Slotkin - Lost battalions: the great war and the crisis of american nationality

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CONTENTS

Dedicated to my father,

Herman Slotkin

different war, same fight

War is the health of the state.

Randolph Bourne

Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

You cant break eggs without making an omeletteThats what they tell the eggs.

Randall Jarrell, A War

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

Maps

Illustrations

Safe for Democracy: The Lost Battalion and the Harlem Hell Fighters

The world must be made safe for democracy. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have.

Woodrow Wilson, Address to Congress (April 2, 1917)

On Monday April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson summoned Congress into joint session to hear his call for a declaration of war against the German empire. For two and a half years he had resisted with determination all pressures for the United States to intervene in Europes Great War, in the hope that American diplomacy and economic influence could bring about a negotiated peace without victory. But pressure for U.S. entry had become intolerably great. A chain of political and economic decisions bound the United States to the Allies despite our official neutrality. The nations leaders were convinced that if the United States did not now decisively intervene, it would lose its power to influence the ordering of the post-war world.

That decision committed the United States to full participation in the worldwide competition of the Great Powers, and broke the political tradition that had restricted overseas engagements to the Caribbean and the Pacific. To fight the war the United States would disrupt and transform its political institutions, licensing Washington to regulate every aspect of civil life from the purchase of consumer goods to the expression of opinion. Opposition to the war was considerable, the risk of social disorder serious, victory by no means assured. To win the public to his cause, Wilson framed U.S. war aims as the defense of ideals at once universal and distinctly American: to make the world safe for democracy and create a League of Nations to govern the world of nations as our own civil institutions governed the citizens of the republic.

Wilsons dream of a new world order was the culminating expression of a vision of American power that had captivated the nations intellectual and political elites for thirty-five yearsthe so-called Progressive Era of American political history. In that time the United States had developed into the worlds leading industrial power. Its population, its productive capacity, its technology, its wealth, and its military potential had grown with astonishing speed. Rapid change produced social disruption. But the success with which the nation had overcome the destruction of the Civil War and mastered the technology and organizational problems of industrial mass production inspired a generation of leaders with a heroic vision: the belief that a combination of scientific method and the will to action would enable enlightened leaders to rationally control the future course of development. That belief was shared by both the captains of industry who had created the gigantic corporations and trusts, and the Progressive reformers who wanted to regulate them. The pragmatist philosopher William James expressed their creed succinctly: the world is essentially a theater for heroism. In heroism, we feel, lifes supreme mystery is hidden.

The leading opinion makers of the Progressive Era conceived of war as an expression of that heroic vision. Even James, who abhorred violence, believed that to sustain both social solidarity and the dynamism of the quest for progress, a moral equivalent of war was required: something heroic that could rouse mens idealism and public spirit as war does, but without the violence and destruction. At the other extreme, nationalist Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt saw war as a positive good, the means by which the great fighting races spread their superior civilization to the red wastes of savagery and barbarism. Aggressive fighting for the right, Roosevelt wrote, is the noblest sport the world affords. The Progressives who organized the nations war effort in 1917 believed the quest for world power could go hand in glove with the labor of perfecting American democracy at home, because the war itself would mobilize and unite public opinion, and vest those in command with authority to get things done.

Events would prove their vision of war an illusion. Governing elites had the power to unleash war, but could not control the violent forces of nationalism, racism, and class conflict that shaped its course. The stress of war would pry apart the fault lines in American society, and reveal that the democracy for which the world was to be made safe had not resolved the most fundamental issues of its own national organization: Who counts as American, and what civil rights must citizenship guarantee?

There were two regiments whose presence among the American Expeditionary Forces in France symbolized this unresolved dilemma. The 308th Infantry was part of the AEFs 77th Division; the 369th Infantry was on loan to the French Fourth Armys 161st Division. Both regiments were raised in New York, the city whose cultural complexity and power would shape the form American society would take in the twentieth century. They would fight their greatest battles within twenty miles of each other, as part of the all-out Allied offensive that broke the German armys will to resist.

The 77th was a unique outfit: sometimes known as the Melting Pot Division, because its ranks were filled with hyphenated Americans from the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Little Italy, Red Hook and Flatbush in Brooklyn, the tenements of Harlem and the Bronx. It was said that its men spoke forty-two different languages, not including English. In their ranks were all [the] races and creeds of the great metropolis,

men who had only recently been subjected to the pogroms of Russia, gunmen and gangsters Italians, Chinamen, the Jews and the Irish, a heterogenous mass, truly representative both of the varied human flotsam and the sturdy American manhood which comprise the civil population of New York City.

The division had fought with awkward courage in the battles of August and September, and its assignment in the great offensive was critical and exceptionally difficult: to protect the AEFs left flank and take by assault the heavily fortified Argonne Forest. But it was only the chance of their location and the haste with which the campaign was planned that forced Pershings staff to rely on them. The army still did not entirely trust the men of this division. It was not simply that they were draftees and inadequately trained: that was true of most divisions in the AEF. These men were suspect because of who they were and what they represented: hyphenated Americans at a moment when nothing less than 100% Americanism seemed an adequate standard of patriotism and loyalty. Many were first- or second-generation immigrants, and traced their ancestry to countries with which the United States was now at war.