by G. J. Meyer
Attacks on dissent reached a level of intensity sufficient to destroy organizations that under other circumstances might have acquired lasting significance. On September 21 Senator La Follette was the featured speaker at the St. Paul convention of a young, fast-growing populist-progressive organization called the Nonpartisan League, which by protesting the exploitation of farmers by grain brokers, packinghouses, railroads, and banks had elected one of its members governor of North Dakota in 1916. Though the league’s membership was drawn largely from the plains states west of Chicago, places where enthusiasm for the war was conspicuously limited, its leaders were early to see the dangers of overt opposition. They tried to limit themselves to criticism of profiteering war contractors, controls on wheat prices but not cotton, and the like. Some had misgivings about inviting La Follette to speak, fearing that his appearance would brand the league as antiwar. When they explained their concerns, the senator said he would speak only briefly and say nothing about the war.
When he arrived at the convention hall, however, La Follette found himself being cheered wildly by a capacity crowd of ten thousand, with five thousand others outside in the street, unable to get in. Apparently with the encouragement of the league’s leaders, themselves swept up in the excitement of the moment, La Follette decided to talk about the war after all. He had to do so extemporaneously, not having brought a speech with him. He did not attack intervention itself but focused on how it was being financed, the huge profits being made, and the government’s suppression of First Amendment rights. His audience was ecstatic, but trouble quickly followed. The worst of it came not from anything the senator said but what an Associated Press reporter said he said.
La Follette had told the league members—as most of the journalists present reported accurately—that before the declaration of war, the United States had had “serious grievances” in consequence of German submarine attacks. (He added that those grievances could have been avoided if the country had been truly neutral, and that they were in any case not serious enough to warrant “involving this Government in the loss of millions and millions of lives.”) But the story that went out on the AP wire to every paper in the country quoted him as saying “we had no grievances” full stop. The result was a fresh irruption of transcontinental rage. So many demands for La Follette’s expulsion from the Senate poured into Washington, with Theodore Roosevelt once again beating his war drum, that a committee was appointed to look into the matter. La Follette’s seat hung from such a thin thread that the lawyers he consulted advised him to make no further public comments about anything.
The consequences for the Nonpartisan League were devastating. The industries it had criticized and their political agents condemned it as socialist, anarchist, disloyal, seditious—as everything respectable and patriotic citizens were certain to find alarming. The leader of the Minnesota Public Safety Commission, in arguing that league members and other “traitors” should be tried by military courts-martial, said that “where we made a mistake was in not establishing a firing squad in the first days of the war. We should now get busy and have the firing squad working overtime.” The league’s founder and driving spirit, Arthur Townley, was convicted on a dubious charge of violating the Espionage Act by urging draft resistance. He would not emerge from prison until the war was long over, Woodrow Wilson was no longer president, and the league was dead. Its legacy, which survives to the present day, is a state-owned terminal grain elevator, a state-owned mill, and a state-owned bank, all in North Dakota.
Clergy deemed to be deficient in Americanism frequently found themselves in search of new employment or worse. In Los Angeles on October 1 police raided a gathering of ministers who called themselves the Christian Pacifists and represented fourteen denominations. Three members of the group were jailed on a curious charge: “discussing, arguing and preaching certain theories in opposition to the orderly conduct of the affairs of the United States of America…calculated to cause American citizens then and there present to assault and batter the persons uttering the same.” The safest targets were of course clergy in relatively remote places and those belonging to less well-known, therefore less respectable, denominations. In rural Oklahoma, a preacher named William Madison Hicks, who described himself as president of a World Peace League, was first tarred and feathered and then fined ten thousand dollars and sentenced to twenty years for allegedly saying that “the men at the head of this war are nothing but a bunch of grafters” and that he did not believe anyone had an obligation to register for the draft. Presumably he found some comfort in the later reduction of his sentence to five years.
Elementary and secondary school teachers, being by the nature of their calling ill-paid, obscure, unorganized, and subject to the whims of local dignitaries, were most easily crushed under the wheels of One Hundred Percent Americanism. But college professors, even prominent ones at leading universities, were by no means safe. Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, an antiwar activist and a member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace until intervention infected him with war fever, established his patriotic credentials by publicly firing two respected professors whom he accused of a lack of patriotism. When this drew protests, the Columbia trustees defended the firings on grounds that the two men “had done grave injury to the University by their public agitation against the conduct of the war.” Famed historian Charles A. Beard resigned from the faculty in protest, his act all the more striking because he had always been and remained a supporter of intervention. Other professors, including the philosopher John Dewey, protested without resigning. The New York Times, however, praised Butler and the trustees. Similar things were happening at public and private colleges across the country. The zealots did not always eschew violence in their determination to cleanse the academy of subversion.
Early November was a kind of watershed, elevating the hysteria to a new level both in Washington and in the country at large. One triggering event was the first world-changing result of the war that was supposed to make the world safe for democracy: the establishment of a Communist regime in Russia, putting that nation on the road to Stalinism and further generations of grief. The determination of the Bolsheviks to make peace with Germany provided mainstream America with a new constellation of demons, the country’s tiny number of self-styled communists, who found themselves loathed and feared and marked for destruction. The far more numerous socialists did themselves no favor by showing sympathy for the Bolsheviks, though their doing so was usually innocent enough. Neither they nor anyone else knew very much about the Bolsheviks at this point. It was by no means clear what kind of regime Lenin and his cohorts intended to impose, and writers such as John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, were inviting their readers to rejoice at the birth of the workers’ paradise. The upshot, in any case, was intensified denunciation of socialists as unfit to participate in the public life of the nation. Woodrow Wilson, with little knowledge of the hardships and losses that the war had brought down on the late tsar’s subjects, scornfully dismissed the Russian peacemakers as “fatuous dreamers.”
Fresh hysteria led to new attacks on the IWW. In Tulsa, seventeen Wobblies, none of whom had police records, were charged with exploding a bomb at the home of an oil company executive. A judge found them guilty in spite of a total lack of evidence and the incontrovertible fact that the central defendant had not been in Tulsa at the time of the bombing. To further ensure that justice was served, six witnesses for the defense were arrested, charged, convicted, and fined one hundred dollars each. The only thing that any of the accused were clearly guilty of was belonging to the IWW.
The night of their conviction, the seventeen Wobblies were removed from the city jail by vigilantes and driven out of town. There they were stripped, whipped bloody, covered with boiling tar and feathers, and allowed to run for their lives. The authorities made no effort to identify their abductors. When an IWW representative arrived in Tulsa to investigate, he was arrested and tra
nsported to Chicago, which had become the headquarters of the anti-Wobbly crusade, to face charges. Another mysterious and ultimately unsolved bombing, this one in Sacramento, California, led to the rounding up of sixty men believed to be connected with the IWW. When the authorities were unable to connect any of them with the crime, they were charged under the Espionage Act instead. Meanwhile 113 of the Wobblies who had been arrested in September were still awaiting trial in Chicago.
In October sixty-nine-year-old Richard Pettigrew, a South Dakota populist lawyer, was indicted after telling a reporter that “there is no excuse for this war” and “we should never have gone into a war to help the Schwabs [Charles Schwab was president of Bethlehem Steel] make $40 million a year.” Like all Americans who said such things, he faced a long prison sentence, but the charges were dropped on grounds that his health was bad. The fact that Pettigrew had served two terms in the U.S. Senate, so that a trial would have drawn national attention to his views, was perhaps not irrelevant to the authorities’ unwillingness to pursue this particular case.
From the perspective of the White House, the most awkward domestic development of late 1917 must have been New York City’s mayoral election. Incumbent John P. Mitchel, the youngest mayor in New York history up to that time and a brilliantly effective reformer, was seeking reelection on a so-called Fusion ticket, representing the most progressive elements of all the leading parties. He faced a trio of challengers: Republican William Bennett, Tammany Hall Democrat John F. Hylan, and Socialist Morris Hillquit, who told voters that electing him would be “a clear mandate for open negotiations for a general peace.” The campaign was a complicated affair befitting the nation’s biggest and most diverse city, with many factions and interests injecting their own issues, but Mitchel and the newspapers did their best to turn it into a referendum on the war. They smeared not only the socialist Hillquit but also Tammany’s Hylan with accusations of disloyalty. “Mayor reveals Hylan as a member of the German propaganda here,” the Times informed readers. “New York wants no mayor in City Hall to whom enemy spies would have access,” said the Herald.
The strategy backfired. Hylan, an honest and earnest man of limited talent, won by a big margin. The Socialist Hillquit received only seven thousand fewer votes than Mayor Mitchel; together he and Hylan tallied almost three times as many votes as Mitchel’s 150,000. It was another black eye for the Wilson administration, all the more annoying because, unlike the humiliation in Wisconsin, it had come in a fight that the White House had neither sought nor willingly entered. It was also a fresh challenge to one of the president’s favorite oratorical themes: that the American people, with the exception of the despised “hyphenates” and small scattered clusters of villains and fools, were unified in their support of him and his war.
Background
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The War, Too, Changes
By the autumn of 1917 the war was in its fourth year and, on the Western Front, as solidly deadlocked as ever. The front was not significantly changed from where it had stood at the end of 1914. All the belligerents but one were in a state of exhaustion so far advanced that one of the prime objectives of every government was to conceal the truth from populations teetering on the edge of despair.
The sole exception was, of course, the United States, her banks and factories busily propping up the Allies with money and food and materials of every description, her War Department sending half-trained recruits across the Atlantic as fast as transport could be found for them but still not allowing them to engage the enemy. That would have to come later—later than 1918, General Pershing continued to insist.
But if the war seemed a vampire with its fangs deep in the throat of a slowly dying Europe, it was not actually static. Having changed the world beyond any possibility of a return to what it had been in July 1914, the war itself was inexorably changing.
Even the generals, some of them at least, were learning. The best were working out new tactics. They were adapting to new technologies, new weapons, that would change the nature of warfare forever and make a repetition of the stalemate impossible. Whenever America’s doughboys did enter combat, they would find themselves in a different war from that of earlier years. The enemy they confronted would not be the German army of First Marne or the Somme, the army that had fought Britain, France, and Italy to a standstill while bringing Russia to her knees.
The core tragedy of the Great War, what made it so long and costly with no end in sight after years of horror, is the historical accident that it broke out at a time when the military advantage lay decisively on the side of the defense. The machine gun had been perfected, able to fire hundreds of rounds per minute and go on doing so indefinitely, stopping masses of attackers literally dead in their tracks. Artillery was available in quantities and varieties that the gunners of earlier wars could not have imagined; essential to any offensive, it was also devastating in defense. Motor-powered heavy machinery had transformed military engineering, too. Many of the “trenches” were actually elongated underground cities, often built of concrete, deep enough, in some places, to be safe from all but the biggest guns.
They also serve…
…who send sons to the armed services, and cookies to those sons.
When the war began, and for a long time afterward, there were no answers to the machine gun. Nor were there airplanes capable of functioning as weapons in any serious way; “bombing” was dropping a hand grenade from an open cockpit. There was no such thing as a tank, a conveyance that could advance against machine guns without being shot to bits, and only writers of fantasies had ever thought of such a thing. Thus the years of slaughter, of sending men with rifles into torrents of machine gun fire, of losing tens of thousands in a single day while accomplishing nothing. By midyear 1917 Italy’s troops were looking for opportunities to surrender en masse, French troops were refusing to attack, and only fear of the political consequences stopped Lloyd George of Britain from sacking Sir Douglas Haig for expending so many men in so many fruitless offensives.
The status quo was intolerable, unsustainable. And so, gradually but inexorably, tactics began to change. How it happened and who deserves credit is not clear, but a German general named Oskar von Hutier was involved early. A seasoned warrior, married to a cousin of Erich Ludendorff, Hutier first came to fame in September 1917 when, as commander of the German Eighth Army, he used boldly innovative tactics to bring to a successful conclusion a siege of the Latvian city of Riga that had been dragging on for two years. He was even more spectacularly successful at Caporetto on the Italian front two months later, using the same approach in mounting an offensive that carried his troops down out of the Alps almost as far as Venice. After that he was given a key command on the Western Front, and what was called the Hutier Method was made the centerpiece of plans for a 1918 offensive.
The Hutier Method substituted a brief artillery barrage for the days of saturation shelling that had always begun the offensives of both sides. It thus restored to attackers the lost element of surprise. It replaced masses of men advancing shoulder to shoulder with fast-moving detachments of six or eight “storm troops,” trained to penetrate enemy territory as far as possible as quickly as possible, making use of available protective cover, bypassing strongpoints instead of trying to capture them, carrying their rifles slung across their backs and using hand grenades to clear out pockets of resistance. The bypassed strongpoints would be reduced later, by a second wave of larger, slower-moving units equipped with heavier weapons.
That Hutier invented these tactics is questionable. By one account, he found it described in a captured French document that its intended audience had presumably ignored. In all likelihood no one invented the Hutier Method—it appears to have evolved step by step out of the planning work of the German general staff’s tacticians. What matters is that, when tried, it produced stunning results. Ludendorff entered the winter of 1917–18 thinking that it offered a way to clear the way to Paris before the growing American army pu
t victory forever out of Germany’s reach.
Earlier we took note of another innovation: Ludendorff’s system of defense in depth, which involved maintaining only a thin and intentionally permeable front line, allowing enemy attackers to penetrate far beyond that line, then hitting them hard with a main force positioned far to the rear and driving them back. This, too, proved effective, reducing German casualties sharply. It appeared to Ludendorff that he now had a way to break open the Western Front—and an equally sure way to keep the Allies from doing so.
But then came the next innovation, this one the brainchild of a British general. Sir Herbert Plumer, a dumpy little pear-shaped man with a big white mustache and the mild blank face of a senior clerk, had been in command of the British Second Army since 1915. He and his army were at Ypres when, in the summer of 1917, Haig launched the third of the great offensives that have gone into the history books bearing that devastated city’s name. In September, the same month that Hutier captured Riga in the faraway Baltic region, Plumer was ordered to capture the piece of high ground (high by the meager standards of Flanders) known as Messines Ridge. This gave him his chance to demonstrate that he had found the weakness of Ludendorff’s defensive system and figured out how to exploit it.
There was never any question about the Second Army’s ability to take the ridge, because it was obviously lightly defended. The question was what would happen after it was taken. If Plumer’s troops had continued their advance—that was the invariable next step whenever an objective was easily taken and the way forward seemed clear—they would inevitably have run into a counterattack and probably been sent reeling back to their own lines if not farther. He instructed them to do the unexpected—to stop as soon as the ridge was secure, dig in, and wait for heavy machine guns and light artillery to be rushed forward to support them.
