EX-SERVICE MEN DEMAND JOBS
No one knows
No one cares if I’m weary
Oh how soon they forgot Chteau-Thierry
-From Newsreel XLVI,
The Big Money, a volume in the USA Trilogy
by John Dos Passos
President Woodrow Wilson and his wife rode in an
open carriage from the White House to the Capitol for his
second inaugural on the morning of Monday, March 5, 1917. For the first time
since the Civil War, a president was given special protection on Inauguration
Day. Letters threatening the president’s life had alarmed the Secret Service.
Agents had inspected every building on Pennsylvania Avenue along the mile-long
route. Soldiers were stationed eight feet apart on both sides of the broad
avenue.
Wilson, running on the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war,” had
been reelected by a slim margin. Now he had to speak of the nearness of
war. In the inaugural address he said, “We are provincials no longer. The
tragic events of the thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have
just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning
back.”
Those months of turmoil traced back to June 1914, when an assassin killed
a man few Americans had ever heard of-Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to
the Austro-Hungarian throne, slain in Sarajevo, Serbia. The murder reverberated
through Europe and erupted in a war whose causes bewildered Americans;
in Wilson’s words, the events “run deep into all the obscure soils of
Europe.” Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and Russia declared war
on Austria-Hungary. Germany declared war on Russia and France and invaded
Belgium. Britain declared war on Germany. Bulgaria and Turkey allied
with Germany. German troops advanced into France and threatened Paris.
By the end of the year, both sides were fighting from trenches along the 350-mile
Western Front that extended from Switzerland to the English Channel.
Wilson kept America officially neutral while U.S. factories shipped arms to
Britain and France, defying German U-boats. The war seemed far away to
most Americans until May 7, 1915, when a U-boat torpedoed, without warning,
the British passenger liner Lusitania. Some 1,200 men, women, and children
-including 128 Americans-were killed. A few days before the sinking,
Americans had read about a horrible new weapon-poison gas, used by Germany
for the first time on the Western Front. The sinking and the gas intensified
anti-German sentiment while simultaneously producing a plea for
continued neutrality from German-Americans, one of the nation’s largest and
oldest immigrant groups.
Between the time of the election and his inauguration in March 1917, German
submarines shattered Wilson’s hope of ending the war through mediation,
a noble idea he called “peace without victory.” No country was
interested. Germany declared a U-boat blockade of Great Britain and in a
note to the United States warned that any ship entering the embargo zone
would be sunk without warning. Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with
Germany. Then Wilson obtained from British sources a copy of a telegram
sent by German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador
in Mexico, instructing him to offer Mexico an alliance with Germany
with the promise of “an understanding” that Mexico would reconquer
and keep Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. British code breakers had decrypted
the telegram. Wilson arranged for the telegram to be released on
March 1 by the Associated Press. The German plan to ally with Mexico
stunned and infuriated Americans.
On the evening of Monday, April 2, Wilson again traveled up Pennsylvania
Avenue to address a joint session of Congress, this time in a car escorted by a
squad of cavalry, sabers drawn. The cavalrymen, ceremonial troops from Fort
Myer, across the Potomac, routinely rode out for funerals and occasions of
state. As the car turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the dome of the Capitol
could be seen ahead, glowing, illuminated for the first time by a new system of
indirect lighting.
At eight-thirty, in a light spring rain, cavalrymen eased their horses into
the silent crowd on the Capitol Plaza, opening a path for Wilson’s car. He got
out and, alone, walked up broad stairs that had been cleared of picketing
pacifists. The building and grounds were guarded by cavalry troopers, U.S.
Marines, Secret Service agents, postal inspectors, and uniformed police.
Senators marched into the House carrying little American flags. The galleries
were packed with people who had been issued special passes by jittery security
men. Justices of the Supreme Court sat before the Speaker’s platform. Foreign
diplomats, in formal evening attire, sat to the side, invited to a joint session for
the first time in memory.
As Wilson walked down the aisle, the justices rose and led the Senators and
representatives in applause, cheering and yelling for two minutes and giving
Wilson the kind of reception he had never received before. Holding the speech
he had typed himself, at first not looking up, Wilson began describing Germany’s
“warfare against mankind.” He spoke to silence until he said, “There is
one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making; we will not choose
the path of submission.”
Chief Justice Edward White, who had fought for the Confederacy in the
Civil War, suddenly rose, dropped his hat, raised his hands above his head,
and clapped them once. Then from the Congress, a reporter wrote, came “a
cheer so deep and so intense and so much from the heart that it sounded like
a shouted prayer.” More cheers came when Wilson said, “Neutrality is no
longer feasible…. The world must be made safe for democracy.”
When Wilson finished his thirty-six-minute speech, he slowly walked out
of the chamber to more cheers, more flag-waving. Back in the White House,
he said to his secretary, “Think of what it was they were applauding. My message
of today was a message of death for our young men.” Then, by one account,
he put his head down on a table and sobbed.
Early in the morning of April 6, following an 82 to 6 vote in the Senate, the
House voted 373 to 50 to declare war. Wilson received a similarly overwhelming
response in letters and telegrams, including a congratulatory message from
London signed by forty-year-old Herbert C. Hoover, chairman of the American
Commission for Relief in Belgium. Hoover, a millionaire mining engineer,
had taken over the task of feeding the Belgians, whose food supplies had been
sharply curtailed after German troops invaded the small kingdom in 1914. He
directed a mammoth effort that saved Belgium from starvation. When America
entered the war, Hoover returned home, and Wilson immediately made
him U.S. food administrator, increasing his reputation and bringing his name
into everyday use: housewives who aided the war effort by serving nonwasteful
meals said they were “Hooverizing.”
When a song-and-dance man named George M. Cohan read the “war declared”
headlines, he was on a train heading for New York City from suburban
New Rochelle-only “forty-five minutes from Broadway,” according to
one of his songs. He began humming a tune, and by the time his trip ended,
he had written a song that would echo the cocky patriotism of the nation.
That night Cohan telephoned Nora Baye, a star of vaudeville, and on May 12
she sang the song for the first time to a cheering audience. Most Americans
heard it on their Victrolas or gathered around their pianos, reading the words
from a song sheet with a cover by Norman Rockwell, then twenty-four years
old. He would soon be in the U.S. Navy.
Over there, over there
Send the word,
Send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming Ev’rywhere….
When Congress declared war, the Regular Army had 127,588 officers and men
to send into a war of attrition, where in a single month 300,000 British soldiers
had been killed, wounded, or gassed.
At first, people believed that the army sent off to fight the Germans, like
the army raised for the Spanish-American War, would be made up of volunteers.
Teddy Roosevelt offered to lead a volunteer force, as he had done in
that “splendid little war.” But this war needed men by the millions, and the
only way to get them was by a draft. Pacifists, radicals, and patriots found
themselves on the same side in opposition to the draft. Anarchist Emma
Goldman, later jailed and deported for her opposition to conscription, predicted
the draft would bring civil war. Speaker of the House Champ Clark,
advocate of an all-volunteer army, declared that in his state of Missouri there
was “precious little difference between a conscript and a convict.” Conscription
was given a soothing label-Selective Service-and the act passed.
President Wilson signed it on May 18, and it would be the basis for conscription
in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
The act outlawed the Civil War practice of buying one’s way out of the
draft. During the Civil War, wealthy men could legally duck the draft for
three hundred dollars-this at a time when a typical laborer was making less
than five hundred dollars a year. That inequity had touched off the New
York City draft riots of 1863, in which as many as two thousand may have
died, and similar, less deadly riots in other cities.
More than nine million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one
registered on June 5, 1917, and placed their fate in the hands of local, governor-appointed
“boards of responsible citizens.” Each draft board had a set of numbers
to bestow on the selectees (a term that vied with draftee). On July 20,
Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, himself a pacifist, was blindfolded as he
stood next to a large glass bowl. He pulled from it a small piece of paper bearing
the number 258. The drawing kept up throughout the day until more than
10,000 numbers had been drawn. For American young men, a life of chance
had begun. “Your number came up” entered the language.
They began their military lives in hastily built training camps that sprouted
in twenty-three states-white men and black men who had never been on a
train before, college boys, farmers’ sons, and slum dwellers. About 18 percent
of them were immigrants of forty-six nationalities, many of them unable to
speak English. By the beginning of October, more than 500,000 men were in
the camps, which were mostly in the South. Regulations said that the men,
about 70 percent of them draftees, were to be turned into soldiers in four
months of seventeen-hour days. Many of the recruits had only wooden guns,
and many would go to the front without ever having aimed or fired a rifle.
Most of the junior officers were either National Guardsmen or recent college
graduates given a few weeks of training in officer candidate schools. The senior
officers were of a different type-Regular Army officers who had learned their
soldiering on the parade grounds of West Point, men who had gone to war
against Spain in Cuba in 1898, or chased Pancho Villa across the Mexican border,
or fought guerrillas in the Philippines.
The Regular Army had four Negro regiments, which traced their lineage to
the freed slaves of the Civil War. They boasted a legacy that included the
Indian-fighting “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Old West and the 10,000 black
troops who fought in the Spanish-American War, some under Captain John
J. Pershing, giving him his nickname Black Jack. Some African-American
leaders believed that service in the Great War would do nothing to advance
black civil rights. But in 1918 William E. B. DuBois, editor of the Crisis, official
organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), wrote, “first your Country, then your Rights!” His belief was that
loyalty and courage in wartime France would inevitably produce equal rights
and opportunity in peacetime America.
Men of the American Expeditionary Force, the AEF, first reached France in
May 1917, a short time after the triumphant arrival of General Pershing and his
stirring salutation to France. Standing at the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette,
who fought for the United States in the Revolutionary War, a spokesman for
Pershing exclaimed, “Lafayette, we are here!” On his staff was Captain George
S. Patton Jr., whose sister Anne was secretly engaged to Pershing, a widower.
Patton, bristling at the implication of favoritism, was trying to get off Pershing’s
staff and into action. A cavalryman with a love for horses, Patton was
transferred to a new kind of cavalry unit called the tank corps.
As Americans continued to pour into France and made their way to the
front, they fought alongside French forces at Belleau Wood and on the river
Marne. Among them were the black American regiments not attached to
U.S. forces but assigned to French divisions made up of Africans from French
colonies. They wore French helmets and fired French rifles. One such unit
was the 369th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard, dubbed
by the French the Harlem Hellfighters.
In August Pershing set up an American front along what the battle maps
called the Saint-Mihiel salient, a sharp angle in the German line. The salient
looked like a dagger aimed at Paris, with the town of Saint-Mihiel, on the
river Meuse, as its point. General Pershing decided to hurl three hundred
thousand American troops against the salient, which the Germans had controlled
since the hell of trench warfare had begun in 1914. Then he would shift
those troops, along with hundreds of thousands more, to the battle line
known as Meuse-Argonne. There, in 1918, he would open what he hoped
would be the decisive campaign of the war. As he later wrote, he had launched
with practically the same army and within twenty-four days “two great attacks”
on battlefields only sixty miles apart.
During this campaign, individuals who would play key roles in the events of
1932 first revealed themselves. Among the units at Saint-Mihiel was the Yankee
Division, formed by National Guardsmen from all six New England
states. Like other divisions, the Yankee had Regular Army officers in key commands,
including Colonel Pelham D. Glassford. Because his men had no cannon
of their own, they had to learn to fire French 75-millimeter guns and the
heavier 155 guns. Glassford’s men could not match the French on accuracy,
but he could speed up the firing by teaching his Yankees the dangerous feat of
loading on the recoil. They learned to fire forty shells a minute-so fast that
some German officers insisted the Americans were armed with machine-gun
cannons. One of Glassford’s guns became famous as Betsy the Sniper, aimed
by a man who had been a star pitcher for Yale. He treated the gun like a rifle,
picking off targets at seven thousand yards. His men could fire and load so
fast that they could have four of Betsy’s shells in the air at one time.
Continues…
Excerpted from The Bonus Army
by Paul Dickson Thomas B. Allen Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Walker & Company
ISBN: 0-8027-1440-4
