Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865

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the Orioles’ training camp in North Carolina, eighteen-year-old Ruth rode

his horse into a soda fountain shop and asked for two drinks, one for him

and one for his horse. With war stories ﬂooding the news, the irrepressible

Babe, with his voluminous appetite for food, drink, and women, gave anxious

readers someone safe to cheer. Babe Ruth did not kill people—he just killed

other players’ records. In 1916, he set a baseball record during the fourth

game of the World Series when, as the pitcher, he led the Boston Red Sox to

a fourteen-inning win, allowing only one run to cross the plate. A strong-arm

pitcher with a blazing fastball, Ruth’s real razzle-dazzle came with the bat,

which he used to launch more balls over the outﬁeld fence than any player of

his era. He was a home run catapult.

hile Babe Ruth tapped out his bat-on-ball, over-the-fence rhythm,

tricky-ﬁngered piano players got dance ﬂoors bouncing with the syncopated

melodies of ragtime. Scott Joplin, a black man from Texas taught piano by

a German immigrant, ﬁrst popularized the infectious quick-step of ragtime

with songs like “The Entertainer,” synonymous today with stilted motion

pictures of boxy Ford Model T’s pufﬁng past coat-and-tie bicyclists or with

the antics of silent-ﬁlm comedians getting bopped on the head. Dancing to

ragtime music was the delight of young women with bobbed hair—that radi-

cal,

chin-length coif that seemed somehow molded by nature onto ﬂappers’

heads in the 1920s, though it was ﬁrst worn before World War I. The ﬂappers’

bobs were a signal that the New Woman’s look might have as much pluck

and spring as a ragtime jig. Ragtime was gaiety, a good mood transcribed into

four-four time, the musical equivalent of children laughing, and it ﬁt the spirit

of a nation enamored of its own possibilities. The 1910s were as intentionally

silly and wonderfully frivolous as they were weighed down by international

catastrophe. Ragtime could accompany troops on the ﬁrst transports out of the

United States headed for Europe in 1917, but the sad wail of a jazz trombone

seemed more suitable for soldiers praying before battle, soldiers who had

already heard battlefront reports.

The

Yanks Are Coming

Part of the trick for the rulers of each ﬁghting nation was to ﬁgure out how

to encourage the whole populace to want to ﬁght. Government-sponsored

propaganda

became one method, ﬁrst in Europe, then in the United States. A

nation has boundaries, but nationalism is a phantom of the emotions, and it

upon emotions that advertisements and propaganda play. First the British

and French, then the Americans, convinced themselves that Germans were

baby-stabbing, woman-ravaging monsters maniacally driven to ruin liberal

civilization and replace it with despotism. When war jingoes and recruitment

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WORLD WAR I

posters stopped convincing French soldiers that the ﬁght was worth it, the

French government and ofﬁcer corps resorted to a subversion of their own

ideals to keep the ﬁght going. During 1916, two of history’s bloodiest battles

were waged, at the Somme and at Verdun. In each case, over the span of mere

months, more than 1 million soldiers died. To the ﬂea-speckled, hacking men

in the ditches waiting for the signal to leap forward into a spray of German

machine-gun bullets, there seemed no reason left to ﬁght. The tactics did not

work. The battle lines did not change. Slogans and jingoes sounded thin and

tinny, no longer imbued with heroism or some call to a higher purpose. Where

propaganda failed the French military and civilian leaders, force would have

to sufﬁce. In 1917, French troops mutinied en masse and were threatened with

execution if they did not get back in line, or at least into the trenches—an ex-

ample

of the kind of despotism the French told themselves they were ﬁghting

against. These were the conditions facing American doughboys who began to

arrive in the summer of 1917, one half-year after Germany’s ﬁnal mistakes,

the ones that drew the United States directly into the conﬂict.

Not only would a modern military of unprecedented size have to be created

in the States—trained, equipped, and shipped to Europe—but also the people

of America would need a reason to believe in if they were going to willingly

commit their sons to death. By January 1917, Germany was starving: infants

malnourished, mothers without meat or milk. The German high command

believed that within six months Britain could be driven to surrender if U-

boat warfare were resumed. With Britain out of the way, French resistance

would crumble. So Germany announced that unrestricted attacks on any

ships approaching Britain or France would start on February 1. American

seamen were going to die. As well, the volume of trade between Britain and

the United States had grown so substantial that the U.S. economy would be

dealt a severe blow by the threatened interruption. As if this were not inﬂam-

matory

enough, the British intercepted a German communiqué originating

from foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman. From Washington, DC, he had

cabled the Mexican government to suggest an alliance. Would the Mexicans

be interested, Zimmerman asked, in regaining the lands it had lost seventy

years ago in the Mexican-American War? If so, perhaps Mexico should join

Germany when the time came and take up arms against the people of the

United States. The British held onto the Zimmerman telegram until the middle

of February. Then they passed it along to President Wilson and released it to

the press, where it was ﬁrst published on March 1. The timing was genius.

After a series of American merchant vessels had sunk, punctured by scream-

ing

German torpedoes, Wilson addressed Congress on April 2 and asked for

a declaration of war against Germany.

President Wilson knew that Germany’s government needed to be slandered,

AMERICAN STORIES

110

not just as an aggressor, but as a body without principle, just cause, or de-

cency of any sort. Wilson’s message to Congress began one and a half years

of carefully crafted language designed both to inﬂame American outrage at

Germany and to make a hyphenated, heterogeneous population unanimous

in its support for total war. Mr. La Follette might be French-American while

Mr. Wilson was Scottish-American, but both were “civilized” members of

humankind, and it was under the banner of humanity that Wilson sought to

unite his nation.

ilson detailed Germany’s despicable acts: the sinking of hospital ships

on their way to relieve the sick in occupied Belgium; the use of “spies” in

the United States; the Zimmerman telegram. In this German “warfare against

mankind” the United States now had a responsibility: “The world must be

made safe for democracy. . . . We have no selﬁsh ends to serve. We desire no

conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material

compensation for the sacriﬁces we shall freely make. We are but one of the

champions of the rights of mankind.”

These were ideals of a noble order, and

four days later, on April 6, Congress declared war against Germany, though

six senators and ﬁfty representatives (including Jeannette Rankin, the ﬁrst

woman elected to the House) voted no to war—the greatest number of votes

opposed to a war declaration in the nation’s history. And so began America’s

involvement in a titanic struggle, which would bleed dead fully one-half of

all Frenchmen between the ages of twenty and thirty-two. A whole generation

was dying, and the doughboys were on their way to stop the carnage.

A Doughboy in the

Trenches

The smell of death could not be bottled, nor could the sounds of exploding

shells be synchronized with the sight: “talking” movies had not yet been in-

vented.

Newsreel footage of combat did make its grainy way onto the canvas

screens of movie houses where cigarette smoke further clouded the images.

Moving pictures were the only sensory way to grasp the apocalypse of war

other than writing, which remained the most prevalent news medium during

the world war. Radio signals could be sent across the Atlantic Ocean, but

commercial radio did not make its debut until 1921. Americans eager to learn

about the war read about the war.

On September 28, 1914, a young American named Alan Seeger wrote a

letter to his mother from Toulouse, France.

Seeger had joined the French

Foreign Legion and wanted to let his mother know why he was going to ﬁght

and maybe die in the land of pastries and champagne. After graduating from

Harvard, Seeger had gone to Europe, a normal rite of passage for well-

educated, well-to-do Americans. There he could visit cathedrals and statues,

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WORLD WAR I

soak in the sordid perfection of an older civilization, become cultured as well

as educated. When war was announced, Seeger found himself feeling French,

like an adopted son of a culture and people whose existence and continuance he

valued enough to sacriﬁce his own. He informed his mother, “In this universe

strife and sternness play as big a part as love and tenderness.” Philosophy

explained war, and for one who understood that life has two faces, the only

good choice was to experience both the strife and the love. So Alan Seeger

would ﬁght, and he hoped his mother would “see the thing as I do and think

that I have done well.”

Alan

Seeger lasted—in war and life—two more years. During these ex-

traordinary

times, he lived in trenches, fought from trenches, recuperated in

chateaus and under trees. He lounged with rats and dined from vats of meal

and mush. He continued to write to his mother, kept a diary of poems and

thoughts, and wrote dispatches to the New York Sun. Along with a handful of

other Americans in Europe, Seeger saw the cause of civilization as synony-

mous

with the cause of the Allies. This was also true for Herbert Hoover, for

example, a wealthy mining magnate from the Midwest who had lived abroad

most of his life and took over the task of coordinating relief for Belgium. Edith

Wharton, an established personality and the author of The Age of Innocence

(along

with forty other books), resembled Seeger in her journey from New

York City to Paris, a city she found majestic in its architecture and romantic

in its wintry light. Also like Seeger, Wharton wrote for American newspa-

pers

and publicized the suffering of the Allies, calling on America to join the

war; like Hoover, she worked to provide comfort to the displaced refugees

of northern France and Belgium. Each of these Americans, if only in small

ways, brought the United States closer to war by making the Allied cause

seem noble, necessary, and distinctly anti-German.

The watery rainbow hues of autumn on a stretch of the battlefront appealed

to Alan Seeger, who captured them for his readers in a description of guard

duty at dawn: “The light splash in the foreground becomes a ruined château,

the gray streak a demolished village.” Hymn-like praise from a brave man

guarding a French sunrise could last only so long in an environment made

to kill. By Christmas of 1914, Seeger’s portrait of war dropped from earlier

images of airplane ﬁghts and “the magniﬁcent orchestra of battle” into the

subterranean slop where he lived with his comrades. In the trenches, “down

the length of one curving wall the soldiers sit huddled, pressed close, elbow

to elbow. They are smoking, eating morsels of dry bread or staring blankly

at the wall in front of them. Their legs are wrapped in blankets, their heads in

mufﬂers.” Covered by their gear, little else protected them. He depicted how

“a villainous draught sweeps by. Tobacco smoke and steaming breath show

how swiftly it drives through. The ﬂoors are covered with straw, in which

AMERICAN STORIES

112

vermin breed. The straw is always caked with mud left by boots which come

in loaded down and go out clean.” December nostalgia crept into Seeger in

his trench. He said, “the smell of the wicker screens and the branches in the

dirt on top of the trench reminds me of Christmas odors in American houses

decorated with green things for the holidays. Then the smell of powder from

the shrapnel kills the holiday reminder.”

One year later, in October 1915, Seeger was a veteran of the Foreign Le-

gion,

having shared food and shelter with men from all over the globe. Then

he and his comrades fought in their ﬁrst sustained battle, Champagne. For

four days he lay on a ﬁeld, with artillery shells whooshing overhead, bombs

thundering the earth, and friends dying all around him. The French effort to

break through the German lines proved futile. Though carnage enveloped

him, Seeger wrote to his mother to say, “There should really be no neutrals

in a conﬂict like this.” He had chosen his course and would not waver, having

adopted a stoic resolve as the war dragged on. “The conﬂagration spreads and

there is not the smallest glimpse of hope of seeing it ﬁnish inside of years and

years,” he wrote. “This is a little disheartening. But as in times of peace there

is nothing better than love and art, so in times of war there is nothing better

than ﬁghting and one must make the best of it.”

During the late winter of 1916, Seeger came down with bronchitis, recuper-

ted ﬁrst in a hospital, and then was taken in by a wealthy woman who provided

a comfortable bed in a pink and white room. American papers had reported

him dead, but he wrote to his mother to assure her that his heart continued to

tick. Convalescence ended, and after a month enjoying the pleasures of Paris,

Seeger returned to the front, where he waited for a battle that seemed long in

coming, especially after Verdun’s draining of munitions and “eating of the

world,” as he put it. He amused himself with a bored soldier’s small tricks,

once sneaking up to a tangle of German barbed wire and leaving a card there

with his name on it. During these ﬁnal months of waiting, Seeger told a friend,

“It was natural that I should have staked my life on learning what [war] alone

could teach me.” Harvard had given him Ovid and Cicero. The battlefront

would give him “an emotion that I remained ignorant of.” He realized that kill-

ing

and death—quite likely his own—were essential ingredients in this grand

experiment, but only because they were part of some greater whole: “Love is

the sun of life,” he mused to the same friend. A few months later, in July 1916,

Alan Seeger died, trailing off into the dust after dashing off a ﬁtting last few

words on June 28: “I am glad to be going in the ﬁrst wave. If you are in this

thing at all it is best to be in to the limit. And this is the supreme experience.”

An Egyptian friend of Seeger’s, also in the Foreign Legion, eulogized his

sprint into the abyss: “How pale he was! His tall silhouette stood out on the

green of the cornﬁeld. He was the tallest man in his section. His head erect,

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WORLD WAR I

and pride in his eye, I saw him running forward, with bayonet ﬁxed. Soon he

disappeared and that was the last time I saw my friend.”

ithin a year, by the summer of 1917, American soldiers were arriving

in France by the thousands under the command of General John J. Pershing,

recent leader of the foray into Mexico in search of Pancho Villa. Some of these

doughboys would have read Alan Seeger’s poems, which had been published

in major New York newspapers, and some might have read his obituary in the

Times or a collection of his poems, released in late 1916. A total of 2 million

Americans troops crossed the sea, many in merchant vessels commandeered

for the war effort. On the way, they played cards, frequented the bars aboard,

and prayed that a U-boat would not ﬁnd them before the convoy of destroyers

found the U-boat. More than 300,000 African-Americans enlisted or were

drafted, but almost none saw combat under an American ﬂag, though nearly

200,000 made it to France. The Ninety-second Division—all African-

American—was placed directly under French command, and its members

fought bravely and with distinction, but most black doughboys were consigned

to menial jobs, segregated and mistrusted by their white American ofﬁcers

just as much in France as in the States.

For

the ﬁrst time in U.S. history, the army and navy allowed women to

enlist, mainly in clerical positions or as nurses. Between 25,000 and 30,000

proud women went to Europe, some civilians going early in the war, as Alan

Seeger had done, but most as part of the major push, catching a ride with

Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force and dressed in the uniforms of

the U.S. military, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), or the

Red Cross. However, the YMCA disliked the idea of black women tending

white men, and the Red Cross did not want black women to wear its uniform

at all. Addie Hunton, a member of the YMCA national board, eventually

convinced the organization to send her to assist the black troops. After a few

days in France, it became apparent to Hunton that white American soldiers

maintained their racial prejudices even while ﬁghting overseas under the

banner of freedom. At American military camps, signs reading “No Negroes

Allowed” were a common sight, and, Hunton remarked, “sometimes, even,

when there were no such signs, services to colored soldiers would be refused.”

Such petty prejudices did not impede women like Hunton from offering the

soldiers comfort and the sight of welcomed faces. During the screening of a

newsreel, the troops saw a group of “colored women . . . marching” as part

of a war parade. “The men went wild,” Hunton remembered. “They did not

want that particular scene to pass and many approached and fondled the screen

with the remark ‘Just look at them!’”

Pershing’s forces did not engage in major combat operations until the

last six months of ﬁghting in 1918, and while they made a concerted dif-

AMERICAN STORIES

114

ference during a few offensives, it was mainly the stunning presence of so

many fresh troops with the promise of more to follow that shattered the

last resolve of the Germans to continue ﬁghting. November 11, 1918, was

the day Germany and the Allies signed an armistice ending combat. A war

without end ﬁnally ended.

Woodrow Wilson and Some Kind of Peace

Back in January 1917, before the United States entered the war, President

Woodrow Wilson made a surprise visit to the Senate to deliver a speech call-

ing

on America to help bring a brokered end to hostilities. He said the nations

of Europe must agree to “a peace without victory.” If instead the war ended

with winners and losers, the imposed peace terms “would leave a sting, a

resentment, a bitter memory” for the vanquished. Wilson believed “only a

peace between equals can last” (later events of the 1930s proved him right).

However, within four months, the United States gave up the role of mediator

and declared war on Germany, joining Britain and France. Two years later,

negotiators met in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles outside

Paris—a seventeenth-century, glittering glass and gold parlor whose hanging

crystal chandeliers and polished ﬂoors ﬁttingly stretched along a corridor of

seventeen mirrors from the Salon of Peace at one end to the Salon of War at

the other. There, on June 28, 1919, diplomats of a failed continent signed an

imperfect peace, the Treaty of Versailles, ofﬁcially ending the war ﬁve years

after it had begun.

When

Wilson returned from Versailles in the summer of 1919, he brought

with him the exact kind of peace treaty he had warned and fought against.

Germany was made to accept a “war guilt” clause in which it took all blame

for starting the war; consequently, Germany also agreed to make “reparations,”

cash payments of $33 billion, for the damage inﬂicted on Belgium, France,

and even Britain (where German bombs had been dropped, although there had

been no actual ground combat). In another visit to the Senate, Wilson made

a plea for the United States to join the newly created League of Nations, an

offshoot of the Treaty of Versailles and the prototype of today’s United Na-

tions.

Wilson’s chances to get the treaty ratiﬁed were not good. Wilson was

a Democrat, but Republicans had taken control of the Senate in 1918. Some

senators—namely an elder Republican statesman named Henry Cabot Lodge,

who loathed President Wilson’s politics—argued that the provisions of the

League of Nations charter could drag the United States into another war. Sena-

tor

Lodge and a majority of his colleagues did not place faith in a brand-new

international body composed of the same deranged princes, prime ministers,

and presidents who had just orchestrated ﬁve years of unnecessary war. Mak-

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ing matters worse, Wilson refused to consider compromising with Lodge by

reducing U.S. obligations under the League charter. The Senate now seemed

likely to reject the treaty and thereby refuse to join the League—regardless

of Wilson’s plea, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”

Like the son and grandson of preachers that he was, Wilson embarked on

a train tour of the country to take his enthusiasm for the League of Nations

directly to the people. Pushing himself harder than he ought to have done,

Wilson suffered a massive stroke in Pueblo, Colorado, in September. He was

physically incapacitated for the rest of his presidency, though few people

outside his inner circle of conﬁdants knew the extent of his impairment. The

Senate rejected the treaty, and American foreign policy became, in certain

ways, isolationist—a retreat from other nations’ problems and nasty habits.

After ﬁnally enlisting, training, and sending 2 million doughboys to the

killing ﬁelds of Europe’s collective insanity, Americans were more con-

vinced

than ever that overseas military entanglements needed to be avoided

entirely. Peace and prosperity topped the American agenda in 1919, as most

Americans—worn out by the nagging of progressives to improve, improve,

improve—ditched the reformist crusades of the previous twenty years. The

nation had been made rich through war contracts: misery, as it turned out,

was good for business. Before the war, the United States had been a debtor

nation, borrowing from the grand banking houses of Europe to ﬁnance the

luxuries of cars, skyscrapers, and subways. Starting in 1914, however, the

ﬂow of credit reversed. Great Britain, Russia, and France had had to bor-

row

billions of dollars in cash and supplies to prevent rail-thin civilians and

gluttonous machine guns from starving. American banks offered the gold

and credit; American farmers supplied the wheat, the pork, and the beans;

merchant ships not sunk by prowling German U-boats ﬁlled their holds with

dry goods heading to Europe and with promissory notes heading home. The

coming American decade was supposed to be ﬁnanced, in part, by the interest

payments of a Europe shattered by war—where inﬂation became so bad that in

the early 1920s, Germans would have to ﬁll a shopping cart with Papiermarks

just

to buy a loaf of bread. Germany never repaid its debts to the Allies, who

in turn never fully reimbursed U.S. banks. But Americans found ways other

than collecting debts to cram their pockets with dollar bills during the 1920s.

The commercial airline industry, for example, rose like a steel phoenix from

the dogﬁghts and reconnaissance ﬂights of the war. Airplanes were at ﬁrst a

novelty, then a deadly tool, and ﬁnally, under business leaders like William

Boeing, a highly proﬁtable way to travel.

There were demons to reckon with along the way, especially certain cruel

tricks of democracy summoned by wartime fears: antiwar speakers had been

jailed; left-leaning unions like the Wobblies were driven almost to extinction;

AMERICAN STORIES

116

the president had set up a propaganda bureau—the Committee for Public

Information—to generate war fever; local school boards bowed to external

pressure and altered curriculum guidelines to make them more nationalistic;

people had renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage,” as though a single spoken

word of German might infect the war spirit with a taint of sympathy for

the enemy; returning African-American veterans were beaten while still in

uniform; and after Russia succumbed to rabid Bolsheviks in the autumn of

1917, many Americans worried that communism might spread like cancer.

Fear and heightened bigotry were also the legacies of World War I, legacies

that competed for dominance of the American mind in the coming decade.

Notes

1. D.F. Fleming, The Origins and Legacies of World War I (Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, 1968), 34.

2. Dorothy Schneider and Carl Schneider, Into the Breach: American Women

Overseas in World War I (New York: Viking, 1991).

3. Andrew Carroll, ed., War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from Ameri-

can

Wars (New York: Scribner, 2001), 126.

4. Carroll, War Letters, 127–128.

For a thoroughly enjoyable account of Babe Ruth’s life, read Leigh Montville,

The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (New York: Broadway, 2007).

6. Albert E. McKinley, Collected Materials for the Study of the War (Philadelphia:

McKinley, 1918), 13–16.

7. All excerpts from Alan Seeger’s writing are taken from Letters and Diary of

Alan Seeger (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917).

8. Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson, Two Colored Women with the

American Expeditionary Forces (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Eagle, 1920), 26, 156.

9. McKinley

, Collected Materials, 9–11.

10.

John Milton Cooper Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson

and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press,

2001), 119.

THE 1920S

Al Capone’s free soup kitchen, 1930. (MPI/Getty Images)

117

The 1920s