-Caveat Lector- from: To Die For Cecilia Elizabeth O�Leary Princeton University Press�1999 ISBN 0-691-01686-0 365 pps � Pprbck -----
'JOHNNIE GET YOUR GUN": THE MILITARIZATION OF NATIONAL CULTURE The many-sided debate that characterized the years leading tip to the United States' entry into the Great War came to an abrupt end when the government declared war on 6 April 1917. Recognizing the broad appeal of the antiwar movement, President Wilson emphasized, when he asked Congress for a declaration of war, that the government would respond to any expression of disloyalty "with a firm hand of stern repression." Two months later, he warned that the "masters of Germany" were using "liberals . socialists [and] the leaders of labor" to "carry out their designs.� In June, the Espionage Act, designed to criminalize opposition to the war, became law. One year later, the Wilson administration gave its full support to the Sedition Act, which implicitly made any criticism of the war, the flag, or the government illegal." States such as Minnesota passed laws that made it a crime to speak out against enlistment, while nine states passed laws making it illegal to verbally oppose the war effort and fifteen states passed criminal syndicalism statutes. These antiradical statutes had their precedent in legislation passed by New York and three other states in 1902 and 1903 to curb labor militancy. But the proliferation of antisyndicalist laws between 1917 and 1920 represented both a qualitative and a quantitative shift in governmental policy: the targets of repression were now political as well as labor organizations. Moreover, it was now acceptable to criminalize dissidents for their ideas and associations, in addition to their actions. Police and detective forces also expanded during World War I, and private organizations such as the National Security League and the American Protective League (APL) were set up to crush political opposition. The new militarism resonated within popular culture. George M. Cohan's song "Over There" called the nation to arms: 'Johnnie get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.... Hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle do or die." As men marched off to war, popular songs replaced pacifist mothers with women who promised Uncle Sam, "If I Had a Son for Each Star in Old Glory, I'd Give Them All to You." Another song pledged, "My Country Right or Wrong. Hollywood films and military spokesmen glamorized the idea that boys too voting to enlist could serve their country as scouts. The Boy Scouts, originally organized in England to make patriotic men out of "unruly" working-class youths, was established in the United States in 1910." As soon as the United States entered the war, the Scouts pledged 100 percent patriotism and dedicated three hundred thousand boys to fighting the war on the home front by selling liberty bonds, growing vegetable gardens, and patrolling the nation's coastline. A poster titled "Weapons for Liberty" captured the bond between men and boys with a larger-than-life scout handing the sword of "preparedness" to an American warrior." In a single day, 14 April 1917, the Boy Scouts blanketed New York City with twenty thousand army recruitment posters." In the film The Boy Who Cried Wolf the hero is a young scout who dreams of catching his very own spy. After a series of harrowing mishaps and adventures, the scout finally accomplishes his mission. In the end, he is rewarded for his vigilance against the threat from within as the final scene fades on the child soldier saluting the flag." Militant nationalists, who had failed to institutionalize military drilling in the public schools at the turn of the century, now succeeded in creating a masculine culture of order and discipline among the Boy Scouts. Trained to express an unquestioning and jingoistic allegiance, Boy Scout troops across the country staged massive operettas in celebration of "America First.� The "great scout citizen," Theodore Roosevelt, enthusiastically embraced the quasi-military organization of young boys, while encouraging young girls to emulate Betsy Ross by tenderly sewing stars onto flags for boys to carry into life's battles. Women's patriotic duty, Roosevelt contended, was to bear children for the nation. He maintained that a wife, just like a soldier in battle, must be judged by how she did her duty." In 1911, Roosevelt charged women who gave birth to only one or two children with committing a "crime against the race" and denounced women who "in their thirst for their rights, forget their duties." Men, on the other hand, were encouraged by Roosevelt to achieve "manliness in its most vigorous form," bravely carrying out their duties like soldiers on a battlefield. He offered himself as an example of a skinny child who had "built bodily vigor ... for national service." After gaining physical strength in the "Wild West," Roosevelt had gone on to command the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War and later led safaris into "primitive" Africa, inspiring images of Rudyard Kipling's imperial and manly prose in popular newsreels that documented his adventures."' In addition to the Boy Scouts, hundreds of thousands of Americans joined homefront campaigns. President Wilson's administration worked in tandem with patriotic organizations, as well as representatives from advertising, the press, and the entertainment industry. The government not only lent the full authority of the state to volunteer efforts but also directly intervened in supervising a nationally orchestrated campaign to spread an officially approved patriotism. just days after the United States' entry into World War I, President Wilson took the unprecedented step of setting up a federal agency to shape public opinion and mobilize unconditional support for America's role in the war effort. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed by Progressive reformer and journalist George Creel, worked with the secretaries of state, war, and the navy. Since the committee was staffed by a relatively small number of paid administrators, the vast majority of its work and finances came from volunteers. Advertising agencies donated acres of billboard space, as seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men fanned out across the country to advertise patriotism by giving short talks in movie theaters, churches, and fraternal lodges. "The idea," wrote Creel, "had the sweep of a prairie fire." Theater owners gave the organization exclusive access to their audiences, and thousands of men from every state volunteered to be speakers. The head of an advertising agency drafted the first bulletin for the men's talks. Encouraged by the CPI's scope and effectiveness, government departments turned to the Four Minute Men when they needed to "arouse the nation swiftly." The CPI flooded the country with vast amounts of information, its Washington office producing a relentless barrage of news stories, editorials, war bulletins, educational material, advertisements, billboards, photographs, cartoons, movies, war expositions, and conferences." Under the slogan "Every Scout Boost America," troops across the country canvassed their neighborhoods with CPI literature. The Committee took up the challenge of molding public opinion into a single "white-hot mass instinct" for war." It mobilized millions of Americans who just months before had supported isolationism or pacifism by drawing on the political prestige of government officials, the intellectual legitimacy of university professors, and the marketing know-how of advertising executives. One of its first pamphlets, The War Message and Facts behind It, featured speeches from prominent politicians and historians. Franklin K. Lane, the secretary of the interior, described the war as a struggle �against feudalism�the right of the castle on the hill to rule the village below. It is a war for democracy�the right of all to be their own masters." The moral themes in government pronouncements resonated within Progressive circles and among suffrage groups and black Americans who believed that by entering into the social contract of war they could gain full citizenship rights. But the intrusion into civic life of state institutions went far beyond mobilizing public opinion favorable to the war effort. Volunteer organizations-including the American Defense Society, the National Security League, and the AFL, all of which coordinated their surveillance activities with the Department of Justice�fanned out across the nation to hunt down radicals and immigrants suspected of harboring disloyal sentiments. In a three-day raid, the APL and the Bureau of Investigation arrested tens of thousands of men for draft evasion, only to have all but a small fraction released. Before World War II the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation had limited responsibilities and no clear mission for law enforcement, but demands for surveillance and prosecution of suspected spies and slackers quickly led to what Frank Donner calls the "federalization of intelligence. By 1918, the attorney general could confidently claim, "it is safe to say that never in its history has this country been so thoroughly policed." The movement to legislate patriotism, initiated during the flag movement of the 1890s, created a vast web of new laws during World War I. Precedents for government-promoted patriotism had first occurred in the public schools. By 1913, twenty-three states required public schools to display the flag. During the Progressive Era, states legislated nationalism by requiring the compulsory teaching of subjects ranging from flag exercises and civics to instruction in English and courses on U.S. history. But the most dramatic increase in state directives took place during the years surrounding World War I. Unlike legislation at the turn of the century, which delegated broad discretionary authority to school boards and mandated educational practices already in existence, World War I enactments reflected lawmakers' determination to enforce a national will." Even the specific text of the Pledge of Allegiance came under close scrutiny. In the 1900s, organized patriots and educators had been too busy spreading the word to worry about standardization. Versions of the pledge multiplied as teachers, textbooks, and patriotic organizations boosted their favorite wording and form of presentation. During the war years, however, Americanizers worried about immigrants who maintained dual allegiances and debated whether the wording of the Bellamy pledge allowed immigrants to swear a secret loyalty to another country. The Woman's Relief Corps proposed a solution: replace the words "my flag" with "the flag of the United States." As war continued in Europe, nationalists upped their demands for national conformity, making the daily pledge of allegiance by every student and in every public school the normative expectation. On a Chicago morning in 1916, an eleven-year-old black student, Hubert Eaves, stepped apart from his classmates and refused to salute a flag that to him represented Jim Crow, disfranchisement, and lynching. Such dissent caused considerable controversy. "I am willing to salute the flag," Eaves explained, "as the flag salutes me." The Chicago Defender broadcast his story in bold headlines: "Youngster, Eleven Years Old, Starts New Philosophy of American Patriotism�Tells judge Dudley that Flag is a Dirty Flag that Will Not Protect Its Unhyphenated Citizens." For his crime, Hubert Eaves was arrested, brought before a juvenile court, and tried. Judge Dudley, unable to locate a criminal statute that governed Eaves's behavior, ordered him to return to school." In the South, rumors spread that Germans had launched a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing black Southerners that they were being asked to fight abroad for rights denied to them at home. The newly formed Bureau of Investigation took the rumors seriously and initiated a full-scale surveillance program aimed at black Americans, assuming a dubious loyalty from citizens it considered un-American. Rather than protecting the rights of black citizens against a resurgent racism, the bureau forwarded reports to the State Department on anyone who complained of discrimination or lynching. White Southerners sent frantic letters to the bureau about the changed "demeanor of the colored people," blaming the "propaganda that has been very vigorously carried on by German influences in order to upset the racial situation, and drive away the agricultural labor in the South." White employers reported seeing black servants reading the Chicago Defender, gathering in small groups to discuss the war, and practicing the unAmerican behavior of refusing to step aside when white people passed them on the sidewalks. The investigation of black citizens reflected the bureau's belief that spies and traitors, rather than the forces of white reaction, had incited the race riots of 1917. As racists dismissed black demands for social justice, nativists condemned anyone who did not act or appear sufficiently assimilated as "un-American." Increasingly, those under suspicion were expected to prove their true Americanism through public acts of loyalty. pps. 227-232 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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