six days out from New York, with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans, the phrase “Remember Belgium” was already imbedded in millions of American minds as a token of German brutality.9

  Many New Yorkers needed little prodding to side with the Allies, despite Wilson’s plea for neutrality. This was especially true within the city’s business and professional elite, dominated by Protestants of British descent who viewed the British Empire’s constitutional monarchy and the French Republic as politically kindred to the United States. In their eyes, London and Paris, not Berlin and Vienna, were the cities whose standards of civilization New York had rightfully inherited. That the Allies, just like the Germans, might be concerned with maintaining their empires and seizing new territories and markets was rarely acknowledged. Endorsing American neutrality while supporting the Allies in spirit, the New York Times voiced the dominant position of the city’s establishment: the war was one between “autocracy and democracy . . . between the slowly reached ideals of liberty toward which Europe has been struggling for a century and the old system of absolutism.” In short, the Times argued, the Allies stood for enlightenment and progress; Germany and the other Central Powers embodied tyranny and reaction.10

  Among the new immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and settling into the city’s tenement districts, ardent Allied sympathizers could be found as well. The city’s Czechs and Slovaks, for instance, supported an Allied victory as their best hope for freeing their homelands from the thrall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After Italy joined the Allies in May 1915, the half million inhabitants of Little Italy, East Harlem, and other Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx festooned their shops with flags and banners urging the Italian army to seize Trieste and Trento from the Austrians. “Women and girls sat on the stoops” in Little Italy, a Times reporter noted, chatting “about the war and what Italy was going to do to Austria and Germany. . . . In the streets little children played war and talked war.” Thousands of young emigrants, reservists in the Italian army and navy, lined up outside the Italian consulate on Spring Street; some boarded steamships for Genoa and Naples. But older women on Mulberry and Mott streets looked somber: many “had sons, grandsons, or relatives in the army of Italy, and it was easy to see that they were thinking of what the war might mean to their far-away kindred.”11

  Other groups in America, however, were averse to the Allied cause, a fact appreciated by Sir Gilbert Parker’s German rivals. Like the English propagandists of Wellington House, dignitaries in Berlin covertly tried to shape American opinion. In this they had the cooperation of the German ambassador to Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, who feared that American links to Britain and France might eventually lure the “great neutral” into the war on the Allied side. To help prevent this, von Bernstorff relied on a slush fund of millions of dollars in German Treasury notes, much of which he deposited in the Chase National Bank on lower Broadway in July 1914. His emissaries enlisted a flamboyant young German-born poet, George Sylvester Viereck, who began publishing a pro-German weekly magazine, The Fatherland, from an office on Broadway. With undisclosed subsidies from von Bernstorff’s fund, he printed a steady stream of lively, provocative articles under the motto “Fair play for Germany and Austria-Hungary.” Viereck vowed to “break the power of England upon our government” and exploited every opportunity to undermine support for the Allies. Americans, he suggested, should prefer the “German imperial cross” to the “well-known double-cross of Great Britain”—a point he underscored by reminding readers of British “tyranny” during the American Revolution and War of 1812.12

  Celebrating the kaiser’s birthday: the cover of The Fatherland, January 26, 1916. JOSEPH MCGARRITY COLLECTION. DIGITAL LIBRARY, VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY, DIGITAL.LIBRARY.VILLANOVA.EDU.

  Among the hundred thousand readers claimed by The Fatherland were, unsurprisingly, many New Yorkers of German birth or ancestry. A remarkably diverse group, German Americans abruptly found themselves having to sort out where they stood in relation to their homeland’s war effort. After the Lusitania sinking, the number of German aliens applying for American citizenship in New York quadrupled. But others struggled with mixed feelings. A young writer named Hermann Hagedorn, raised in Brooklyn and educated at Göttingen and Harvard, spoke for many of his fellow German Americans in 1914: “Soberly gratified though I might be at every German setback, every German victory set my Teutonic heart beating faster.” He would eventually become an ardent supporter of the Allied cause, convinced that only the defeat of Germany could lead to a new world of “Free Peoples Triumphant.” Arguing with his pro-German brother Addie, he warned that “this country would be split into fragments as our family is now split, the members torn from each other and each member torn within himself,” unless all Americans embraced the Allies. But such convictions came, as Hagedorn admitted, at the price of a painful inner struggle with his German identity.13

  Most vocal among New York’s German population were those who expressed pride in Germany’s war aims. On August 4, 1914, thousands of young men, reservists in the German army, marched up Broadway singing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” making sure to sing louder as they passed the British consulate. When some brawled with English and French reservists who tried to seize their banner, Mayor John P. Mitchel banned all foreign flags from public display. Facing the Royal Navy’s blockade of the German ports, most of these German sympathizers ultimately stayed in New York. But the fervor and pride they felt ran deep in Yorkville, Williamsburg, Astoria, and the city’s other German enclaves. When the Brooklyner Freie Presse solicited funds from its readers “to help the widows and orphans of their suffering countrymen in German
y and Austria,” the paper distributed thousands of souvenir Iron Crosses so subscribers could remember “the heroic deeds of the German soldiers for which it is bestowed.” Manhattan’s German-language dailies, like the Staats-Zeitung and the New Yorker Herold, called for an embargo on American aid to the Allies. While the papers deplored the loss of life on the Lusitania, they also argued that the munitions the English liner was carrying made it a legitimate target.14

  German immigrants and their children who had long recited the credo “Germania our mother; Columbia our bride” saw no reason to quell their voices simply because so many of their fellow Americans favored the Allies. Were they not also Americans and entitled to speak freely? Why should they not buy German war bonds and applaud their fatherland’s military ambitions just as other New Yorkers backed England and France? “Organize, Organize!” Viereck exhorted his readers. Though many “ridiculed the hyphen” that distinguished German Americans from their fellow citizens, he insisted, “we shall make it a virtue.”15

  Other New Yorkers also leaned away from the Allies. The city’s Irish population, still large, included numerous friends of the insurgency that would culminate in the Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin against British rule. John Devoy, editor of the Gaelic American, and his comrades in the city’s Clan na Gael made New York the most important place outside Ireland for raising funds and smuggling supplies to Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Brotherhood as they prepared their rebellion. To be sure, New York’s Irish community also included nationalists who believed Irish home rule would follow an Allied victory. “I say not down with England but up with Ireland,” lawyer William Bourke Cockran told a Carnegie Hall audience. But Devoy and many others found little to admire in the British war effort and believed that a victorious Germany would press a defeated England to grant Irish independence. Indeed, by 1915, Jeremiah O’Leary, a militant well-known on both sides of the Atlantic, was publishing his scathingly anti-British satire magazine, Bull, out of a Park Row office, using secret funds from von Bernstorff’s bank account.16

  Eastern European Jews also scrutinized the Allied cause skeptically. By the war years, Jewish emigrants from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires had made New York the largest Jewish city in the world. On one hand, New York Zionists hoped that British victories against the Ottomans would lead to the recognition of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. On the other hand, the socialism that many Jews brought with them from Europe dictated that the war be rejected as a capitalist bloodbath. Above all, most Jews simply could not stomach the fact that the bitterly anti-Semitic czarist regime was one of the principal Allies. Many of the 1.5 million Jews on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx had fled Russia and Russian Poland to escape pogroms, an oppressive draft, and the reactionary policies of Czar Nicholas II’s government.

  In 1915, bloody attacks by czarist troops on Jewish villages—scapegoats for the Russian army’s blunders on the Eastern Front—only further outraged New York’s Jews, while also making liberal Gentile advocates of the Allied cause squirm. Harry Golden, a young boy selling Yiddish papers on a Lower East Side corner, knew how to lure customers with breaking war news sent from Eastern Europe: “No matter what the outcome of the skirmish I shouted ‘Russians retreat again!’ I shouted it even if the Russians advanced.” Moreover, the kaiser’s main ally, the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef, was a known foe of anti-Semitism. “Franz Josef was the old reliable,” Harry Golden recalled. “The East Side Jews adored him.” Russian bigotry and Austrian tolerance made it hard to view the Allied cause as a clear-cut crusade of “democracy” against “autocracy.” Shrewdly, Viereck’s Fatherland celebrated Franz Josef with a lavish cover portrait, while on another cover a cartoon depicted the cruel, sword-wielding czar intimidating a Jewish captive.17

  “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” former president Theodore Roosevelt announced to an auditorium full of New York’s Knights of Columbus in October 1915. Roosevelt repeated his message in numerous speeches and interviews, specifying his main target: “those professional German-Americans who seek to make the American President in effect a viceroy of the German Emperor.” Roosevelt had become the most visible spokesman for Preparedness, a nationwide movement sponsored primarily by wealthy businessmen and professional men in New York, Chicago, and other large cities. Preparedness men urged the need for rearmament and a national draft. Most in the movement’s organizations—the National Security League, the American Defense Society, and the American Protective League—were openly pro-Allied and anti-German. They were also profoundly anxious about ethnic pluralism and the complex loyalties it implied.18

  Preparedness advocates sought to alarm and awaken their countrymen by pointing to the dire vulnerability of their nation’s largest metropolis. In a 1915 book entitled America Fallen! J. Bernard Walker, a former Scientific American editor, argued that the new long-range guns the government had been placing since the 1890s in the six forts now guarding New York harbor might, in fact, fail to deter a German invasion, even though the guns made New York the most heavily defended place in the country. Evading their shells, enemy submarines could take Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, Fort Hamilton at the Narrows, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard under the cover of night. The German surface fleet could then bombard Manhattan’s signature skyscrapers—the Woolworth Building, the Singer Building, the Municipal Building—to terrify New Yorkers into submission and extort a $5 billion ransom from them. The Battle Cry of Peace, a popular 1915 silent film produced by a Briton, J. Stuart Blackton, and endorsed by Preparedness groups, portrays “an unnamed foreign power” using ships and planes to bomb and shell lower Manhattan—a feat made easy after secret agents gain control of the city’s pacifist movement and lull naïve New Yorkers into a state of utter defenselessness. Walker and Blackton unwittingly echoed the very invasion plans the German high command had shelved a few years earlier. (They also echoed forgotten concerns from the 1880s and 1890s, when mass-circulation papers like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World warned of the port’s vulnerability to another potential threat, an artillery bombardment by Spanish warships, although an attack on New York does not seem to have been on the Spanish agenda, even during the Spanish-American War of 1898.)19

  But proponents of Preparedness were also doing something new: they were calling on all Americans to worry about the fate of a city many of them distrusted or even despised. Manhattan, with its bankers and immigrant masses, had come to seem a malevolent foreign force to many; by the 1890s, some Americans openly viewed Wall Street and Ellis Island as national threats. But some of the Preparedness visionaries of 1915 saw these attitudes as mistaken and dangerous. While millions viewed New York as an alien excrescence, the reality, they implied, was that New York was the essence of America: a rich, powerful, yet utterly vulnerable place, oblivious to how its own self-indulgence and softness lay it open to enemy assault. A successful attack on New York would be an attack on America, an attack the slumbering nation might not survive if it did not arm itself in advance.

  On the other hand, some Preparedness lobbyists did harbor agendas that implicated New York and other large cities as threats to national security in and of themselves. While there was room in the movement for liberals who viewed Prussian militarism as a menace to world progress, many Preparedness activists were wealthy Anglo-Saxons of deeply conservative views. To these men, military preparation would not only defend America against the external foe, Germany, but also foster a national unity that would help combat internal enemies—labor unions, activists who favored an eight-hour workday, leftist radicals, and recent immigrants who allegedly harbored divided loyalties.

  A long-range gun at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, guarding New York from naval attack, c. 1908. GEORGE GRANTHAM BAIN COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

  Fear of internal enemies was already well embedded in the consciousness of New York conservatives. After the Civil War, National Guard regiment
s in New York and other American cities—often composed mainly of wealthy volunteers for whom membership represented a mark of status as well as patriotism—began constructing armories. These imposing castle-like fortresses housed weapons, provided space for regimental drills, and served as citadels steeling the city, in the words of the editor George W. Curtis, “not only against the foreign peril of war, but the domestic peril of civil disorder.” New York’s sprawling slum and sweatshop districts harbored threats to the safety of the city’s propertied classes, Curtis and the Guardsmen believed. The Draft Riot, the Paris Commune of 1871 in which radicals seized control of the French capital, the rise of a vigorous American labor movement challenging the prerogatives of capitalists, the violent strikes that paralyzed American railroads in 1877, and the calls of a small but vocal array of immigrant anarchists for class war all figured in the thinking of armory builders. (So, perhaps, did apocalyptic novels like Joaquin Miller’s Destruction of Gotham [1886] and Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column [1890], which pictured New York conquered and ravaged by an enraged, brutalized working class.) Behind brick and granite walls, they stockpiled guns and ammunition to protect the established social order and prevent revolution.20

  With their Gothic towers and crenellated ramparts, armories became visual tokens of the social stresses besetting New York and other cities. While leftists like Boston’s B. O. Flowers denounced armories as “great storehouses of death” and “Plutocracy’s Bastilles,” journals of middle-class opinion, such as New York’s Independent, viewed them as necessary bastions against strikers who, by forcing other workers to join them, were “worse than wild beasts turned loose upon society.” In case of attack by proletarian masses, one reporter suggested in 1887, troops in the Twelfth Regiment Armory on Columbus Avenue at Sixty-First Street could defend its ramparts “in the mediaeval manner with boiling oil and melted lead, or even in the modern manner with musketry fire.” Armories became bases for National Guardsmen who sallied forth to quash the Brooklyn streetcar drivers’ strike of 1895 and other work stoppages, which appeared to many on both right and left as the first quiverings of an erupting class war. By 1910, some twenty armories—subsidized by the city and by Guardsmen’s contributions—loomed over neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs; the five-acre Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, completed in 1917, was the nation’s, and possibly the world’s, largest such structure. Over time, the city’s armories would serve a wide range of purposes—as banquet halls, galleries for pathbreaking avant-garde art, showrooms for antiques, and homeless shelters, among others. But for Preparedness advocates in the mid-1910s, they continued to serve their original purpose, as forts arming those “ready to march forth for the defense of our homes and the upholding of the law,” as a Brooklyn Guardsman had once put it, especially if foreign agents stirred the pot of domestic discontent.21