New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  Despite the arrests and allegations, munitions continued to flow from the harbor’s docks and rail yards onto waiting ships. As the New York Times noted, any plan to remove “the thousands of tons of condensed destruction . . . would divert millions of dollars from New York.” E. B. Thomas, none too worried about the posturing of prosecutors, announced in August that Lehigh had earned an unprecedented $7.6 million over the past year and spoke of “the encouraging outlook for a continuation of the heavy volume of traffic.” Charges against Thomas and his colleagues were not pressed. Business, and lax safety conditions, went on pretty much as before. Most believed with the Times that, while the explosion “must prove cheering news to Berlin and Vienna,” the event was an unfortunate freak accident. To Woodrow Wilson, it was “a regrettable incident at a private railroad terminal.”36

  Only after the war did investigators uncover what really took place at Black Tom. In 1916, Frederick Hinsch had used a brownstone at 123 West Fifteenth Street in Chelsea as a safe house to plan the Black Tom attack. Two of the depot’s night watchmen had been bribed to look the other way. Under cover of darkness, Hinsch’s recruits—probably an immigrant from Austrian Slovakia named Michael Kristoff, a naturalized US citizen named Kurt Jahnke, and Lothar Witzke, a German naval cadet—snuck into the depot and set off detonators, making their escape before the stored ammunition exploded.37

  In 1939, a joint US-German Mixed Claims Commission ruled that Germany owed $21 million in damages to the American claimants in the Black Tom and other sabotage cases, including the Lehigh Valley Railroad and Black Tom’s insurers. Adolf Hitler was in no mood to pay out money to Americans, and the Nazi government “boycotted” the commission’s decision. Following another war, the West German government made good on the claims, paying them on the installment plan. Not until 1979 were the reparation payments owed for the events of July 30, 1916, completed.38

  Von Bernstorff ’s agents had scored a victory. Not only had they destroyed tons of munitions that would have been used against the kaiser’s troops, but they had disabled the key depot and gotten away with it. Yet their momentary success could not stop the flow of exports. The real casualty of their tactics was the security of the vast majority of German Americans who had nothing to do with such skullduggery. The kaiser’s officers and diplomats had been willing to sacrifice their American cousins in a vain attempt to limit the flow of American aid to their enemies. In New York and throughout the country, headlines about Albert’s portfolio and Scheele’s bomb lab raised doubts about the loyalty of anyone bearing a German name.

  Months before the Black Tom explosion, President Wilson himself had pointed the finger of blame at German Americans without naming them directly. In his December 1915 State of the Union address, delivered a week after he demanded von Papen’s recall, Wilson had lauded those “virile foreign stocks” whose peoples had enriched the nation over recent decades. But he also blasted “infinitely malicious” foreign-born US citizens, “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life” and sought “to destroy our industries” for the sake of “foreign intrigue.” Treachery, the president insisted, would not be tolerated. But how were Americans to tell the difference between manly, patriotic newcomers and disloyal intriguers? Here Woodrow Wilson offered his people no guidance.39

  June 5, 1917, dawned fair and cool in New York. Through the morning and afternoon, thousands of men lined up outside neighborhood schools, barbershops, and storefronts to register for Selective Service. America had finally joined the Allied war against Germany. President Wilson had asked Congress to declare war in April, after the Germans resumed unrestricted U-boat warfare against all vessels, including American freighters and passenger ships, heading for Allied ports, and after British naval intelligence divulged intercepted cable messages that proved that German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann was secretly trying to lure Mexico and possibly Japan into a surprise attack on the United States. America’s war, Wilson intoned, would be a war “to make the world safe for democracy.”40

  Now the test had come. Would America’s population of immigrants and their sons step forward to register for the nation’s first mandatory draft since the Civil War? Somewhat nervously, the New York Tribune recalled the Draft Riot of 1863. People recognized that neither Congress nor the public unanimously supported entry into the war. But the day passed without major problems. Although thousands of “slackers” failed to appear as summoned, six hundred thousand New Yorkers and over nine million others nationwide came forward to register.41

  Never far below the surface, the city’s ethnic tensions caused scattered incidents, as thirty-eight thousand registrants were picked by lottery for the draft during the summer. While standing in line for his draft board physical, Russian Jewish immigrant Meyer Siegel joked about a gruff policeman nearby. “What did you say about me, you dirty kike?” the policeman shouted as he arrested Siegel for disturbing the peace. But a judge threw the case out of court, and Siegel was able to share the mix of excitement and bewilderment felt by millions of other young draftees. “Here I am,” he wrote, “one day, a student of law; the next day, learning how to kill my adversary and be killed. Some change-over!”42

  Sixty miles east of Manhattan, in the woods of Yaphank, Long Island, thousands of drafted New Yorkers were training at the army’s newly built Camp Upton by the fall of 1917; other draftees occupied barracks at Camp Merritt in northern New Jersey. By the time Upton’s and Merritt’s troops started boarding transport ships at the Hoboken docks over the winter and spring for the passage to France, ethnic pride as well as American patriotism infused the esprit de corps of new units and traditional regiments alike. In addition to the Upper East Side “blue bloods” of the National Guard’s Seventh Regiment, and the tough Irish teamsters and stevedores from Hell’s Kitchen in the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, a mix of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, Slavs and Italians, natives and immigrants filled the ranks of the Seventy-Seventh, or “Melting Pot” Division, whose insignia bore an image of the Statue of Liberty.43

  Flag-waving crowds cheered the “hardy back woodsmen from the Bowery, Fifth Avenue and Hester Street” as they marched through Manhattan in preparation for the voyage to Europe. Among them were many bearing German names and some who spoke with a German accent. Immigrants set aside their reservations about joining the Allies. “I figured this country was different from Russia,” concluded Morry Morrison, a Jew from Brooklyn. “It was worth fighting for.” On Broadway, theatergoers hummed along with the war’s two signature songs, “Over There” by George M. Cohan, grandson of a County Cork emigrant, and “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” by the Seventy-Seventh’s own Sergeant Irving Berlin, who had passed through Ellis Island as a boy named Israel Baline. Perhaps, Preparedness advocates and liberal reformers both hoped, entry into the war was achieving the “Americanization” and unity they had long desired.44

  With the federal government now putting its own money into the war effort, military contracts brought new jobs. Over eighteen thousand workers flocked to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where they built dozens of antisubmarine boats, barges, and scows, and serviced ships that would convoy the “doughboys” to France. Factories making gas masks and airplane motors opened in Queens. With drafted men leaving their jobs, women filled positions as trolley conductors and assembly-line laborers “for the duration.” Backed by the Wilson administration, which prized workplace harmony as a key to efficient war production, labor unions won higher pay and the right to organize, a circumstance many businesses accepted because the government also guaranteed cost-plus profits on war contracts. “We are all making more money out of this war than the average being ought to,” a steel manufacturer admitted.45

  But as local factories churned out equipment for General Pershing’s American troops in France, and as patriotic New Yorkers bought “Liberty Loan” war bonds and observed meatless and wheatless days to save foodstuffs needed on the Western Front, a nervous, angry current ra
n under their flag waving. The battle for pro-Allied loyalty and unity, many believed, had yet to be won. The Rialto, the Broadway, and other midtown movie houses showed silent films with titles like The Claws of the Hun, The Prussian Cur, and The Hun Within, melodramas that portrayed German soldiers as brutish villains. Were wartime atrocities the result of the kaiser’s militarism, or did they reflect innate traits in German “racial” character, as pernicious on the Hudson as on the Rhine? The movies did not always provide a clear answer. “German agents are everywhere,” warned ads placed in popular magazines by the Committee on Public Information, the federal government’s new war propaganda agency. “Report the man who spreads pessimistic stories . . . cries for peace or belittles our efforts to win the war.” CPI director George Creel justified such tactics by citing the need to mold the American people into “one white-hot mass” committed to the war with “deathless determination.” Like others in the Wilson administration, Creel feared that patriotism might not be enough; outrage, hatred, and suspicion were necessary tools for the enforcement of loyalty.46

  As Creel and Wilson both knew, the war continued to divide Americans, nowhere more obviously than in New York. The city’s intelligentsia, the vanguard of the nation’s liberal opinion, split bitterly over the war. The New Republic’s Walter Lippmann saw in the call to arms against the kaiser the rise of a democratic global order, “the Federation of the World,” and a renewed crusade against “our own tyrannies . . . our autocratic steel industries, our sweatshops and our slums.” But the Greenwich Village writer Randolph Bourne was appalled by how eagerly pro-war liberals agreed to march in lockstep “with the least democratic forces in American life”—the reactionary Preparedness men, the zealots who detected a “Hun” in every individual who chose not to buy a Liberty Bond.47

  Activists in various causes found the war to be a source of division and conflict. While some of the city’s woman suffragists remained committed pacifists, Carrie Chapman Catt of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, seeing in the war an opportunity to win over Wilson and Congress, now denounced “every slacker . . . every pro-German” who could vote while loyal women could not. Disharmony was equally evident in Harlem, the community rapidly becoming the nation’s “Negro Mecca.” From the pulpit of St. James Presbyterian Church, the Reverend F. M. Hyden declared that military service would be “the noblest appeal for political and economic rights which colored men could present to the nation.” Harlem’s foremost intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois, also came to endorse the war, urging African Americans to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens.” But others disagreed. In the pages of their monthly Messenger, two young Harlem socialists, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, exhorted their fellow blacks to reject participation in Wilson’s war. “No intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it now exists,” the Messenger declared. Those black leaders who were shouting, “first your country, then your rights,” were nothing but “hand-picked, me-too-boss, hat-in-hand, sycophant, lick-spittling Negroes.” Few, however, were willing to risk the draft resistance the Messenger seemed to counsel. Harlem’s men duly registered for the draft and went off to serve in a segregated army under white officers. But many did so with a determination to press the fight for freedom on both sides of the Atlantic. On July 28, 1917, eight thousand African Americans, including many draft registrants, marched silently down Fifth Avenue in protest against lynch law and racist violence. “Make America Safe for Democracy” read the banner under which they walked.48

  Other groups in New York—Socialists, anarchists, the “Wobblies” of the Industrial Workers of the World—more uniformly opposed American entry into the war. Most formidable was the Socialist Party, which had garnered nearly a million votes nationally for its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, in 1912, and which adopted an antiwar platform in 1914. New York’s immigrant Jewish garment unions made the city one of the national party’s bastions. To Morris Hillquit, the party’s leader in New York, the war was “a cold-blooded butchery for advantages and power” benefiting “the ruling classes of the warring nations.” In the November 1917 mayoral election, Hillquit, the party’s candidate, lost to Democrat John Hylan and came in behind John Purroy Mitchel, the sitting mayor and candidate of the pro-war, independent “Fusion” ticket. But Hillquit ran a formidable campaign, winning 142,000 votes, more than the Republican candidate got. The Socialists quadrupled their usual vote in the city. Hillquit’s platform, with its calls for public housing and school lunches, spoke to those still left behind by the war boom. But the turnout, which also sent Socialists to the State Assembly and the city’s Board of Aldermen, was clearly a protest against American involvement in Europe’s conflict. Both friend and foe interpreted the results as evidence of a strong antiwar groundswell in the city’s electorate.49

  To Theodore Roosevelt, the meaning of the Socialist campaign was clear: Hillquit was a “Hun . . . inside our gates.” Such invective was becoming common in New York, where the private Preparedness groups echoed Roosevelt and the CPI in their demands for absolute loyalty. Increasingly, anyone who questioned the war—religious pacifists, leftists, those who continued to view neutrality as serving the national interest—found themselves publicly denounced as allies or even agents of Germany. The New York Times blasted “half-baked disciples of socialism, internationalists, pro-Germanists” among the city’s public school teachers and demanded the dismissal of any teacher who corrupted students by opposing the war or who didn’t “believe in Liberty Bonds.”50

  The Wilson administration looked on without censure. The president and some of his cabinet officers offered verbal reassurances to “loyal” dissenters that their civil liberties would be protected, but in practice they drew few lines between legitimate opposition and disloyalty. “The military masters of Germany,” Wilson reminded the public in a June 1917 address, “filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people.” By implication, such efforts were continuing—although in reality, von Bernstorff and his saboteurs had left the country, and propagandists like Viereck had lost credibility.51

  In 1917 and 1918 Congress, urged on by Wilson, passed several laws, including an Espionage Act and a Sedition Act, which sharply curtailed freedoms of speech and the press for the war’s duration. Any person acting, speaking, writing, or publishing so as to “cause insubordination, disloyalty, [or] mutiny,” or to obstruct the draft, could be tried, fined, and imprisoned, with jail terms running up to twenty years. According to Wilson’s postmaster general, Albert Burleson, who played a key role in monitoring and prosecuting mailed publications that violated the Sedition Act, any public allegation that “the Government is controlled by Wall Street or munitions manufacturers” was seditious, as was any statement “attacking improperly our allies.” While cautioning that “criticism, honest criticism, ought not to be muzzled,” the New York Times applauded the Sedition Act for giving federal prosecutors “latitude to frame indictments against traitors.” By the war’s end, the government had arrested over 3,600 Americans for sedition or for allegedly “disrupting” the war effort; 1,055 were convicted for antidraft speech or activity under the Espionage Act.52

  New York’s unbridled talkers, writers, and thinkers—beneficiaries and benefactors of the city’s rich heritage of public discussion and debate—were favored targets. Federal agents raided the offices of Viereck’s Fatherland and shut down Jeremiah O’Leary’s anti-British Bull. Burleson denied mailing privileges to dozens of antiwar periodicals, including the socialist Call, Emma Goldman’s anarchist Mother Earth, and The Masses, organ of the Greenwich Village avant-garde. Brooklyn butcher Stephen Binder received a two-year jail sentence for publishing an antiwar book. In Queens, Peter Grimm went to jail for saying, “America ought never to have gone to war with Germany. It is only a war of the capitalists.” True, the government did not go the extra
step to deprive antiwar groups of their right to assemble or to keep their candidates from running for office. But everywhere Morris Hillquit spoke during his mayoral campaign, his steps were dogged by Justice Department stenographers, taking down his every word, waiting to catch him out in a “seditious” utterance. Hillquit, a seasoned lawyer, watched what he said.53

  On the morning of September 3, 1918, officers stood vigilantly at the doorways of Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, and the city’s ferry landings, stopping every male who appeared to be between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one and demanding to see their draft registration cards. The Justice Department’s New York “slacker raid” was under way. As the day wore on, “slacker patrols” pulled young men off city streetcars and street corners and confronted them in restaurants and theaters. Those “suspects” who could not produce a card were detained and taken to the city’s National Guard armories, where they were held for hours, interrogated, and made to fill out a questionnaire about their draft status. By the end of the raid two days later, the investigators had stopped over sixty thousand men. Most turned out to have valid draft exemptions or were not carrying their cards when detained. About two thousand were ruled to be “seriously delinquent”; hundreds were sent to the army’s headquarters on Governors Island or to Camp Upton.54