Beyond the Huddled Masses: American Immigration and the Treaty of Versailles 1845110447, 9781845110444

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction
Part 1: American Immigration and the New World Order
Part 2: The Persistence of Enemy Europe
Part 3: The American Race
Part 4: Conclusion
Endnotes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Kristofer Allerfeldt

American Immigration and The Treaty of Versailles

huddled masses

Beyond the Huddled Masses

Beyond the Huddled Masses American Immigration and The Treary of Versailles

KRrsToFER ALLERFELDT

LONDON·NEWYORK

Published in 2006 by LB.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin's Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2006 Kristofer Allerfeldt The right of Kristofer Allerfeldt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Twentieth Century History vo1.6 ISBN 1 84511 044 7 EAN 978184511 044 4 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by 1] International Ltd, Pads tow, Cornwall from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

Part 1 American Immigration and the New World Order

7

Part 2 The Persistence of Enemy Europe

45

Part 3 The American Race

135

Part 4 Conclusion

205

Endnotes Select Bibliography Index

209 240 252

This book is dedicated to my father, Kurt Eric Allerfeldt (1920-2004). I miss him.

INTRODUCTION

hile queuing in the slowly snaking and seemingly endless line to have our passports examined at Washington Dulles airport, I overheard one of my fellow British passengers complain to his wife that he 'felt like an immigrant'. The man probably had no intentions of staying in America - it seems he was going off on a Caribbean cruise - but the comment was interesting on a number of levels. Most obviously it was apparent that as a white, 'native' British subject he did not consider himself a modem-day 'immigrant' since he was not, to my knowledge, either a refugee, an economic migrant or an asylum seeker; certainly he seemed to feel that his position was different from these less fortunate categories of traveller: The word 'immigrant' was loaded throughout the course of the twentieth century. It is also a term that has a vast number of connotations today - but then it always has had Plenty of historians, political scientists and sociologists, as well as a host of less 'qualified' commentators, have analysed what we and our predecessors have meant by the word, to whom the term should be applied, and what policies should be adopted to deal with the 'problem'. This analysis was rarely more widespread than in post-First World War America. The war served to both interrupt and crystallize what had been an ongoing debate over 'New' and 'Old' streams of immigration since the last decade of the nineteenth century. While the parameters and subject of this debate may have been more real and more immediate, there was little new in the controversy. Since the foundation of the republic there had always been arguments over who could, and could not assimilate into American society, but with the massive increase in trans-oceanic migrations at the turn of the twentieth century, these issues seemed to become far more pressing. Coupled with this increase in numbers there was the Victorian passion for categorization. Immigrant groups were now seen in terms of their 'racial traits', which defined their susceptibility to such shortcomings as promiscuity, drunkenness or other forms of debauchery and criminality. Their fecundity and intelligence were discussed in the same terms. The all-too-sudden lurch from war to peace, and the seemingly surprising collapse of the Central Powers, had a dynamic effect on this debate. The November armistice re-ignited this passionate debate because the migrants were expected once again to flood in, perhaps, the pessimists said, in greater numbers than ever before.

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There has been a standard historical reading of the 'failure of "the Peace"', which claims that the debacle of the Treaty ratification acts as an epilogue to the

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crusading spirit of Progressivism. Wilson's league's failure can be seen as the denouement of the Progressives' struggle for a more logical, fairer, and more morally sOlIDd world. \lW:ille historians may dispute the reasons for the failure of the Wusonian dream, there can be little doubt that just as the war had brought out a commonality of patriotic purpose in many resident Americans, the peace brought a search for new enemies. As the peace conference got lIDder way, many saw the increasing resistance that Wilson met as symptomatic of Europe's decadence. With what was,. to many, a questionable sincerity, there was a conscious decision by the opposition to capitalize on these feelings. They advocated the cutting of the revered, lIDtouchable, seemingly sacredly strong and binding ties with the 'Old World', and told the electorate that America was now its own country, a nation that could decide its own interpretation of its own history and its own future. In many ways the Treaty of Versailles' is little diffe.rent from most other peace treaties. By their nature all treaties impose too heavy a penalty in the opinion of the vanquished, and do not propose enough benefits to satisfy the victors; but a treaty that aimed to resolve what was arguably the first truly global conflict was bound to excite more accusations of failure, inequality and downright bias, and it is hardly surprising that the 1919 conference was condemned from the outset, its implications being so great not only for those powers who had bled themselves dry in the conflict, but also those on the periphery of the war. It has been widely accepted that the compromise that was to shape the history of the next eighty years and probably beyond, emerged from the gathering, disputes and haggling of the 'Big Four' Woodrow WUson, Uoyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando in the Quai d'Orsay in 1919. The earnest struggles of the world's leaders to resolve the issues of German war guilt and reparation, nationality and the redrawing of borders, military and naval disarmament, and international law and international policing have been seen as detennining not only the events of the inter-war years, but also of the Second World War and even the Cold War. More immediately, the treaties that emerged from the Paris peace conference created sharp divisions between the Old and New Worlds on either side of the Atlantic. Those who looked to Wilson as their saviour in defeat we.re disappointed, as were many of those who looked forward to a New World order based on liberal principles of justice and equanimity. This study aims to discover the extent to which this disillusion was reflected in the post-war American attitude to the foreigner, and to establish how the Treaty and the debate over ratification fed the xenophobia, clannishness and nativism of the United States in the 1920s. There are two contrasting images of the America of the 1920's. More than any preceding decade in US history, the twenties are associated with American suspicion of the outside world and yet American industry, American money and American culture arguably had greater influence on the rest of the world than at any time before. Much of the renovation and expansion of the 'glittering decade' throughout Europe and as well as at home was financed by all-powerful American banking houses like Morgan, Kuhn Loeb and National City. Attempting to forget the pre-war world that had led to such suffering, a new modernism emerged to a soundtrack of American jazz and the resultant 'modem'

INTRODUCTION

citizen was more or less consciously influenced by such novelties as American film stars, American style advertising and the moral relativism of American

novels. At the same time, the mood of a large proportion of America was fundamentally introverted and retrospective. These are the years in which America attempts to tum back the clock with 'normalcy': the years when victorious Protestant morality made the nation 'dry': the years of are-invigorated Ku Klux Klan that marries business with bigotry: the years in which the word 'isolation' takes centre stage, and in which Congress passes two landmatk immigration Acts in 1921 and 1924 - that have the effect of categorically asserting America's independence from the outside world.' These Acts are crucial to the decade in that they established a quota regime, not only extending the limitations on Asian immigrants, but also on Europeans. This is perhaps one of the turning points in US history, marking as it does the breaking with the traditional 'open-door' policy that had always marked the history of the republic's relations with Europe. TIlls wotk seeks to investigate the role of the Treaty in this 'break', an event that was severe enough to sever links between the Old World and the New. Such a seemingly straightforward question brings with it a series of other consirl.erations. Was this schism the result of America's pivotal role in the 'resolution' of what many saw as the nadir of European bickering, bickering that had escalated into the most bloody war in history? Was it the natural reaction to the New World's unique military intervention in the squabbles of the Old World? Did the Treaty's seeming failures renew the US sense of mission? Did it give them a new-found faith in their legendary exceptionalism? Did victory boost the growing sense of a unique American national identity, and did this result in a feeling that there must be a stricter demarcation of those entitled to participate as citizens in the nation? Perhaps the negotiations at the close of hostilities had the opposite effect. Did the Treaty's formation of the new nations, particularly in eastern and central Europe, need resident populations in this region? And wouldn't the population that was required to build these new nations consist of exactly those who would have previously constructed the New World on the other side of the Atlantic? Did the pressure for the closing of the door lead in tum to inform the Treaty debate? Did it lead to the resident but unassimilated American Czechs, Hungarians, Poles or Yugoslavs demonstrating their nationalism and returning in order to populate, found, and serve these emergent states? And did this in tum reduce the power of those lobbying to retain a more open immigration policy with Europe? WIth these questions in mind this study will hope to introduce the concept that with the immigration Acts of the early 1920s the Americans sought their own physical statement of that guiding principle of WIlson's Versailles dream: 'national self-determination'. In doing so, it will raise further questions, such as how much were the Acts governed by the end of America's engagement in the European war, or were they more a response to events at home? Can the two phenomena be disentangled? Were the Acts the result of growing anti-European sentiment raised by their behaviour over the Treaty, or was it more the playing out

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of the passions roused on the domestic front by the war itself?

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Ibis study started off as an analysis of the impact of arguably the most important treaty of the twentieth century on American perceptions of Europeans. It was to be an examination of how participation in a bloody war, and then what was famously - if rather inaccurately and oddly - called a 'Carthaginian' and flawed peace, changed the views of many Americans about the Old World. The essence of the study was simple: it was to take as a starting point the issues of immigration and the peace, these being conjoined by the idea of 'national self-determination' - the core, the most widely known slogan, of Wilsonian diplomacy - and applied through exclusivity back on to the United States. There is no denying that this view still forms a major part of the thesis, and that in some ways this is still that work - but it is also more complex. Immigration is not the first subject that springs to mind with the mention of Versailles: the most obvious pictures are of the debates in Paris resulting in acrimony. At the time most Americans were given the image of it in terms of the French demands for reparations and the Italians walking out over Fiume. To many of those who read the Treaty with a measure of determinism, it is a catalogue of missed opportunities, and the repercussions are seen as without parallel. History emphasizes the German feeling that the terms were too harsh, with catastrophic consequences for the future of Europe and the rest of the world. Post-colonial historians stress the significance of the demands of 'minor nations' being ignored. To another group of observers it failed to establish the means for the reallocation of territory and rank, which in tum enabled a continuation of a distribution of power very similar to the status quo ante, again with disastrous reverberations into the future. But of course the proposals of the Treaty did alter the post-war situation. Perhaps one of the main changes to the world order was that the upstart of the pre-war world, Germany, was excluded from international relations, and a new and idealistic, economic and at least temporarily military superpower, America, forced itself to be actively included. Perhaps more importandy, Europe as a whole seemed to have been ousted from its pre-eminent position by the mayhem it had created in its own homelands: now they were seen not only as fallible, but also as barbaric and incomprehensible. As one twenty-first century historian has pithily put it: 'Europeans, in their hubristic determination to rule the rest of the world, destroyed their own .... any reason, any aim, any goal, and any commemoration paled before the havoc they had wrought." These arguments form the basis of many of the historical analyses of the six months of deliberation in Paris, and indeed these issues took up the bulk of the coverage at the time and since. Many would argue that the seeds of the Second World War and the Cold War lie in the failure of the grandees in Paris in 1919 to setde the problems that led to the First World War, and discover a suitable way of dealing with what they saw as the malevolent, if intangible, presence of Bolshevism at the conference. Surely by comparison with those titanic issues, the significance of American immigration policy pales into the background. Some may accuse this work of

INTRODUCTION

trying to find coonections that really do not exist, or are at best tenuous. But the coonections are there: they are definitely there, although in order to discover them it is necessary to look at the conference in its 'full context', rather than just as the negotiations to find a treaty to end the Great War. The Paris Peace Conference, or something very similar, was plalUled from the time America entered the war. Wtlson's political fixer, aid and friend, 'Coloner Edward House, was charged with organizing an investigation into the possibilities of a new basis for the post-war world in September 1917. It was seen by idealists as a way of resolving not only the issues that had been at stake in the Great War, but also many others that had troubled the pre-war world. Mass migration had been one of the most characteristic features of the years leading up to the conflict, and was an aspect of the period that touched on, and highlighted a huge array of troubling areas. It involved questions of race and eugenics: it was a matter of both domestic and foreign policy: and it intricately related to the angst in the leading powers of the world, angst that accompanied the pains of uroanization and industrialization. Immigration was a vast subject in all respects, and it would be surprising if the issues surrounding migration, such as racism or the free movement of labour, let alone nationalism, were not amongst those discussed in Paris in 1919. In human, economic and political terms the demographic shift from the Old World to the New had had a huge impact In the first fourteen years of the twentieth century alone, Canada, Brazil and the United States had taken in more than twenty-five million European immigrants, with America receiving the lion's share. In terms of proportional numerical impact on the host population, this migration was never to be equalled in US history. These are huge numbers of people, particularly when America at this point had barely one hundred million citizens: we are looking at a quarter of the entire contemporary US population crossing the Atlantic to settle in these countries in under a decade and a half 'What is surprising is not so much that migration is an aspect of the prospective plans under discussion for the post-war world, but rather, how little attention is actually paid to its regulation at the conference. Having said that, there can be little doubt that the fears, expectations and advantages of immigration were implicit in many of the arguments that motivated, took place at, and resulted from, the Paris Peace Conference, especially from an American perspective. This work will argue, in three related sections, that the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty debate were vital cogs in the mechanism that drove America to restrict immigration in the 1920s a change of policy that had vast repercussions across Europe and Asia. It will lay out three aspects of the Treaty negotiations that tie the ongoing American immigration debate firmly to Versailles. The first is largely concerned with the aftermath of fighting, and with the redistribution of European territory and population, as well as the perception of Europe in American public opinion. This section argues that nativism fed off the disillusion induced by the failure of the wartime Americanization schemes, and how the behaviour of many who were foreign-born in America reinforced this view. It is largely concerned with the period of American participation in the war, and the jockeying for position in the build-up to the Paris Peace Conference itself.

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N ext comes an analysis of the connection between radicalism and the peace proposals. 1bis section will argue that the Russian Revolution and its corollary in the US, the Red Scare and the consequent deportation scandal, had a major impact on the Treaty debate by widening the rift between visions of an internationalist and an isolationist America. It will argue that the issues of the Treaty Debate made the rift so deep that it became central to the philosophy behind the abandoning of open-door immigration, and as such was an important element in the passage of the restrictive Acts of the early 1920s. The final section addresses the failure to agree the Japanese proposal for a race equality clause and places the immigration debate at centre stage of the negotiations in Paris. It argues that even if the proponents' genuine motive was the establishment of a more equitable post-war world, it was still viewed at the time as being an underhand way of undermining immigration controls on the West Coast of America and elsewhere. In arguing this it becomes apparent that WIlson's role in the rejection of the provision was central, and that he was driven as much by his own political imperatives as by the open threats of Australia's irascible Billy Hughes and the insinuations of the Japanese delegation.

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AMERICAN IMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

1

'Three billions! \mJ.at do you want it for?' gasped the senator [Ibomas C. Martin, (Democrat, Virginia) chairman of the Senate Finance Committee] .... 'Clothing, cots, camps, food, pay, medical supplies, haversacks, blankets, slickers, cooking outfits, horses, mules, motor trucks, gun carriages, all forms of transportation, airplanes, balloons, marching equipment, guns, rifles, pistols, tanks, gas masks ... ' [Major Palmer S.] Pierce went on. But three billions of dollars of these things! 'And we may have to have an army in France!' Pierce added out of the then secret convictions of the War Department. 'Good Lord!' exclaimed the senator. 'You are not going to send soldiers over there, are you?' 'That may be the only way to win the war.' Testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, April 6, 1917, the day Wuson declared war on Germany 4

TI

e Great War was not like any other war that American troops had taken part in. Although the scale of human, industrial and agricultural mobilization, attrition and the trenches echoed the civil war, this was not a conflict fought for the 'salvation' of the American state as was that war, the revolution, or the war of 1812. It was not, ostensibly, fought for American economic gain, or territorial expansion, or the protection of US subjects, as were the Mexican or Indian wars, the Spanish-American war or the Boxer uprising. To those who volunteered, and to some who were conscripted, it was being fought for the projection back into the Old World of the ~erican ideals' of freedom and democracy, the search for which was generally given as the very reason that many Americans claimed their ancestors had left Europe. As such, the shipping of some two and a half million US troops to fight European enemies on the Western Front presented a totally new dimension to the relations between the two continents. Since the 1907 outing of Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, it had been apparent that America had the ability to project its power across the globe. Now that this ability had been moved from the theoretical to the practical, it was felt that America's action would leave the attitudes on both sides of the Adantic fundamentally and irrevocably altered -

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORID ORDER

and nothing confumed this better than the demands the Americans sought to impose on Europeans in the peace. If Americans had altered the European balance of power with their military intervention, by the time of Wilson's arrival in Paris they were seeking to make that alteration permanent with their diplomacy. To some contemporaty observers, the hard-won and bloody victories of the Westem Front would create a growing feeling that the fates of America and Europe were now related in a way that had not been seen since before the American Revolution. Gone were the admonitions of Washington and the decisions of Monroe, which warned of the toxicity of European diplomacy. Instead there was a new optimism, most notably among the patrician Anglophiles who eulogized that the war had cemented a positive process of bridging the New and Old Worlds: to them, the great alliance forged in the war invigorated the valuable cross-pollination between the 'Anglo-Saxon' nations that had been developing since the end of the nineteenth century. The present war was needed to show that the Atlantic is now narrower than the Straits of Dover before the days of steam.... America as well as England now see the world as one. Their isolation, which was never splendid, is now impossible .... But if America can discard her old tradition of aloofness, it is surely not too much to ask that her allies should forget their old rivalries and claims. 5 Such views were not shared by all, however, especially those who had actually done the fighting To many of those returning home, victory had been achieved at too great a cost. Sailing over on cramped, Spartan ttoop-ships - initially, more often than not, British crewed and owned - American' doughboys' underwent an epiphany before they even arrived. They disembarked disorientated and confused and sometimes sick that is, assuming they had escaped the attentions of the prowling German U-boats, which by 1918 they invariably did' Once in Europe, they were then subjected to the tedium of further training and drilling, before they were allowed to advance to the terrors of the front. To the less sanguine among the American Expeditionary Force, the scene they encountered did not inspire awe. Here were the youth of Europe wallowing in mud, filth and slime, heat and dust or snow and rock in order to slaughter each other. Here was the inventiveness and industriousness of the Old World, the cultural home of most Americans, being harnessed to the design, production and use of increasingly cruel methods of mass murder. Here were the old countries gassing, shelling, machine-gunning and goring each other with bayonets in a ghasdy struggle for the possession of a few miles of treeless, devastated, pockmarked, uninhabited wasteland. To those doughboys who arrived with less than a 100 per cent belief in their cause, the war was not only savage but also senseless, and not only in its execution, but also in its motivation.' Ezra Pound's often quoted condemnation summed up this attitude: the European conflict that led to close on a quarter of a million American casualties, was to him simply a senseless struggle to save 'an old bitch gone in the teeth, a botched civilization.'· Whether the causes of American intervention were seen as justified or not, it

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was impossible to ignore the effect on both sides of the ocean when so many Americans crossed the Atlantic and trained and served, at risk of wounding, capture or death alongside French, British, Russian, Italian and other troops in Europe. There can be little doubt that prejudices on both sides were altered, with new ones emerging and some old ones being dismissed, as allies mingled and enemies were encountered in the shared horrors of the front line and the fraternity of the reserve positions. Most importantly, for many of these young Americans it was their first experience of the Old World. That is not to suggest that all the experiences of the Americans in Europe were negative. As well as the mud, shells, barbed wire and gas of the Western Front, there was also the comradeship and excitement, and the culture, vibrancy, immediacy and decadence of leave time in the old cities of Europe in wartime. This was especially true of Paris, where the audible guns of the front lines gave the already notorious city an air of 'living for the day'. This vitality inspired new levels of pleasure seeking, with the result that the French capital became a metaphor for the worldly education of the 'doughboy'; as a popular music hall song of 1919 explained, the retuming soldiers were altered by their changed perceptions of 'morality', a morality they came to consider, for better or worse, as 'European': They'll never want to see a rake or plow And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow? Imagine Reuben when he meets his Pa He'll kiss his cheek and holler OO-LA-LAl How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm After they've seen Paree?' The war telescoped youth. It 'made men of boys' - but the fond memories of brief passions were mingled with the guilt. Reminiscences of ardour made young American troops think of betrayed sweethearts at home, or fear the disapproval of family or local community. This shame was all the more because American troops had been denied the pleasures of the flesh that French, and increasingly British, troops took for granted. This was because the authorities in America had a pervasive horror of venereal disease that had led to the strict outlawing of 'easy' women close to the AEF camps at home and in France. Moreover, by the time many of the veterans returned home, although the Volstead Act had not become law, some three-quarters of America was 'dry'. Critics considered that these measures reduced morale and camaraderie because they removed the few pleasures available to the fighting man. While their allieslU condemned the AEF's moral stance as unnecessary, if not positively damaging for men willing to risk all for their nation, the US Army argued that such measures trained the doughboy for the abstinence of the front line, and ensured many more healthy troops available for action. AEF propaganda told the troops how important and desirable sexual hygiene was to be in the forthcoming struggle: 'A German bullet is cleaner than a whore.' This campaign of education was re-enfo:rced by more practical measures. Doughboys were subjected to fortnightly inspections with the threat of court-martial and forlieting of pay for

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORnER

those found to be infected.!! To many less tolerant Americans the practical and casual acceptance by their allies of the Canlal needs of soldiers was not merely a marl!: of a different approach to the war, it became another reason to regard the Old World as a place of decadence. The Europeans, and especially the French, seemed to relish the discomfort their pragmatic approach caused the sanctimonious Americans. General 'Black Jack:' Pershing was horrified when Clemence au told him of the brothels that had been arranged for the AEF on disembarl!:ation. Pershing met with solid resistance, and had to back down, when he attempted to close all brothels in the regions in which Americans were to be stationed. Nevertheless, he still took a pretty young French mistress for 'the duration' of his stay in Europe. In his apparent duplicity Pershing was responding to, rather than bucking against, the mood of the times. The morality of the Wdsonian crusade needed nurturing, even if such highmindedness was not necessarily favourable to the soldiers of the ABE A high moral tone among the American troops added to their sense of purpose, as well as the belief in their exceptionalism, and Wilson was later to play this emotion for all it was worth. For instance, he recounted that 'one of the most beautiful stories ... that we heard in France .... [was] the testimony that all of them [the French and British) rendered was that they got their morale back the minute they saw the eyes of those ....incomparable sons of America.''' The war changed this, and with peace there was no going back. John Dos Passos summed up the changes amongst the generation that bore the brunt of the fighting when he has one of his protagonists ask his girl if she is still a virgin. The girl nodded, but explained to him how she had adopted a new, more pragmatic morality: 'Funny, isn't it?...in wartime .... you boys risked your lives. I guess I can risk that'" While it could be argued that this had always been a side effect of war, it appeared to many disapproving post-war observers that this pragmatism was a manifestatinn of that European import, relativism. American progressive neo-puritanism and its sense of mission sometimes reinforced a feeling of guilt that engendered a hearty dislike of decadent Europe. As with most soldiers, war merely made them want to return home to the familiar and the loved, to settle down peacefully; by comparison with Europe, their own country - for all its considerable problems - appeared wholesome, spacious, unsullied, honest and peaceful. The innocence that many arriving in Europe had self-consciously seen as naivete was now a desirable trait, which had to be preserved at all costs. It was all unfamiliar, brutal and disgusting, and many American soldiers in France felt a growing contempt and hatred for Europe and Europeans as a whole. The idealized images of the old country, fed to them by grandparents, parents, church elders, priests, rabbis and schoolmasters, swiftly evaporated While in Europe, America became the utopia, and many of the American soldiers felt that Europeans, with their starvation rations, their crowded, devastated, crumbling cities, and their war-tom countryside, must look on them with envy. They felt as alien to the war-weary peasants and the battle-hardened veterans they saw on their way to the front line as they did from the Huns they shened, shot, charged at and bayoneted when they arrived at the battlefield

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As if these disclosures and discoveries were not enough, the peace negotiations brought a further rift. When the war ended it became apparent that not all the 'entente' protagonists had had the same objectives in mind, and it did not take long for the euphoria of armistice to change to a fear of the future. As the French poet Paul Valery put it 'we hope vaguely, we dread precisely; our fears are infinitely more precise than our hopes; we confess that the charm of life is behind us, abundance is behind us, but doubt and disorder are in us and with us.' F. Scott Fitzgerald was more blunt. To him the war ended and the survivors became a 'lost generation' of cynics who found 'all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'.!4 Although the Kaiser and his evil cohorts of Prussianism may have been defeated, and the forces unleashed in total war meant that the old autocracies were on their way to oblivion, there were new problems. Bloody Bolshevism had replaced militaristic Prussianism, and it appeared all the more dangerous for its profane delight in the chaos it created. Similarly the war may have spelt the end of the overt scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia, but this was not necessarily considered a benefit by all. The splintering effects of nationalism were replacing the cruelty and greed of imperialism, and they bore with them the germinating seeds of those potent historic hatreds - race and religion. By any reckoning the costs of the war had been beyond compare: one American estimate put it at $186,000 million. This was made up of some $123,000 million spent by the Entente and their allies, and $63,000 million by the Germans and their allies. The same source claimed that some 7,500,000 had died in the conflict;" infrastructures had disintegrated; and Europe's leading financial systems were creaking towards conapse, tottering under vast debt and with many nations facing the prospect of huge indemnities. Many questioned what this sacrifice had achieved, and as the British historian, Arnold Toynbee, explained, the end of the war did not bring an end to uncertainty: instead it laid bare a skeleton of unexpected feelings and new dangers all around the world, highlighted in the ruins of the old, pre-war world: Symptoms of nervous derangement were apparent in almost all the great communities of the world, though they differed in form and degree according to the differences of experience during the past six years. Germany was stunned by defeat; France was embittered by the barrenness of victory; Eastem Europe and the Islamic world were distracted by the fever of national awakening; Russia was possessed by Bolshevism; India and China were shaken to their depths by intellectual and political upheavals; Japan was intoxicated by imperial ambitions ... Most telling is the fact that Toynbee discusses America, not in terms of the crusading President Wilson's triumphal march into Paris, nor even in terms of an awakening economic giant, but in relation to its growing distance from Europe. He emphasizes the rejection by many in America of European supremacy, the turning away from what the bulk of Americans considered the cradle of their own culture, and he explains that as 1919 opened, the 'United States was partly paralysed by a nervous horror of the Old World.'''

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORlD ORDER

The relations between the two continents had changed. It was as if by fighting in the name of freedom, America had eamed the right to break the ties that bound the two worlds - and rather than diminishing as the horrors of the war receded and as the damage was repaired, this feeling became even more evident As the Paris Peace Conference got under way and the Treaty met its demise with the voters in America, many Europeans, and especially their leaders, became viewed as cynical, manipulative, self-serving, and incapable of reform. As one leading American commentator ruefully explained it appeared that the Old World was populated by 'damned vultures. ... [who had] taken the heart out of the peace; taken the joy out of the great enterprise of the war, and have made it a sordid malicious miserable thing like all the wars in the world. We had such high hopes of this adventure.'" In many ways the rejection of the Treaty and the League was a rejection of Europe, a statement of America's wish to cut ties with the continent and all it stood for. This study will examine one of the most crucial ways in which this independence was expressed, through the limitation of the most important and deep-rooted of all means of cross-pollination between the two worlds: mass immigration.

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the close of the Great War, America was threatened with a human deluge from Europe. The worst elements of a half-wrecked continent began a frenzied scramble to get to America. Unchecked, that threatened deluge would have swelled to several million immigrants a year, and would have swamped our national life; Lothrop Stoddard" 'The whole of peasant Europe would like to come to the United States. If the Allies were to prohibit emigration from Europe, and the conditions were such that the people wanted to leave, there would be a revolution.' The President of the [California] State Conunission of Immigration and Housing on his retum from a tour of Europe, April, 1919." o study of America's Progressive era can possibly ignore the impact of the Great War." Some take its start as Progressivism's finish; others see America's entry into the European conflict as the end of the era; others let Progressivism limp on past the treaty debate into the dawn of the 1920s: no one ignores it. This industrialized war had fundamentally altered America's vision of what lay beyond the water's edge - and significantly, the rest of the world had not become a more attractive place to Americans when war ended; furthermore, as America received the reports of the progress of the peace negotiations in Paris, there was little to suggest that it would. It is probably fair to say that the fears of European barbarism introduced by the war were cemented by the process of making peace. If many Europeans were seen as barbarians, it could be held that this was little more than a continuing trend. Few analyses of American history in the Progressive era ignore the influence of mass immigration, and few studies of immigration can ignore the inexorable move towards the restriction of European immigration on the grounds of a growing contempt for the so-called New Immigration. Each study of the subject tends to emphasize a different aspect of the array of nativist arguments: for instance, for Maldwyn Jones it is the influence

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of the 1911 Dillingham Report; John Higham maintains that the crystallization of the racial theories and the effects of economic fluctuations are the fundamental drives for the restrictionists; whereas the power and values of Anglo-Saxonism and Americanism are central to Gary Gersde's analysis. Z1 ~atever the main driver, there can be lime doubt that there was a growing demand for a change in immigration policy in the years following the war. Most studies of America in the 1920s include a section on this radical departure from what had become accepted as one of the most essential of the core American values: the right of refuge for the 'oppressed of all nations'. ~en the 1921 Immigration Act established a quota on European immigration, few observers then, or now, disputed the significance of such a move. There had almost always been restrictions of some kind on immigration: thus potential immigrants were not to originate from the 'Asiatic Barred Zone' established by the 1917 Act, and they had to have the disembarkation tax; they had to demonstrate on arrival that they did not intend to overthrow American democracy; were not diseased (physically or mentally) or morally or criminally suspect, or a prostitute, contract worker or insane - as long as they were none of these things, then they were likely to gain entry. With the 1921 and 1924 Acts, American public opinion had in large measure consciously moved beyond the vaunted acceptance of mass immigration as an inherent open to 'all'. The numbers and origins of immigrants were now restricted, and not on individual grounds, so the era of the huddled masses had ended. 22 Most commentators see this change of heart as the result of a variety of pressures that had been building since at least the last decade of the nineteenth century. Population pressures associated with industrialization and its corollary urbanization had wrought changes on the American landscape in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that had made it near unrecognizable. To many nativeborn Americans there was an element of forlorn hope, of trying to return to a pre-civil war golden era. The vast new machinery brought to bear on the decennial census figures seemed to indicate that from 1890 onwards America was moving away from being a nation of farmers." This was no longer a rural nation of independentminded owner-occupiers descended from forbears who had hacked a living out of the virgin forest, lived a life of honest toil, and provided for themselves with rifle, axe and homespun honesty and self-assurance: this was a nation where growing metropolitan areas spread across the country introducing the poisons of the city and corrupting the nation. By 1910, the United States had a recorded population of some 91 million. Between 1880 and 1914 over 23 million immigrants arrived in America, and throughout that period around 15 per cent of the resident population was foreign born, the vast majority from southern and eastern Europe." Moreover, it was claimed that the overwhelming bulk of these immigrants remained in the traditional points of immigrant arrival, cities such as New York, Boston and San Francisco. Those who did not were drawn to the growing industrial cities that emerged at the tum of the century in America. These sprawling towns sucked in workers who manufactured, processed and shipped goods, and in tum this production relied on improved transport networks, enabling the manufacturing

AMERlCAN IMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORnER

regions to draw in still more drones. These workers were very often members of the so-called 'New Immigration', impoverished peasantty from, as we have seen, southern and eastern Europe. The coincidence of this new stream of immigration with the expansion of American industty led to people blaming these untried immigrants for much of the changing face of the industrializing countty, attributing these unwelcome changes to their suspect character and background. These Slavic, Mediterranean and 'Hebrew' aliens were seen as lacking the motivation, the independence of spirit and the intelligence to do other than become the tools of the big industrialists, fuelling the growth, corruption, squalor and unpleasantness of the huge cities and vast industrial complexes that were increasingly associated with them. In industrial areas of New York State, different industries drew in different groups of immigrants. In Buffalo, huge numbers of Poles worked in the steel mills, whereas Rochester and Utica attracted largely Italians to their textile mills. Czechs ended up dominating the workforce in the meat packinghouses of Cedar Rapids and Omaha. In the industries of the Pittsburgh and Cleveland areas it was estimated that by 1910 some 70 per cent of the workforce was Slavic in 0rigin.Z5 With this industrialization came urbanization, and with that the immigrant populations became associated problems of poverty, disease and crime in overcrowded slums. Nevertheless, from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, the promise of a new life in the New World drew in nearly a million of Europe's poorest and least fortunate each year. It would be surprising if this vast demographic shift: had excited no hostility, and it was pounced on by opponents of immigration, who saw the continuing stream of incomers as the root cause of the unpleasant changes they saw in the nation. To many of these nativists, the obvious poverty, ignorance and ill health of these incomers was not merely seen as evidence of a lack of opportunity, it was considered a result of their racial inferiority. In line with the popular race theories emanating from the works of philosophers, historians and scientists such as Arthur de Gobineau, Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, advocates of immigration restriction, predicted the overwhelming of the resident, Anglo Saxon-based 'native' stock, anticipating that it would be replaced with a mongrelized mixture of the Slavic, Mediterranean and Semitic 'races'. These, however, came from inferior stock that, even when transplanted to the fertile, democratic opportunities of the New World, would never give anything to the nation except an ever-growing mass of second-class offspring and a new race problem. Tied in with the fear of these changes in population was a change in the perception of the objectives and ambitions of those arriving The new arrivals were not seen as pioneexs or settlers these were not men who came for a new independence, a freedom from the old tyrannies in Europe in what was becoming viewed as a traditional 'American' sense: they were human flotsam. They arrived following work, and it was assumed they would leave if that work dried up. Unlike the pioneers, they were content to remain in the overcrowded slum 'colonies', already filling up with their kind in all the major cities of the coasts and mid-west. Even if they chose to move away from the squalor of these hell holes, it was

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usually still under the auspices of the 'bosses' and the 'trusts' - two words redolent to Progressives of the corruption and false promise of the 'Gilded Age' of industrializing America - who controlled all aspects of their miserable lives. It was seen as typical that even when they arrived in the free air of America, rather than breathing deep and establishing their independence, external forces still dominated their lives. In the words of Francis Amasa Walker, chief of the US Census Bureau, these were the 'beaten men of beaten races'." Even if they did decide to leave the safety of their squalid colonies, they were now able to head west, that most American of objectives, but in a most 'unAmerican' way. The driving of the Golden Spike - the symbolic name for the section of rail joining the east coast to the west - in 1869 had meant that transcontinental travel was now relatively cheap, convenient, reliable, safe and fast. It was possible to reach any area of the country from a railroad station with relative ease - and it was also possible to return if the area was not as anticipated, if the instant Nirvana of the industrial age was not there. While the new technology certainly brought in advantages, it also heralded almost unimaginable changes. The vast chequerboard tracts of wilderness offered as incentive to the rail entrepreneurs were sold on to would-be settlers - but the rail also encouraged a new form of roorless, itinerant wo:rker. Untapped resources could be exploited and exported. Hydraulic mines replaced the old placer wo:rkings, and devastated the areas they exploited. Fish-wheels, steam saws, donkey engines and most importanrly the railroad, transformed the scale and nature of the Western wo:rkplace. Trust-scale lumber and agricultural empires emerged and replaced the pioneer settler. The West began to suck in wo:rkers who could be moved in, supplied, and then moved on and out. The railroad hastened industrialization of the virgin West, and many saw this as yet another unwelcome feature of modemity; thus there slowly evolved a growing movement for conservation. In some cases, most notably amongst a blue-blooded circle of urban intellectual-cum-politicians-cum-naturalists - including Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge - this equated to a nostalgic, almost Luddite form of nativism that viewed the urbanizing immigrant horde as both a symptom and a cause of the decline of rural values and rural America. They sought a return to what Roosevelt called a 'strenuous life' of simple right and wrong, outdoor pleasures and preservation of the wilderness that had done so much to shape their vision of the true 'American'. By the opening years of the second decade of the twentieth century the continual stream of immigration was exciting a larger and larger opposition over an ever-widening part of US society. Since the incomers were undesirable on racial, political, religious, economic and health grounds, they became the scapegoat for all the 'acids of modemity', and arguably it was only the devastating consequences of the assassination at Sarajevo that temporarily silenced the clamour for their exclusion, or at least for their control WIthin months of the outbreak of war, with conscription, the Royal Navy's blockade, mines and Uboats, the vast trans-Arlantic traffic had slowed to a trickle. But this was not the only result. The supposed defenders of open immigration began to evaporate as the effects of the war deepened. It was not merely the

AMERlCAN lMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

consequence of the war itself that quietened the pressm:es for the continuation of open immigration: there were more active reasons for the desertion of the cause. Along with erosion of the philosophical, historical and sentimental objections to the closing of the gates - which certainly became less tenable as an increasingly savage Europe tore itself to pieces there were practical considerations. Modern war, with its global implications, demonstrated that American industries could no longer rely on mass migrations to provide cheap, malleable, compliant laborn: As a response, American industry mechanized and mobilized. The great factories, mills, canneries and foundries of the heartlands brought in new sources of native-born labom:, especially the 'Great Migration' of blacks from the south. As time progressed women began to make up increasing numbers of the labom: force, especially in the expanding munitions industry. In addition, America's industrial leaders, at the urging of the government, undertook a huge campaign to 'Americanize' the existing immigrant workers. They claimed their objective was to tum them from cheap, wage-slave automatons into a reliable, committed woIkforce, inspired by the ideals of America - with the result that those who succumbed to the constant pressure also began to cut the ties "ith the Old World Urged to be patriotic to their new home and with little hope of returning to their old homes, even the despised 'new immigrants' began to revise their opinions about open-door immigration. The destruction, fratricide and impoverishment of wartime Europe cut familial ties as surely as the isolation and breakdown in communications imposed by the increasingly dangerous transAtlantic traffic. The result was that many immigrant groups - and especially those from Germany and its allies - while, often silently, continuing to support their countries of origin, became less committed to the prospective arrival of unlimited numbers of their countrymen following peace. When war broke out, there was a trickle albeit of several thousand - of patriots who returned home to fight for the flag they had been born under; but there was no mass exodus of Europeans across the Atlantic. Instead, the vast majority of 'aliens' of the warring nations remained in the United States, and this was not only because of the physical difficulties of joining their national armies, difficulties that were growing ever more apparent as the need for manpower in Europe grew. Stranded, many of the foreign-born residents decided to naturalize, even without the pressure of government schemes. There can also be little doubt that as the war dragged on, and as the evidence of the slaughter in Em:ope continued, this number grew. It appeared that, at least outwardly, a number had begun to think like 'Americans', and it was easier and more patriotic, as well as more profitable, to adopt an outwardly American attitude. As one contemporary report put it ... here in Nebraska, the German farmer is too busy raising dollar wheat and 9-cent hogs to bother his head about the war. He is as near as he wants to get ....He takes natural pride when he hears of a German victory, and his sympathies are of course "ith his kinsmen and brothers in the trenches, but that is as far as it goes. He is an American 6rSt.27

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As with the Revolution and the Civil War, the usual processes of assimilation were accelerated by war. It became increasingly apparent that the ambitions of their compatriots in the front lines of the European conflict were not necessarily those of the alien residents in America. 1bis was especially true of the dominant nations such as the Germans and Austrians, whose territorial and imperial ambitions were less comprehensible in the American environment. It was less true of those subject nations of Europe such as the Poles, Slovaks and Czechs, whose nationalist ambitions were more in keeping with emigre values. As the war went on, and as effective pro-British propaganda bit deeper in America, there was a feeling that the war, even if the old country lost, might bring about huge changes: namely democracy, increased wealth and independence. There were also more obvious and less altruistic reasons for voluntary Americanization. A considerable number of immigrants of all nationalities had prospered in the booming years of the United States' industrialization, and many aliens felt there was more potential to improve their lot in the New World than in the Old. They felt they owed little to their old countries, and certainly less to their rulers, for whom their compatriots had volunteered to fight - or more likely had been conscripted. Resident in America for decades, many had children who had been bom in the United States, and sometimes to American spouses. The security, the prosperity and the well-being of the next generation gave a new commitment to their adopted country and its future, while at the same time weakening the ties with the old country: As one of the most staunch advocates of Americanization pointed out: When the war opened, there were gathered together in United States territory ... 15% of all the Danes in the world; 8% of all the Finns, 13% of all the Germans, 7% of all the Italians; 8% of all the CzechoSlovaks ... 8% of all the Poles ... and 24% of all the Jews. Not only were these immigrants in touch with the members of their own race in America, but they were in constant communication with their home countries .... When war was declared, practically all such communications were suddenly suspended. Immigrants could hear nothing from their families and friends, and the news from the war zone, which appeared in the American press, was too general for the man interested in the happenings of a particular locality in Europe. 28 As the dreadful war ground on, there were signs that the immigrant population as a whole was beginning to slide away from openly fighting for the right of their compatriots to arrive and challenge their own new-found security. On the other hand, the nativist pressure increased as the war drew on. From 1914 to 1917, when German-Americans requested that America stick more closely to its promises of neutrality, they found that they were increasingly portrayed as disloyal and most likely in the pay of foreign agents, even though their requests were in line with official government policy. When America did finally enter the war, the pro-British, pro-Allied propaganda shifted from being merely the expression of the bias caused by the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon strain in the American population, to being the official line of the US government.

AMERIClk'\; IMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORlD ORDER

To many immigrants American neutrality had been a sham since August 1914, and it had become increasingly so as it drew closer to Wilson's fateful decision on 2 April 1917. To many aliens, America had been at war with Germany and her allies. Fully 90 per cent of US exports had gone to the entente; American munitions killed and wounded an increasing number of German soldiers; and American loans funded the means to kill others. America had a huge financial interest in a British victory; as demonstrated by the way in which the New York stock market dropped after news of German victories and rose on the news of Allied gains. To many of America's foreign-born and the majority of nativists, 100 per cent Americanism was in fact Anglo-Saxonism in another guise:' The pre-war image of the Germans as a nation of hard-working farmers and industrious intelligent workers, creative musicians, cultured philosophers and peerless scholars, was replaced by that of them as the Hun. They were now the wreckers of Louvain, the rapists of Belgian women, and the butchers of innocent civilians, including the frequently depicted children who drowned when the LHsitanio went down. Their greed, cruelty and unquestioning acceptance of autocratic rule made them join the ranks of the other European barbarians - the 'new immigrants'. Germans were fifth columnists, or at least their paymasters, disrupting legitimate American trade and endangering innocent lives as they planted bombs on ships and set fires in warehouses. They were spies who even went as far as to arrange for other 'hostile' powers - Mexico and Japan to invade the republic. Austrians and Bavarians were portrayed as suspect because of their Catholicism, and there was a growing suspicion amongst the less tolerant Protestant American patriots that Pope Benedict XV was 'a pro-German dago', especially after his abortive peace proposals of 1917. As Theodore Roosevelt had pointed out even before the war, the arrival of increasing numbers of the 'new immigration' had caused middle-class America to look with fondness on the Anglo-Saxons. As he had put it: 'There is just one redeeming feature about all these new nationalities: [their arrival] .... has diminished what used to be the one feeling of hostility, that against England'" This feeling was reciprocated on the other side of the Atlantic. Even before the war there was a feeling of the two nations having a shared destiny in the world, and some influential figures in the hierarchy of British society began to view America as an Anglo-Saxon nation. This feeling was expressed by the British Admiral, Sir John Fisher, who saw the melting pot as a means to draw the Anglo-Saxon nations together and expand the much vaunted virtues of the Anglo-Saxon ideals. He claimed that: ... nationalities of every species pour into the United States ... but in the second generation they are all pure American - their language English, their literature English, their traditions English. What damned fools we shall be if we don't exploit this into a huge Federation of Englishspeaking peoples. 31 When Wilson declared war on Germany in April 1917, no less a figure than Britain's King George V declared that he had always hoped that the two nations

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22 BEYOND TIlE HUDDLED MAsSES

would unite in a great cause. Many of those who held such views felt that with victory, this commonality of purpose had been cemented. One commentator eulogized that the pre-war differences that had existed between the two leading Anglo-Saxon nations should be put behind them because 'our [British] cousins have been slandered [in America] for over a century."2 When patriotism surged after US entry into the conflict, unsurprisingly the constituent nations of the empires of the Central Powers were all condemned as 'hyphenated Americans' if they showed any sympathy for their home countries, or anything less than total, tangible, visible support for America's war effort As the editor of a German language paper complained: 'We were attacked, suspected and slandered ... If we do our duty [for America], the ones consider us hypocrites, the others cowards, if we do it conscientiously. But secretly they suspect our loyalty.''' On the other hand, those belonging to the Entente nations were not condemned in the same way. Few patriots would even notice, let alone condemn British-Americans as hyphenated, and the patriotism of French and ItalianAmericans conveniently fitted with American ideals. Nevertheless, the same was not true of Russia's brief spell as America's ally - or more correctly, co-belligerent or, for example, of Poles, Czechs or Serbians. There were plenty of incidents of eastern Europeans falling foul of the patriots, finding themselves accused of espionage or worse. When America entered the war it obviously meant that the real patriotic venom was reserved for some 6,000 German and Austrian nationals who were interned between 1917 and 1918. In many ways the war merely served to reinforce the prejudices about central and eastern Europeans. By the end of the war, the Anglo-Saxon heritage of America seemed to be unassailable. Proof, albeit reluctant, of this can be found in the works of a variety of analysts, from anthropologists to political scientists, and all shades in between. For example, while attacking the science and philosophy behind the Anglo-Saxon supremacists' claim, the sociologist, Carol Aronovici, could not dispute the strength the wartime propaganda had lent their position: The present war with the discredit heaped upon the civilization and kultur of the Teuton leaves the Pan-Anglo-Saxon leaders with a clear conscience in claiming this country for the descendants of the original settlers from the British Isles."

3

Rip van WlIlkle, awakening in 1925, would not recognize the map of Europe he knew even in 1914, with its 3,000 miles of new boundaries and six new states. Burdensome taxes, low standards of living, no fine clothes, bath tubs, even new Ford cars ... Is European civilization in decline?

Raymond Leslie Buell" e prejudices that had fuelled American nativists during the war were seen as even more relevant when the war ended It was the behaviour, structure and viability of the successor states to the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Romanov empires that worried those nativists who thought of the spectre of relendess post-war immigration. The pre-war territories of Turkey, AustriaHungary and Russia were the areas where the vast illiterate, diseased, impoverished and undesirable horde immigrants had fled hopeless conditions before the war. It was estimated that 'Austria, Hungary, Russia, the Balkans, Germany and the war-born states of Finland, Czechoslovakia and Poland Ihad] ... sent nearly 600,000 immigrants to the United States in 1914 alone.'" Conditions in these regions had been relatively stable in 1914 by comparison with the tumult of the post-war world Now, in the winter of 1918-19, these were the areas where conflict continued, where revolutions and civil wars raged, the areas where the populations were most fluid, and where the pools of refugees were massed and growing. These were the areas where disease and poverty, where persecution, inequality, hunger and lack of opportunity would once again spur emigration. As the commissioner for immigration explained, the situation had changed, and it was important to bear in mind that:

T:

... economic pressure and political unrest and oppression are all potent promoters of emigration .... At the present time [early 1919] disturbed economic and political conditions prevail in intensified form over a great part of Europe, instead of only locally as in the past." Movement in post-war Europe was inevitable. It is almost a truism that all war

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creates disruption and displacement within populations. This war, the most massive of wars, had seen correspondingly vast numbers tom from their homelands. Central and eastern Europe in particular were on the move, and the figures were known to be huge; but their sheer size, and the area of territory involved, often made accurate assessment of the scale of the problem difficult. By the end of 1919 it was estimated that as many as 3.5 million former subjects of the Tsar found themselves refugees, exiled in marginally more peaceful areas of the world, from the Chinese borderlands to the Finnish marches. When the dust of the world war had settled, Russia's civil war brought further suffering, disruption and upheaval for the peoples of the imploding Romanov empire. A 1921 Red Cross report claimed that some 758,000 Russians had fled their homelands and ended up in Romania and Turkey alone. A million ethnic Germans would move back to Germany, and nearly two million Poles left their homes to become resident in the new state. Turks and Greeks, Bulgarians and Hungarians - all central and south-eastem Europe seemed to be waiting to see where the new boundaries would be drawn, and would, no doubt, move accordingly.38 It was feared that the Treaty itself would also add to the pressures for emigration. In reassembling post-war Europe the authorities in America feared that the enforced transfer of people 'might stimulate the immigration of such classes' lie. those who now found themselves considered as racial minorities in what they had seen as their '0W'Ii countries]. It was estimated that this spur could be even more powerful than general 'war weariness, among the victors and vanquished alike.'" Few refugees saw the ravaged and unstable borderlands and disputed territories of central and eastern Europe as their final destination; most sought residence in more proruising regions of the world. This wanderlust above all targeted those pre-war magnets for the European disaffected the New Worlds of Australasia, South Africa, Canada, and of course above all, the United States. It was not only the effects of continuing conflict that created disruption: there were also the problems created by the huge initial mobilizations that had caused enormous changes in the population of regions. At least 45 million men had served in the various armed forces during the conflict. Men had more or less willingly left their homes and crossed borders, oceans and continents to fight for what they saw as their 'nation'. Many had ended the war serving in victorious or defeated forces far from where they lived before 1914. However they were going to be arranged, post-war governments would be faced with the problems of a new demographic order. Whatever solution governed the creation of the new Europe, populations would once again be on the move. The magnitude of the migrations hinged to a large extent on the degree to which the peacemakers would be allowed to implement logical and equitable, and above all, acceptable, planning. Even so, assuming that their intentions were governed solely by democratic and liberal principles, there would still be winners and losers. There were going to be huge numbers to whom the decisions of the great and the good in Paris would be unacceptable. 'Without doubt there was going to be a Diaspora of those who wished to move from their newly designated homeland, and those who wished to move to other regions -

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

and not only in Europe. Some of the new nations that would grow out of Wilson's plans for Europe, like Poland and Czechoslovakia, sought to attract their nationals 'home' from the New World in order to build the state out of ethnically, religiously and historically homogeneous individuals. As the Paris Peace Conference opened there was a request from the Italian government that America retain its relatively open prewar immigration policy; this was at least partly motivated by a wish to reduce the huge manpower surplus of the nation, a situation made all the more acute by the addition of a vast return migration of patriotic American-Italians who had responded to the wartime call to serve the old country. There was also the problem of the repatriation of prisoners of wa:t A total of six and a half million men were taken prisoner in the war;'" by November 1918 some had already been freed; others had died of wounds or disease. Nevertheless, there were still vast numbers of captured belligerents in camps deep within the territories of their former enemies. For example, at the time of the armistice it was estimated that over two million Russians languished in Germany, and 1.5 million enemy POWs were being held in Britain, France and Italy. There were some two million former Central Power soldiers in Russian prison camps, although for one reason or another the majority of these prisoners did not leave until 1922.41 There were other problems posed by the peace. It was certain that Germany and her allies' ability to wage war would be curtailed, but this, too, could present a new problem: what would be done with the excess population that had been inducted into the huge German army? Even a formal peace does not make friends out of former enemies. Germany had mobilized some eleven million troops in the conflict, and Austria-Hungary nearly eight. 42 The United States had a dilemma here, and Congressman Royal C. Johnson of South Dakota summed up American fears when he explained that the disillusioned still wanted to head to the New World: to them, nothing had changed. However, he had ... .. .talked with many German prisoners of war, and found them practically united in a purpose to come to America as soon as war ended They believe that they will be received here with open arms and that America is the land of wealth and promise. [The Altoona Times takes up this argument and explains that] ... we do not want those German soldiers who, during the four years last past, have looted homes, tortured prisoners, raped women and bayoneted babies. In other words, we do not want at least nine out of ten German ex-soldiers. Further, we do not want anyone from Germany who defends now, or who ever has defended, the fiendish Hun fighting men .... Our law makers and immigration authorities should know that the American people feel a resentment toward the devastating murderous Hun... We want none of his kind in this country!' It was becoming clear, even before the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, that the cessation of hostilities did not mean that everyone returned home or was allowed to settle wherever they wished There was bound to be - there had to be

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THE HUDDLED MAsSES

- some measure of compulsion, even in Wilson's idealized post-war world. Unsutprisingly, lhere were not many who wished to be repatriated to areas engaged in new territorial or civil wars. In olher cases it may have been that lhe nation lhey had fought for no longer existed, or the territory lhey had considered home now belonged to lheir old enemy. Any planning for migration assumed lhat the parries involved would allow lhe influx or exodus of populations, but this was not always the case. For example, as lhe peace negotiations continued, lhe Bolshevik government refused to accept lhe return of some 800,000 Russian POWs ..... Many understood that, like previous conflicts, lhe disruption would mean lhat even when lhe war was resolved lhe peace itself would certainly cause migration - only this Great War would cause an equally great migration. Whatever lhe results of lhe redrawing of Europe's borders, there were bound to be some dispossessed elhnic, religious or political minorities for whom emigration was the most appealing option. 45 It was not only lhe geo-political aftermath of the war lhat made nativists in America fear a resurgence of emigration from lhe heartlands of Europe: the near-obliteration of infrastructure, lhe continuation of lhe Royal Navy's blockade, and lhe failure of lhe Central Powers to divert manpower to agriculture meant lhat starvation and disease were rampant across wide swalhes of Europe. There was a chromc shortage of fats, dairy products and protein. Throughout much of lhe war lhe region's population had been reduced to starvation wilh rations based on root crops - turnips, potatoes, acorns and chicory as well as sawdust, bark and grass fOImed lhe basis of a variety of ersatz products of limited digestibility and even less nutritional value. There were reports of diphlheria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy and dysentery. Spanish influenza was sweeping lhe world, and cruelly, on top of lhe bloodiest war, this was lhe most deadly outbreak of disease in human history. The conditions for a pandemic were perfect: troops lived in a squalor and fillh lhat would rarely be found under peaceful conditions in any area of lhe world, let alone 'civilized' Europe, and crucially, as recent research shows, lhey lived in amongst a greater concentration of, and in closer proximity to, infected poultry at lhe front than would be found anywhere outside lhe most crowded of Asian cities, generally considered to be reservoirs of lhe disease today. The Hi N1 virus as scientists knew it - struck poorly nourished populations, and it travelled wilh lhem on cramped, poorly ventilated trains. It followed lhe soldiers, sailors, nurses and olhers to and from crowded embarkation and disembarkation points. It spread in hospitals, refugee and prison camps and on troop ships. It moved as troops and civilians returned home, and it travelled about lheir home countries and visited relatives. It was to leave over twice as many dead in its wake as lhe war itself: recent estimates put the dealh toll at some 50 million worldwide. 46 The virus devastated lhe New ~rld as much as the Old, and at its remarkably short-lived but deadly peak in lhe autumn of 1918 it made European post-war conditions seem even more unpleasant, and those coming from lhe plagued continent lhat much less desirable; and through its death toll it also cut familial ties that would have bound people to lhe region of lheir birlh. Further, lhere was a more insidious incentive for fleeing the Old World, in lhat

AMERICAN lMMIGRATION AND TIlE NEW WORLD ORDER

many feared there would probably be a large increase in the taxes levied by the new post-war governments since the restoration of sanitation, transportation and other outward aspects of twentieth-century living could only be achieved with huge injections of finance. The cost of living in post-war Europe was comparable to that of America, but the goods and services taken for granted in the New World were simply not available in the Old. European wages were also estimated at anywhere from a thixd to a half of those being paid for comparable work in America. Life was squalid, depressing and, many felt, hopeless. There was little to distinguish 'victors, vanquished and neutrals', and there was even less to keep Europe's population at home. 41 This huge, fluid mass of displaced humanity had to go somewhere, and as the p£Ogressive Commissioner of Immigration for the Port of New York, Frederic Clemens Howe, explained in his annual report, the situation in the former Central Power states was particularly perilous: There are many, pemaps a multitude ... in Germany, including army and navy officers, landowners, small capitalists and others upon whom the burdens of changed conditions will fall so heavily that they will resort to emigration for relief. ... [Similarly] If current reports may be accepted ... the war has left [rural] Austria in a most distressing economic condition, and a people so placed almost invariably seeks relief through emigration .... but whether the drift will be toward the United States or to other European countries is uncertain ... although it seems reasonable to expect that in common with other rural peoples ... [they] may tum to the New World as a refuge. ... He was, howeve:t:, uncertain whether the devastation in Europe would lead to emigration or i.mmigration. It depended on how the new governments behaved, because: The line of the record of migration to this country follows with barometric fidelity the record of economic conditions here and abroad You may tell by looking at this line when times are hard in Europe and good in America .... Everything depends upon the developments of the next twelve months. If Europe finds the means of reconstruction, her men will stay with her very largely, for the work that must be done will mean such heavy demands that there will be nothing short of a labour vacuum. Her men will stay with her because if necessary they will be kept there. So far, howeve:t:, Europe has neither found these means of reconstruction nor shown any convincing indications that she can find them. Her own people seem to be strongly of the opinion that she can not, and so they are turning their eyes towards the United States. 49 Howeve:t:, there was a growing feeling that America should not be obliged to take these disaffected peoples. Kenneth Roberts of the SaMday Evening Post, one of the country's leading journalists, later summed up the mood of an increasingly crusade-weary America, a nation that no longer saw itself as the world asylum,

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when he wrote: If, for humanitarian reasons, we must take in a million or two Polish Jews, we must also take in a large slice of the population of Serbia, three quarters of a million Greeks, a million and a half Italians, a couple of million Jews from Rumania, Hungary and the Ukraine, and enormous numbers of other physically, morally and financially wrecked people of Central Europe. We are not obliged to take in these people any more than we are obliged to dig half of the unexploded shells out of the battlefields of Europe and bury them in our own farmlands for our own plowshares and harrows to explode. It would be a nice thing to do, but only a madman would seriously insist that we ought to do it. 50 During the period of more than sixth months that Wdson and his team were in Paris negotiating the Treaty, while America was being exhorted to lead the world into a shining future, the issue of immigration was casting a blight in Washington. There were eleven bills related to the tightening of immigration measures introduced into the House of Representatives, and there were five put forward in the Senate. The proposals ranged from more stringent controls on the residence and activities of aliens, the introduction of more effective Americanization measures, and the deportation of aliens who had withdrawn their naturalization applications in order to avoid the daft. Four bills were put forward that proposed a total ban on immigration: one would ban it for three years, another for four, another for five, and the final suggestion was a complete ban on all immigration for ten years. 51 Although few of the restrictions and none of the bans became law, it is instructive that during this period of moral crusading there was no suggestion that the rights to emigrate should be eased, or that existing restrictions should be lifted. Instead, the most effective restriction, and the most effective protection against the renewal of waves of impoverished immigrants, were the passport requirements imposed during the war, and which continued after the annistice. These measures were introduced in July 1917 as a temporary, emergency measure, and in May 1918 were extended to cover any period of 'war, or national emergency' when the admission of aliens could constitute a threat to public safety. 52 It is an indication of Woodrow Wdson's position that by August 1919, against the advice of his Secretary of Labor, William B. Wdson, he had secured an assurance from Congress that these controls would stay in place for 'one year after the signing of the peace'.53 Even while the world was being re-ordered in Paris, it was obvious - at least to some in the offices of the leading newspapers and magazines, and in Congress - that unchecked European immigration was still considered a real threat to American society. It was equally obvious - given the bills put forward in congress as well as Wilson's request for continued passport controls - that both the President and a majority in Congress felt that the League would not be capable of, or should not be allowed to, control migration to the United States. In this vital area 'Wdsonian Internationalism' was, at the very least, complicit in the raising of the drawbridge of 'isolationist' America.

4

'Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.' Theodore Roosevelt, 191654 'Hold up Americanism! Avoid Internationalism as you Avoid Death!' Presidential candidate and strike crusher, General Leonard Wood, October 191955 nce the negotiations in Paris opened in January 1919, the full extent of the gulf between Old World and New World aspirations became apparent. This was evident in the disintegration of the wartime truce over immigration, the fear being, as already outlined, that immigration would swiftly reach, or even exceed, its old pre-war peaks. Also, there had apparendy been a belief in a common purpose that had supposedly created a truly United States. This patriotism had manifested itself while US troops had been fighting in France in a Manichean clarity of simply being 'for' or 'against' American virtues. In January 1919, however, it was felt by many that such coherence was no longer applicable. As the war drew to a close, the nations that had been subjugated within the now collapsing dynastic empires of central and eastern Europe and other disputed areas were all set to plead their case. This was apparent on both sides of the Adantic, as patriotic exiles as well as those in Europe sensed a chance to realize ancient and dormant, but nonetheless deeply felt, ambitions of independence. In many immigrant communities nationalism, not Americanism, flared Generally, those Americans without an interest tended to view what they regarded as unseemly petitioning as a sign of the unassimilated nature of many foreign-born residents. American values, they felt, should put true Americans above this jockeying for position. In addition some Americans, fired with the crusading spirit of the Wilsonian world, found a new reason to feel superior to many Europeans. The military and economic might of the United States created a new and patronizing attitude among a certain section of post-war Americans. As the language of Wilson's secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, demonstrated, a swathe of the American public felt

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integral, personally, to the process in Paris - as Americans. They took a pride in Wllson's stance, for they were members of the world's most powerful nation that was selflessly fighting to right the wrongs that had led to the monstrous war: Tumulty explained how self-important many on the American side of the Atlantic viewed themselves to be, by comparison with the 'little' nations of the Old World: Everyone who came to Paris aimed first to see the President. Representatives of the little, downtrodden nationalities of the earth from eastem Europe, Asia and Africa thought that if they could get at the President, explain their pathetic ambitions, confess their troubles to him, all would be well." Even before the Paris Peace Conference opened, magnanimous America aided and inspired some nations such as the Czechs, the Poles, the Seroians and even Zionist Jews. These more fortunate 'nations' found champions through whom they achieved many of their aims. The American delegates had generally received them sympathetically, largely because the views of these supplicants on the whole conformed with those of the Big Four, or at least did not disrupt their plans too severely. It was felt that they had been coerced into fighting - on either side and their pleas were seen as having a pedigree that corresponded to legitimacy and stood a far better chance of success. Others like the Ukrainians, Italians and Irish felt they were being ignored as their ambitions increasingly fell foul of the plans for the greater scheme for Europe. 57 Although unsavoury to many Americans, particularly those recent arrivals of the New Immigmtion, this compromise was increasingly viewed by Wllson's supporters as a part of the horse-trading necessary to restore peace and alter European thinking. They felt that such flexiblity, even if initially falling beneath the high standards promised in the President's metoric, would be justified by the forums for discussion ingherent in the principles of W.tlson's 'New Diplomacy'. Some felt a more immediate need for representation. Since hostilities had broken out, the various national groups had attempted to gain support for their homelands' causes in America. The propaganda war that preceded W.tlson's fateful declamtion of war between the Germans and, to a lesser extent, their allies, and the Entente is well documented. The pendulum of US opinion swung between the belligerents as the American papers informed the public about the atrocities and heroism of each side. Never a very even struggle, even before Ameriran entry into the war, the contest became almost entirely one-sided. For example, the exploits of the heroic trans-Atlantic, blockade running, journey of the submarine the Deutschltmd with its thousand tannes of cargo, and similar German moral-boosters were eventually outweighed by memories of the Bryce Report into German atrocities in Belgium and the sinking of the iJlsilonio and other vessels. Not long after Wllson met the Deutschlonds heroic Captain Koenig in the summer of 1916, American papers resumed their accusations of 'Hunnish' barbarity. This exploit was quickly forgotten as the papers loudly broadcast such indications of the Germans being

AMERICAN lMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORnER

the 'mad dog[s] among the peoples of the world' to an increasingly pro-Allied nation. This tum-around in opinion was made all the likely by highly publicised suspicions of Gennan sabotage and terrorism, as well as propaganda gaffs cuhninating in the Zimmennan Telegram and the supreme miscalculations that led to the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.'" All the time that this high-profile struggle was going on for the heart of America and her financial, human and material treasures, national groups such as the Czechs, the Serbs and the Irish were struggling to gain the backing of the American government and the American people. It had been apparent since early in the war that the United States would playa vital role in the peace, and some immigrant pressure groups began to formulate peace policies before the war even broke out; for example, the Czechs began their ultimately successful push for independence as early as 1912. When war broke out, America became fraught with alliances of immigrant groups. Anglo-Saxon in-chief and preparedness advocate, Theodore Roosevelt warned there was a danger that America could easily become 'Balkanized'. In some cases the war created strange coincidences of interest, in others old tensions were revitalized; thus German-Americans allied with Irish-Americans, Hungarian-Americans fought with Russian-Americans, and Jewish-Americans boycotted Polish-Americans. Mter several well reported clashes between rival national groups, by 1916 it was generally realized that more could be achieved in the United States through diplomacy than animosity, and the instances of physical violence between national groupings gradually petered out at least on the surface. Instead, the national organizations began to raise money, hold rallies and host charity events for the 'Old Country'. All the while the foreign-born were generally carefu~ in the glowering climate of '100 per centism, to be seen supporting more 'American' causes. They conspicuously gave to the Red Cross, and hoped to be reported purchasing more liberty bonds than their enemies. When Wilson went to Paris, the foreign-born stepped up their campaigns, and the importance of the 'hyphenate' population in America on Wtlson's policies cannot be denied. There is little doubt that without Thomas MasarylCs campaigning in the United States, and Iris portrayal of the seemingly doomed but undimmed heroism of the Czech Legion in Russia, the ('-zechs would not have fOlmd a homeland. Paderewski's cultivation of House's friendship certainly contributed to the foundation of the Polish nation. Pemaps the most curious example of this exile power, this influence of the 'hyphenate' on the negotiations for the future of Europe, was the decision of the Ruthenians to press for a homeland. Part of the pre-war Hungarian kingdom, this disparate group arguably existed only in exile in America. They had organized a plebiscite in November 1918 to authorize their leader Gregory Zatkovich to go to Paris to unsuccessfully try to gain their independence. However, no such vote could have taken place in Europe: there had never been a Ruthenia state as such, and as a result there was no real sense of a dynamic, live, national consciousness. Some opponents argued that it had required the crossing of the Atlantic and the re-assembly of a Ruthenian community in America to create a nationalist impulse."

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1bis petitioning did not always meet with sympathy. As a German language newspaper put it: Not a day has gone by in the last month in which some class of hyphenated Americans did not draw up some lengthy resolutions to put pressure on the President at the peace conference to espouse their special pretensions and to champion claims which are often contradictory." Disillusioned Americans claimed that Wilson's rhetoric was being subverted by the foreign-born. The president had gone to Europe to unite the post-war world in a new diplomacy based on 'equal terms of liberty and safety' for all nations. But to many of his supporters it appeared that his crusade highlighted many of the fissures that had been camouflaged, but not resolved, in American society by the overwhelming drive for a national unity while US troops were fighting in France. The logic of these disenchanted idealists was simple. If the hyphenated American - the Italian-American, the Polish-American, the Irish-American fought for the territorial or national supremacy of his birth country over the more internationalist, idealist American peace proposal as laid out in Wilson's various speeches, that was a sign of his incomplete Americanization. The immigrant in question had not succumbed to what they saw as the siren songs of the Americanization movement. The movement had been, and in many cases still was, all-encompassing effort. It aimed to convert the polyglot, hyphenated America of 1917 through the 'creation of an understanding of, and love for, America', into a single, indivisible 'nation'. 1bis would, it was hoped, in the words of the government-sponsored body in charge of the task, in tum create 'the desire of immigrants to have a home here and support American institutions and laws.'" Further, if the Americanization campaigns of the war aimed to convert the foreign-born to the American cause at home, these objectives had mutated with the end of the fighting and now aimed at a world-wide movement that all peoples might be united in a 'world brotherhood'; this was because: Americanization is carrying democracy to all peoples, first within the boundaries of America, and second to all peoples without the boundaries of America, in order that the world may have a greater industrial, educational, economic and political freedom.62 Hardly surprisingly, the language of the government Americanization campaign was pure Wilsonian rhetoric. It was also seen in many quarters as a failure. As Wilson's private secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, explained - quoting the ubiquitous George Cree~ Wilson's suave propagandist - even while Wilson thrashed out the details of the peace in Paris the nationalist groups at home jockeyed for the interests of their own 'homelands'. Old, un-American hatreds reemerged The draft of the League Constitution was denounced even before its

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION AND THE

NEW WORLD

ORDER

contents were known or explained. The bare facts that the document proved acceptable to the British Empire aroused the instant antagonism of the 'professional' Irish-Americans, the 'professional' GennanAmericans, the 'professional' Italian-Americans, and all those others whose political fortunes depended upon the persistence and accentuation of racial prejudices [withio America]." Such behaviour could only indicate that wartime compliance and wartime patriotism among the foreign-born had been at best shallow, and at worst a complete sham. As Tumulty went on to explain, the peace process was showing the true situation because it was only now that the hyphenate felt that their efforts could yield real benefits for the country of their birth. He saw this self-interest as a part of an orchestrated campaign at the time of the Paris Peace Conference by the leaders of the immigrant communities, men he condemned as the newly emboldened, recendy re-emerged, 'professional hyphenates'. The situation had grown more serious in 1919 than it had been in 1918, because: 'Where one hyphen was scourged the year before' by Americanization, it seemed that' a score of hyphens was now encouraged and approved' by such un-American groups." Tumulty was by no means alone in his assessment of the situation. Some of the most influential leaders of the Americanization movement saw the Treaty's demise as indicative of a real and explicit failure to achieve the genuine incorporation of the foreign-born into American life. When George Creel, writing his own account of the events of 1919, assessed the failure of Wilson's dream, he laid the blame squarely at the door of un-American groups of foreignborn who were simply fighting for their own selfish interests. Creel had been at the forefront of the government wartime drive for 'enthusiasm, unity and high resolve'" that was Americanization. To him, the Treaty arguments meant a fractured American society. The idea of self-determination meant that the battle of the nationalities, which he had worked so hard to subdue when America was at war, was now re-opened. In Creers wartime remit, in the hyperbole of patriotism he did so much to produce, the war was commonality of purpose. The war effort was the self, the past, submitted to the national struggle, submitted to America's struggle. Instead, now 'each day [of the Paris Peace Conference] saw the delivery of new blows at the very foundation of American unity. The forces of hyphenation were boldly called into being and no effort was spared to revive and exaggerate the divisive prejudices of American life.'''' One by one, the other wartime Americanizers began to lose enthusiasm for the conversion of the immigrant, many feeling that the cause was impossible. Perhaps the most striking example was that of Frances Alice Kellor. This committed social reformer, lawyer and sociologist was not just the head of the highly influential, privately funded, National Americanization Committee, she was also perhaps the most important, and certainly one of the best known of all 'Americanizers'. Over her long career as evangelist for the incorporatinn and understanding of the foreign-born in the Progressive Era she earned the tide of the 'immigrant's chaperone'. It was she who had advised the government agencies on wartime Americanization policy; she was the adviser on Americanization to

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the National Chamber of Commerce; she had chosen the membeIS of the ethnic populations who were to liaise with Washington policy make:rs; and it was she who oveISaw the vital 1,000 or more workplace Americanization schemes. Like Creel and Tumulty, by the end of the war she was pessimistic about how effective the processes aimed at the incorporation of the foreign-born really had been. Kellor, too, began to see the alieu's partisan reaction to the Treaty negotiations as divisive and detrimental to America. She explained in a pessimistic mood that the schemes she had done so much to implement were in many cases a failure: Some racial groups that had helped to win the war had become, during the period of the Armistice, all but embryonic republics within a great republic. They were bent upon diverting the power, which had been used to help win the war, to help settle the peace terms in [the favour of] their own countries. They therefore turned their attention away from Americanization efforts that were then in full swing. They reasoned that 'making the world safe for democracy' meant that the things which the immigrants had sought in America could now be realized in the homeland and without the added difficulties of learning English or of changing allegiance." Kellor also pointed out that the disillusion with the Americanization programme was not simply a reflection of the difficulties of assimilation. The reconstruction of Europe presented opportunities, and many immigrants were tempted to return in order to be 'in' at the outset of what promised to be boom times. Kellor felt that this vision of Europe as the promised land was largely being promoted by the various national, ethnic and religious groups known under the heading of the 'inunigrant associations'. But to those trying to include the immigrant in US society, these organizations were divisive. To a large extent this huge variety of organizations had been seen by Americanize:rs during the war as reservoirs of hyphenation. The members of the associations saw themselves more as mechanisms for the aid of displaced peISons. Their whole purpose had been to provide a means of ethnic, political and commercial contact with the Old World, and as such they were generally at odds with the 'neighbourhood' inclusiveness and melting-pot ambitions of the crusading AmericanizeIS. To the more ambitious among the foreign-born, the economic opportunity, the political freedom and other promises of better life that had drawn the Europeans to America were now seen as being in greater supply in resurgent, post-war Europe. As Kellor put it, in America 'organizations that were created for the protection of the immigrant became political bodies with economic aspirations .... and in consequence lost much of their interest in [promoting) America.''" This 'opportunism' on the part of the foreign-born added further fuel to the growing mistrust of the close-on 14 million foreign-born in American society, and these suspicions were later to be confirmed by the report of the inunigration commissioner for 1919-20. Rather than heralding a huge upsurge in immigration, the end of the war had seen a net inunigration of fewer than 20,000, and some

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

230,000, largely Europeans, had left America. The accusation that had always accompanied the 'new immigrant' was proved: he was little more than a bird of passage, an economic migrant. It appeared that few Europeans had any interest in becoming American. Some analysts saw this as the result of the opportunities in Europe, others saw it as the result of a growing hostility towards aliens among native-born Americans.'" Whatever the reason, there was a palpable feeling that the wartime drive for incorporation was meeting major obstacles and rapidly losing momentum. Perhaps the most spectacular example of the mood of failure and growing anti-foreign sentiment came from those within the industrial world The W01:kplace Americanization drive of the war had probably been the aspect of the movement with the highest profile. The factory workers famously received titbits of information on the duties of American citizenry in their pay packets. They were also given information on aspects of American history and insights into American life, and they received sample naturalization fOTIns. The participating companies funded a variety of different routes to encourage their foreign-born wot:kers to Americanize. Businesses allowed employees paid time off in order to attend civics, literacy, language or other educational classes. In some cases the companies actually funded the teachers and supplied classrooms, in others they gave preference in hiring to those foreign-born who could prove they were already attending Americanization school. 70 With the post-war reduction of government contracts and the consequent downturn in orders, the growing fear of Bolshevism and the increasing signs of industrial disorder, the workplace Americanization scheme took on a more fuverish aspect in the Armistice period The Ford Corporation is probably one of the finest examples of this more aggressive approach. In an article for the Literary Digest in February 1919, just before the Seattle general strike, the sister of the US Ambassador to Turkey noted approvingly that Ford sacked those foreign-born who did not attend the company's Americanization course.71 The eccentric, self-made and self-educated Henry Ford, smarting from his failed 'Peace Ship' venture of 1915 and the consequent mockery in the American press, had launched his empire on to a crash course of Americanizing the foreignborn in order to demonstrate his patriotism." During the war, for two days every week the immigrant attended classes before and after work. They began the classes by proclaiming themselves 'good Americans', and the course culminated in a re-enactment of the melting-pot process in flag-waving pantomime. 73 By the war's end even the tireless Ford was disillusioned with the results that the scheme had yielded, and with equal passion and drive he turned against the immigrant At the start of the Paris negotiations, in January 1919, in the first edition of what was to become his notorious anti-Semitic mouthpiece, the Dearborn Imkpendent, Ford was already warning Americans that the unAmericanized immigrants, and the unassimilated Jews and Bolsheviks in particular, were bent on world domination. By the time the final wrinkles were being ironed out of the Treaty in Paris, it Was Ford's own lack of Americanization that was being exposed In June 1919, Henry Ford brought a high profile $1 billion libel suit against the Chicogo Tribune, but it led to the public humiliation of this American icon when he exposed his

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own ignorance of American history. When cross-examined it turned out that the Irish-born millionaire had no idea when America had had its revolution, although he did know that Benedict Arnold 'was a writer'." Although the reasons behind his decision may have been different, in common with many others in America, his commitment to the education and incorporation of the immigrant, which had been waning in the wake of peace, was now dead. He voiced the feeling of a prevalent opinion when he said he felt that Americanization was useless, and instead ominously warned that in the postwar world 'We ought to double our guard against any of the old dangerous things creeping back to their former places.''' The Americanization debate continued into the Treaty fight. To the proponents of the league, there was little doubt that many of the opponents of Wilson's dream were motivated by the interests of foreign nations, rather than by America. Opponents of the league saw the Treaty's influence as equally divisive. The grand old man of American foreign policy, Elihu Root, warned that the issues of nationalism raised by Wilson's dream could only be destructive, and American intervention in the affairs of Europe could only lead to fissures in American society: 'How: he asked 'can we prevent dissension and hatred among our own inhabitants of foreign origin, when this country interferes on foreign grounds between the races from which they spring?' 76 Some tied the representation of hyphenated groups with partisan politics. Republican Senator William Borah managed to become the champion of the Irish and attack Wilson at the same time. Another republican, the New Yorker, Fiorello La Guardia, initially a supporter of Wilson's peace policies, became furious at what he saw as the betrayal of Italy with the granting of Fiume to Yugoslavia. He called for a national 'Republican election to show the world that Wilson is discredited at home .... [and told his audience that] anyone who votes the Democrat ticket is an Austrian bastard.''' Wilson's nemesis, Henry Cabot Lodge, whose Boston constituency contained a sizeable immigrant element, supported the Italian claim to Fiume.7B Although a thorough-going racial theorist and a committed restrictionist, he listened to the Irish cause and supported Czech, Slovak and other central European nationalities in their bids for independence. All the while he was protesting that membership of a truly powerful League of Nations generally seen as the only means for the protection of the integrity of these new nations - would drag America into 'Foreign Entanglements' and threaten 'the very root of [the American] national character and national economy'.'" He apparently saw no contradiction in his position when he explained to the US Senate in August 1919 that he ... .. .object[ed) strongly to having the politics of the United States tum upon disputes where deep feeling is aroused, but in which we have no direct interest. It will tend to delay the Americanization of our great population, and it is more important not only to the United States but to the peace of the world to make all these people good Americans than it is to determine that some piece of territory should belong to one European country rather than to another.""

AMERICAN lMMrGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Although he was arguably the supreme Anglo-supremacist, in the interests of partisan politics Lodge allowed the hyphenate to point out the flaws in the League. There can be little doubt that Lodge was happy to have the ItalianAmerican, the Irish-American or the Gennan-American air their grievances, and to allow them to instil doubts in the minds of the American public about the wisdom of Wtlson's vision. Perhaps his attitude was far more sophisticated. Perhaps he felt that by fighting the battles of Paris in America, the foreign-born inadvertendy highlighted the problems of national allegiance, and perhaps through this un-American attitude they drew attention to the underlying troubles that lay ahead for the nation if it continued to allow unrestricted European immigration.

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'We now in this draft bind ourselves to submit every possible international dispute or difference either to the league court or to the control of the executive council of the league. That includes immigration, a very live question, to take a single example. Are we ready to give to other nations the power to say who shall come to the United States and become citizens of the Republic?' Henry Cabot Lodge, February 1919." 'Every purpose is for the future, and the future must be for America .... We know what all peoples are thinking, and yet we, by a fine alchemy of our own, combine that thinking into an American plan and an American purpose. America is the only nation which can sympathetically lead the world in an organized peace: Woodrow Wilson, September, 1919.82 erman-Americans had largely stuck to their wartime policy of 'Halts Mauf, a strategy that one commentator called uttering 'Yes and Amen [to everything], but otherwise stay[ing] mum'. Unlike the Irish, Czechs or Italians, the Germans had not held any mass rallies; they did not bombard Congress with delegates; and they did not send funds to their compatriots in the Old Country, except for famine relief; nor did they plead their case openly in the nation's press. They felt that a stolid, stoical, uncontroversial silence while the Big Four decided their fate would show suitable contrition for the 'atrocities' their countrymen had committed in Europe. They also felt that silence would demonstrate faith in Wilson's wisdom. They were so quiet that many commentators felt that the German-American had ceased to exist he had been swallowed up in the heat of patriotic fervour in his new nation, and become simply 'an American'. Many German-Americans ceased to defme themselves in terms of their homeland and instead expressed their group loyalties in terms of religion, or more importandy for this study, as Europeans - as 'white'. One scholar has termed this transformation of definition as the emergence of the German-Americans' perception of themselves as 'Old Stock' Americans."

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However, when the negotiations were over and Wilson touted his dream for domestic approval, German-America reasserted itself in an effort to gain more favourable terms for their compatriots. German-Americans felt betrayed, having believed that Wilson would stick to his Fourteen Points. George Creel condemned their behaviour as yet another example of the post-war resurgence of hyphenation, claiming that 'Professional Germans, silent throughout the war for fear of treason charges, emerged from retirement.' He particularly singled out the behaviour of the former, Republican, Secretary of Labor and Commerce, 'Charles Nagel [for] going so far as to issue a pamphlet attacking the League of Nations and arguing against the return of Alsace-Loraine to France.''' CreeYs assessment was a key plank in Wilson's fight for the League. On his Western tour he opened his attacks on the opponents of the League by questioning their judgement, if not actually going as far as openly attacking their patriotism: I know that pro-German propaganda, which has heretofore not dared raise its head again, has now boldly raised its head and is active all over the United States ... Pray understand me. I am not accusing some of the honorable men whose objections I am trying to answer with trying to draw near to Germany ... But I am saying that what they are attempting to do is exacdy what Germany desires. S5 On more than one occasion he told his audiences on that ill-fated tour that opponents of his solution to the problems in Europe could only be motivated by un-American sentiments - by hyphenated motives. Some, he claimed, were radicals, seeking to bring Bolshevik chaos and Red terror to America; they opposed the Treaty and the League because, he argued, they saw the equanimity and unity of purpose within it as being the only way in which their revolution could be avoided" Others, he said, were motivated by the wish for the territorial aggrandizement of their 'home' countries. And there were hyphenated Americans whose thirst for revenge, financial compensation or simply national recognition outweighed all considerations of the greater good of mankind inherent in WIlson's vision of America's mission. He explained that America's role in the post-war world was going to be an active one, and that to assume any other stance was as unrealistic as it was untenable. His position was that the war had changed everything The idea that America could insulate itself from the events abroad was an attempt to re-create a world that had gone forever. He told those who could not see this that even if they wanted to return to pre-war America, it was impossible because 'The isolation of the United States is at an end, not because we chose to go into the politics of the world, but because ... we have become the determining factor in the history of mankind ... .Isolation ended by the forces of history, not by the processes of individual choice.'''' He explained this reasoning clearly in the final speech of his league tour, at Pueblo, Colorado, were he linked the themes of international progress and hyphenation:

AMERICAN L\1MIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

This Treaty is not merely a settlement with Germany, it is a readjustment of the great injustices which underlay the whole structure of European and Asiatic society ... .I find, moreover, there is an organized propaganda [against such a vision, which has] proceeded from exactly the same source which threatened this country here and there with disloyalty and I want to say that I cannot say too often, any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic whenever he is ready ... for it is only certain bodies of foreign sympathy, certain bodies of sympathy with foreign nations, that are organized against this great document which the American representatives have brought back from Paris.'" WIlson's warnings about these 'bodies of foreign sympathy' played to a ready audience. America in 1919 was a nation that had been whipped up into a frenzy about the traumas of the post-war world.: race riots, rising unemployment, strikes and bombings, pitted Red hunters, race theorists and super-patriots against aliens, revolutionaries, parlour Bolsheviks and ~bblies. In 1919, America was a nation divided, and the issue was, in essence, what was America and who was an American. The battleground for this dispute can be seen as the Treaty, which polarized the country - it highlighted and defined American ideals. 10 both sides it was the single issue that laid out America's mission, and most importantly, it was seen as the way to the American vote. Few Americans did not have an opinion on the issues inherent in the reconstruction of the post-war world, and the Treaty was the very essence of this plan: it was the blueprint for the post-war world. WIlson was out to prove he could be as patriotic as the next red-blooded American, and certainly more patriotic than his opponents. The president understood the value of Americanism, he always had. He now tied patriotism to the League, as he had previously tied patriotism to neutrality and then to the war effort. He told his audience that 'I have no hesitation in saying that in spirit and essence it [the Covenant of the League of Nations] is an American document'" The president continued to use this as a theme. The hyphenate was his archenemy: 'the most un-American thing in the world is a hyphen ....it ought not to be there, and every man that comes to take counsel with me with a hyphen in his conversation, I take no interest in whatever."90 But the issues were more complex than simply what constitoted an 'American' or a 'hyphenate'. Nativists worried about WIlson's schemes, fearing that his internationalism was mild Bolshevism - and even if it were not, the acceptance of the dominion of any such body would diminish America's ability to control its own destiny." Such misgivings came to a head in the notion that the League of Nations would take away contrul of America's immigration policy. Theodore Roosevelt's wily Secretary of State, Elihu Root, gave additional fuel to Henry Cabot Lodge's reservations to WIlson's League. Even before the signing of the Treaty in the Hall of Mirrors, Root told Lodge that America stood to lose control over... .. .purely American questions, as for example questions relating to immigration [that] are protected only by a clause apparently empowering

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the Council to determine whether such questions are solely within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States. I do not think that in these respects the United States is sufficiendy protected against the injurious results which are wholly unnecessary for the establishment and maintenance of this League of Nations.92 Root was preaching to the converted It was common knowledge that Lodge personally disliked Wilson. He was furious that Wilson had negotiated in Paris without any high level Republicans. He was also incensed that there were no Senators, the usual guardians of American treaty relations. He objected to many of his policies, and shared the belief expressed by his close friend Theodore Roosevelt, that Wilson was 'wedded to the belief that rhetoric is action'." In particular Lodge disliked Wilson's attitude to the foreign-bo=. Lodge had been a staunch advocate of a restrictive immigration policy since the early 1890s. Boston Brahmin and Anglophile, Lodge had seen great changes in his native city and the nation at large - few of which he felt represented improvements, and most of which he blamed on unrestricted immigration. 94 To Lodge - a man whose pride in his blue-blooded ancestry knew few limits - the overwhelming influence on human behaviour, ability and destiny was heredity. Given this unshakeable belief, he doubted the possibility of the poor genetic material in the New Immigration would ever be able to assimilate into American society. He was equally certain that the easiest and most effective course was restriction, whether that was achieved through a literacy test, consular inspections or a quota system--or a combination of all these. He was, perhaps, the most consistent and long serving advocate of immigration restriction in the Congress that finally scuppered Wilson's League dream in March 1920. 95 Lodge had already sowed the seeds that he, no doubt, hoped would yield the fullest political mischief for Wilson when he told the Senate in February that the proposals for the League needed 'reflection, discussion and earnest thought' not least because--'We are asked to leave to the decision of other nations, or to the jurisdiction of other nations, the question of what immigrants shall come to the United States.''' Given the climate of American opinion, there were few issues that could raise popular suspicion of the consequences of membership of the League like the immigration issue. This argument became a central plank for the opponents of Wilson and his league, and it was a highly effective tactic. Lodge knew that the question of immigration control had the power to bring in a wide-ranging alliance of interest groups against the Covenant of the League as it stood. On the East Coast he could count on his own constituency: the urban patricians, the elite of the established academic, business and political world. Members of this group, such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, wrote influential works on race theory, detailing the threat to America of incoming inferior races. Some of the super-wealthy; like Mrs E.H. Harriman and Andrew Carnegie, funded research into the Eugenics movement. This fashionable area of research was pioneered by a man who claimed descent from the Puritan Fathers, Charles B. Davenport. He researched the inheritance of human traits, and bearing in mind his pride in his heritage, it was rather unsurprising that he discovered evidence to demonstrate the detrimental

AMERlCAN lMMIGRATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

effects on the American 'breeding stock' of immigration from the poorer nations of Europe." These significant and powerful people were united in the cause under Robert DeCourcey Ward and Prescott Farnsworth Hall's influential Immigration Restriction League of which Lodge himself was a leading light. Since 1894, this umbrella group had bombarded Congress with negative information on the consequences of a continuation of unrestricted immigration. It had also sponsored bills and prodnced a variety of widely circulated pamphlets, and it was not likely to allow such a devastating propaganda coup as the League fight to pass unnoticed. On the West Coast, Lodge knew that he could find a similarly responsive, if entirely different audience, not least amongst the re-emerging anti-Asian pressure groups. Lodge was aware that the issue of 'race equality' had been raised in Paris by the Japanese: it is hard to see how he could have been a literate American and remained unaware, it was an issue of such great concern. As will be discussed below, he must also have been aware that the issue of equality was regarded as a way of removing the restrictions on Japanese immigration by most interested commentators in America. His own feelings on Japanese immigration were clear, namely that he saw it as detrimental to all aspects of American life: the economy, culture, health, the political and military stability and of course the racial harmony of the nation were all in danger from the 'Yellow Peril'. It was Lodge who was to swing the vote in favour of a total exclusion of Japanese immigration, in his final speech to the Senate in 1924. So, as Lodge addressed the Senate in February 1919, there can be little doubt that his feelings as to the potential danger of relinquishing control over immigration policy were real. It was also certain that this message found a receptive audience, as the language he used was bound to cause alarm and rally opposition to Wilson's plans. He told them that former President Howard Taft claimed 'in an article that appeared in the National Geographic Magazine ... [that) all organized labor is for the League ... [and that) American labor favors putting the restriction of immigration in the control of other nations.' He asked the Senate if America was 'ready to leave it to other nations to determine whether we shall admit to the United States a flood of Japanese, Chinese and Hindu labor?' He explained how once in the League, the United States the nation would be restricted to 'one vote, which she could not cast on a dispute to which she was a party'. In short, he pointed out that America would have to 'part with the most precious of sovereign rights, that which guards our existence and our character as a nation'98: immigration control. While Lodge rallied support through the issue of immigration, it would appear that Wuson was advised to play down the issue. In response to Root's fears, Wilson was told by acting Secretary of Labor, Frank Polk, that 'there is probably no one question as to which [there is) less possibility of doubt as to [the) meaning of [the) Covenant than that of immigration .... [In the light of the rejection of the Japanese Race Equality Clause) There can thus be no possible doubt that this question is absolutely reserved. Going still further, there is positive provision, the eighth paragraph of Article 15.''' This paragraph points out that issues of 'domestic jurisdiction' were beyond the scope of the League of Nations

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Council Wilson re-iterated this to Lodge and the Senate Committee at their meeting in August 1919, telling them that 'such matters as immigration, tariffs and naturalization are incontestably domestic questions in which no international body could deal without express authority to do so.' He admitted that the subject of immigration had not been mentioned in its own right, but explained that 'no enumeration of domestic questions was undertaken, because to undertake it, even by sample, would have involved the danger of seeming to exclude those not mentioned.'lOo Wilson obviously felt that this explanation would cover him as far as opposition to the League and the Treaty on the grounds of immigration control was concerned. But he was mistaken, because the issues inherent in immigration control had already played a vital role in the formation of the Treaty, and as Lodge indicated, they were to be one of the leading issues in its rejection by the American people. Immigration was to be crucial to, and perhaps the pivot for, two of the most divisive and contentious problems at the Paris Peace Conference: radicalism and race. At home, immigration was to be the focal point of the differences between post-war and pre-war America, between those who saw a bright future, and those who wished to return to a comfortable past. In short, to America in 1919, immigration conttol was the issue of American national self-determination.

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THE PERSISTENCE OF ENE:MY EUROPE

'I had wondered, not without anxiety, what it would feel like to be in an enemy country. Should I meet with stiff and resentful pride, or would the attitude be an even more painful cringing?' Henry Noel Brailsford in Vienna, 1919.'

M

yone with the scantiest knowledge of the history of the First World War will tell you that it raged between August 1914 and November 1918. elodramatically and memorably, the 'guns fell silent' in Europe on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 - presumably this was because the twelfth would have signalled the finality of Armageddon. Why then would an experienced, well informed British journalist, travelling in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Russia between February and May 1919, call his book A Record of Travels in Enemy Europe? Was this merely for dramatic effect? Was he, like the ill informed Japanese soldier stranded alone on the Pacific island, carrying on his own private war? Was he just being the pedant, and pointing out that at the time of writing, Germany had merely signed an armistice, and no lasting peace had been agreed? In the case of this commentator, Henry Brailsford - veteran British war correspondent, socialist, women's suffragist, Labour Party activist and correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, the undon Nation and the DailY Herald - all of these explanations are true, and in this interpretation he was certainly not alone. Europe was still at war. Well into 1919, there were German troops fighting, in German regiments, in German uniforms and under German command, in areas of what had been the Eastern Front. Although they withdrew from Byelorussia, the Crimea and the Ukraine, German 'Freebooters' remained fighting in the Baltic regions under General Rudiger von der Goltz. Poles were fighting against Russians and Czechs; Hungarians fought Poles; Greeks fought Turks; civil war flared up in various regions of Germany; and a ferocious, bloody and barbaric struggle was tearing the heart out of the vast Russian empire. As late as July 1919 it was estimated that there were still 23 separate wars being fought in Europe.' The continent was a long way from peace, and whatever his political allegiance, Brailsford was certainly accurate in his description of some regions of his travels as belonging to 'an enemy'.

THE PERSISTENCE OF ENEMY EUROPE

What is particularly interesting about this commentator is that his enemy was not the enemy of his country. Unlike his elected government, Brailsford showed a considerable sympathy for the emerging revolutionary governments of Hungary, Germany and Russia. To him the continuation of the inhuman suffering caused by the Royal Navy's blockade could do nothing other than drive home the hatreds brought to the surface by the war. Like many of his generation, he felt that the original thinking the democratic principles, the egalitarianism and the optimism of Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Lenin and all the other revolutionaries - held the key to European, if not world salvation. Brailsford made no secret of the fact that he hated all the old regimes. To him, the leaders were out-dated, inhuman parasites whose nationalistic rivalry had forced millions of men of all European nations to be senselessly martyred in the shell-bursts, gas, mud and bullets of the front lines. In addition he saw these governments as being responsible for the deaths of countless non-combatants in the effects of the blockade, destruction of infrastructure, long-range shelling, zeppelin raids and submarine warfare. To him, and to many others of all nations and at all levels of all societies, these antiquated class-based rulers had lost any legitimate right to rule. He welcomed the collapse of what he saw as the militaristic Hohenzollem Empire, the autocratic Romanov Empire, the decaying Ottoman Empire and the anachronistic Hapsburg Empire. He saw the conditions left in the wake of their demise as creating the ashes from which a socialist phoenix would rise, spread its influence from Russia westward through Europe and to the New World, and herald a brighter future. This travelogue has a sub tide: Across the Blockade, and it is in this that the key to his apparent inaccuracies lie. France and Britain maintained - arguably, and with diminishing enthusiasm in many quarters that the continuation of the Royal Navy's wartime blockade was still withholding vital supplies for the Central Powers.' In December 1918, American relief agencies had some 200 million pounds of bacon and 100 million bushels of wheat, as well as huge quantities of other meats and dairy products, waiting in cold storage for shipping to Europe; but still the French and the British refused to lift the blockade. 'Make the Hun pay', and 'Do not Feed the Beast' were the vindictive sentiments of large sections of the British and French populations who had suffered terrible privations and who now demanded retribution. The result was that the stranglehold remained in place until July 1919, only in this pater period it was justified largely as a means of coercing the leadership of the defeated powers to agree to the Paris peace proposals: To Brailsford, and to many others, the shortages of essential supplies to the former Central Powers were creating unnecessary suffering for the most helpless and hapless of Europeans. Herbert Hoover, the supreme American technocrat of his generation, head of the American relief effort, told Oemenceau that 'the wolf is at the door of the world'. The French leader was unimpressed even when Hoover told him that between 200 and 300 million Europeans of all ages were in real danger of starvation in the winter of 1918-19. When he pointed out that the vast majority of these unfortunates were in the territories of the former Central Powers, Oemenceau, with a cynicism born of genuine hatred, quipped that there were still too many Germans.'

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The Allied policy of continuing the 'economic warfare' certainly reduced this surplus. In all during the war it was claimed that the blockade had starved over one and a half million German and Austrian subjects to death. Statistics showed that neo-natal mortality in Germany was running at between 30 and 85 per cent in the first months of 1919 - in America it was under 10 per cent. In these nations some 800 people a day, generally the very young and the very old, were dying of nutritional and other deficiency-related disease. In what would become Czechoslovakia, half of all births were still-born. Compared with the 1914 figures for Vienna, the nea-natal mortality had doubled during the years of the blockade, and infant mortality rose from some 5,000 per year in the city; to over 35,000.' Even after hostilities had ended, Brailsford argued the survivors were still being treated as the enemy, with the result that they would surely continue to see the Allies - including the messianic Americans - as their enemy. In their tum, for a variety of reasons that will be explained below, there can be little doubt that many Americans regarded the Europeans, and especially the 'radicals', as their enemy.

6

e threat of revolution was visceral in 1919. For his first Sunday sermon of 1920, Dr Carl S. Patton of Los Angeles' First Congregational Church looked back on the past year. He started off with an analysis of the terrible bloodshed in Russia, concluding that it had been 'an unsettled year'.' He then moved his attention westwards, hopping around Europe and discussing the unrest and political tllrmoil in Poland, Germany, Porrugal and Hungary. He then dips into Asia, looking at India and Korea before dashing back to Europe via Egypt, to examine Italy, Albania, Rumania, Annenia, Greece, Britain, Ireland and France. He concludes his whirlwind tour of the Old World's industrial and social conflicts with the understatement that '1919 was not a good year anywhere in Europe for people who like quiet times'. Speeding over the Atlantic he finds things were litde better in America. He details the dock and textile strikes in New York, Lawrence, New Bedford, Fall River and Philadelphia. He mentions the general strike in Seattle and adds Tacoma, although the strike was averted in this city. He catalogues further strikes by 'the miners in Butte; the telegraph and telephone operators; the railroad shopmen; the actors; the printers; the Boston policemen; the express teamsters of New York; the street railroad men; the shopmen; the steel men and the coal men .. .' As with many other Americans, the good doctor concludes that in 1919 'we have had many other things here in America more or less like what they have had in Europe.' Many Americans would have gone further and claimed that the troubles in America were the result of the agitators and agitation in and from Europe. Since the birth of the United States there had always been a suspicion that while all immigrants were not radicals, most radicals were immigrants. By the end of 1919, this misgiving was so well entrenched that to a large section of American opinion the solution to growing industrial strife and acts of political terrorism

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was seen as wntlng into the law of the land the ability to retum all the troublemakers to their home countries. To another group of Americans such niceties were unnecessary, and the solution lay in the immediate expulsion of the radicals, whether the law sanctioned it or not. In investigating this escalation of intolerance, this survey will briefly trace the historical impact of a connection between Europeans and extremism in America. A majority of existing studies have sought the explanation for this prejudice in the flowering of super-patriotism inspired by the war. While accepting and examining that premise, this work will also look into the extent to which the conflation of European and radical was strengthened by the experience of the battle for the peace in its conception in Paris and its reception at home. Three interwoven strands of reinforced anti-radical nativist belief will be teased out of this study of the Treaty and its implications. The first draws on a perception that the American and European 'masses' had fundamentally different aspirations and ideas of how they should be achieved before, during and after the Paris Peace Conference. Rather than coming together in the conclusion of a common cause, this work will argue that strife at home and the inability to reach concrete agreements in Paris widened this gulf The second strand - which to some extent is a product of the frest - is the growth of political anti-Bolshevism in WIlsons world view. The third is a perception that in the months of the Treaty ratification debate, Bolshevism once again played a leading role, not least as it was used by opponents and supporters of the Treaty as a mark of the 'un-American' nature of each otheis position. Each argument compliments the other, while at the same time introducing a polarity that reaches fruition in the 1920 presidential election. Also, vitally, these positions rely on a mental picture in the minds of many in America that the situation in Europe, and at home, was steadily worsening At the root of this growing apprehension is radicalism in the shape of Bolshevism, or at least revolutionary socialism. Most importantly, each hammers home the message that 'radicalism' and 'foreignness' are one and the same. There is little new in this brand of American exceptionalism, and in order to understand its heritage and the depth of its effects, it is perhaps wise to briefly examine the attitude of American labour to their European counterparts. In the years leading up to the escalation of the European conflict, there had been, on both sides of the Atlantic, a trial of strength between the existing conservative and liberal elites, and the emerging mass political movements further to the left. Whereas the socialist parties made considerable progress in Europe, in spite of brief spells of radical reforming zeal, America had emerged from the bloodshed of its civil war as a fundamentally conservative nation. The reunited nation was more concerned with territorial consolidation and business expansion than with adventurous political experiments. The failure of radical reconstruction, and then the virtual implosion of the Populist movement, were brief episodes as America explored and exploited the potential of the West. What emerged was a nation with relatively high levels of property and land ownership. Alongside this there was an increasing and seemingly limitless promise of personal wealth. It W3$ a combination of these elements, and a belief in their potential, that made the population - at least the large proportion of the

THE PERSISTEt'KE OF ENEMY EUROPE

established 'white' population - optimistic, but politically conservative. Added to these pressures for confonnity and stability there was the influence of increasing immigration from the poorer regions of Europe, which made many resident Americans appear increasingly isolationist, if not reactionary. This 'new [European] immigration' was of especial concern in the most densely populated regions of the Eastern seaboard and emerging industrial regions, as it was here that the native-born saw the greatest change to their environment. Unsurprisingly, it was here that they - the native-born, especially the second-generation immigrants - felt their livelihoods most challenged. It was not considered coincidence that the perr:eived reservoirs of radicalism tended to be the industrial slums of the large metropolis of the east and mid-west or the outermost regions of the far west: these were the areas with the greatest concentrations of immigrant labour. Rapid urbanization, rapid industrialization and rapid demographic change bred insecurity and uncertainty. As in Europe, there was a large section that felt reform was essential in order to preserve democratic institutions. In the United States, this group tended towards a peculiarly American version of liberalism, known as 'Progressivism'. Nebulous and wide-ranging, with its catch-all title applied as much to a moment as a movement, Progressivism has been notoriously difficult to define. It seems safe to say that most now see it as at least fundamentally urban, Protestant, middle-class and white, if not :Anglo-Saxon'. It is perhaps easiest to regard it as an interest group dedicated to social and political reform, and whose influence spread across the country. It would also appear that at least a strand within the movement, and probably a majority, prided themselves on a rational and evolutionary reliance on incremental restructuring and improvement. Most importantly for this study is that it was largely a policy of containment of reform, not revolution.' A conservative nation, the Americans had always tended to feel that true revolutionary radicalism was a European import, and this is true even at the emergence of the nation. \Vhile calling itself a revolution, America's struggle for independence had been backed by two of the most autocratic nations of Ancien Regime Europe: France and Spain. '\XIhen a truly radical French republic emerged shortly after the American republic became a reality, the radical ideas of Thomas Paine and other advocates of the people retreated into the background More traditional parameters of what was desirable, or acceptable, for the governance of the new nation came to the fore, and America's relations with France's revolutionary leaders swiftly soured Even in these, the idealistic, glory days of the republic, the new nation's revolutionary fervour had swiftly given way to worries about state security, and a deep-rooted fear of 'Jacobinism' had fuelled the introduction of controls used on largely Irish radicals as early as the 1790s with the Alien and Sedition Acts. There was a variety of different stereotypical radicals: Irish revolutionary-nationalists, German socialists, Jewish Marxists, Russian nihilists, Italian anarr:hists, and all contributed to a gradual but growing acceptance of the notion that revolution was associated with Europeans. In the 1880's alone, anarr:hists had assassinated the Russian Tsar Alexander II, the Spanish prime minister Canovasdel Castillo, the French President Sadi Carnot, the Hapsburg Empress Elizabeth and the

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Italian King, Umberto I. With the industrialization of Adantic migration in the final quarter of the nineteenth centllly, America felt itself to be increasingly subjected to the ideas that motivated the assassinations and bombings in Europe as growing numbers of radicals crossed the Adantic. During this period, public opinion was informed by an outraged American press that reported with great and horrifying detail highly violent 'un-American' acts on American soil There were the Irish-led Molly Maguire riots in the Pennsylvania coalfields during the 1870s; the killing of seven policemen by mid-European anarchists in the bombing of Ollcago's Haymarket in 1886; and the shooting of Andrew Carnegie's deputy, Henry Clay Frick, at Homestead in 1892 by a Russian-bom anarchist. The new cenrory opened with a bang when an anarchist of Polish descent assassinated the president, and two Irish brothers blew up the offices and killed members of the staff of the LA Times. As the press stressed, with some exaggeration, these and many other similar atrocities were all the work of European immigrants. Perhaps the most glowing example of the terrorist as foreigoer is that of Leon Czolgosz, McKinley'S assassin. Although bom in Detroit and raised in Michigan, this US citizen's un-American action was understandable because 'other Americans' were 'pleased to know that the Assassin is not an American: Further, according to many 'informed' contemporary commentators, many bombthrowing fanatics were linked in a worldwide network. For example, the Ollcago police chief confidendy asserted that the Haymarket bombing was 'methodic not a haphazard conspiracy [and thatJ .. the ferment in Russia is controlled by the same heads and the same hands as the activity in Chicago." He, like many others who saw conspiracies in the violence of radicals, could not believe that such actions were all too often the result of despair at the local conditions. Few 'decent Americans' felt that the United States could remain immune from the radical bacillus that was spreading across Europe, and there was more than a litde truth in this belief Desperate and unreformed radicals often fled persecution - or retribution - in their home countries, feeling that once in the United States they could find relative safety, with a new life in the anonymity and obscurity of an urbanizing nation, or the emptiness of the frontier. Others sought the growing economic opportunities in an expanding, industrializing, urbanizing America, and utilized it in order to fund their radical activities. Secretive, underground and sinister organizations such as the Italian 'Black Hand: were portrayed in the popular press as spreading their parasitic and all-pervasive network of roots in the immigrant colonies of the major cities. Here they organized criminal activities in order to fund their own nefarious anarchist agenda both in Europe and the New World By 1903, as a result of President McKinley's assassination by a 'deranged: young anarchist of Polish descent, America had intruduced immigration restrictions on all who would 'overthrow the government by force'. All furore immigration legislation, up to the 1921 Act, refined the radical groups excluded, with the result that the association of political violence and the foreigo-bom was cemented in middle America's imagination. As the future American Socialist Party leader, Eugene Debs, explained 'Socialism was cunningly associated with "anarchy and bloodshed:' and denounced as a "foul foreigo importation" to

THE PERSISTENCE OF ENEMY EUROPE

pollute the fair, free soil of America.''' By the first decade of the twentieth century, there was an increasing suspicion that America's historic pride in her status as a political asylum was as ill-advised as it was dangerous. There was a feeling that radical agitators were proliferating to the extent that they now fonned a real threat to American industry as well as her political systems. One 'expert' claimed that in 1906 there were over 26,000 revolutionaries organized into effective cells in most of the major cities of the United States. He felt that it was only a question of time before the bombers, assassins and hoodlums could begin their 'reign of terror here .... that boils and bubbles in Russia' in the wake of their abortive 1905 revolution." In the minds of both revolutionaries and reactionaries and many in between - there was little doubt that America was ripe for revolution. Compared with other industrializing nations of the same era, America had achieved what appeared to be an accelerated industrial development. Moreover, the rapid industrialization of the north due to the needs incurred in the Civil War, the vast resources of the country, the huge surges in mechanization, and the seemingly unlimited supply of willing capital from Europe, had created both enormous wealth as well as tremendous disaffection and inequality. Equally importandy, the massive increase in immigration in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had, at the same time, fuelled and been fuelled by America's industrialization. The improvements in technology enabled mass trans-Adantic as well as transcontinental migration. The nation viewed itself as imbued with an indomitable pioneer spirit, and had the optimism of a new, open, fresh continent of untapped land and resources. By the last decades of the nineteenth century it also had an enormously expanding rail network, which enabled huge numbers of settlers to spread further and further west in a pattern that had repeated itself in the American imagination since the first white settlers. These developments also enabled vasdy greater production of :finished goods and their distribution. It allowed labour and spare parts, fue~ consumables and other supplies to be delivered more cheaply, more reliably and more speedily over ever-greater distances. It also enabled immeasurably increased exploitation and extraction of raw materials as well as their transportation from even the most inhospitable regions of the country to the growing industri~ urban centres of production and consumption. R~ improved containerization and refrigeration meant that grain, hogs, beef or even fruit could be produced, processed, packed, shipped, stored and consumed in unheard-of quantities. The same applied to products from salmon to st~ timber to tungsten. Technology conquered the vast expanse of the United States, and the scale of that conquest created fortunes of an entirely new order. This colossal expansion in economic activity, and the seemingly horizon-less potential for more growth, in tum fuelled the need for further labour. Tum-ofthe-century America drew in vast numbers of immigrants to provide plentiful and cheap manpower to produce, build, mine and harvest the means to power the United States' ever-expanding economy. While this demand for labour escalated, the countries that had provided the old sources of immigration in the north and west of Europe - most notably Britain and Gennany were utilizing their own growing populations as they underwent their own industrialization or expanded

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their own imperial ambitions. This had the effect of forcing American industrialists to source labour from the less developed, less industrialized areas of southern and eastern Europe. By the early 1890s, the burgeoning populations of the peasant-fanning regions of Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Russia and AustriaHungary, as well as the Jewish settlements of the Pale, had overtaken the old Scandinavian, British, Geonan and Irish nations as the main suppliers of hopeful migrants. There were several other reasons for this shift in immigrant origin and for the massive increase in numbers. First, this mass migration was in part the result of the demographic pressures arising from a worldwide population explosion in the nineteenth century. Europe's population had grown from 190 million on the eve of Waterloo to 460 million on the eve of the battle of the Marne. Advances in medical knowledge and techniques, also food production and its distribution and preservation, as well as sanitation, reduced infant and neo-natal death rates, improving fertility and life expectancy all these contributed to increased population densities, and spurred the need for national and intra-national migration. This in tum was aided by improved transportation both on land and at sea. The huge investments in transport spurred large-scale advertising, and their extravagant claims drew in growing numbers of settlers and sojourners who in tum established trans-Adantic familial netwOlks that served to further encourage this exodus. 12 Also, and most significandy for this study, this resdess mobility was the result of a gradual and incremental relaxation of the rules governing movement within, and migration from, the autocracies of central and eastern Europe. There was a growing realization that the absolute control over the movement of the poorer and less educated masses was not only becoming more difficult, it was also debatable as to whether it was still altogether desirable. While maintaining their traditional dislike of popular mobility, even the Russian authorities saw in the boom in human traffic an opportunity to export some of the more troublesome elements of their growing population. The freeing of the Balkan regions from Ottoman rule, the concessions wrung from Franz Joseph in the wake of the disruption caused by the Geonan victory over Austria in 1867, and the unification of Italy, all contributed to a seeming liberalization that fed the evergrowing waves of emigration. While the governments of these areas did not encourage emigration - and in most cases actively discouraged the New World ambitions of young males who had yet to complete their military service - in practical teons they did little to stop the more or less constant flow of hopeful migrants from the late 1890s to the outbreak of war in 1914. In many cases they were pleased to export some of their excess, their landless population that had been for some years heading into the major cities in their territories and causing the growth of slum areas and serious problems of overcrowding. During this period., cities such as Vienna, Prague, Budapest and St Petersburg expanded massively, and the local authorities claimed to notice seriously detrimental affects on the health, morality and criminality of the inhabitants, and on transport as well as living conditions within their metropolitan areas. The poverty, disease and unemployment of this urbanization of the peasantry was also seen by authorities and revolutionaries alike as the

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penect breeding ground for radicalism, and governments were glad to export at least some of these potential agitators to America. By the time of the abortive 1905 Russian revolution, Europe's mass political parties had experienced a general lean to the left. One of the effects of this prevailing trend in industrial westem Europe, most imporIantly Germany, was the move towards universal, albeit male, enfranchisement, which in rum created a literal impoverishment of the electorate. Politically empowered and rapidly expanding, the industrial workforce demanded rudimentary safeguards for their health, wealth and wellbeins 'When these were forthcoming, with such measures as national insurance schemes or workplace health and safety regulations as in Germany, Belgium and France or, to a lesser extent and more slowly, in BriIain, the pressures srew for more 'radical' rights - a compulsory cut in working hours, or even worker represenIation in boardrooms, If they secured these 'privileges' their enemies argued that the greed and impatience feeding class solidarity and intemationalism would mean that from there it was but a short step to revolution. As that mos t American of unionists, Samuel Gompers, put it, in a rare demonstration of sympathy for the European Left: 'They [the European workers] feel that great social changes must come soon; that the final curtain has been rung down on the human comedy of government, of and for the [ruling) classes; that the day of democracy is at hand .. .'" There was a certain smugness with which American conservatives and business leaders regarded their European counterparts. The runaway capitalism of the Gilded Age and early Progressive era was made possible only with the connivance, if not positive support, of local as well as Federal government in America." A striking example of this is provided by the democrat Grover Cleveland, who was considered an opponent of the big business-government cosiness that in many instances characterized the Gilded Age. Perhaps the one great social reform that Cleveland signed into law was the Sherman Anti-Trust legislation, but while it was apparently a great leap forward for the middle classes, it proved to be a sham for American labour. 'While trumpeted as an antimonopoly curb on big business that forbade 'combination or conspiracy' of any group that might damage trade, it soon became apparent that this was to become a weapon in the hands of the judiciary in order to control the organizing of workers. There was perhaps some truth in Cleveland's liberal reputation when compared with his predecessor, Benjamin Harrison, at least at a personal level Harrison had personally commanded a company of soldiers fighting strikers in the 1877 rail strike, and had then acted as the prosecution in their trial in the Federal Courts. At the time of its passage, the Sherman laws would probably have been regarded as retrogressive in some of the more liberal regions of Europe. Arguably this course - one of liberal promise but conservative action - marked the American government's reasoning in regulating the political representation of the industrial workforce from Cleveland through to Wilson. It is perhaps best summed up in Cleveland's own words: 'The opportunity for safe, careful and deliberate reform is now offered; and none of us should be umnindful of a time when abused and irritated people,. ,may insist upon a radical and sweeping rectification of their wrongs.'15

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It has been argued that the American wage-earning workforce of this period never really developed the class consciousness of the European workers." Americans liked to pride themselves that this classlessness was the result of the continuing democratic, egalitarian structure of the nation, combined with the opportunities open to the individual Proponents of this view liked to feel that, like the marshafs baton in the knapsack of Napoleon's foot soldiers, all the lower ranks of industry held the key to the boardroom in their pocket. The rags-to-riches stories of the Andrew Camegies, Jay Goulds and John D. Rockefellers inspired the American dream, and these living embodiments of the potential of the American dream certainly seemed to be impressive examples of the egalitarian potential of American society. There were also the more widespread and prosaic explanations for such conspicuous success, involving such mundane and unattractive elements as inherited wealth, speculation, ruthlessness and innate ability, which generally bred more wealth - if less admiration than that most 'American' of traits, virtuous dedication. There were, of course, also more often than not the failures, and this sustained a cynicism in some areas of American society that militated against the incremental gains promised by the Horatio Alger model" In some cases it was the very polyglot nature of America's industrial workforce that worked against unified class identities. In some regions, particularly the immigrant 'colonies' of the inner cities, nationality was often confused with, if not more important than, social status, Frequendy it was national solidarity among the various immigrant groups that took priority over class solidarity. For example, the linguistic, cultural and familial bonds common to Slavic workers in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania precluded their amalgamation with other labour groups of a different ethnic origin. This was even truer when the groups that a union attempted to incorporate were of different colours. After the heady days of the idealistic Knights of Labor (KoL) in the 1870s and 1880s, and its demise in the wake of the Haymarket bombings, organizing male white workers in the same group as black or Latin-American wage earners was largely anon-starter." These national and ethnic divisions were regularly encouraged by management, and often exploited. In situations of industrial strife, strikes were often broken by importing workers of a different nationality or ethnic background, as with the importing of immigrant labour to break the KoL strikes in the bimminous coal mines of Pennsylvania and Ohio in the 1880s. This reinforced prejudices against foreign-born workers amongst the native-born, who increasingly came to see them as immoral, ignorant, unskilled, self-serving drones who would work in unhealthy and dangerous conditions for pay that was considerably less than that demanded by their American counterparts. Not only was this seemingly over-weaning compliance on the part of the foreign-born seen as damaging to the individual industries, and threatening to the advances in pay and conditions that 'true' Americans had fought for, it also threatened the entire labour movement as a whole. The stereotype of the foreignborn as ignorant of democracy, used to living under autocratic conditions, and seeing violence as the only means of bringing about political change, was as deeprooted in the working-class culture of the American-born as it was in the thinking

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of the middle classes. To the native-born working man, the immigrant, and especially the 'new' immigrant, was a threat at every level American labour organization had undergone a change in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Largely in response to the anti-union repercussions of the Haymat:ket bombs, the American unionism that was evolving as the twentieth century dawned was conciliatory, exclusive and conservative. Catering for a socially mobile, ambitious and increasingly well trained, settled workforce, it was based on the pride of the artisan in his skilled labour, and organized along the lines of the individual trades and crafts that collected under the umbrella of the American Federation of Labor (AF of L). The unions tended to aim at protecting rights, work practices and existing rewards rather than reforming. In the main, such reforms as they went after tended to be specific, rather than broad in their scope, and governed by a strong sense of reality rather than led by idealism. Since the crafts they represented were largely the province of the native-born, or the more settled and better integrated immigrants, the AF of L tended to exclude recent arrivals. To some extent this was the result of the nature of the jobs that immigrants tended to take. The AF of L craft unions excluded those with poor language and literacy skills as well as those lacking the training, aptitude or means to work as anything other than machine operatives and manual labourers in the mills, factories, packing houses, construction and transport industries. Those disqualified from the AF of L were often disinterested in unionism. They were frequendy e.mployed in jobs where unions traditionally had very little power. This could be the result of the industry attracting a ready supply and swift tunlover of labour. It could be because of the isolation of the workplace and/ or the autocratic management, which meant that industrial action was not an option. Often unfamiliar with the concepts of unionism, the foreign-born seldom had either the linguistic skills or the education to respond to the pleas of union activists. When the immigrant crossed the picket line, it was frequendy out of ignorance rather than bravery, and equally, sometimes, without malice towards the striking workers. More often than not they had been shipped in for the conflict, and may well have been totally unaware that the dispute was in progress until they arrived at the site. Sometimes they were even fresh from the docks after their Adantic or Pacific crossing. However, this disinterest was very often seen as hostility by the settled workers, already angered by the universal rumour of foreign hordes being imported to reduce wage rates; it was seen as opposition to the 'American' values of the native-born workman and the AF of L - reinforcing perceptions of the inherent foreign-ness of radicalism. This all changed in June 1905 when an effective, national, radical and inclusive union e.merged in America. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was committed to the principles of worker solidarity and revolutionary overthrow of the existing syste.m. The radicalism of the movement meant that it was largely seen as an import-anarchistic, undemocratic and un-American. This popular view of the IWW as alien was reinforced by the way in which the organization sought to represent those excluded from the AF of L - the unskilled, the coloured and the unnaturalized. Internationalist in its approach, the IWW had no

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interest in preserving 'American' values, and saw no virtue in what the 'Americanized' called 'patriotism. They were international, and distinguished their enemies by their class, not their nationality. They reinforced their alien nature in their leadership. At the core of the organization were 'foreigners'. The initial meeting included among its most notorious members, a defrocked Catholic priest, Father Thomas J. Hagerty; the editor of a radical German language paper, William A Trautmann; and a Venezuelan who had become a contributor to anarchist intellectual papers in Italy and France, Daniel DeLeon. Although there was also a distinctly American flavour to the movement, it was composed of outsiders, men whose beliefs were already at odds with the establishment. The notorious Eugene Debs, socialist leader and the veteran of the violence of the Pullman strike, spoke enthusiastically at the birth of the movement. There was the advocate of industrial espionage and latter-day Communist, William Z. Foster. Even the most 'American' aspect of the organization was seen as being alien by many conservatives. It was the anti-intellectual, hands-on approach of the former hard rock miner William ('Big Bill') Haywood and others of the 'overall brigade' from the mines, woods and farms of the far West that gave an active rather than theoretical aspect to the movement.!' Within a year of the founding conference the 'Wobblies', as they became known, were in the headlines when Bill Haywood was implicated in the assassination of the ex-governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg. The ensuing highprofile trial brought out the feelings that were to matk the establishment's view of the rww until the otganization was effectively, if temporarily, neutralized in the 1920s. It also reinforced their 'otherness' in the minds of mainstream American society. Theodore Roosevelt chose his words when he condemned Haywood as an 'undesirable citizen'. What he said, and what many believed, was that Haywood was not suitable material to be an American. iXlhat he implied was that, to a large proportion of solid American citizenry, Haywood, and the rww itself, was decidedly un-American." The rww embraced this condemnation. It was this very celebration of their position outside American society that made the rww such a potent and threatening force, and arguably it was this nonchalant dismissal of the American dream that polarized opinion. The cynicism that underlay the rww anthem 'Hallelujah, fm a Bum' was at loggerheads with the optimistic, ebullient, bullmoose ethos of Teddy Roosevelt's America, with its self-assured, expansive virility, and eulogies to the seemingly unlimited potential of the American nation. It was also at odds with the cool, rational liberalism of Woodrow Mson. To the constituents of both of these presidents, the W:Jbblies were 'wild-eyed agitators who tend to [make] indiscriminate assault on everything good and bad alike.'2! IWW agitators were active in most of the major industrial conflicts of the first decades of the twentieth century. In Spokane and Missoula in 1908-09 rww members were imprisoned, beaten and run out of town for fighting for what they called 'free speech', but what residents saw as a blasphemy against the American dream. There were Wobblies on the picket lines with the textile workers in New York, Lawrence and Paterson. They were present in the miners' strikes in Colorado, the farm workers' disputes in California, the Louisiana and Washington

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State timber wars and the abortive Philadelphia general strike of 1910, as well as other less well known conflicts. By the time war broke out in Europe the Wobblies had a truly national presence and reputation, which belied their actual numbers. As a commentator later explained, at the height of their power in 1918: I do not think its [the IWWs] membership exceeds 200,000, and yet its name is a source of terror and fear for the same reason that a mad dog in a crowded thoroughfare or a murderous maniac at large might terrorize a large community.22

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'It has been reckoned that at least $50,000,000 were [sic] spent in this country. The German government sought to establish here bases for military attacks on Canada and even India, and for fomenting trouble with Mexico and Japan. Its campaign to interfere, by strikes, explosions and :fires, with the manufacture of munitions and their transportation was widespread and continuous, and included the destruction of vessels as well as factories. Another field was the xinfluencing of public opinion, especially through the press. There was an endeavor to influence legislation, both state and national The German Ambassador, Bemstotff, was at the head of the organization, but our government did not request his recall for that reason, but only that of his attaches, BoyEd and Pap en, DI. Albert, and also the Austrian Ambassador Dumba. The officers of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company were also very active: Arthur L. Frothingham, 191923 'There will be no compromise because you cannot compromise with a rattlesnake ....That goes for both the International Union [of .Mine, Mill and Smelter iXbrkers] and the IWW... .1 believe the government will be able to show that there is German influence behind this movement [the strike at the Queen copper mine]'. Walter S. Douglas, chairman of Phelps-Dodge on his way to Bisbee, Arizona in June 1917.2' n order to understand the reaction of America to the peace, it is essential to understand a little of what Americans at home felt during the waI. 15 In order to understand how the alien nature of radicalism informed the American negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, and their desires for the post-war world, it is important not to lose sight of the continuation, perpetuation and evolution of that all-too-prevalent connection between 'alien', 'radical', 'enemy'

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and WIth this in mind, it is also vital to recognize that the war intI:oduced new feats and highlighted existing suspicions of alien activity at home. In part this was a genuine fear of fifth columnists, saboteuts and other tIaitors. It was also the result of over-zealous patriotism - a wish to play a part in the nation's StI:uggle, patriots who needed to fight a war in America, and who made a stereotyped radical alien into the perfect target. It was not only the response to the patriotic call that revitalized the stI:uggle with the alien-radical: the conflict placed the radicals even further at odds to the majority of Americans. Opposed to war between the capitalist, imperialist nations, the socialists, anarchists, Bolsheviks and other radicals could see the only result of the stI:uggle being further suffering for the under classes. The American war effort with its massive increase in production, its huge mobilization of labour, its increased social contIol, its generation of massive profit, all served to highlight the existing struggles between labour and capital. It gave them a more vital edge and created a new polarity. Arguably, the Great War was the motor that propelled the final stage of America's growth to fuIIy fledged financial independence, and turned the nation into a global economic power. When Europe went to war it was America that supplied much of the finance and much of the weaponry, and in doing so the American economy boomed. In the first full year of war, the Americans supplied the British alone with $1,100,453,950 worth of 'war material', and as the Allies' resources became depleted, so American production increased to fill the void by the war's end Britain and France owed America some nine billion dollats.Z6 When America joined the war in April 1917, production had to increase even further to clothe, arm, equip and feed their own army: in a year and a half this had expanded from a small force of a little under 200,000 men, designed to deal with border disputes and minor conflicts, to a massive modem conscript army of just over 3.5 million. There was also the need to constI:uct, man and maintain the shipping to send these men to the front and supply them there, for in the nineteen months of America's war some two million servicemen were shipped abroad, three-quartets of whom would see combat. All this was ostensibly for the 'defence of democracy', although the more honest, as well as the more cynical, admitted that it was also for the defence of America's now massive investI:nent in the Allied cause. America was not a unified country when it entered the war: Perhaps observing the protI:acted slaughter in Europe meant that they did not go to war with the same enthusiasm that reports claimed the tIoops of the Old World had marched to the front. Although most patriotic sources claimed that the nation rose as one to the cause, in fact an indication of the popularity of the war is apparent in the figures for the first batch of volunteets: fewer than 200,000 had come forward by the end of May 1917, even though General Petshing had declared that a million men would be needed27 Theodore Roosevelt, 'that old lion', put forward a scheme to raise 'five hundred thousand vohmteets ... [the] picked aristocracy of fighters'. It was decided instead to leave it to 'the scientific army planners', and the shortfall was made up by a formidable combination of a Federal conscription bill and a massive national patI:iotism drive utilizing all forms of media. Although the draft provided the greater proportion - some 72 per cent of those who

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served in the AEF were draftees a far higher number than those who took part in the civil war, it was the campaign for patriotism that had a more lasting legacy." In an effort to create a semblance of unity the drive for American values and American virtues eventually became so all-pervasive that it was said that 'an American could not step on a streetcar, go to the store, open a magazine or newspaper, go to church, or attend a movie, without being exposed to the message' of rabid 'anti-Prussianism' and super-patriotism.'" This huge omnipresent drive for '100 per cent Americanism' created a national mood in which it was imperative not only to be committed to the American cause, American values and American ways, but to display this commitment, and if necessary, prove it beyond any doubt. This campaign was spearheaded by the urbane, thoroughly 'modem' newspaper man, George Creel, who oversaw the omnipotent 'Committee on Public Information'. As one of the foremost advocates of active government-sponsored Americanization pointed out, Americans feared foreigners and ... .. .grew uneasy when they began to read about the war activity of some of the foreign-born in America. They began to ask why aliens had not become naturalized; why naturalized citizens had not become Americanized; why America did not come first in their interests; and why naturalized citizens were retuming to serve in the armies of their home countries. As the war progressed, a widespread apprehension grew among Americans as to what they ultimately might do." The unnaturalized alien, of whatever nationality, represented a member of a sinister pool of potential enemies within the nation itself There was a lurking suspicion that they cared more for the nations they had left than the nation in which they were now resident. There was also a feeling that many of the aliens had been stranded in America when war broke out their migration for work interrupted by the escalation of the conflict. They found themselves prevented from returning by the occupation of their homeland or the threat of futile service in one of the armies slowly throttling each other in Europe. Huddled in amongst their own kind, they needed to be inducted into American society, inculcated with American virtues and sold the American dream. They needed to be Americanized, and the nation took this work increasingly seriously. Obviously one important strand of this patriotic eagerness was aimed at the resident German population. More than any other national group they needed to be shown the error of their compatriots and incorporated into American society. According to contemporary estimates, some 13 per cent of the world's German speakers lived in America at the outbreak of the war in Europe. The 1910 census put the German-American population at some 11 million, and there were 4,500,000 German-speaking, un-naturalized aliens who had been born in the lands of the Central Powers.'! For all these groups the wartime choices were stark. Patriotism in America was almost entirely a question of Anglo-Saxon conformity, especially after the 114 Americans were killed in the sinking of the LusitanUi, if not from the invasion of neutral Belgium by the marauding, bloodthirsty Huns in August 1914." Germans,

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and less so other nations overdy fighting the entente the Austrians, Hungarians, were required to fit into this increasingly narrow Bulgarians and Turks interpretation of Americanism To the patriots, even those aliens who seemed loyal could not be trusted. The population was warned to 'Beward [sic] of the German-American who wraps the Stars and Stripes around his German body.'" They could be fifth columnists, saboteurs or spies. There were plenty of examples of their activities when warehouses stockpiled with arms and ammunition for the Allied forces were burnt to the ground, or when German naval attaches were discovered to have funded 'firebugs' and other saboteurs to the tune of some $30 million. The papers ran stories of 'treacherous' Irish dockers enabling German saboteurs to place incendiary devices on board Allied shipping loading at the New York waterfront. The nativists and patriots were convinced that the Hun paymaster paid the man who put lemon juice and sand in the bearings of vital war-work machinery. He was cheering on the man who spiked trees to shatter saw blades cutting timber for aircraft production, and he supported those who deliberately produced potentially lethal and shoddy shells, bullets or bombs. The leading German-American spokesman, Charles John Hexamer confirmed this picture of the 'disloyal' Hun in the midst of the nation when he ill-advisedly went into print declaring that while he supported a truly neutral stance, if he were Secretary of State he would 'force England to her kuees in two weeks'." In short, it seemed the Germans were behind all the breakdowns and all the accidents that dogged America's drive to supply those fighting for democracy, a fact that effective and well targeted British propaganda, and then American, drummed home at any opportunity. To many in America's heartlands, once America was roused to join the conflict, the war took on a crusading, semireligious tone. There was no more room for any form of neutrality, hyphenation or equivocation. As the evangelist:, Billy Sunday thundered: '[Kaiser] Bill against Woodrow, Germany against America, Hell against Heaven ....Either you are loyal or you are not, you are either a patriot or a black-hearted traitor.'''' The nation's press exhorted the purchase of liberty bonds and donations to the Red Cross, and at the same time they reported frightening tales of Germany financing hordes of pacifists and radicals. The atmosphere became hysterical. Anyone with a foreign accent was suspect, and an incident could be sparked by the most innocent of actions if the perpetrator looked or sounded different By May 1918 the Attomey-General's office was receiving 1,500 accusations of disloyalty every day." Where the more or less uncritical, patriotic press could not prove that the foreign-born were actively anti-American saboteurs or traitors, they might often paint them as 'alien slackers', attempting to avoid military duties or disrupt the war effort with their stolid refusal to do war-related work." Some of the American newspapers, fired with Americanizing fervour, jumped on the fact that aliens were exempt from the draft and thoroughly condemned them if they refused to volunteer - although America had treaties with many European nations that exempted their subjects from conscription. After the war, some 736 Swedes, 444 Norwegians and 600 other nationals who were being held, due to be deported, for their failure to respond to the draft, were found to be protected by

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the terms of existing treaties." Such details did not stop true American patriots from complaining that these foreigners enjoyed the fruits of American freedom, without being willing to fight fo!: their continuation. To the '100 per center such actions were questionable, if not actually treasonable. Such patriotism was not confined to any particular section of the population - even high-ranking members of Wilson's administration became swept up in the fervour, and were keen to demonstrate their loyalty by pointing out potential disloyalty among the foreign-born. It was an era of hyperbole. Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, as reasonable a barometer of the populist sentiment within the administration as any, perhaps expressed this thinking best when he informed Chicago residents that he would not tolerate such behaviour, threatening that 'we [the patriotic Americans] will put the fear of God into the hearts of those who live among us, and fatten upon us, but are not Americans.''' Aliens suffered from new forms of discrimination in the name of the war effort. In some states they were barred from teaching jobs or land tenure, in others where they had had the vote on taking out naturalization papers before the war, they found themselves disenfranchized when America joined the war. Some states barred aliens from hunting, and others from jury service.'" Knights of liberty, the American Defense Society, the American Protective League (APL), and other vigilante groups provided the opportunity for more or less government-sanctioned alien-investigating activities, and an occupation for patriots not able to serve in France. The scale and success of this activity is demonstrated by the largest of these organizations. Some 350,000 APL agents investigated over three million cases: they intercepted mail, spied on neighbours, and intimidated aliens. Huge amounts of paperwork were generated, and terrifying plots were uncovered. Age was no barrier to patriotism, and even children found a place as home-front heroes. Over a thousand branches of the snappily named Anti-Yellow Dog League sprang up over the country enabling true American operatives of ten years old and ave!: to join in the persecution." German agents were seen in the most unlikely places, and their ruthlessness and cunning seemed to know no limits; but in spite of the best efforts of all of these patriotic paragons, they turned up no spies at all. As American casualties in France mounted, the claims against aliens became more common. They were accused of arson, sabotage, draft evasion and aiding the enemy, and anyone who expressed anything less than total commitment to the Allied cause was suspect. Pacifists came in for special abuse. The president of the American Historical Association, William Roscoe Thayer, attacked the Germans and their allies as the modem-day barbarian horde, and he condemned anyone, including William Jennings Bryan, Newton D Baker and Henry Ford, whom he felt had supported Wilson's ideal of neutrality as a 'moral eunuch'." The sociologist Franklin H. Giddings claimed that pacifist meetings were for 'morally obtuse women and their consorts.'43 In Minnesota and north Dakota there was a drive against the anti-war, leftist, largely German and Scandinavian farmers of the Nonpartisan League, when its agents were kidnapped and beaten, and its meetings broken Up.44 In Oregon, Julius Rhuberg, an elderly man, was sentenced to fifteen months for condemning the war. Even chmch ministers were beaten,

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tarred and feathered, and one was even lynched - for their pacifism. Anything that could be construed as pro-German was severely punished. In Ohio a drunken sailor received a ten-year prison sentence fOt: singing 'Deutschland uber Alles'. Sometimes the claims were so outrageous that they now appear comical, as with Frank T Howenstine, an optician of German extraction. This man was accused of fitting glasses and giving eye drops to men in California in order to distort their vision and disable them for the draft. He and his female assistant, who accused Wtlson of being English and fighting for an unjust cause, both received heavy sentences under the Espionage Act." Finally, when the Reverend Herbert Bigelow, a socialist and former pacifist, was kidnapped and beaten by Ohio patriots for his less-than-fulsome hatred of the Hun, Woodrow Wtlson felt obliged to speak out against this 'spirit of lawlessness' but even then, little changed. In this climate of what the nation's most famous, and arguably most witty German, HL. Menken, called 'perverfid patriotism'," few organizations dared to openly oppose the snowballing Hun-hatred. Although many patriots were rather indiscriminate in their mistrust of aliens, particularly during the war, perhaps the worst fate awaited those who were seen as socialists or members of the IWW. Revelling in their role as outsiders, in their pithy and direct way the Wobblies shouted their pacifist, internationalist message: 'Don't be a soldier. Be a man .... Refuse to join the army, refuse to go to wat:'47 These troublemakers were seen as disrupting vital war production, especially in the woods, farms and mines of the far west. The old association of radicalism and foreignness took on a new and more important guise, and the '%bbly', the socialist and the Communist were now a threat to the nation. Un-American in their views, it was held that such tIaitorous enemies of liberty could not be of American extraction. They were ostracized and persecuted, often with official collusion. There were beatings; there were tarring and featherings; there was also the emergence of what was to become a favourite with the post-war Ku Klux Klan: 'the neck-tie party'. All this brutality took place in the name of patriotism." Americanization's all-pervading influence meant that to stand in its way was to invite either prosecution, violence or ostracism - or all three. The age-old connection between the foreigner and the radical was reinforced, especially between the Germans and the suspect American Socialist Party. Since the revolutionaries of 1848 had started to arrive in America, Germans had always been seen, along with Italians and Jews, as one of the more radicalized of the European immigrant groups. Nativist groups soon extended this radicalism to all enemies of the United States. Curiously, the autocracy, 'Prussianism' and militarism of Germany and her allies were equated with the radical threat. There was talk of the Kaiser and his 'socialist forces'. It did not surprise many 'patriots' that the three most famous Socialists tried during the war - Eugene Debs, Charles T Schenck and Victor Berger - were all of German-speaking stock. Official sources pointed out that of the 144 foreign language 'radical publications' recorded as 'received and distnbuted to subscribers [in the US] ... before or during the World War', 90 originated from the nations fighting for the Central Powers. Although he was speaking after the Armistice the long-term Socialist Victor Bergeis comments are enlightening when he

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complained that '\Xk [Socialists] are to be sent to prison because they [the Federal govemment] want to use this hysterical atmosphere to put the Socialist Party out of business. They have grabbed those who have 'Hun' names like Victor Berger. They took the Huns from their Hunnish names. They don't know much. They took Kruse for a Hun, and he is a Dane. Engdahl is a Hun they say, and he is a Swede, and all of them born in this country.' 49 Berger's comments show that in reality many disaffected aliens of all nationalities supported the Socialists with their adamant and principled anti-war stance. Nevertheless, even before April 1917, the Germans were seen as the prime movers on the far left. There is some truth in this perception. In the 1916 presidential election - in spite of the fact Wtlson famously fought on the neutral platform of 'He kept us out of the war' - showed a marked abandoning of the Democrats and a swing towards an increase in the socialist vote in areas with high German-speaking populations. A good indicator of this German-socialist link is provided by the wartime experience of 'America's most German city': Milwaukee. A survey of the 1916 voting patterns over the entire city's wards bears out the strength of socialism amongst German speakers. It would seem that in industrial cities at least, the higher the percentage of voters with a German-speaking background, the higher the socialist vote.'" The city was historically linked with the left. The former leader of the Social Democratic Party, and co-founder with Eugene Debs at the famous 1901 Unity Convention of the Socialist Party, Victor Berger, led the city's socialists. In 1910, 'Wisconsin had elected the Austrian-born Berger as the fIrst Socialist to serve in the US Congress. Although considered less than radical by many of the nation's leading socialists, during the war he remained faithful to the socialist principle of internationalism. From the outbreak of war he had condemned America's pro-Allied stance as being motivated more by Wall Street 'graft' than genuine patriotism, and fought hard to prevent American entry as the 'preparedness' campaigners became more vociferous. 10 the early months of America's entry into the war, when patriotism was in its fIrst flush and Americanism had not assumed its full Anglo-Saxon flavour, Berger's socialists condemned the draft law as illegal They claimed Wtlson was assuming unconstitutional, dictatorial powers and with the Draconian emergency powers being assumed by the president, it was not difficult to find evidence to support the accusation. Had Berger stopped at that accusation he would probably have retained considerable support across the nation. However, he then went on to claim that the war was simply the result of 'Wilson representing the all-powerful American plutocracy. 51 By March 1918, although indicted under the provisions of the Espionage Act, Berger polled over 100,000 votes. Although he lost in the US senatorial race for the 'Kaiser's State', as 'Wisconsin was now known, his blatant slogan 'heaven or hell, peace or war, Socialists or Profiteers' enabled him, and many other socialists, to attract a sizeable rural vote.'"' However, historically radical 'Wisconsin did not represent the nation. In November 1918, Berger was once again elected to the US Congress, but this time the House of Representatives voted by one vote short of unanimity to refuse him his seat. By February 1919, as Wtlson was negotiating to bring reconciliation to

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the Old World, American patriots were still seeking to contain what they saw as an all-too-apparent threat at home. Berger, having become the bye-word for disloyalty, was sentenced to 20 years in prison under the Espionage Act" Berger's experience serves not only to underline the link increasingly drawn between 'Germans', socialists and anti-war feeling, but also the increasingly hard line taken by the authorities with regard to such dissent. With Russia's October Revolution, socialism was seen to take on an even closer connection with America's enemies, and not just those linked with the 'Kaiserism' of the Central Powers. Bolshevism was a new and potentially more virulent creed, and 1his threat was far more violent, far more contagious and far more dangerous. As the New York Times explained: We do not speak of the kind of socialism that is found in Germany ... ~ speak of the kind to be found in Russia and the United States... [a variety that is potentially] an infinite cause of disaster to liberty .. .'54 While the socialists had sought to keep America out of the war, and were consequendy by implication associated with sympathy for the Central Powers, after the October Revolution the more radical Bolsheviks openly advocated a world uprising that would overthrow 'democracy' in both Europe and America. The passage of Lenin's sealed train to Russia through German territory; persistent accusations of German funding of the Bolshevik party; the Bolsheviks lack of support for Russia's continuation in the war - all these were seen as demonstrating a link between Germany and Bolshevism. This collusion was confirmed with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Germany had gained Russian territory and Russian indemnities. Most importandy, with Russia's exit from the war, the Kaiser's generals could close the Eastern Front and move their batde-hardened and victorious troops to Flanders. It was considered a terrible betrayal, because as the New York Times explained, 'thanks to Russian Socialism the Germans now outnumber the French and British on the Western Front.' 55 In addition to the deteriorating position in Europe, there was the growing realization that the enemy - in the shape of 'Reds', most particularly the IWWwas now on American soil, particularly in America's industrial heartlands and the cities, as well as the woods, farms and fisheries of the Pacific coast. During the war, even after the October Revolution, radicals were seen as being in the pay of Germany: 'Germany, through members of the IWW organization, is financing a gigantic plot to destroy the industrial plants and crops of the Pacific Coast.'''' Why else did the IWWs activities increase, in frequency, daring and violence, if they had not got access to increased funding, and why did this upsurge coincide with American entry into the war in Europe? Even more worrying was the suspicion that such radical activity could be seen as representing the opening stages of a 'Worldwide Anarchist Plot .... [to which] Washington officials connect[ed] rww, Bolsheviki and Revolutionaries in many lands.''' Even if some of their demands met with sympathy - as was, for example, undoubtedly the case among the workers in the forests of the North-west - the climate of the times was one in which national unity demanded conformity, and this could only be achieved with consensus. America was the armoury and the bank of the entente, it was fighting a war to 'save democracy', and in order to fulfil this role it needed a compliant workforce and a stable economy. A simple logic emerged: any group that did not conform to these demands

ThE PERSISTENCE OF ENEMY EUROPE

must by necessity be linked with America's enemies, and anyone linked with those enemies deserved short shrift The threat of sabotage and the wild-cat strike, although less common than patriots frequently implied, was enough motive for vigilante groups to swing into action. In July 1917, in Arizona, 1,200 striking copper miners associated with the IWW at Bisbee were shipped in railroad cars and dumped in the middle of the New Mexico desert by sheriff's deputies and left to fend for themselves without any supplies. In Butte, Montana, six vigilantes beat, emasculated, tortured and lynched the half-Indian IWW olJSanizer, Frank Little. A study of PittsbUlJSh's response to war-time radicalism shows that the growth of federal, and other less officially sanctioned agencies during and after the war was the result of a coincidence of bigotry, self-interest and the impact of constant patriotic exhortations.'" It shows that patriotism created peculiar bedfellows, as it activated a variety of groups for one reason or another interested in the downfall of radicalism. There were the home-front heroes, interested in demonstrating their loyalty, and peIhaps improving their job prospects in the process. Some of these guardians of patriotic virtue became the near-legendary G-men: in reality a rather ineffective force, they nevertheless became the vigilante, gun-totting, granite-jawed, incorruptible heroes of film and comic book for generations of American boys. PeIhaps most importantly there was the happy coincidence of patriotism and profit for the steel mill owners and other industrialists. The war provided opportunities for both labour and capital, and by its end, some nine million wOl:kers were engaged in war-related industries. 59 W'hile war orders poured in, the growing numbers of working men enlisting or being drafted into service, along with the war-time reduction of immigrant labour, meant that the opportunities for industrial action expanded to keep pace. From April to October 1917 America lost over six million work days to strikes." From the steel yards of Pittsburgh to the timber mills of Spokane, 'unpatriotic radicals' attempted to disrupt America's ability to produce war material for herself and her allies. For example, in July 1917, shortly after the notorious Bisbee expulsions, Governor Thomas E. Campbell of Arizona telegraphed the president to ask for help in dealing with the rww. He claimed that they had reduced the state's copper production, a vital war material, by 75 per cent!'

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'The nineteenth century has often been called the Age of Nationality ....Right here we should understand the true meaning of nationalism, and should closely distinguish it from Race, with which it is often confused.... Race is what people physically really are; Nationality is what people politically think they are.' Lothrop Stoddard, 1924.