BackStory; The Great War: The Long Shadow of WWI

This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. The United States entered World War One on April 6, 1917. In 1917, Americans were later rivals to the Great War, fighting had raged in Europe for three long years. American Doe boys, as it turned out, would only be involved in the war for 18 more months. But when the smoke cleared, and a new world emerged, America was a nation transformed. Today on the show, World War One's long reach to American history will look at the way the conflict shaped civil liberties? It was not until World War One that the Supreme Court actually got involved in interpreting the First Amendment. And we'll also consider what happened. A military service by African Americans failed to win them the respect they deserved. Not only did it have no impact, it incited defenders of white supremacy. The Great War, one hundred years later, don't go away. Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities,

and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Ed Ayers. Here with Peter Onough. Hey Ed. And Brian Ballow is with us. How you doing Ed? We're going to start today in a little town called Emmitsburg, Maryland, right at its edge, where the sidewalk ends, and all the freight trucks drive out to the farmland. It is an interesting intersection. It's loud. It's busy. This is Mark Levich, there with our producer Andrew Parsons, and Mark is on a mission. And I am trying to document all of the World War I memorials in the United States. And that's actually never been done before. He's found about 2000 so far, but based on his research, he estimates there are roughly 10,000 out there. Here on the edge of Emmitsburg, we find one on a narrow slice of grass

where two roads split. It's not a really useful space. It's just a very tiny finger of land. It's just a few feet by a few feet, really. 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 Indiana artist in the years immediately following the war. The statue is meant to inspire, but... I think cheesy is probably a good word to describe it. Now, this doughboy isn't in the trenches, and he's not in the midst of a charge. Instead, he steps forward with barbed wire at his feet, with a rifle in one hand, and holding a grenade over his head with the other. You know, it's hard to make sense of. You give it a quick glance and go, oh yeah, that's a doughboy, that's World War I, I get it. But then you sort of look a little more carefully, and it's like, hmm, okay.

It's World War I, I see that, but why on earth would somebody in World War I be fighting like that? You know, it's like I've got the sword, the bayonet, and the rifle, and the grenade, but then the pose itself is awkward. To me, it almost looks like he just found a grenade, and he's telling people, hey, look at that cat, look what I found. It looks like it could be a grapefruit. It's true. Never really actually stopped and looked at the statue. This is Eliza Hunt. She has no idea what the statue honors, even though she lived in an apartment building behind it for years. And that building was nicknamed, you guessed it, the doughboy. Then a kid nearby offers his guess on what the statue is. Hitler? In case you missed that, he said Hitler. And we can hardly blame the people here for not really knowing much about this statue. Emmitsburg resident Becky Ott points out that it's not really in a centralized location.

There's no parking here, and it's a busy road. If you weren't looking for it, you probably wouldn't even know what was there. Levych claims that this is not the case with memorials for other wars. Take this civil war. Not only are its monuments given better placement, but they also have heritage societies and re-enactment groups keeping them in good condition. But World War I monuments tend to stand alone, tucked away on the edges of cities and towns. Some are orphaned, some have been run over by cars, and many of these are endangered. So what about the place we most associate with war memorials, Washington, D.C.? Well, Congress is 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 by Americans in the shadow of the Great War. It is mind-boggling perhaps to think

that there are more World War I memorials than World War II memorials to sort of make one stand up and take notice and say that this was so important to so many people. And in a way, the legacies of World War I are just like the monuments built to remember it, hidden in plain sight. It's been a long time since that war has garnered this much attention, at least here in the U.S. And yet, as we just heard, there's plenty of concrete evidence, so to speak, that World War I meant a lot to the people who lived through it. And so today on the show, we're marking the centennial of World War I's beginnings in Europe with an hour on some of its legacies here at home. We've got stories about Woodrow Wilson's radical post-war vision for America about the emergence of the first amendment as we know it today, and about how World War I spawned a new generation of African-American political organizing.

But first, let's return to that doughboy statue in Maryland. Our producer, Andrew Parsons, got to wondering why these memorials got shunted off to the sidelines of America in the first place. The answer he discovered has a lot to do with the times in which those statues were created. Andrew's going to take it from here. When doughboy statues started to pop up around America after the war, artists and architects were horrified by how, well, cheesy they looked. Must we suffer not only war, but also the commemoration of war? This is Art Historian Jennifer Wingate, quoting from the Christian Science Monitor in 1922. She's the author of a book called Sculpt in doughboys. There's so many funny things that they say, but they really see it as it just kind of horror, you know, worse than the war itself. They call this worse than the war itself. 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.

Wingate says many communities in America felt abandoned because the federal government focused more resources for memorialization abroad, and especially to bearing roughly 30 percent of the fallen American soldiers on their European battlefields. Honestly, I think there's this feeling of powerlessness, you know, ultimately that leads to this local immediate desire to do something, to dedicate something. For those families of those 30,000, the memorials here came to be, you know, even more important. Wingate says in every other American war, there was some time that passed to let communities heal before the monuments went up. In the Civil War, for example, monument buildings started decades later, and was actually 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 assessing budgets and fundraising to get their very own doughboy,

the federal fine arts commission in DC decided to weigh in. They were among the critics that were very troubled by the doughboy. They sent pamphlets 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 the fallen. And then they say, if this is the budget you're looking at, please don't erect a sculpture. But many towns didn't heed the warning and rushed to memorialize the Great War because of what they saw around them. The period after World War I, of course, the immediate 1919-1920 is really a period of crisis. So there's the red scare, and there's a recession, and there's unemployment, and racial tension, and lynchings. And I mean, it's very volatile. And so again, I think it is related to this sense of needing to reestablish a sense of power and control

and confidence and this feeling that everything is okay. Even E.M. Viscasne, the Indiana sculptor, who made that statue in Emmetsburg we heard about before, played on the red scare when hawking his doughboys across the country, calling his 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, beautiful memorials? 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 Reinfeld, a professor of history and archaeology at Sweet Briar College, says that so much of World War I straddled this line between the old and the new.

The war itself in so many ways is that betwixt in between. It's the first modern war, large scale war of the 20th century, but it has roots in the past. They're still trying to use calvary and yet they have machine guns. They're using airplanes, but they're embroiled in trench warfare. And so just as World War I itself was a modern war with historic baggage, basically. The memorials very much are on that edge of new and modern, but they can't be too modern because then they wouldn't console people enough. And even those more modern memorials have problems. When you try to integrate memory into daily life in more abstract ways, those memorials can blend in a little too well. So maybe the shunting aside of World War I memorials isn't just because of a design flaw, particular to the doughboys. Maybe it has to do with how the war itself is remembered.

What does it take for war to really stick in people's memory, and usually it's either a personal connection or geographic connection? When you think of other wars, especially here in the South, the Civil War is not only not forgotten in terms of people's personal laws, but also geographically the battlefield still surrounds 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 World War I and it's in the middle of that. It's geographically abroad, and there are no surviving World War I veterans. Which leaves people like Mark Levych to search around the nation, doing the remembering for us all. Back in Emmett's Bergmerland, Mark stops to notice three small cops or bases at the base of the doughboy that look relatively new. It almost looks as if it's an offering of some kind or incense. I can't say this is, I've seen anything like this before. And for a moment, it seems like the statue is serving a purpose.

It does seem that someone is paying his or her respects. Meaning Mark might not be that alone in his search to remember after all. Andrew Parsons is one of our producers. We'll post some photos of the doughboy Monuments he talked about at backstoryradio.org. It's time for a short break that don't go away. When we get back, a war resistor is accused of yelling fire in a crowded theater. You're listening to backstory. We're back with backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. I'm Peter Ronoff. And I'm Ed Ayers. We're talking today about World War I. Now as you may remember from your history books, the United States didn't enter that war until 1917. But August 1914, 100 years ago this month, Mark the beginning of the fighting on the continent of Europe.

Well, we've been calling comments from our website. And we have one from listener Peter's story. And I thought I would share it with you guys and see what you have to say. What Peter wants to know is whether or not Americans paid any attention to World War I before 1917, before American involvement. Or Peter asks, was the war entirely over there that is in Europe, perhaps, of interest only to foreign news buffs and financial types, but few others? What do you say? I say it's a good question because our textbooks always have the lucetania as sort of the beginning of the American interest in the story. And yet if you go back and read newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries, they're covered with international news. We imagine America was ignorant of the world before this. So I'm glad we have a person who specializes in this period here to help us understand it. Where is that person at? It is safe to say that until Americans actually entered the war,

they tended to view it more as a spectator sport. So it's not as though they were not interested. They were interested in the way they were interested in how their favorite baseball team was doing in fact. I challenge that, Brian. It seems to me that Americans know that their players in the world, they know that whatever happens with us or does impact them, whether they fight in it or not. Because Americans are aware, particularly in the wake of the Spanish-American war, American imperialism, America is a worldwide power. It's an empire. And it's engaging with native populations in the Philippines and elsewhere in ways that the British have been engaging with native peoples around the world. And there's a lot of shared experience and increasingly a sense of shared interest in making the world safe for Anglo-American trade. Let's say Americans are on the bench rather than up in the stands.

Yeah. Well, I challenge your challenge, Peter. I think it's over one. Join in ahead of the time you yield. I'm Switzerland here. 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 they're started to be public opinion polling then Americans are notoriously uninterested in foreign affairs. This is not to say that they're not aware of the many commercial relationships between the United States and especially Great Britain, but Europe in general. But I don't think they envision the United States militarily engaged around the world. The way we now take for granted.

And if you look at our go-to source, newspaper headlines, you see headlines that scream giants and Germans lose, referring to a baseball team and the German troops overseas. There is an element of spectator sport observation until we get involved militarily. Well, I think you're both wrong. And you're going to resolve this because there's a third team on the field. So here's what I would say. I think that focusing so much on commercial, I think is kind of beside the point here. If we think about what has America's major role in the world been over the late 19th and early 20th century in its own perception, it has been as missionaries. And we look at World War One not merely as a game, but as an opportunity to use our missionary impulse. And certainly President Wilson speaks this language more than anybody to come and work things out and save the world in the same way that we've been

saving Africa, saving China through missionaries. So it's interesting that it's not just a very cold calculation, but this missionary impulse. Yeah, and Ed, with that sense of mission that you're talking about, that long period of indecision, of sitting it out of neutrality, is not in difference. It's coming to a clear understanding of where and how you need to intervene. So you're in the world, do you need to intervene now? And on what side, those questions don't answer themselves at first. And it takes a period of sustained public relations, sustained reporting on observing the war before Americans can become clear, at least some of them, enough of them to make the choice to intervene. And Peter and Ed, we'd be remiss if we left our listeners thinking that those questions were resolved just because we entered the war. Right. Because in fact, there was remarkable resistance to this war, or 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 the countryside, where people continued to say, well, wait, this doesn't need to be our war. What's in it for us? Yeah, and I think you're right, Brian. And there's a real revulsion against the war in its aftermath. The great question, why did they fight? And was it just industrial interests? Was it a quest for economic domination and power? I think Ed's point about a missionary sense in Woodrow Wilson was absolutely on point because Americans needed to be able to tell themselves there was a point to this war when it was finally over. And the notion of, well, exporting democracy, that was a way of making sense of it. It's something like emancipation in the Civil War. The difference being, in the 1920s, the story would have been that was a mistake

that it was your munitions makers that got us into this. That's exactly right. So unlike the Civil War, in which we cleaned it up after the fact, oh yeah, it was too free to slaves. After World War I, it's like, gee, you know, what a mistake. We'll never do that again. And then World War II, I'd not to ruin the story for people, but there's another World War after this one that actually goes back and gives shape and meaning to World War I that it did not have had it been isolated. Over there. Over there. Over there. Over there. Over there. Over there. Over there. That the gangs are coming. The gangs are coming. The drum, drum, tomming, and becoming everywhere. Now, just in case you don't remember all the details of World War I and beyond the sinking of the Lucitania, let's fill in some of the basics. On July 28th, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.

By August of that year, that conflict had consumed much of Europe as countries bound by treaties to defend and support one another were drawn in. Russia, France, and Great Britain, the Allies fought against Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, and the Ottoman Empire. And those were just the big players. In 1917, the United States joined in. Ultimately, more than 100 countries and colonies would be involved in the war. In November of 1918, the Great Powers signed armistice agreements effectively ending the fighting. It took six more months for negotiations to result in the last peace treaty, the Treaty of Versailles, designed to extract reparations from Germany. 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. It resulted largely from the efforts of Woodrow Wilson,

who, as Harvard historian Eris Monella says, felt the Old World Order, one where nations supposedly balanced each other's power as a means of ensuring peace, just wasn't working. Wilson sees the war as evidence that the balance of power arrangement has failed spectacularly and cannot be resuscitated. There cannot, in his view, be a new order that is again based on balance of power. So then the question becomes for him, what is the alternative to balance of power? And the alternative that he comes up with, an institutional form takes the form in his mind of the League of Nations. And I think that Wilson has in mind a fairly straightforward parallel between the League of Nations as he sees 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 the Constitution was going to bring together

were sovereign international entities. Describe Wilson's vision of collective security through the League of Nations when he first imagined it. And tell me how that changed as a result of his war experience. Well, the issue that is often focused on when we think about collective security and the point 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 the United States to military involvement in Europe or elsewhere wherever conflict was going to break out. And actually Wilson was very, very clear. And he stated this numerous times explicitly that the military intervention was going to be the very last resort, only if everything else has failed. And everything else meant two things that were to come before military intervention. One was what he called world opinion.

His sense that once you get countries agreeing to be members to join up, you will get countries and leaders starting to feel that they have an interest in the sense. Now, if that wasn't going to work, if some country was going to take aggressive action despite these kinds of shared understandings, then the next stage was going to be economic sanctions. But here, this was going to be a multilateral process. So this is the innovation. Innovation is it wasn't simply going to be one belligerent was going to put the other belligerent under blockade. It was going to be that the world community, in a sense, was going 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 that was an important stage. So buy-in from the international community was one of the real key innovations that Wilson was pursuing. Absolutely, and I think, I mean, look, international organizations had been in place for a while and obviously the clearest precedent here is the concert of Europe that was put in place

after the Napoleonic Wars, after 1815. But for Wilson, actually, it wasn't a very good precedent because the concert only took into account the views of the great powers. And Wilson actually strongly believed in this concept of the equality of nations that the small nations, as they were called at the time, had to be involved in this. And in fact, he perceived, in a sense, the small nations operating as a kind of break on the ambitions of the great powers. How did the League of Nations that actually emerged out of the Treaty of Versailles how did that differ from Wilson's original conception? Yeah, well, that's actually a really important question because one thing that's often missed in the history is that the League of Nations covenant that emerged out of Versailles was a very different creature from what Wilson had envisioned. And I think the best example of this is through the evolution of what's known as Article 10

that guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the nation's 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 a security and territorial integrity of the member states. But then there was a very important and extended accept. And he said, accept in such circumstances, and I'm paraphrasing, except in such circumstances, where changes in racial conditions and economic conditions and the desires of the people is concerned, will necessitate changes in borders pursuant to the principle of self-determination and he said that in such cases, the League of Nations could by a 75% or a 3-quarters majority could actually affect the redrawing of borders, of international borders. So he actually wanted to build into the League a mechanism for what can only be described as, I suppose, a form of world government.

This is really pretty radical stuff. It is quite radical stuff. Now, I want to emphasize Wilson did not come by this radical idea easily. He came by it because by the end of the war he was convinced that the old order was so broken and so dangerous that something radical had to be done to put together an international system that would work. It wasn't exactly what Wilson envisioned, but we do get a League of Nations, sans the United States. Did it accomplish what Wilson thought it would? Well, obviously it didn't. It didn't even come close. First of all, the League covenant that emerges from the negotiations in Versailles is quite different from what Wilson had in mind initially. It's to his mind a watered-down version. He's still defensive. He still wants the United States to join it.

And that's because 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 a chance of it evolving in the right direction over time. Then the other problem is that the United States Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles and the League covenant that was attached to it, and so the United States, in fact, never joins a League of Nations. How much did Wilson's vision shape American foreign policy in the century that has followed? Oh, I think it's shaped American foreign policy and American posture in the world to a very great degree. If we look at Franklin Roosevelt, I see Roosevelt as a convinced Wilsonian who believes in a Second World War that Wilson had it right in terms of the general principles, but bungled 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 he reconstitutes the League of Nations as the United Nations. And that system that Wilson put in place is not only not discarded. It's in fact bolstered and developed into the United Nations system that we have today, the United Nations Security Council, the General Assembly, and all of the various other organizations like UNESCO, like the World Health Organization, and so on and so forth, that in fact have a great 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 has in fact evolved. Even if it hasn't fulfilled all the hopes that he and others have had for it. Eris, thanks for making Wilsonianism safe for public radio. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It was a great pleasure. Eris Manella is a historian at Harvard University.

He's the author of the Wilsonian Moment. If you're just joining us, this is backstory. And we're marking the 100th anniversary of World War I's beginnings by exploring some of that war's legacies here at home. In 1917, the year that the U.S. entered the fray, a Philadelphia man named Charles Shank mailed out 15,000 leaflets protesting the country's brand new draft system. Shank was General Secretary of the Socialist Party of the United States and his flyers urged people to fight what Shank and other war dissenters considered involuntary servitude. But earlier that same year, Woodrow Wilson had pushed the Espionage Act through Congress. This law essentially made it a crime to interfere with U.S. military operations, including recruitment. Wilson and others believed that enemy sympathizers on the home front were endangering the war effort. And on these grounds, Charles Shank was arrested and sentenced to six months in jail.

He appealed the decision arguing that it was a violation of his first amendment rights. To our ears, this sounds like an open and shut case. And a perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to rein in legislative infringement of civil liberties. But University of Chicago legal scholar Jeffrey Stone says that 100 years ago that wasn't so clear. 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 the first amendment. Where the justices came down, at least in this case, was on the side of the government. The Supreme Court concluded that during wartime, the government had broad authority to suppress potentially dangerous speech and upheld Shank's conviction. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion. And in doing so, Holmes wrote a kind of puzzling opinion. Again, Jeffrey Stone.

The first amendment provides that Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of speech or of the press and taken literally that seems to mean the government can never interfere with speech. And Holmes wanted to say, that can't be right. And so he gave this famous hypothetical to say, well, clearly it doesn't mean what it seems to mean because obviously the government can prohibit someone from falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater. We admit that, in many places and in ordinary times, the defendants would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. And then he uses this very famous language of clear and present danger. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. Most of us today hearing the phrase clear and present danger would think that meant a very demanding test, a very rigorous test.

And nothing that shank did would seem to qualify for the kind of clear and present danger that's typified by, say, a false cry of fire in a crowded theater, where there'd be an immediate dash to the exits and people would be trampled and people would be harmed. So it was clear that in the spring of 1919, when Holmes headed down these decisions, his view is that the First Amendment had very little bite to it. But that summer, Holmes's opinion began to change. As he boarded the train for his vacation in New England, fate would have it that Holmes was seated next to a fellow judge named Learned Hand. And very respectfully, because Holmes was the Supreme Court Justice, and Hand was a 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? Hand wasn't the only one criticizing Holmes's take on the First Amendment, other public intellectuals pointed out that Holmes was, well, wrong. And to his credit, he actually listened to the different competing views, and when he came back to Washington the following fall, he began to have serious second thoughts about what he had done in Shack.

That became evident when the court heard Abrams versus the United States that fall, like Shank, Jacob Abrams, and his cohorts had been arrested for distributing anti-war flyers. They were convicted under a newer federal law, the Sedition Act, which expressly prohibited any disloyal, profane, scourless, or abusive language about the U.S. government. The majority of the Supreme Court said, basically, this is a non-issue. We've already decided this last spring in Shank, and therefore these guys go to jail. And Holmes, to everyone, Shack, joined by Justice Lewis Brandeis, wrote a powerful eloquent dissenting opinion in which he latched on to the phrase clear and present danger. And he said, no, no, no, the test is clear and present danger. There's no clear and present danger here. Abrams cannot be convicted. The majority said, what are you talking about? This case is no different from the cases from the spring, and Holmes basically pretended that the case was different.

Holmes was a respected judge, yet his fellow justice is just couldn't understand his sudden conversion on the First Amendment. Stone says that while Holmes and Brandeis continued to push for a broader interpretation of the First Amendment in a series of eloquent dissents in the post-war years, they never persuaded the majority. 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 in America thought about freedom of speech. It wasn't until 1969 that the Supreme Court finally overruled a shank decision in a case called Brandenburg versus Ohio. And in its decision, the court cited several of Holmes and Brandeis's famous dissents from nearly 50 years before. And it's a great example of exactly what they were arguing about. What they were saying 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 can come to have perhaps better conclusions.

And their opinions were meant to be, and were, in fact, a perfect illustration of exactly what they were defending in terms of the meaning of free speech. Jeffrey Stone is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. It's time for another break, but stick around. When we get back, have the Neural Disease brought down the progressive movement. More backstory coming up in a minute. This is backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. I'm Peter Ronoff. 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 the 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 to the action. As the United States mobilized for war in 1917, Americans began to fear for their young soldiers. But not in the way you might think.

Take, for example, this letter to government officials from a concerned mother. I could bear it if my boy came back a cripple. But I would rather he died in the trenches than to have him come back with an incurable disease, or one that would take his children and his children's children for generations. Now this mother wasn't talking about just any ailment. Americans, including the president, were terrified of venereal disease. And they had a reason to worry. In the days before penicillin, V.D. could decommission a lot of soldiers. And that's exactly what was happening to U.S. allies overseas. Over the course of the war, an estimated 5% of British troops were hospitalized for syphilis and gonorrhea. To head off the threat posed by all the young men beginning to coalesce in training camp stateside, places known for their proximity to brothels and saloons, President Wilson and a coalition of progressive reformers set up the committee on training camp activities.

But historian Nancy Bristo says that this group of reformers all had different ideas about how to stop the scourge of venereal disease. 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 self control and manage their bodies through sexual abstinence, at least until marriage. And they're going to do things like hosting picnics and having town parades. And those things are going to have much impact 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 a pretty complicated way to provide opportunities for girls to find a route that is meaningful to them away from prostitution, away from simply being exploited for sex during the war. But the efficiency reformers when push comes to shove are going to be most interested in keeping the soldiers free of disease.

And the commission on training camp activities, the federal agency that's actually created to oversee these issues during the war. GTCA is really most of all concerned with efficiency. And here you can think of any number of urban governments that are set up in this time to run things in a more democratic but also more efficient manner. These folks when it comes to VD are wanting to hand out condoms. They want to cut to the chase. And that's really where the federal government comes down is that they really want virile yet virginal soldiers as the historian Ellen Brandt describes it, but they're willing to have the backup plan. So it sounds to me like virile trumped virginal. Yes, they're going to be willing to use law enforcement programs and they're going to use them pretty repressively for young women. Part of what happens as they begin a more law enforcement 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 that resembles a sexual act. In fact, they can be at a dance and dance incorrectly. I have a wonderful report from one of the investigators. He's a field worker for the commission on training camp activity writes a report from New Jersey. And he reports that promiscuous girls are very easy to identify by the way they dance. And he says in his report, the investigator attended a dance and personally danced with some of the young girls present. The manner of dancing by certain of these girls was so suggestive as to constitute almost positive proof of their indulging in sexual intercourse. And they go on to talk repeatedly then in reports coming from their investigators about women who appeared to be prostitutes. And what that means in fact is that they're women who aren't behaving according to white middle class purity driven social standards. They're not adhering to the notions about women that they will be pious and pure and domestic and submissive. Sounds like there's some investigators who are violating those rules as well.

I'm glad you noticed. And once you're rested, it goes like this. You're rested and you are taken to a hospital or to some sort of medical clinic where you're tested for venereal disease. If you have it, you are then locked up in a hospital until you're cured in a prepenicillin world. This could take months and months and months. You might never be cured. Once you're cured, you are then prosecuted for your crime. And then once you're prosecuted, you are held in a 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 were treated the same, where both would become advocates of purity in American life. The reality is that both this commission and the American populace, and I suppose I should add a third population, the American soldiers, they don't buy it by and large. Boys will be boys, men will be men, but women are to be the moral bastions of the American culture. This coalition is easy to make fun of, but they did have some very idealistic hopes. Did the coalition hold together after the war? Were any of these objectives pursued in the 1920s and were the actors the same?

Historians have long said that World War I brought the end of the progressive movement. I would actually frame it just a little bit differently and say that the war actually empowered progressives 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, okay, we'll work together on this because we all agree that veneeral disease is a serious problem in American life. They could hold together tenuously until there's actual real power to hand around. Until you 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. So even during the course of the war, people recognize who's winning and losing in this agency. And people begin, for instance, to quit their jobs with the CTCA. Because it's wartime, many people have to play along because to disagree with federal policy is to be charged during this war as often as the case, to be charged as being unpatriotic, being charged with actually helping the enemy even.

But with the end of the war, that pressure to go along really fractures. And in the aftermath of the war, the progressive coalition in general is coming apart at the seams. Even as Americans are just fed up with federal intervention in their lives, Americans have a short attention span. In the aftermath of the war, we see the decline of progressivism quite rapidly. We go from an all for one and one for all to, you know, individualism. It's up to you to make your own way. Let's not have a social safety net. Let's not be preoccupied with community. Nancy Pristo is a historian at the University of Puget Sound. She's the author of Making Men Moral. Social engineering during the Great War. When we think about the struggle for African-American civil rights, a lot of us cast our minds back to the post-World War II era in the 1950s and 1960s.

But a lot of the activist organizations from that period had their roots in the years following World War I. African-Americans participated in that earlier war in a big way. We're going to conclude our show with a story of one of them, a woman named Catherine Johnson. She was one of many thousands of black Americans whose experiences in World War I profoundly affected their views of the nation and left them more determined than ever to fight for justice. Catherine Johnson was born to a middle class family in Ohio in the years following the Civil War. When she was in her 20s, she moved down South, first to teach in an all black college in North Carolina, and then in Arkansas. It was right around this time that Jim Crow laws and the violence that enforced those laws were tightening their grip on the South. In 1906, her Arkansas school was attacked and nearly burned down by white rioters. That experienced taught her a lot.

Being upright and being right is never going to be enough. This is historian Catherine Lent Smith, who profiles Johnson in her book Freedom Struggles. She wants to do more. She wants to be more forceful. She wants to be out in the world making a difference and teaching doesn't allow her to do that. So Johnson finds a place in the nascent black freedom struggle, becoming a field organizer for the newly formed NAACP. And with the advent of World War I, Johnson and on God of these African-American activists see an opportunity. When the U.S. 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 about self-determination and all sorts of things that African-Americans living in Woodrow, Wilson's United States didn't have. But hope to have. Many of them, Johnson among them, saw the war as an opportunity 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.

Nearly 400,000 African-Americans served in the war, half of them serving abroad, most worked as laborers. There were also some black civilians who joined the war effort as volunteers. Johnson was one of them. And as a volunteer for the YMCA in France, she had a front-row view of a society where black people were treated very differently than they were back home. Johnson herself talks about sitting on public transportation and seeing a white woman give up her seat for a French colonial African soldier and marveling that that would never ever happen in the United States. 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. They were given the worst jobs on bases and they were thrown in the brig when they barked 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 promises of the war and the unchanged segregation in the United States turned with a new energy to political organizing. NWACP chapters proliferated. Membership spiked in black nationalists organizations like Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. African-Americans realized that they had to make their demands and defend themselves rather than to prove themselves and show themselves worthy. And that's a very different strategy. Well, it's a mediumly different strategy than the one that they had been pursuing before. And was it that no proof could be stronger than the willingness to die for their country yet? It seemed to have no impact whatsoever.

Not only did it have no impact, it incited defenders of white supremacy. It provoked them into greater repression and violence. White 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 and major cities including Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands injured as white rioters set upon black neighborhoods, lynching spiked in the south with several black soldiers in uniform among the victims. But what you see in Chicago, what you see in D.C., what you see elsewhere are veterans bringing their military training to bear and really doing organized defense of their neighborhoods to keep white rampagers out. So in Chicago, for example, veterans go to the armory of the 8th Illinois National Guard, gather arms, and then station themselves at strategic corners of their neighborhoods to defend from incursions.

Despite violent resistance, black political organizations continued to grow throughout the 20s and 30s. Catherine Johnson continued in a lot of these circles. She stayed active with the NAACP and Garvey's group, and she worked in settlement houses in Chicago, helping the waves of black families who had moved there during and right after the war. In the 30s, she joined solidarity movements with freedom struggles in Africa. In a lot of ways, her work was typical for a black activist of this era. Where she diverges is in 1940 when she decides to run for Congress, which not many black women opted to do in 1940, right? And she knew she wasn't going to win, but she has a critique and she wants a platform. And interestingly enough, she's trying to keep the US out of World War II, because she does not believe that the war will serve either the purpose of the African-American freedom struggle. The African-American freedom struggle or the well-being of the nation.

That's Catherine Glenn Smith. She's a historian at Duke University and the author of Freedom Struggles, African-Americans in World War I. That's going to do it for us today, but we're eager to hear any stories you might have about the impacts of World War I on people's lives here in the US. Our email address is backstory at Virginia.edu, and you can leave us a comment at backstoryradio.org. And while you're there, we'd also love to hear your stories and questions for our upcoming episode about the idea of wilderness in American history. We're also on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and whatever you do, don't be a stranger. Today's episode of backstory was produced by Tony Feele, Nina Ernest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, and Bruce Wallace, with help from Emily Charnock. Illigatic is our digital producer and Jamal Milner is our engineer. Special thanks this week to Beth Linker, Thomas Britton, Stephen Ortiz, and Max Brooks.

This week we say goodbye to our intern, Sam Olmstein. All summer, Sam has generously shared his knowledge of history with our producers and provided all manners of clutch backup. Sam, if all high school history teachers were as thoughtful and passionate as you, we'd all be better off. Thanks for everything. Backstories executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Major support for Backstories is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National 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 in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, history made every day. Brian Ballot is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onaf is professor of history emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monicello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. Backstories was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.