The Great Influenza (19 page)

Creel began intending to report only facts, if carefully selected ones, and conducting only a positive campaign, avoiding the use of fear as a tool. But this soon changed. The new attitude was embodied in a declaration by one of Creel's writers that, 'Inscribed in our banner even above the legend Truth is the noblest of all mottoes - 'We Serve.' They served a cause. One poster designed to sell Liberty Bonds warned, 'I am Public Opinion. All men fear me!' [I]f you have the money to buy and do not buy, I will make this No Man's Land for you!' Another CPI poster asked, 'Have you met this Kaiserite?' You find him in hotel lobbies, smoking compartments, clubs, offices, even homes' . He is a scandal-monger of the most dangerous type. He repeats all the rumors, criticism, and lies he hears about our country's part in the war. He's very plausible' . People like that' through their vanity or curiosity or
treason
they are helping German propagandists sow the seeds of discontent' .'

Creel demanded '100% Americanism' and planned for 'every printed bullet [to] reach its mark.' Simultaneously, he told the Four Minute Men that fear was 'an important element to be bred in the civilian population. It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane. To fight for an ideal, perhaps, must be coupled with thoughts of self-preservation.'

'Liberty Sings' (weekly community events) spread from Philadelphia across the country. Children's choruses, barbershop quartets, church choirs - all performed patriotic songs while the audiences sang along. At each gathering a Four Minute Man began the ceremonies with a speech.

Songs that might hurt morale were prohibited. Raymond Fosdick, a student of Wilson's at Princeton and board member (and later president) of the Rockefeller Foundation, headed the Commission on Training Camp Activities. This commission banned such songs as 'I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now' and 'venomous parodies' such as 'Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle While Mr. Rip Van Winkle Was Away?' along with 'questionable jokes and other jokes, which while apparently harmless, have a hidden sting which leave the poison of discontent and worry and anxiety in the minds of the soldiers and cause them to fret about home' . [T]he songs and jokes were the culmination of letter writing propaganda instigated by the Huns in which they told lying tales to the men of alleged conditions of suffering at home.'

And Wilson gave no quarter. To open a Liberty Loan drive, Wilson demanded, 'Force! Force to the utmost! Force without stint or limit! the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.'

* 

That force would ultimately, if indirectly, intensify the attack of influenza and undermine the social fabric. A softer path that Wilson also tried to lead the nation down would mitigate (but only somewhat) the damage.

The softer path meant the American Red Cross.

If the American Protective League mobilized citizens, nearly all of them men, to spy upon and attack anyone who criticized the war, the American Red Cross mobilized citizens, nearly all of them women, in more productive ways. The International Red Cross had been founded in 1863 with its focus on war, on the decent treatment of prisoners as set forth in the first Geneva Convention. In 1881 Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross, and the next year the United States accepted the guidelines of the convention. By World War I, all the combatants were members of the International Red Cross. But each national unit was fully independent.

The American Red Cross was a quasi-public institution whose titular president was (and is) the president of the United States. Officially chartered by Congress to serve the nation in times of emergency, the American Red Cross grew even closer to the government during the war. The chairman of its Central Committee was Wilson's presidential predecessor William Howard Taft, and Wilson had appointed its entire 'War Council,' the real ruling body of the organization.

As soon as the United States entered World War I, the American Red Cross declared that it would 'exert itself in any way which' might aid our allies' . The organization seeks in this great world emergency to do nothing more and nothing less than to coordinate the generosity and the effort of our people toward achieving a supreme aim.'

There was no more patriotic organization. It had full responsibility for supplying nurses, tens of thousands of them, to the military. It organized fifty base hospitals in France. It equipped several railroad cars as specialized laboratories in case of disease outbreaks (but reserving them for use only by the military, not by civilians) and stationed them 'so that one may be delivered at any point [in the country] within 24 hours.' (The Rockefeller Institute also outfitted railroad cars as state-of-the-art laboratories and placed them around the country.) It cared for civilians injured or made homeless after several explosions in munitions factories.

But its most important role had nothing to do with medicine or disasters. Its most important function was to bind the nation together, for Wilson used it to reach into every community in the country. Nor did the Red Cross waste the opportunity to increase its presence in American life.

It had already made a reputation in several disasters: the Johnstown flood in 1889, when a dam broke and water smashed down upon the Pennsylvania city like a hammer, killing twenty-five hundred people; the San Francisco earthquake in 1906; major floods on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in 1912. It had also served American troops in the Spanish-American War and during the insurrection in the Philippines that followed.

Still, the American Red Cross began the Great War with only 107 local chapters. It finished with 3,864 chapters.

It reached into the largest cities and into the smallest villages. It made clear that to participate in Red Cross activities was to join the great crusade for civilization, and especially for American civilization. And it used subtlety and social pressure to all but compel participation. It identified the most prominent and influential man in a city, a person whom others could refuse only with difficulty, and asked him to chair the local Red Cross chapter; it appealed to him, told him how important he was to the war effort, how needed he was. Almost invariably he agreed. And it asked the leading hostess, the leader of 'society' in cities (in Philadelphia, Mrs. J. Willis Martin, who started the nation's first garden club and whose family and husband's family were as established as any on the Main Line) or whatever passed for 'society' in small towns (in Haskell County, Mrs. Loring Miner, whose father was the largest landowner in southwest Kansas) to chair a woman's auxiliary.

In 1918 the Red Cross counted thirty million Americans (out of a total population of 105 million) as active supporters. Eight million Americans, nearly 8 percent of the entire population, served as production workers in local chapters. (The Red Cross had more volunteers in World War I than in World War II despite a 30 percent increase in the nation's population.) Women made up nearly all this enormous volunteer workforce, and they might as well have worked in factories. Each chapter received a production quota, and each chapter produced that quota. They produced millions of sweaters, millions of blankets, millions of socks. They made furniture. They did everything requested of them, and they did it well. When the Federal Food Administration said that pits from peaches, prunes, dates, plums, apricots, olives, and cherries were needed to make carbon for gas masks, newspapers reported, 'Confectioners and restaurants in various cities have begun to serve nuts and fruit at cost in order to turn in the pits and shells, a patriotic service' . Every American man, woman or child who has a relative or friend in the army should consider it a matter of personal obligation to provide enough carbon making material for his gas mask.' And so Red Cross chapters throughout the country collected thousands of tons of fruit pits - so many they were told, finally, to stop.

As William Maxwell, a novelist and
New Yorker
editor who grew up in Lincoln, Illinois, recalled, '[M]other would go down to roll bandages for the soldiers. She put something like a dish towel on her head with a red cross on the front and wore white, and in school we saved prune pits which were supposed to be turned into gas masks so that the town was aware of the war effort' . At all events there was an active sense of taking part in the war.'

* 

The war was absorbing all of the nation. The draft, originally limited to men aged twenty-one to thirty, was soon extended to men aged eighteen to forty-five. Even with the expanded base, the government declared that all men in that age group would be called within a year.
All
men, the government said.

The army would require as well at least one hundred thousand officers. The Student Army Training Corps was to provide many of that number: it would admit 'men by voluntary induction,' placing them on active duty immediately.'

In May 1918 Secretary of War Newton Baker wrote the presidents of all institutions 'of Collegiate Grade,' from Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the North Pacific College of Dentistry in Portland, Oregon. He did not ask for cooperation, much less permission. He simply stated, 'Military instruction under officers and non-commissioned officers of the Army will be provided in every institution of college grade which enroll 100 or more male students' . All students over the age of 18 will be encouraged to enlist' . The commanding officer' [will] enforce military discipline.'

In August 1918 an underling followed Baker's letter with a memo to college administrators, stating that the war would likely necessitate 'the mobilization of all physically-fit registrants under 21, within 10 months from this date' . The student, by voluntary induction, becomes a soldier in the United States Army, uniformed, subject to military discipline and with the pay of a private' on full active duty.' Upon being activated, nearly all would be sent to the front. Twenty-year-olds would get only three months' training before activation, with younger men getting only a few months more. 'In view of the comparatively short time during which most of the student-soldiers will remain in college and the exacting military duties awaiting them, academic instruction must necessarily be modified along the lines of direct military value.'

Therefore the teaching of academic courses was to end, to be replaced by military training. Military officers were to take virtual command of each college in the country. High schools were 'urged to intensify their instruction so that young men 17 and 18 years old may be qualified to enter college as quickly as possible.'

* 

The full engagement of the nation had begun the instant Wilson had chosen war. Initially the American Expeditionary Force in Europe was just that, a small force numbering little more than a skirmish line. But the American army was massing. And the forging of all the nation into a weapon was approaching completion.

That process would jam millions of young men into extraordinarily tight quarters in barracks built for far fewer. It would bring millions of workers into factories and cities where there was no housing, where men and women not only shared rooms but beds, where they not only shared beds but shared beds in shifts, where one shift of workers came home (if their room could be called a home) and climbed into a bed just vacated by others leaving to go to work, where they breathed the same air, drank from the same cups, used the same knives and forks.

That process also meant that through both intimidation and voluntary cooperation, despite a stated disregard for truth, the government controlled the flow of information.

The full engagement of the nation would thus provide the great sausage machine with more than one way to grind a body up. It would grind away with the icy neutrality that technology and nature share, and it would not limit itself to the usual cannon fodder.

CHAPTER TEN

W
HILE
A
MERICA
still remained neutral William Welch, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues watched as their European counterparts tried to perfect killing devices.

Technology has always mattered in war, but this was the first truly scientific war, the first war that matched engineers and their abilities to build not just artillery but submarines and airplanes and tanks, the first war that matched laboratories of chemists and physiologists devising or trying to counteract the most lethal poison gas. Technology, like nature, always exhibits the ice of neutrality however heated its effect. Some even saw the war itself as a magnificent laboratory in which to test and improve not just the hard sciences but theories of crowd behavior, of scientific management of the means of production, of what was thought of as the new science of public relations.

The National Academy had itself been created during the Civil War to advise the government on science, but it did not direct or coordinate scientific research on war technologies. No American institution did. In 1915 astronomer George Hale began urging Welch and others in the NAS to take the lead in creating such an institution. He convinced them, and in April 1916 Welch wrote Wilson, 'The Academy now considers it to be its plain duty, in case of war or preparation for war, to volunteer its assistance and secure the enlistment of its members for any services we can offer.'

Wilson had been a graduate student at the Hopkins when Welch had first arrived there and immediately invited him, Hale, and a few others to the White House. There they proposed to establish a National Research Council to direct all war-related scientific work. But they needed the president to formally request its creation. Wilson immediately agreed although he insisted the move remain confidential.

He wanted confidentiality because any preparation for war set off debate, and Wilson was about to use all the political capital he cared to in order to create the Council of National Defense, which was to lay plans for what would become, after the country entered the war, the virtual government takeover of the production and distribution of economic resources. The council's membership was comprised of six cabinet secretaries, including the secretaries of war and the navy, and seven men outside the government. (Ironically, considering Wilson's intense Christianity, three of the seven were Jews: Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor; Bernard Baruch, the financier; and Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears. Almost simultaneously, Wilson appointed Brandeis to the Supreme Court. All this marked the first significant representation of Jews in government.)