ARMISTICE DAY

By William Urban

This holiday has been known as Veterans Day since 1954, but when I was young the men who served in the Great War were still around — fit enough for a small parade, a speech and an honor guard salute. The great-uncle I lived with summers had no exciting war stories. He was on a naval supply vessel that sailed from Quebec to Boston and back, and the closest he came to a life-changing experience was meeting a young woman in Boston whose father was in banking. Since he was exceptionally good at math and met people easily, he would probably have become rich had he wed her, but he chose to return to Kansas to marry my grandmother’s sister, Stella. His brother was on a destroyer that sank a U-Boat.
German U-Boats torpedoing American ships got America into the war. The German excuse was that these vessels were delivering food and other supplies to Britain and France, but the Kaiser had backed away from “unrestricted” submarine warfare until 1917, when he decided that President Wilson’s not preparing for war indicated that the United States would not fight, and that if the United States did declare war, its ninety million people would not make a difference — a mongrel population such as America’s could not fight, and almost no troops would get to France before Paris fell. Lastly, there were so many Irish who hated Britain (like Pat Buchanan today) and so many German immigrants (still the largest ethnic group in America) that Congress would hesitate to vote for war.
It was not a good period for people with names like my grandmother’s family (Osterfund). Speaking German was punished by vigilantes, so German language churches switched to English and German language newspapers went out of business. But it was not Germans alone who were affected. President Wilson nationalized all major industries and transportation systems, making the mobilization the closest to National Socialism we have ever experienced. This was not National Socialism as it later developed in the Third Reich, but it was pretty much like what Germans had expected when Hitler came to power. Later Wilson’s abuses were directed at pacifists and left-wing radicals, many of whom were recent immigrants from Russia.
Russia was not affected by the end of the war in the West (11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in 1918). The tsar had abdicated in March of 1917 and Russia had become a republic with a Social Democrat government. Then in November Lenin led a handful of Communists to overthrow that government. The result was a long civil war that the Communists won, allowing them to shoot any opponents they could get their hands on and to confiscate the property of those who got away.
Compared to the dead in Europe, America did not suffer much. But the families of the 110,000 who did die in battle or from disease had reason to ask what it was all for; and those who came home with limbs blown off or lungs ruined by gas couldn’t get them much of an answer.
The basic reasons had been to prevent Germany from dominating Europe and German militarism from spreading over the world. Since many German immigrants had come to America to escape service in the Prussian army, they knew what this meant, so they supported the war effort. Also, Americans were familiar with German arrogance before the war, and recently the Kaiser had made a secret proposal to the revolutionary government in Mexico that if it would provoke a war with the United States, it would get back the territories lost in the war of 1846-47 (basically the entire Southwest, including Texas). The telegram was intercepted by the British and decoded, then given to the press.
For all these reasons the veterans were proud of what they had achieved. A very small regular army had expanded quickly to a formidable fighting force that only lacked training, weapons and experience. They got the latter very quickly. The first Doughboys disembarked with the stirring declaration, “Lafayette, we are here.” Soon they were arriving at 10,000 a day, with no troop transports lost to U-Boats. By summer they were ready to blunt the last great German offensive (by divisions brought from the Russian front), then to push the “Boche” back to the point the German generals asked for an armistice (a cease fire) that would be followed by laying down the weapons and the negotiation of peace terms (the Versailles Treaty).
America was never the same afterward. Just as in the Eddie Cantor song, “How ’ya gonna keep ’em, down on the farm, After they’ve seen Pa-ree?” many left the farming life, and those who stayed began using tractors. Grain prices, high during the war, crashed, leaving the farm economy in a near permanent crisis. Prohibition had come in as a war measure, but drinking resumed. Corsets disappeared, replaced by jazz, Freud, and pre-marital sex.
Pacifism became so important politically that by the mid-Thirties, when Hitler and the Japanese militarists were more obviously looking for a war than the Kaiser ever had been, Franklin Roosevelt found it difficult to rally Americans to resist them. No one wanted another war, and many were willing to believe that if they just ignored the world, the world would leave them alone.
There is a lot of that attitude around today. But Barack Obama’s hurried pull-out of Iraq has not worked well, Afghanistan could become another Iraq, and Iran could acquire the nuclear weapons it needs to wipe out “the Little Satan” (Israel) and take on “the Great Satan” (us). We were almost at war in Syria, without allies, without a clear purpose, and without the American people understanding what was going on. Now our allies are as dismayed by our administration’s erratic policies as our enemies are encouraged. A hands-off president leading from behind has a reduced military, an underperforming economy, and a debt crisis that gives China tremendous leverage over what we can do. He is not enthusiastic about patriotic holidays. He is skipping the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
In 1915 Wilson said, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” Within two years we were at war.
Review Atlas (Nov 7, 2013), 4.