It is not true to say that America has forgotten the
Great War. Too many Americans have photos in the attic of grandpa or
great-grandpa in stiff-necked, uncomfortable Doughboy uniforms. Hundreds if not thousands
of towns have statues of Doughboys outfitted in trench-coat and British style
helmet and carrying a bayonet tipped Springfield Model 1903 Rifle. The Great
War shows up in American pop culture. In the movie Forest Gump, the audience
sees a macabre montage of Lt. Dan’s forbearers dying in every major American
war, a tri-corner hat wearing continental, a gray-capped Confederate soldier,
and a trench coat clad Doughboy. The army named the M-26 Tank after Pershing
while a square next to Grand Central Station in Manhattan honors the general.
Still, as Europe commemorates the Great War’s
Centennial it is obvious that the conflict does not have a strong hold on
American memory. For the European the Great War broke the 99 years ‘long peace’
that saw no major continent wide war. In America the Great War falls between
the nation’s two existential conflicts, the Civil War on one end and World War
Two on the other. The Civil war still occupies a central place in American
popular memory, more so in the south but among the northern states as well. World
War Two was part of the texture of everyday life in postwar America.
Everybody’s father or grandfathers had fought in Europe or the Pacific. Every weekend in the 1970s
and 80’s one could turn on the TV and see a movie about World War Two. Where
the army of World War Two road into battle on Lee, Grant, Stuart and Sherman
tanks, the military table of organization and equipment was peppered with
vehicles named for the war’s generals and admirals; the Patton Tank, the
Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the mighty Nimitz
Class aircraft carrier. Tom Brokaw wrote a love letter in The Greatest Generation, a final send
off to the men and women who won the Second World War. That generation, and
America at large, knew what it was fighting for and fighting against.
The reasons
for the Great War are a bit obscure for an American. Most will wonder why the
assignation of some duke in a strange sounding city was worth a continent-wide
war that killed millions, and was the Kaiser really that bad, anyway? Here once
again the other two great American wars overwhelm the Great War, for however
bad the Kaiser may have been, nothing he did can compare to the pure evil of
Adolph Hitler. The reasons for America’s entry into the war are just as vague.
When askedmost Americans would answer ‘The Lusitania’ if they would answer at
all. Few know about Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare and fewer still
about Germany’s ridiculous offer of military and diplomatic help to Mexico if
she attacked the United States.
One
hundred year ago America was a different place than it is today. Few had
plumbing or electricity. The consumer culture was still in its infancy and few
had disposal income to spend on luxury goods. People dressed much more formally,
and informal attire had nothing in common with modern ‘leisure ware’. While as
with today America was in the midst of a great immigrant wave unlike today
those immigrants were overwhelmingly European. German was as ubiquitous as
Spanish is now. Americans were discovering an exotic food then called ‘tomato
pie’.
In
1914 when an American referred to ‘the war’ he meant the Civil War; hundreds of
thousands of Union and Confederate veterans participated in yearly parades and
bored their grandkids with the same old stories of the March through Georgia or
the Seven Days. Those veterans were ghosts of an army long past. As will be
discussed below, unlike today, in 1914 America had no army to speak of, merely
a constabulary scattered throughout the west with outposts in Hawaii and the
Philippines. America’s army was smaller than Portugal’s and the German general
staff, which studied everything, including the American Civil War, gave the
U.S. Army of 1914 not thought at all. The navy had some punch and global reach
but did not master the seas the way the USN has since 1945.
Baseball
was already the national past time while football reigned supreme at the college
level. Women could not vote and blacks were strictly segregated. The growing
temperance movement was on the verge of success. Cinema was a new technology
that most had yet to experience. Demonstrating how much the nation has changed
in the last century the most important film of the time was Birth of the
Nation, a racial passion play that helped revive the Klan and was screened in
the White House by President Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson was a product of his time. Born in the south he
eventually became a professor at Princeton
and governor of New Jersey. His election to the presidency was an
historical accident brought about by the fracture of the Republican Party into
two camps, one for the sitting President William Howard Taft the other for the
upstart and former president Theodore Roosevelt. If the GOP had a united
ticket, it would have defeated Wilson by more than a million votes in 1912.
Wilson was a very much turn of the century democrat. A progressive who wanted
to improve the lot of the common man via the power of the Federal Government,
but also a staunch Segregationist who introduced the practice to the Federal
work force. He may have been an idealist, but he understood that from 1914-16
America was not ready for and did not want to enter the Great War. That said,
he disliked Germany in general, thought the Germans the aggressor and
personally supported the Allies. While Wilson was troubled by Germany’s actions
much of his time was occupied by events
in Mexico, where a civil war was spilling over the Rio Grande into the United
States. Most of the Regular Army and National Guard was deployed along the
border and in Vera Cruz, an almost forgotten event dimly remembered by
Americans through movies like Sam Pekinpaugh’s The Wild Bunch.
From 1914 to 1917 the ongoing struggle in Europe was a
controversial topic in America, editorialized in the pages of American
newspapers, debated on college campus, and argued about over family dinner.
America’s sympathies generally but not universally lay with the Allies.
Millions of German Americans had family fighting for the Kaiser. Millions of
Irish-Americans deeply resented the British, who as recently as 1916 crushed
the Irish Easter Rebellion. Wilson may have wanted to join the war on the Allies’
side but without a cause bellis, there was nothing he could do to persuade
America to go to war. Fortunately the Germans provided him with one.
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