New York at War (34 page)

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 ran 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Some twenty-five thousand men took part in the draft-enforcing patrols, including Justice Department agents, soldiers, sailors, and several thousand members of New York’s American Protective League, a private Preparedness group, equipped with official badges or certificates. Wilson’s Justice Department was strapped for funds and gladly accepted APL men as volunteers. Private citizens reveled in the opportunity to strut, intimidate pedestrians, and interrogate “suspects,” all with government sanction and minimal oversight. Preparedness men who were themselves exempt from the draft because of age, infirmity, or work status relished their role as the city’s vigilantes. During 1917 and 1918, members of such groups, sometimes aided by soldiers or sailors, heckled speakers and broke up public meetings sponsored by socialists, anarchists, and pacifists. Auditorium owners refused to rent their halls to leftists out of fear of reprisals. In New York, it seemed, the 100 Percenters had the “slackers” on the run.
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The “slackers,” however, tried to fight back. Liberal lawyers took up the cause of radicals convicted under the Sedition and Espionage acts, arguing their cases all the way to the Supreme Court (which, however, handed down rulings in 1919 upholding Wilson’s war measures). A young pacifist named Roger Baldwin founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau to defend those harassed under the onslaught against the First Amendment. Despite raids by federal agents searching for evidence of “sedition” in the files of Baldwin’s Fifth Avenue office, his bureau survived to become the American Civil Liberties Union. The liberal journalist Oswald G. Villard, once a Wilson admirer, challenged the president’s record: “If he loses his great fight for humanity, it will be because he was deliberately silent when freedom of speech and the right of conscience were struck down in America.”
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One group in New York, however, found that fighting back was impossible. The city’s German Americans, once so openly proud of their dual heritage, could do no right. To defend the kaiser’s war effort was now taboo. But when they insisted on their loyalty to the United States, they were met with scornful suspicion. “Beware of the German-American who wraps the Stars and Stripes around his German body,” a New York paper warned. The humor magazine
Life
ran cartoons of a rotund, walrus-mustached German American, stolen “Plans of Forts” sticking out of his pocket, who sang his own anthem:

My country over sea,
Deutschland, is sweet to me;
To thee I cling.
For thee my honor died,
For thee I spied and lied,
So that from every side
Kultur might ring.
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As elsewhere throughout the country, New York’s public and private authorities did their best to erase German influences from the city’s daily life. The Metropolitan Opera stopped performing Wagner, while the American Defense Society informed concertgoers that German music was “one of the most dangerous forms of German propaganda.” With the National Security League demanding that schools “Throw Out the German Language and All Disloyal Teachers,” the New York Board of Education, the largest school district in the nation, decided in the spring of 1918 to eliminate German instruction from the elementary schools, to cut back on high school German courses, and to ban nine German textbooks. Educators even debated whether to eliminate the word “kindergarten.”
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