Liberty claims her own! Image credit: Library of Congress

The Great War

The Long Shadow of WWI

08.22.14

World War I was sometimes called “the war to end all wars.” But a hundred years after the fighting began, it’s become a war that’s often forgotten in American history, or viewed as a prelude to WWII. In this episode, we explore some of the ways the conflict affected Americans far beyond the battlefields of Europe — from debates about the meaning of free speech, to the fight over how the war would be remembered.

World War I

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

A Monumental Question

BackStory producer Andrew Parsons, along with Mark Levitch, president of the World War I Memorial Inventory Project, and historians Jennifer Wingate and Lynn Rainville, explores why World War I memorials have so often fallen by the wayside – and how the postwar years have strongly influenced our perception of the conflict.

World War I; forgetting; memorialization; monuments

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers, here with Peter Onuf

PETER: Hey, Ed.

ED: And Brian Balogh is with us.

BRIAN: How you doing, Ed?

ED: We’re going to start today in a little town called Emmetsburg, Maryland, right at its edge, where thesidewalk ends and all the freight trucks drive out to the farm land.

MARK LEVITCH: It is an interesting intersection. It’s loud. It’s busy.

ED: This is Mark Levitch, there with our producer, Andrew Parsons. And Mark is on a mission.

MARK LEVITCH: And I am trying to document all of the World War I memorials in the United States.

ED: And that’s actually never been done before. He’s found about 2000 so far, but based on hisresearch he estimates there are roughly 10,000 out there. Here on the edge of Emmetsburg, we find oneon a narrow slice of grass where two roads split.

MARK LEVITCH: It’s not a really useful space. It’s just a very tiny finger of land– just a few feet by fewfeet, really.

ED: The statue stands alone on a pedestal. It portrays a life-size American soldier from World War I,commonly known as doughboys. And it’s one of many such doughboys churned out by an Indianaartist in the years immediately following the war.

The statue is meant to inspire, but–

MARK LEVITCH: I think cheesy is probably a good word to describe it.

ED: Now this doughboy isn’t it in the trenches, and he’s not in the midst of a charge. Instead he stepsforward with barbed wire at his feet, with a rifle in one hand and holding a grenade over his head withthe other.

MARK LEVITCH: It’s hard to make sense of. You give it a quick glance, and you go oh, yeah, that’s adoughboy. That’s World War I, I get it. But then you sort of look a little more carefully, and it’s like– OK,it’s World War, I see that. But why on earth would somebody in World War I be fighting like that? It’slike, I’ve got the sword– the bayonet, and the rifle, and the grenade, but then the pose itself isawkward.

ANDREW PARSONS: To me it almost looks like he just found a grenade, and he’s telling people like,hey– look at what I got, look what I found.

MARK LEVITCH: It looks like it could be a grapefruit. It’s true.

ELIZA HUNT: Never really actually stopped and looked at the statue.

ED: This is Eliza Hunt. She has no idea what the statue honors, even though she lived in an apartmentbuilding behind it for years. And that building was nicknamed– you guessed it– the Doughboy. Then akid nearby offers his guess on what the statute is.

KID: Hitler?

[LAUGHTER]

ED: In case you missed that, he said Hitler. And we can hardly blame the people here for not reallyknowing much about this statute. Emmetsburg resident Becky Ott points out that it’s not really in acentralized location.

BECKY OTT: There’s no parking here, and it’s a busy road. If you weren’t looking for it, you probablywouldn’t even now it was there.

ED: Levitch claims that this is not the case with memorials for other wars. Take the Civil War. Not onlyare its monuments given better placement, but they also have heritage societies and reenactmentgroups keeping them in good condition. But World War I monuments tend to stand alone, tucked awayon the edges of cities and towns.

MARK LEVITCH: Some are orphaned. Some have been run over by cars. And many of these areendangered.

ED: So what about the place we most associate with war memorials, Washington, DC? Well, Congressis wrestling with the issue, but there is currently no official World War I memorial on the National Mall.What we do have are thousands of memorials many miles from the capital, commissioned byAmericans in the shadow of the Great War.

MARK LEVITCH: It is mind-boggling, perhaps, to think that there are more World War I memorials thanWorld War II memorials– to sort of make one stand up, and take notice, and say that this was soimportant to so many people.

And in a way, the legacies of World War I are just like the monuments built to remember it– hidden inplain sight.

It’s a long time since that war has garnered this much attention, at least here in the US. And yet, as wejust heard, there’s plenty of concrete evidence, so to speak, that World War I meant a lot to the peoplewho lived through it. And so today on the show we’re marking the centennial of World War I’sbeginnings in Europe with an hour on some of its legacies here at home.

We’ve got stories by Woodrow Wilson’s radical post-war vision for America, about the emergence of theFirst Amendment as we know it today, and about how World War I spawned a new generation of AfricanAmerican political organizing.

But first, let’s return to that doughboy statue in Maryland. Our producer Andrew Parsons got towondering why these memorials got shunted off to the sidelines of America in the first place. Theanswer, he discovered, has a lot to do with the times in which the statues were created. Andrew’s goingto take it from here.

ANDREW PARSONS: When doughboy statues started to pop up around America after the war, artistsand architects were horrified by how, well, cheesy they looked.

JENNIFER WINGATE: “Must we suffer not only war, but also the commemoration of war?”

ANDREW PARSONS: This is art historian Jennifer Wingate, quoting from the Christian Science Monitorin 1922. She’s the author of a book called “Sculpting Doughboys.”

JENNIFER WINGATE: There’s so many funny things that they say. They really see it as a just kind ofhorror, no worse than the war itself.

ANDREW PARSONS: No way. They call this worse than the war itself?

JENNIFER WINGATE: Yeah, you’ll see– if you open any newspaper from the period you’ll see articles in the Times, and this debate playing out everywhere.

ANDREW PARSONS: Wingate says many communities in America felt abandoned, because the federalgovernment focused more resources for memorialization abroad, and especially to burying roughly 30%of the fallen American soldiers on their European battlefields.

JENNIFER WINGATE: Honestly, I think there’s this feeling of powerlessness, ultimately, that leads to thislocal, immediate desire to do something, to dedicate something. For those families of those 30,000, thememorials here came to be even more important.

MARK LEVITCH: Wingate says in every other American war, there was some time that passed to letcommunities heal before the monuments went up. In the Civil War, for example, monument buildingstarted decades later, and was actually at its heyday in the 20 years before the start of the Great War.

But World War I memorialization happened quickly. And as local committees formed in towns assessingbudgets and fund raising to get their very own doughboy, the Federal Fine Arts Commission in DCdecided to weigh in. They were among the critics that were very troubled by the doughboy. They sentpamphlets to towns across the country, advising them on the right way to build memorials–commission an artist, hold a contest, take some time to assess the most graceful way to remember thefallen.

JENNIFER WINGATE: And then they say, if this is the budget you’re looking at, please don’t erect asculpture.

ANDREW PARSONS: But many towns didn’t heed the warning, and rushed to memorialize the GreatWar, because of what they saw around them.

JENNIFER WINGATE: The period after World War I, of course, the immediate– 1919, 1920, is really aperiod of crisis. There’s the Red Scare, and there’s a recession, and there’s unemployment, and racialtension, and lynchings. And I mean, there’s just– it’s very volatile. And so again, I think it is related tothis sense of needing to reestablish a sense of power, and control, and confidence, and this feeling thateverything is OK.

MARK LEVITCH: Even EM Viquesney, the Indiana sculptor who made that statue in Emmetsburg weheard about before, played on the Red Scare when hawking his doughboys across the country, callinghis statue a watchful eye over the community.

The doughboy was a visceral reaction to a specific time and place. But what if that didn’t happen?What if communities took a deep breath during the Red Scare and crafted more subtle, beautifulmemorials? Then would the Great War not be shunted aside in our memories?

Well, some communities did, actually. They opted for monuments that were more modern and graceful,sometimes even in the form of public buildings and gardens. Lynn Rainville, a professor of History andArchaeology at Sweetbriar College, says that so much of World War I straddled this line between theold and the new.

LYNN RAINVILLE: The war itself, in so many ways, is that betwixt and between. It’s the first modernwar, large scale war of the 20th century, but it has roots in the past. They’re still trying to use cavalry,and yet they have machine guns. They’re using airplanes, but they’re embroiled in trench warfare. Andso just as World War I itself was a modern war with historic baggage, basically, the memorials verymuch are on that edge of new and modern. But they can’t be too modern, because then they wouldn’tconsole people enough.

ANDREW PARSONS: And even those more modern memorials have problems. When you try tointegrate memory into daily life in more abstract ways, those memorials can blend in a little too well. Somaybe the shunting aside of World War I memorials isn’t just because of a design flaw particular to thedoughboys. Maybe it has to do with how the war itself is remembered.

LYNN RAINVILLE: What does it take for a war to really stick in people’s memory? And usually it’s eithera personal connection, or a geographic connection. When you think of other wars, especially here in theSouth, the Civil War is not only not forgotten in terms of people’s personal loss, but also geographicallythe battlefields still surround us. And you can go through all of our different– Vietnam, Korea– again,geographically there’s not the connection, but people are still alive who served. And you get to WorldWar I and it’s in the middle of that. It’s geographically abroad, and there are no surviving World War Iveterans.

ANDREW PARSONS: Which leaves people like Mark Levitch to search around the nation, doing theremembering for us all. Back in Emmetsburg, Maryland, Mark stops to notice three small cups, or vasesat the base of the Doughboy that look relatively new.

MARK LEVITCH: It almost looks as if it’s an offering of some kind, or incense. I can’t say this is– I’veseen anything like this before.

ANDREW PARSONS: And for a moment it seems like the statue is serving a purpose.

MARK LEVITCH: It does seem that someone is paying his or her respects.

ANDREW PARSONS: Meaning Mark might not be that alone in his search to remember, after all.

ED: Andrew Parsons is one of our producers. We’ll post some photos of the Doughboy monuments hetalked about at backstoryradio.org.

It’s time for a short break, but don’t go away. When we get back, a war resister is accused of yelling firein a crowded theater.

Word War I

Responding to a listener comment on the BackStory website, hosts Peter Onuf, Ed Ayers, and Brian Balogh discuss how public perceptions of the war changed, and what inspired the U.S.to intervene…often with a little help from British news and propaganda.

World War I; foreign policy; interventionism; propaganda

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory.

BRIAN: We’re back, with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’re talking today about World War I. Now as you may remember from yourhistory books, the United States didn’t enter that war until 1917. But August 1914, 100 years ago thismonth, marked the beginning of the fighting on the continent of Europe.

PETER: Well, we’ve been culling comments from our website, and we have one from a listener, PeterStory, and I thought I would share it with you guys and see what you have to say. What Peter wants toknow is, whether or not Americans paid any attention to World War I before 1917, before Americaninvolvement– or, Peter asks, was the war entirely over there, that is, in Europe, perhaps of interest onlyto foreign news buffs and financial types, but few others? What do you say?

ED: I say it’s a good question, because our textbooks always have Lusitania as sort of the beginning ofthe American interest in this story. And yet, if you go back and read newspapers from the 19th and early20th centuries, they’re covered with international news. We imagine America was ignorant of the worldbefore this. I’m glad we have a person who specializes in this period here to help us understand it.

BRIAN: Where is that person, Ed?

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: It is safe to say that until Americans actually entered the war they tended to view it more as aspectator sport. So it’s not as though they were not interested– they were interested in the way theywere interested in how their favorite baseball team was doing.

PETER: I challenge that, Brian. It seems to me that Americans know that they’re players in the world.They know that whatever happens with this war does impact them, whether they fight in it or not,because Americans are aware– particularly in the wake of the Spanish-American War, Americanimperialism– America’s a worldwide power. It’s an empire, and its engaging with native populations inthe Philippines, and elsewhere, in ways that the British have been engaging with native peoples aroundthe world. And there’s a lot of shared experience, and increasingly a sense of shared interest, in makingthe world safe for Anglo-American trade. Let’s say Americans are on the bench, rather than up in thestands.

BRIAN: Yeah? Well, I challenge your challenge, Peter, because–

ED: All right. I like this. This is like World War I.

PETER: Join in, Ed, any time you want. I’m Switzerland, here.

BRIAN: No. I challenge your challenge, because I think what you say is absolutely true of certain elites,particularly those who are involved in commercial transactions. And I think that’s part of what people are watching very closely among the elite classes. But in fact, we know once there started to be publicopinion polling, that Americans are notoriously uninterested in foreign affairs.

This is not to say that they’re not aware of the many commercial relationships between the UnitedStates and especially Great Britain, but Europe in general. But I don’t think they envision the UnitedStates militarily engaged around the world the way we now take for granted. And if you look at our go tosource– newspaper headlines– you see headlines that scream, “Giants and Germans Lose,” referringto a baseball team and the German troops overseas. There is an element of spectator sportobservation, until we get involved militarily.

ED: Well, I think you’re both wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: Ed, you’re going to resolve this, cause you’re the third team on the field.

ED: So here’s what I would say. I think that– focusing so much on commercial, I think, is kind of besidethe point here. If we think about what has America’s major role in the world been over the late 19th andearly 20th Century, in its own perception, it has been as missionaries. And we look at World War I, notmerely as a game, but as an opportunity to use our missionary impulse. And certainly President Wilsonspeaks this language more than anybody– to come in and work things out and save the world in thesame way that we’ve been saving Africa, saving China, through missionaries. So it’s interesting that it’snot just a very cold calculation, but this missionary impulse.

PETER: Yeah. And Ed, with that sense of mission that you’re talking about, that long period ofindecision, of sitting it out, of neutrality, is not indifference. It’s coming to a clear understanding of whereand how you need to intervene. So you’re in the world– do you need to intervene now, and on whatside? Those questions don’t answer themselves at first. And it takes a period of sustained publicrelations, sustained reporting on, observing the war, before Americans can become clear– at leastsome of them, enough of them, to make the choice to intervene.

BRIAN: And Peter and Ed, we’d be remiss if we left our listeners thinking that those questions wereresolved just because we entered the war. Because, in fact, there was a remarkable resistance to thiswar, especially when we implemented a draft in order to staff up the war. And people like Eugene Debs,a socialist, were very active in opposing the war, and they had a lot of support– especially out in thecountryside, where people continued to say, well wait. This doesn’t need to be our war. What’s in it forus?

PETER: Yeah, and I think you’re right, Brian. And there’s a real revulsion against the war, and itsaftermath. The great question, why did they fight? And was it just industrial interest? Was it a quest foreconomic domination and power? I think Ed’s point about a missionary sense of Woodrow Wilson iswas absolutely on point, because Americans needed to be able to tell themselves there was a point tothis war when it was finally over. And the notion of, well, exporting democracy– that was a way ofmaking sense of it. It’s something like emancipation in the Civil War.

ED: The difference being, in the 1920s the story would have been that it was a mistake, that it wasmunitions makers that got us into this. So unlike the Civil War, in which we clean it up after the fact– oh,yeah, it was to free the slaves– after World War I it’s like, ah, gee, what a mistake. We’ll never do thatagain. And then World War II– not to run the story for people, but there’s another World War after thisone– that actually goes back and gives shape and meaning to World War I that it did not have, hadbeen isolated.

[MUSIC PLAYING – “OVER THERE”]

Reshaping a Broken World

Historian Erez Manela speaks with host Brian Balogh about President Woodrow Wilson’s attempts to help build a new Europe, and how his philosophy has shaped U.S. foreign policy for nearly a century.

Europe; Woodrow Wilson; World War I; foreign policy; international relations

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: One of the most significant things to rise out of the ashes of World War I was the League of Nations. That was an international organization that in many ways prefigured the United Nations. Itresulted largely from the efforts of Woodrow Wilson, who, as Harvard historian Erez Manela says, feltthe old world order– one where nations supposedly balanced each other’s power as a means ofensuring peace– just wasn’t working.

EREZ MANELA: Wilson sees the war as evidence that the balance of power arrangement has failedspectacularly, and cannot be resuscitated. There cannot, in his view, be a new order that is again basedon balance of power. So then the question becomes for him, what is the alternative to balance ofpower? And the alternative that he comes up, with an institutional form, takes the form in his mind ofthe League of Nations.

And I think that Wilson has in mind a fairly straightforward parallel between the League of Nations as hesees it, and the US Constitution as it was formed in the late 18th century. Because keep in mind that–and Wilson knows this well– at the time of the Constitutional Convention, the several states that theConstitution was going to bring together were sovereign international entities.

BRIAN: Describe Wilson’s vision of collective security through the League of Nations when he firstimagined it, and tell me how that changed as a result of his war experience.

EREZ MANELA: Well, the issue that is often focused on when we think about collective security, and thepoint that received the most critique in the debate in 1919 and after, is the military commitment. That is,the sense that the collective security arrangements committed United States to military involvement inEurope or elsewhere, wherever conflict was going to break out. And actually, Wilson was very, veryclear, and he stated this numerous times explicitly, that the military intervention was going to be the verylast resort– only if everything else has failed.

And everything else meant two things that were to come before military intervention. One was what hecalled world opinion– his sense that once you get countries agreeing to be members, to join up, youwill get countries and leaders starting to feel that they’re compelled– they have an interest, in a sense.Now if that wasn’t going to work, if some country was going to take aggressive action despite thesekinds of shared understandings, then the next stage was going to be economic sanctions. But here thiswas going to be a multilateral process.

So this is the innovation. The innovation is it wasn’t simply going to be, one belligerent was going to putthe other belligerent under blockade. It was going to be that the world community, in a sense, wasgoing to agree through the League of Nations to put an aggressive nation under economic sanctions.So that was going to be the next stage, and he was very clear that was an important stage.

BRIAN: So buy-in from the international community was one of the real key innovations that Wilson waspursuing.

EREZ MANELA: Absolutely. And I think– I mean, look, international organizations had been in place forawhile. And obviously the clearest precedent here is the Concert of Europe that was put in place afterthe Napoleonic Wars, after 1815. But for Wilson, actually, it wasn’t a very good precedent because theConcert only took into account the views of the great powers. And Wilson actually strongly believed inthis concept of the equality of nations– that the small nations, as they were called at the time, had to beinvolved in this. And in fact, he perceived in a sense the small nations operating as a kind of brake onthe ambitions of the great powers.

BRIAN: How did the League of Nations that actually emerged out of the Treaty of Versailles– how didthat differ from Wilson’s original conception?

EREZ MANELA: Yeah, well, that that’s actually a really important question, because one thing that’soften missed in the history is that the League of Nations covenant that emerged out of Versailles was avery different creature from what Wilson had envisioned. And I think the best example of this is throughthe evolution of what’s known as Article 10, that guaranteed the security and territorial integrity of thenations– members of the League– and committed the other members to intervening in various ways.Because what Wilson said in that draft was, he started off by saying, yes the League guarantees thesecurity and territorial integrity of the member states.

But then there was a very important and extended except. And he said, except in such circumstances–and I’m paraphrasing– except in such circumstances where changes in racial conditions, andeconomic conditions, and the desires of the peoples concerned, will necessitate changes in borderspursuant to the principle of self-determination. And he said that in such cases, the League of Nationscould, by a 75% or a 3/4 majority, could actually effect the redrawing of borders– of internationalborders.

So he really actually wanted to build into the League a mechanism for what can only be described as– Isuppose– a form of world government

BRIAN: Right. This is really pretty radical stuff.

EREZ MANELA: It is quite radical stuff. Now I want to emphasize, Wilson did not come by this radicalidea easily. He came by it because by the end of the war he was convinced that the old order was sobroken, and so dangerous, that something radical had to be done, to put together an internationalsystem that would work.

BRIAN: It wasn’t exactly what Wilson envisioned, but we do get a League of Nations, sans the UnitedStates. Did it accomplish what Wilson thought it would?

EREZ MANELA: Well, obviously it didn’t. It didn’t even come close. First of all, the League covenant thatemerges from the negotiations in Versailles is quite different from what Wilson had in mind initially. It’s tohis mind a watered down version. He still defends it. He still wants the United States to join it, and that’sbecause he has an evolutionary view of such institutions.

He thinks, as long as we can put in place something– even something very imperfect– we have achance of it evolving in the right direction, over time. Then the other problem is that the United StatesSenate rejects the Treaty of Versailles, and the League covenant that was attached to it, and so UnitedStates in fact never joins the League of Nations.

BRIAN: How much did Wilson’s vision shape American foreign policy in the century that has followed?

EREZ MANELA: Oh, I think it’s shaped American foreign policy and American posture in the world, to avery great degree. If we look at Franklin Roosevelt– I see Roosevelt as a convinced Wilsonian whobelieves, in the Second World War, that Wilson had it right in terms of the general principles, butbungled the implementation because he was a less than perfect politician.

And Roosevelt, I think, sets out to implement the Wilsonian vision, if you will, but to do it right. So hereconstitutes the League of Nations as the United Nations, and that system that Wilson put in place isnot only not discarded, it’s in fact bolstered and developed into the United Nations system that we havetoday– the United Nations Security Council, the General Assembly, and all of the various otherorganizations, like UNESCO, like the World Health Organization, so on and so forth, that in fact have agreat deal of impact on the lives of people around the world.

And so, in that sense, I think we have to find that Wilson was right. The system that he believed in hasin fact evolved, even if it hasn’t fulfilled all the hopes that he and others have had for it.

BRIAN: Erez, thanks for making Wilsonianism safe for Public Radio. I really appreciate it.

EREZ MANELA: Thanks for having me. It was a great pleasure.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Erez Manela is a historian at Harvard University. He’s the author of “The Wilsonian Moment.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

A Clear Amendment Danger

Legal scholar Geoffrey Stone and host Peter Onuf unpack Schenck v. United States, a Supreme Court case that first threatened, and eventually paved the way to our modern understanding of free speech.

Espionage Act of 1917; Schenck v. United States; World War I; freedom of speech; legal history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And we’re marking the 100th anniversary of World War I’sbeginnings by exploring some of that war’s legacies here at home.

BRIAN: In 1917, the year that the US entered the fray, a Philadelphia man named Charles Schenckmailed out 15,000 leaflets protesting the country’s brand new draft system. Schenck was GeneralSecretary of the Socialist Party of the United States, and his flyers urged people to fight what Schenck and other war dissenters considered involuntary servitude.

ED: But earlier that same year, Woodrow Wilson had pushed the Espionage Act through Congress. This law essentially made it a crime to interfere with US military operations, including recruitment. Wilson and others believed that enemy sympathizers on the home front were endangering the war effort, andon these grounds, Charles Schenck was arrested and sentenced to six months in jail. He appealed thedecision, arguing that it was a violation of his First Amendment rights.

PETER: To our ears, this sounds like an open and shut case, and a perfect opportunity for the SupremeCourt to rein in legislative infringement of civil liberties. But university of Chicago legal scholar GeoffreyStone says that 100 years ago, that wasn’t so clear.

GEOFFREY STONE: In 1919, what we think of as the Court’s constitutional role it did not yet fully understand. It was not until World War I that the Supreme Court actually got involved in interpreting theFirst Amendment.

PETER: Where the justices came down, at least in this case, was on the side of the government. TheSupreme Court concluded that during wartime the government had broad authority to suppress potentially dangerous speech, and upheld Schenck’s conviction. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.wrote the majority opinion.

GEOFFREY STONE: And in doing so, Holmes wrote a kind of puzzling opinion.

PETER: Again, Geoffrey Stone.

GEOFFREY STONE: The First Amendment provides that Congress shall make no law abridging thefreedom of speech, or of the press. And taken literally, that seems to mean the government can neverinterfere with speech. And Holmes wanted to say, that can’t be right. And so he gave this famoushypothetical to say, well, clearly it doesn’t mean what it seems to mean, because obviously thegovernment could prohibit someone from falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.: “We admit that, in many places and in ordinary times, the defendantswould have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon thecircumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect manin falsely shouting fire in a theater, and causing a panic.”

GEOFFREY STONE: And then he uses this very famous language of clear and present danger.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.: The question in every case is whether the words used are used insuch circumstances, and are of such a nature, as to create a clear and present danger that they willbring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

GEOFFREY STONE: Most of us today, hearing the phrase “clear and present danger,” would think thatmeant a very demanding test, a very rigorous test. And nothing that Schenck did would seem to qualifyfor the kind of clear and present danger that’s typified by, say, a false cry of fire in a crowded theaterwhere there’d be an immediate dash to the exits, and people would be trampled, and people would beharmed. So it was clear that in the spring of 1919, when Holmes handed down these decisions, his viewis that the First Amendment had very little bite to it.

PETER: But that summer, Holmes’ opinion began to change. As he boarded the train for his vacation inNew England, fate would have it that Holmes was seated next to a fellow judge named Learned Hand.

GEOFFREY STONE: And very respectfully, cause Holmes was a Supreme Court Justice, and Hand wasa much younger man, and a Federal District judge– and Hand began questioning Holmes about, well,are you sure you really did the right thing here?

PETER: Hand wasn’t the only one criticizing Holmes’ take on the First Amendment. Other publicintellectuals pointed out that Holmes was, well, wrong.

GEOFFREY STONE: And to his credit, he actually listened to the different competing views. And whenhe came back to Washington the following fall, he began to have serious second thoughts about whathe had done in Schenck.

PETER: It became evident when the court heard Abrams versus the United States that fall. LikeSchenck, Jacob Abrams and his cohorts had been arrested for distributing anti-war flyers. They wereconvicted under a newer federal law, the Sedition Act, which expressly prohibited any disloyal, profane,scurrilous, or abusive language about the US government.

GEOFFREY STONE: The majority of the Supreme Court said, basically, this is a non-issue. We’vealready decided this last spring in Schenck, and therefore these guys go to jail. And Holmes, toeveryone’s shock, joined by Justice Louis Brandeis, wrote a powerful, eloquent, dissenting opinion inwhich he latched on to the phrase, clear and present danger. And he said, no no no, the test is clearand present danger. There’s no clear and present danger here. Abrams cannot be convicted. Themajority said, what are you talking about? This case is no different from the cases from the spring. AndHolmes basically pretended that the case was different.

PETER: Holmes was a respected judge, yet his fellow justices just couldn’t understand his suddenconversion on the First Amendment. Stone says that while Holmes and Brandeis continued to push fora broader interpretation of the First Amendment in a series of eloquent dissents in the post-war years,they never persuaded the majority.

GEOFFREY STONE: But what they did was to keep the issue alive. And they were such good writers,and such highly respected intellects, that those opinions gradually began to affect the way individuals inAmerica thought about freedom of speech.

PETER: It wasn’t until 1969 that the Supreme Court finally overruled the Schenck decision, in a casecalled Brandenburg versus Ohio. And in its decision, the Court cited several of Holmes and Brandeis’sfamous dissents from nearly 50 years before.

GEOFFREY STONE: And it’s a great example of exactly what they were arguing about. What they weresaying is, one of the reasons you have to have freedom of speech is so that ideas can be put out there,and people can think about them and reflect on them, and over time in a marketplace of ideas they cancome to have, perhaps, better conclusions. And their opinions were meant to be, and were in fact, aperfect illustration of exactly what they were defending in terms of the meaning of free speech.

PETER: Geoffrey Stone is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Like A Virgin

Historian Nancy Bristow tells host Brian Balogh about one of the biggest worries about sending young Americans off to war: whether they would be having sex — and how that preoccupation helped end the Progressive movement.

World War I; public health; reform movements; sex; sexually transmitted infections; soldiers

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’re talking today about the long shadow cast over America by World War I.We’ve talked about the ways war has been memorialized, and about some of its geopolitical legacies.We’re going to turn now to a couple of stories about what the war meant for Americans a little closer tothe action.

BRIAN: As the United States mobilized for war in 1917, Americans began to fear for their youngsoldiers– but not in the way you might think. Take, for example, this letter to government officials from aconcerned mother.

CONCERNED MOTHER: I could bear it if my boy came back a cripple, but I would rather he died in thetrenches than to have him come back with an incurable disease– or one that would taint his children,and his children’s children for generations.

ED: Now this mother wasn’t talking about just any ailment. Americans, including the president, wereterrified of venereal disease. And they had a reason to worry. In the days before penicillin, VD coulddecommission a lot of soldiers. And that’s exactly what was happening to US allies overseas. Over thecourse of the war, an estimated 5% of British troops were hospitalized for syphilis and gonorrhea.

BRIAN: To head off the threat posed by all the young men beginning to coalesce in training campsstateside– places known for their proximity to brothels and saloons– President Wilson and a coalitionof progressive reformers set up the Committee on Training Camp Activities. But historian Nancy Bristowsays that this group of reformers all had different ideas about how to stop the scourge of venerealdisease.

NANCY BRISTOW: I would describe sort of three wings here. You’ve got people concerned with purity,people concerned with social justice, and people concerned with efficiency.

So the purity reformers are going to want to provide opportunities for people to have safe, clean,healthful interactions– men and women together, to be good middle class Americans who have selfcontrol and manage their bodies through sexual abstinence, at least until marriage. And they’re going todo things like hosting picnics, and having town parades. And those things aren’t going to have muchimpact, and will become less and less important to the federal government as the war goes on.

Then you’re going to have social justice reformers, who may be trying to manage the situation in apretty complicated way– to provide opportunities for girls to find a route that is meaningful to themaway from prostitution, away from simply being exploited for sex during the war. But the efficiencyreformers, when push comes to shove, are going to be most interested in keeping the soldiers free ofdisease. And the Commission on Training Camp Activities– the federal agency that’s actually created tooversee these issues during the war– the CTCA is really, most of all, concerned with efficiency. Andhere you can think of any number of urban governments that are set up in this time to run things in amore democratic, but also more efficient manner. These folks, when it comes to VD, are wanting tohand out condoms.

BRIAN: They want to cut to the chase.

NANCY BRISTOW: They want to cut to the chase. And that’s really where the federal governmentcomes down, is that they really want “virile yet virginal soldiers,” as the historian Alan Brant describes it.But they’re willing to have a backup plan.

BRIAN: So it sounds to me like virile trumped virginal.

NANCY BRISTOW: Yes. They’re going to be willing to use law enforcement programs, and they’re goingto use them pretty repressively for young women. Part of what happens as they begin a more lawenforcement directed program to prevent venereal disease is they begin to arrest women on the street.And they arrest them for a range of behaviors. They need not actually be engaging in anything thatresembles a sexual act. In fact, they can be at a dance, and dance incorrectly.

And once you’re arrested you are taken to a hospital, or to some sort of medical clinic, where you’retested for venereal disease. If you have it, you are then locked up in a hospital until you’re cured. In apre-penicillin world, this could take months and months and months. You might never be cured. Onceyou’re cured, you are then prosecuted for your crime. And then, once you’re prosecuted you are held ina reformatory, often on what was called an indeterminate sentence.

So for all the talk of social justice reformers about moving to a world where men and women weretreated the same, where both would become advocates of purity in American life, the reality is that boththis commission– and the American populace– and, I suppose, I should add a third population, theAmerican soldiers– they don’t buy it, by and large. Boys will be boys, men will be men, but women areto be the moral bastions of the American culture.

BRIAN: This coalition is easy to make fun of, but they did have some very idealistic hopes. Did thecoalition hold together after the war? Were any of these objectives pursued in the 1920s, and were theactors the same?

NANCY BRISTOW: Historians have long said that World War I brought the end of the progressivemovement. I would actually frame it just a little bit differently, and say that the war actually empoweredprogressives, and created coalitions that perhaps were a little bit tenuous all along.

And so suddenly you have people who before had been able to imagine themselves having a coalition–OK, we’ll work together on this, because we all agree that venereal diseases is a serious problem inAmerican life. They could hold together tenuously, until there’s actual real power to hand around– untilyou actually begin to repress American women and lock them up, until you begin to distribute condoms.And then they begin to really recognize the differences that they have.

And in the aftermath of the war, the progressive coalition in general is coming apart at the seams, evenas Americans are just fed up with federal intervention in their lives. We go from an all for one and one forall to a– individualism, it’s up to you to make your own way, let’s not have a social safety net, let’s notbe preoccupied with community.

BRIAN: Nancy Bristow is a historian at the University of Puget Sound. She’s the author of “Making MenMoral, Social Engineering During the Great War.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Red Summer

Host Brian Balogh speaks with historian Adriane Lentz-Smith about how WWI offered both promise and disappointment for African-Americans struggling for civil rights.

African American soldiers; Red Summer; World War I; disappointment; inclusion/exclusion; racial violence

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: When we think about the struggle for African American civil rights, a lot of us cast our minds backto the post-World War II era, in the 1950s and 1960s. But a lot of the activist organizations from thatperiod had their roots in the years following World War I. African Americans participated in that earlierwar in a big way. We’re going to conclude our show with the story of one of them, a woman namedCatherine Johnson. She was one of many thousands of black Americans whose experiences in WorldWar I profoundly affected their views of the nation– and left them more determined than ever to fight forjustice.

BRIAN: Catherine Johnson was born to a middle class family in Ohio, in the years following the CivilWar. When she was in her 20s, she moved down South– first, to teach in an all black college in NorthCarolina, and then in Arkansas. It was right around this time that Jim Crow laws, and the violence thatenforced those laws, were tightening their grip on the South.

In 1906, her Arkansas school was attacked, and nearly burned down, by white rioters. That experiencetaught her a lot.

ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH: Being upright, and being right, is never going to be enough.

BRIAN: This is historian Adriane Lentz-Smith, who profiles Johnson in her book, “Freedom Struggles.”

ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH: She wants to do more. She wants to be more forceful. She wants to be out inthe world, making a difference, and teaching doesn’t allow her to do that.

BRIAN: So Johnson finds a place in the nascent black freedom struggle, becoming a field organizer forthe newly formed NAACP. And with the advent of World War I, Johnson and a lot of these AfricanAmerican activists see an opportunity.

ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH: When the US finally entered the First World War, called in this beautiful,flowery, inspiring language by Woodrow Wilson to a war for democracy, to a war that would be aboutself-determination, and all sorts of things that African Americans living in Woodrow Wilson’s UnitedStates didn’t have– but hoped to have– many of them, Johnson among them, saw the war as anopportunity to show the rest of America that they were capable of carrying the uniform, showing valor,doing all of the things that a citizen would do.

BRIAN: Nearly 400,000 African Americans served in the war, half of them serving abroad. Most workedas laborers. There were also some black civilians who joined the war effort as volunteers. Johnson wasone of them. And as a volunteer for the YMCA in France, she had a front row view of a society whereblack people were treated very differently than they were back home.

ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH: Johnson herself talks about sitting on public transportation, and seeing awhite woman give up her seat for a French colonial African soldier, and marveling that that would neverever happen in the United States.

BRIAN: But Jim Crow followed African American soldiers to France, in both official and unofficial ways.Camps were segregated, and black soldiers were disciplined for talking to white French women. Theywere given the worst jobs on bases, and they were thrown in the brig when they balked at that work.Fights between white and black soldiers were frequent.

As the peace treaty was signed in Paris, black soldiers and civilians disillusioned by the unmet promisesof the war, and the unchanged segregation in the United States, turned with a new energy to politicalorganizing. NAACP chapters proliferated. Membership spiked in black nationalist organizations, likeMarcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association.

BRIAN: African Americans realized that they had to make their demands and defend themselves, ratherthan to prove themselves and show themselves worthy. And that’s a very different strategy– well, that’sa mediumly different strategy– than the one that they had been pursuing before.

BRIAN: And was it that no proof could be stronger than the willingness to die for their country, yet itseemed to have no impact whatsoever?

ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH: Not only did it have no impact, it incited defenders of white supremacy. Itprovoked them into greater repression and violence.

BRIAN: That violence peaked in a six month period in 1919 that came to be known as the Red Summer.Beginning in April of 1919, about 30 major riots rocked towns in major cities, including Washington, DC,and Chicago. Hundreds of people were killed, and thousands injured, as white rioters set upon blackneighborhoods. Lynchings spiked in the South, with several black soldiers in uniform among thevictims.

ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH: But what you see in Chicago, what you see in DC, what you see elsewhere,are veterans bringing their military training to bear, and really doing organized defense of theirneighborhoods to keep white rampagers out. So in Chicago, for example, veterans go to the armory ofthe Eighth Illinois National Guard, gather arms, and then station themselves at strategic corners of theirneighborhoods, to defend from incursions.

BRIAN: Despite violent resistance, black political organizations continued to grow throughout the ’20sand ’30s. Catherine Johnson continued in a lot of these circles. She stayed active with the NAACP, andGarvey’s group. And she worked in settlement houses in Chicago, helping the waves of black familieswho had moved there during and right after the war. In the ’30s she joined solidarity movements withfreedom struggles in Africa. In a lot of ways, her work was typical for a black activist of this era.

ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH: Where she diverges is 1940, when she decides to run for Congress– whichnot many black women opted to do in 1940, right? And she knew she wasn’t going to win. But she hasa critique, and she wants a platform. And interestingly enough, she’s trying to keep the US out of WorldWar II, because she does not believe that the war will serve either the purpose of the American freedomstruggle, or the well being of the nation.

BRIAN: That’s Adriane Lentz-Smith. And she’s a historian at Duke University, and the author of”Freedom Struggles, African Americans in World War I.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: That’s going to do it for us today. But we’re eager to hear any stories you might have about theimpacts of World War I on people’s lives here in the US. And you can leave us a comment atbackstoryradio.org. And while you’re there, we’d also love to hear your stories and questions for ourupcoming episode about the idea of wilderness in American history. And whatever you do, don’t be astranger.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, KellyJones, and Bruce Wallace, with help from Emily Charnock. Emily Gadek is our digital producer, andJamal Millner is our engineer. BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

BRIAN: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, The University of Virginia, TheNational Endowment for the Humanities, and The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties, by the Tomato Fund– cultivating fresh ideas inthe arts, the humanities, and the environment– and by History Channel. History, made every day.

PRODUCER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is Professor ofHistory Emeritus at UVA, and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is President and Professorof History at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the VirginiaFoundation for the Humanities.

[MUSIC PLAYING]