This is about an hour. Okay. Its 11 00. I think we know you are excited to be here and to hear Adam Hochschild tell us about the legacy of the First World War today. Thank you for being with us over these past three days. Its been very exciting for us to see how excited and engaged history educators are. Thank you so much for that. If i didnt say it, im grace leatherman. We are loving doing this online conference with you. Its a pleasure to be with you, because really there is no kind of person i more enjoy talking with than teachers of history. Teachers of history have been tremendously important in my life from high school, from college and also people who are involved in teaching public history by working in museums, historical sites and so forth. All that has had a huge influence on my life. I dont think i would be writing History Today were it not for two very good history teachers that i had when i was in high school. Let me tell you a little bit about how i came to the subject that im going to talk about today. I have for a long time as long as i can remember been obsessed with the First World War. I had relatives on both sides of my family who fought in it in several different armies. It always has sort of seemed to me i think the historian simon shama described the First World War was the original sin of the 20th century. So much of whats afflicted us in the last 100 years comes directly out of that war. So ive always been fascinated by it. I did a book called to end all wars that came out about ten years ago, which was about the First World War, focused on the british experience, because thats where britain was britain is where the conflict was sharpest between people who thought the war a noble and necessary crusade and people who thought correctly, i think, that it was absolute madness and would make the world turn for the worse in every conceivable way. The book that jennie mentioned is the story of an American Woman who lived through that period. That kind of woke me up to what life in the United States was like in the First World War and its immediate aftermath. And thats what im writing about right now. So the thoughts im going to share with you today are not from a book thats published but from a book in progress. So lets go ahead. I just want to make sure are you folks seeing my screen here . Do you have to click share screen again . Okay. Good. All right. So you are seeing my slide show. Thats fine. Let me go ahead then. I want to first describe the usual way that we remember america in the First World War. Then talk about aspects of that history that we tend to ignore. The way the story is usually told, the european powers had been battling themselves to a stalemate for nearly three years, starting in 1914. The british, french, germans. The war produced untold millions of deaths and even larger number of wounded and destruction beyond that of any previous european war. It left a devastated landscape as well. And still the carnage went on and on leaving te the powers of old world exhausted. Then german submarines started sinking american ships. President woodrow wilson, who was in power at that time, declared enough is enough. On april 2, 1917, he went before congress and asked it to declare war. And congress promptly did so. Wilson picked general john j. Pershing to lead the u. S. Troops who went to europe. Pershing arrived in france, declared famously, la ffayette,e are here, and by mid 1918, 2 million american troops were in europe. They fought bravely. They helped to win the war. Swiftly, the armistice came, which was really a german surrender. Greeted with tremendous fervor here and in all the warring countries. Ticker tape parades welcomed the american troops home. General pershing was greeted as a great hero. And thats where the chapter on world war and so Many American history textbooks end. The country is at peace. The next chapter of American History begins. The 1920s, flappers, prohibition, speakeasies, the mode modelt and babe ruth. This skips over a great deal. I want to go back and look at the war years more closely and then at the two years that followed the socalled peace. From the moment the United States entered the war, there was a fierce propaganda barrage from the government. This is a u. S. Army recruiting poster. Just look at it for a second. At the image of ferocity that it contains. There was a tremendous paranoia about spies. Why . Not because there were a lot of german spies in the United States. There had been, but almost all of them had been rounded up fairly early in the war because their pay master made the mistake of leaving his briefcase behind on a new york elevated train. It was promptly collected by the american agent who was tailing him. So there were really no real german spies by the time the u. S. Entered the war. But there was this tremendous paranoia in the air. I think in part because the United States had a huge foreign born population. The first reflection of that was paranoia about spies, then paranoia about everything german. Sometimes mixed with a longstanding antisemitism. Look at this poster, for example. The guy, the evil spy, has a german helmet but maybe a jewish nose. Now i heard about the atmosphere of this time from my father who was 25 years owed in 1917. He was the son of a jewish immigrant from germany. The family spoke german at home but they were terrified of doing so on the street. Some states actually passed laws against speaking german in public. German language instruction stopped in schools and universities across the country. Signs appeared like this one in a park in chicago. And amazingly, there were burnings of german books. Here is a bonfire outside a high school in wisconsin of german language books and textbooks. Another picture of that fire. If you read the slide, it says, chalk down the sidewalk, it says, here lies the remains of germ german at bhs. Robert pregger was a minor in illinois. He tried to enlist in the u. S. Navy, but he got turned down because he had a glass eye. He had the bad luck to be german born. One day in 1918, he was seized, wrapped in an american flag, forced to sing the star spangled banner and lynched. Here are the people who lynched him. They were put on trial. The jury deliberated ten minutes and found them innocent while a military band played outside the courthouse. There was antigerman craziness in the air in other ways. No more german music was played. Weddings took place without the wedding march. Names were changed. Berlin, iowa, became lincoln, iowa. East germantown, indiana became pershing, named after the again. Families named schmidt became smith. There was ferocity in the air at the very highest level. For example, this is former secretary of state, secretary of war, senator from new york, now in 1917 he was a special emissary of president wilson. He told an audience in new york in the summer of 1917 that, quote, progerman traitors were threatening the war effort. Here is what he said in his own words. There are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason. There are some newspapers published in this city every day, the editors of which deserve execution for treason. With his hatred of the media, he would be right at home in the trump administration. People like him were as fierce as they were about the war because there was considerable resistance to it. This is another thing that gets left out of our history books. There was a group, for instance, called the womens peace party that agitated against the war both before and after the United States joined. Here is an advertisement for an antiwar meeting that was to take place on the very eve of the war itself, the day before wilson went to congress to ask for the declaration. Two days later, this Organizations Office just two blocks away from the white house was vandalized and smeared with yellow paint. There were popular an titiwar songs like this one. And there were newspapers, publications that took a strong antiwar stance, like this socialist newspaper in new york city. A National Magazine that was a strong voice against the war was the masses which was the liveliest magazine in america. It was the magazine that published john reed, walter lipman, sherwood anderson, many others, many of the best artists and cartoonists of the day. In many ways, it was a precursor of todays new yorker. It published antiwar cartoons like this one. Christ being shot by a firing squad. If you look carefully, the different hat and helmets, you see all of the warring countries are represented in the firing squad. There were prominent political figures who spoke out against the war like socialist party leader eugene debbs, the fivetime socialist candidate for president. And the very caharismatic emma goldman who started organizing against the draft. Several u. S. Senators were strongly against the war. The boldest voice was from wisconsin. He asked on the floor of the senate if this is a war to make the world safe for democracy, as wilson had proudly proclaimed, why shouldnt there be selfdetermination for ireland, for egypt, for india . He told his fellow senators that he could still be a patriot and oppose a particular war. In the 19th century, he gave examples of how Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln had done so. He began receiving mail. He was hanged on the campus of the university of wisconsin in effigy. His fellow senators opened an investigation, should he be expelled from the senate. Debbs and goldman had worse fates. We will come back to that. The government moved quickly to suppress antiwar demonstrations. Anyone who refused military service was sent to prison or locked up in camps like this one, fort douglas, utah. Here is one such resister. An antiwar activist and social worker named Roger Baldwin who was sent to prison. We will come back to him. One of the things that really characterized this period was the rise of vigilanteism. Organizations sprang up around the country. The largest was something called the American Protective League. This is the badge that its members got to wear. I think you can read it on the screen. Operative, American Protective League, auxiliary to the u. S. Department of justice. Because the organization, did indeed, have Justice Department support. By the end of 1917, the American Protective League had more than 200,000 members. It was made up of men only men. No women. Who were too old to fight but who wanted to feel somehow that they were defending their country. What did they do . Among other things, they carried out what they called slacker raids to find people who had not registered for the draft. And make citizens arrests on them. Sometimes also a slacker was somebody who had failed to buy a war bond. Here, for example, are some of the young men who were arrested in a slacker raid in new york city in 1918 in which 60,000 people were rounded up because they had no draft cards. These slacker raids by the American Protective League were a comparatively mild side of the vigilanteism that really took off in these years. Other expressions of it were much worse. Cartoons like this one glorified vigilante violence and sometimes people acted on that urging. Here is a newspaper headline about one such episode involving members of the countrys most militant labor group, the Industrial Workers of the world. 17 in tulsa, oklahoma, were beaten, tar and feathered. It doesnt say that one of the leaders of the masked vigilantes who carried out the action was the local police chief who had tipped off the newspaper in advance to have a reporter on the scene when this took place. Here is a photograph of another victim of tarring and feathering. A man named john mikes, who was a farmer from minnesota. He was attacked by masked men in 1918 because he refused to buy war bonds. The men who attacked him were put on trial but found innocent. Someone else, an organizer, had a worse fate. He was seized from his bed in montana in the middle of the night and hanged from a railroad bridge outside of town. Here is his body. Frank little, 38 years old. His crime was coming to organize workers in the mining town where an underground fire several weeks earlier had taken the lives of more than 160 miners. That brings us to an important point. The real target of repression during this war, during the war years in the u. S. , was not really draft dodgers or alleged progermans. It was the left. It was organized labor. This was an era of enormous labor strike starting in 1909 for the next ten or 12 years there were huge strikes every year in the United States with hundreds of thousands of workers walking off the job each year. They were met with force. Sometimes it was National Guard or state militia that put down strikes. These are state militia men in massachusetts facing some striking clothing millworkers. They were put down by police. Thats a striking garment worker. The war gave the federal government and big business the perfect excuse to crack down or organized labor in every way. Their impulse to do so was only exacerbated by the rise of the bolsheviks in russia. The american establishment was terrified at the prospect of the Russian Revolution spreading to the United States. I think this is what led, starting in mid 1917, the next three years or so, to the worst period of political repression since the end of slavery. Its an era largely forgotten about. I want to emphasize that this political repression happened not just during the First World War. It continued for more than two years after the war ended. And it happened on several fronts. There were a series of laws passed, the most important of which was the espionage act of 1917. Actually, an amended version of that law is still with us. And people Like NationalSecurity Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has been arrested under it. But the law of 1917, the espionage act that year, among other things, gave the government the power to sensor the press. Remember the magazine the masses that i talked about. This issue, august 1917, was its last. That issue was printed but it was banned from the u. S. Mail. Why . Because sensors objected to several pieces of text and several cartoons in the issue. Here is one of the cartoons they objected to and thought subversive. The liberty bell crumbling. So the best magazine in the country was forced to cease publishing. Over the next four years, spring of 1917 through spring of 1921, more than 400 issues of american newspapers or magazines were banned from the mail, from 75 different publications. In many cases, that meant the publication shutting down entirely. Who was americas chief press sensor . Its the guy in this picture. Albert s. Burlson. He was the postmaster general and the law gave him the power to sensor what went through the mail. He was a former congressman from texas, actually the first texan to serve. Very conservative. When he was born, his family owned 20 slaves. He loved being the chief sensor. Right after the armistice in november 1918, president wilson declared an end to censorship. The war was over. Why would we need that anymore . He paid no attention. He kept on banning publications he didnt like. Wilson didnt seem to mind. Paid very little attention. On occasion, explicitly backed him up. Another facet of the repress was the way the government moved to jail critics of the war. I earlier showed you a pictures of eugene debbs, the socialist leader and leader before that of the Railway Workers union. Here he is at a federal prisoner, sentenced for speaking out against the war. Like so many war critics, he was still in jail two years after the war ended. In november 1920, while debbs was convict number 9653 in the atlanta federal pen ten , he red more than 900,000 votes for the socialist party. Far from the only person sent to jail for speaking out, someone else was Kate Richards ohare, socialist party activist. In prison, she became good friends with emma goldman who we talked about earlier. Also jailed for owe poepposing war. Goldman spent two years in prison. After that, the government also deployed another weapon against her. It deported her from the United States where she had lived for more than 30 years. She and 248 other radicals the government was eager to get rid of were shipped off to russia just before christmas of 1919 on this decrepit ship. In a way that feels familiar today, in 1919, the United States was swept by a frenzy about deporting people. No less than three people eyeing the democratic and republican president ial nominations in 1920 were campaigning on promises of mass deportations. When this deportation frenzy began in 1919, it was a very stormy time. The war was over. During it, the cost of living had soared. We were in the midst of the biggest strike wave in American History. One in five American Workers went on strike during the year 1919. These are Chicago Police called out because of a Steel Workers strike in chicago. The year 1919 was also a year of some of the worst racial violence in American History. Why . In part because of returning war veterans. 400,000 blacks and several million whites had were competing for jobs. The jobs were scarce because the War Industries had closed down. It