THE WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH
1.
With the outbreak of the World War in August 1914, the mind of America
suddenly became strikingly distinct from that of Europe. They were
fighting; we were watching. President Wilson appealed to the United
States to be “neutral in fact as in name ... impartial in thought
as well as in action.” The older American stock sympathized, on the
whole, with England, except for the Irish and Germans; the newer
immigrants had different racial and national affinities and memories,
some holding allegiance to their former governments, some, like the
oppressed Russian Jews, being especially bitter against their former
rulers. In this situation, American neutrality was the result, not of
indifference, but of lack of understanding on the part of many groups
in our population and of a stalemate between the rest.
One definite result certainly was that all these diverse groups of
new and old immigrants began to feel themselves a unity, an American
people. They felt their distinction from the warring nations overseas,
their own interest, their own reaction to the complex problems at
issue. Meanwhile, however, both parties were trying every means to
bring the United States into the war on their own sides. Germany
tried to bring about an embargo on munitions sold to the Allies and
in default of that, to obstruct their shipment by both peaceful and
warlike means. Great Britain, more especially, tried to influence
American public opinion in favor of the Allies and against Germany.
Within, there were pacifists and advocates of preparedness, both trying
to mold opinion. This formation of an American mind, and the difficulty
of determining its future direction, came to a head in the election
of 1916, when the German-Americans opposed President Wilson, and when
Hughes was supported by Roosevelt, the arch-interventionist. During
this period we experienced the first development of what we have
since grown to know intimately as “propaganda,” a deliberate, elaborate
technique for influencing the mind of the group.
The declaration of war by the United States in April, 1917, unified
the American mind in a manner and to a degree that were almost
inconceivable. Every immigrant group began to pass resolutions
favoring the government; the foreign language newspapers commenced
an intensive propaganda for the prosecution of the war. Volunteers
came from every section of the country and every type of origin, as
many from the children of Germans as from any other group. The draft
law was passed with apparent general approval; and its enforcement
met with surprisingly little difficulty. Huge loans were made to the
Allied governments. Tremendous bond issues were raised by the American
government, with general approval and the coercion of any minority
objectors. The National Council of Defense, founded in August, 1916,
was able in many cases to overcome the dominant profit-motive of our
society in gaining self-sacrificing patriotism of manufacturers and
merchants.
Along with this voluntary and spontaneous unification of the group
mind, came repression and coercion directed to forcing into agreement
any unabsorbed minority groups. The Committee on Public Information was
founded in September, 1917, to exert propaganda through the sources of
public information, to send out favorable news and opinion, and even
through censorship to suppress material considered dangerous to the
general cause. The censorship exercised by the military forces on war
bulletins, war correspondents and the personal letters of soldiers, was
applied less strictly to the general population. The secret service,
greatly expanded to cope with German spies, began hunting out strikers,
radicals or any others who—in the minds of the detectives or of any
other government officials—might possibly obstruct the war efforts.
Emergency acts gave the President unusual power in these and other
directions.
This use of force was characteristic, not only of the government,
but of local groups as well. In one place a German sympathizer (real
or supposed) might be made to kiss the flag; in another a strike
leader might be lynched. In Milwaukee, where public opinion was
sensitive on account of the large number of German-Americans, a quota
of Liberty Bonds was assigned arbitrarily to every person, and he was
practically forced to purchase them, irrespective of his ability to do
so, by threats of ostracism, by influence of his creditors, by every
sort of social pressure,—in order that Milwaukee might rank as a real
American community and go “over the top” in every “drive.” The military
language applied to these campaigns was matched by a growing technique
of organization. Professional propagandists perfected a method of
meetings, songs, card-catalogs, and quotas, by which any cause might be
assured of huge sums of money. The greater propaganda of our government
and foreign governments was matched by the little propaganda of every
subgroup, as long as this was not in conflict with the general purpose.
A striking illustration of this is in the successful drives of the
various war-work agencies, the Red Cross, American Library Association,
Young Men’s Christian Association, Jewish Welfare Board, Knights of
Columbus, and the rest; and especially in their enormous joint campaign
just after the signing of the armistice. Every American felt that this
joint campaign, first, would help the soldiers and the common cause;
and second, indicated by its inclusiveness the complete unification of
America. Along with this general unification came the similar process
in many of the immigrant groups themselves. Professor Miller[68] tells
how this was reflected in the Czecho-Slovak group in America, so that
bitter atheists united with Catholic priests on joint committees for
national freedom in their old home in Europe.
2.
This internal unification was accomplished by a high emotional tension,
a national and personal uncertainty, and a common hate. The prejudice
against the various immigrant groups, arising as a result of the
great wave of immigration, was abated for the moment; all the little
prejudices were summed up in one great hatred of the common enemy,
Germany. This was reflected in avoidance of everything German in
this country as well; German instruction was withdrawn from many high
schools, German music from the opera houses, German fried potatoes from
the restaurants. The term, “German-American,” formerly in good repute,
now became a byword, and with it every form of “hyphen.” The demand now
was for “hundred per cent.” Americanism.
In the prevailing ignorance of foreign languages and peoples, or even
if this ignorance had not existed in its full measure, the hatred
against the Germans was transferred in part to other groups as well,
even those with most reason to be anti-German or anti-Austrian.
Foreign language newspapers fell under popular suspicion and official
censorship much heavier than that of the English language periodicals.
Some states passed laws, later declared unconstitutional, forbidding
teaching, preaching or public meetings in languages other than English.
Foreign sounding names attracted suspicion, and were changed in large
numbers. Altogether, America begun to repeat the oppression of subject
groups which had caused permanent resentment and sown the seeds of
rebellion in almost every land in Europe, to create her own Ireland,
Alsace-Lorraine or Poland. Americanization became a synonym for
compulsory adoption of American standards and group habits.
Americanization had had a long, if somewhat unsatisfactory, trial
before the war. It was the attempt, at that time, to bring American
culture to the supposedly uncultured immigrant through settlements,
night schools, and other cultural agencies. The attempt was
satisfactory in a comparatively small proportion of the total immigrant
population; and the earnest workers blamed this fact on the poorness
of their textbooks, the unsuitability of their buildings, or the
weariness of the people after a day of arduous labor. Now, all of these
were undoubtedly true, but a more fundamental cause of the weakness of
Americanization methods lay in the fact that they were all one-sided;
they consisted in attempts to change the immigrant into an American,
rather than attempts to join many groups together into a composite
unity. Even the conference on Americanization called by the Secretary
of the Interior in 1918 passed friendly and practical resolutions,
but still one-sided and consequently superficial.
The few individuals who persisted in their individuality, who refused
to be absorbed in the group purpose, formed no clearly marked group of
themselves. They were the “conscientious objectors,” who refused any
type of activity that might help the military machine; the “slackers,”
who evaded the draft for selfish reasons; various religious groups,
such as the Quakers; a few economic dissenters, such as the Industrial
Workers of the World. They received, as they must have expected, the
violent disapproval of the group, expressed in terms of mob attack,
legal imprisonment, or at least, extreme social disapproval. They were
the unassimilated residuum of personality in the general unification of
the American group under the pressure of an external foe.
3.
Then came the armistice in November, 1918. As Dr. Drachsler remarks:
[69]The war lasted long enough to make America painfully conscious
of her peculiar problem of nationalism, but was not of long enough
duration to fuse the divergent ethnic elements permanently.
The artificial unity of war-time had no longer a purpose, and began
instantly to dissolve into its component elements. But the high
emotional tone of the war-time remained. Men still hated violently,
but they could no longer release this hatred in battle or in sending
others to battle. The repressive agencies remained in existence and in
excellent running order; groups had learned how to use propaganda as an
instrument; the habit of group pressure on subgroups and on different
and opposing groups had been strengthened. Most of all, great masses of
Americans had a new group consciousness of America as a group, with the
uniformity of habit, opinion and conduct characteristic of their own
subgroup taken as normal for the whole.
The first result, then, was that the original subgroups fell apart and
that their opposition was stronger and more open than before the
war. This was due certainly to the heightened emotional tone, not only
of the American mind, but every group mind the world over. During the
war men and nations lived habitually under conditions of excitement,
uncertainty and tension. After the war the same emotional tone remained
to color whatever group ideas might become associated with its action.
So the whites who had drafted negroes to fight for them resented these
same negroes coming home with the new pride of soldiers, remembering
new equality of treatment they had received from the French. The
daughters of the rich no longer danced with the poor, ignorant farm
boys as they had in every cantonment. Prejudice against the uniform
returned, and girls of certain classes would no longer care to be seen
with soldiers or sailors; as they had when those men were expressing
the group purpose by their very garments. And the hatred of the various
immigrant groups for each other—the hatred of the older American
groups against the immigrant, the Catholic and the Jew, returned with
redoubled force. As the present writer found occasion to note directly
after the close of the war:
[70]During the war we felt that prejudice between men of different
groups and different faiths was lessening day by day, that our common
enthusiasm in our common cause had brought Catholics, Protestants
and Jews nearer together on the basis of their ardent Americanism.
Especially we who were at the front felt this in the first flush of
our co-operation, our mutual interest and our mutual helpfulness.
This disappointment was common to many of us who had allowed our hopes
to run beyond our knowledge.
Another cause of this unusual strength of group hatreds was the very
repression of the war period. Individuals and sub-groups had sacrificed
their prejudices for the common purpose, but they had done so without
pleasure and as a sacrifice. Now they resumed their group intolerance
with redoubled zest due to long repression, whether that had been
voluntary or forced. The “white, gentile, Protestant American” may
have resented fighting on an equality with the negro, or under the
orders of a foreigner—now that resentment had its vent. Never has
group feeling run higher in America than in this reaction from the
sudden, violent and partially artificial unity during our participation
in the World War.
One notable result of this sudden relaxation of unity, this sudden
predominance of the subgroups, appeared in the phenomena of
displacement. Displacement is a common matter among paranoiacs, where
one object is substituted for another with the same meaning and the
same feeling-tone of resentment or of pleasure. It is also a common
characteristic of mobs, which may be called for this and other reasons,
a sort of social paranoiacs; the lynching mob will turn from its
intended victim to hang instead a public official or a bystander who
objects even mildly to its program.[71] In this way the hatreds of
war-time were displaced. The hatred for the German was displaced to
the alien as a whole. The hatred and suspicion of Russia, aroused when
that nation drew out of the war, and intensified when it adopted the
radical economic program of the Bolsheviki and the novel political rule
of the Soviets, was displaced and applied to all economic radicals,
whether Russian or American. Finally, the Jew was identified as a
foreigner (even though he might be American-born and a veteran of the
war); and as a radical (even though he might be an ultra-conservative
capitalist). The ancient, lingering anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism of
ages past appeared again; the Jew was not only a Christ-killer or a
boor or a Semite,—for no accusation was ever entirely dropped—he was
also an alien and a radical, an international banker and an enemy of
gentile civilization.