New York at War (30 page)

The fissures of class, ethnicity, and politics never fully subsided in postwar New York but continued as immigration brought hundreds of thousands of newcomers to the city’s slums and sweatshops. Reformers who launched postwar inquests into housing and health conditions pointed over their shoulders to the Draft Riot, warning that the city’s poverty could again incubate violence, perhaps even revolution. Their efforts to improve daily life for what some were coming to call the urban “proletaire” could not put to rest fears about potential enemies within the gate—enemies who might speak not with an Irish brogue or a Southern twang, but in other, guttural accents.
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CHAPTER 7

Huns Within Our Gates

World War I, 1914–1918

O
n the evening of March 8, 1902, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, brother of the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, rose to address 1,300 American dignitaries who had gathered to fete him in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Fifth Avenue. “The measure of confidence placed by two great nations in each other has grown and expanded,” the prince, speaking in his native tongue, told his hosts. Enthusiastic applause greeted his comments from the men at the banquet tables and from the jewel-bedecked ladies seated in the ballroom’s balcony boxes. Among the most conspicuous guests were New Yorkers of German birth or ancestry who had worked their way to success and distinction in the city, men like publisher Hermann Ridder, brewer Jacob Ruppert, real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau, and banker Jacob Schiff.
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The prince had arrived two weeks earlier to take formal possession of the schooner
Meteor
, commissioned as a royal yacht by the kaiser from a shipyard on Shooter’s Island in New York harbor. On February 25, President Theodore Roosevelt chatted affably with the prince at the yacht’s ceremonial launching there. But the prince’s goodwill tour had a larger diplomatic purpose. At the end of the brief American war with Spain in 1898 (a war in which Roosevelt and other New Yorkers figured prominently), the American and German Pacific fleets had almost come to blows in the waters off the Philippines. The episode seemed to presage further clashes between two industrial nations aspiring to world power, and German-American relations had been tense ever since. The prince, a polite man who also happened to be an admiral in the German navy, managed to defuse the tension. In New York he received the “Freedom of the City” from Mayor Low and stated how “inspiring” he found New Yorkers. In their faces, he told reporters, he saw “activity and ambition not dulled by too much contentment, yet not marred by discontent. Is not this the balance,” he asked, “that makes your people so happy and so powerful?”
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No one was happier with all this than New York’s vast German American enclave of 750,000, more than a fifth of the city’s total population. The
New York Times
described a “spectacular” torchlight parade honoring the prince, in which over 8,000 members of 320 local German societies marched down Park Avenue. New York was, after all, the world’s third largest German-speaking city after Berlin and Vienna. Decades of immigration had created an entire city within a city, proud of its own newspapers, churches, orchestras, choral groups, beer halls, and clubs, even as many German newcomers and their American-born children entered the city’s English-speaking mainstream. Most of them cherished American freedoms while simultaneously expressing an exuberant pride in their German roots. Few people suggested that their dual affections should lay German New Yorkers open to the charge of disloyalty. Most observers, including those who viewed the rising tide of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe with dismay, regarded German Americans as the ideal immigrant group: staid, responsible, upwardly mobile.
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What Prince Heinrich knew at the time, and Americans (including German Americans) did not, was that the kaiser and his naval high command nursed an abiding hostility toward the United States, which had come to shape imperial planning. In the German race to overtake Britain as the world’s foremost power, Wilhelm II perceived a threat in the increasingly global ambitions of the United States, especially in American encroachment on territories, markets, and potential naval bases in the Pacific and Caribbean. “A war to the death” between the two powers was inevitable, the kaiser told his advisors.
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Accordingly, between 1897 and 1903, German admiralty staff officers and army strategists developed secret plans for the invasion of the American East Coast as the decisive blow that would knock America out of world competition. Naval officers proposed the seizure of Puerto Rico or Haiti as a staging area for attacking New York and New England, which they judged to be America’s industrial and commercial heart. The planners foresaw one hundred thousand troops landing at Provincetown on Cape Cod and using it as a base for an attack on Boston and the New England coast. The invasion fleet would also prepare for “a joint advance by land and sea against Brooklyn and New York.” After defeating the American navy off the coast, a quick, decisive thrust against New York City and Boston was imperative and far more crucial than the conquest of the mere political capital of Washington, DC.

By 1899 the German military attaché in Washington, Count von Gotzen, had provided the admiralty staff with detailed information on the forts guarding New York harbor. While some officers argued that the harbor’s forts might foil the attack, Lieutenant (later Admiral) Eberhard von Mantey, the plan’s mastermind, predicted that “in New York large-scale panic will result from just the mention of a possible bombardment,” impeding defensive preparations and leading to American capitulation in the face of Germany’s lightning-swift attack.
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It remains unclear whether Germany’s plans for seizing New York represented a serious contingency or a mere academic exercise. At the very least, the plans reveal a vision in which New York and the entire Northeast, sources and symbols of American impudence, would be vanquished by German might. Resentment of the growing power of New York City and its business titans was widely shared. A popular German magazine warned in 1899 that in the new century, “much of Europe will go into the private ownership of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.” In any event, by 1906 the admiralty had shelved its plans, to be forgotten as the army general staff persuaded Wilhelm that a swift land war against France and Russia could bestow the continental domination that Germany deserved. Revenge against American insolence would have to wait. By the time that occurred, some fifteen years after Heinrich’s visit, fears and doubts about the loyalty of German Americans—and of other New Yorkers, as well—would shape how the nation’s largest city experienced a world war. That war’s battlefields remained three thousand miles away, but its passions and allegiances would be urgently local.
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The outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 caught New York and the rest of the country off guard. A month after the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb nationalists, the major European powers put into motion the grand offensives they had been planning for years. The armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) and of France, Britain, and Russia (the Allies) battled each other in Europe and soon also in Africa and the Middle East. As Wall Street’s markets slumped in response to the turmoil, and the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading for four months, President Woodrow Wilson counseled Americans to remain calm and to avoid taking sides in a deplorable conflict that was none of their business. “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action,” he told his countrymen.
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As never before, New York in 1914 was the national capital in every sense but the political, and its international influence led people to call it an “imperial” city. Wall Street, Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and the Statue of Liberty had become catchphrases around the world. But to many Americans in 1914, New York City was also a kind of national litmus test, the most vivid case study of the policy of unrestricted immigration that had filled the metropolis and the country with the peoples of Europe. Almost one third of the nation, and 40 percent of New York City’s five million people, were foreign-born. For many Americans, New York seemed the crucial laboratory for gauging whether immigration was forging a unified people in whose hands democracy was safe or instead a patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods blighted by conflict and degeneration. For many, especially among the native-born, the line between optimism and alarm was often perilously thin. Even liberals bent on preserving a tolerant society feared that national unity was a fragile affair, only preserved by keeping European conflicts at bay. To the German ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, Wilson explained that the nation must stay neutral, or otherwise “our mixed populations would wage war on each other.”
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But Europe wouldn’t let New York alone. The belligerents, recognizing the city’s pivotal role in American finance, industry, and opinion making, immediately sought to enlist hearts and minds on the Atlantic’s western shore. From his headquarters in London’s Wellington House, Sir Gilbert Parker, head of the American division of the newly formed, top-secret War Propaganda Bureau, wrote letters and sent pamphlets across the Atlantic to thousands of “influential and eminent people of every profession” to build “a backing for the British cause.” Parker’s men also fed their version of the war to the principal correspondents of the New York papers and press services, most of whom used London as their base for covering European news, thereby guaranteeing that the British perspective would be read throughout the United States. Such efforts intensified as the summer’s illusions of quick victory gave way to the deadlock of trench warfare along a Western Front occupied by three million soldiers and stretching from the Swiss border to the English Channel. Exaggerated reports of German atrocities against Belgian civilians, disseminated from Wellington House, filled the headlines of New York’s dailies. By May 1915, when a German U-boat sank the English liner
Lusitania
, six days out from New York, with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans, the phrase “Remember Belgium” was already imbedded in millions of American minds as a token of German brutality.
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Many New Yorkers needed little prodding to side with the Allies, despite Wilson’s plea for neutrality. This was especially true within the city’s business and professional elite, dominated by Protestants of British descent who viewed the British Empire’s constitutional monarchy and the French Republic as politically kindred to the United States. In their eyes, London and Paris, not Berlin and Vienna, were the cities whose standards of civilization New York had rightfully inherited. That the Allies, just like the Germans, might be concerned with maintaining their empires and seizing new territories and markets was rarely acknowledged. Endorsing American neutrality while supporting the Allies in spirit, the
New York Times
voiced the dominant position of the city’s establishment: the war was one between “autocracy and democracy . . . between the slowly reached ideals of liberty toward which Europe has been struggling for a century and the old system of absolutism.” In short, the
Times
argued, the Allies stood for enlightenment and progress; Germany and the other Central Powers embodied tyranny and reaction.
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Among the new immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and settling into the city’s tenement districts, ardent Allied sympathizers could be found as well. The city’s Czechs and Slovaks, for instance, supported an Allied victory as their best hope for freeing their homelands from the thrall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After Italy joined the Allies in May 1915, the half million inhabitants of Little Italy, East Harlem, and other Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx festooned their shops with flags and banners urging the Italian army to seize Trieste and Trento from the Austrians. “Women and girls sat on the stoops” in Little Italy, a
Times
reporter noted, chatting “about the war and what Italy was going to do to Austria and Germany. . . . In the streets little children played war and talked war.” Thousands of young emigrants, reservists in the Italian army and navy, lined up outside the Italian consulate on Spring Street; some boarded steamships for Genoa and Naples. But older women on Mulberry and Mott streets looked somber: many “had sons, grandsons, or relatives in the army of Italy, and it was easy to see that they were thinking of what the war might mean to their far-away kindred.”
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Other groups in America, however, were averse to the Allied cause, a fact appreciated by Sir Gilbert Parker’s German rivals. Like the English propagandists of Wellington House, dignitaries in Berlin covertly tried to shape American opinion. In this they had the cooperation of the German ambassador to Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, who feared that American links to Britain and France might eventually lure the “great neutral” into the war on the Allied side. To help prevent this, von Bernstorff relied on a slush fund of millions of dollars in German Treasury notes, much of which he deposited in the Chase National Bank on lower Broadway in July 1914. His emissaries enlisted a flamboyant young German-born poet, George Sylvester Viereck, who began publishing a pro-German weekly magazine,
The Fatherland
, from an office on Broadway
.
With undisclosed subsidies from von Bernstorff’s fund, he printed a steady stream of lively, provocative articles under the motto “Fair play for Germany and Austria-Hungary.” Viereck vowed to “break the power of England upon our government” and exploited every opportunity to undermine support for the Allies. Americans, he suggested, should prefer the “German imperial cross” to the “well-known double-cross of Great Britain”—a point he underscored by reminding readers of British “tyranny” during the American Revolution and War of 1812.
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