Category Archives: Great War centennial

Adopting the 27th Division

17 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by in 23rd (106th) New York State National Guard Regiment, 27th (New York) Division, Great War centennial, Libraries

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I mentioned to someone connected to the WW1 Centennial Commission last week of my intention to “adopt” the 27th Division during the Great War 100th anniversary. I intend to blog about the division, especially its 23rd (106th) Infantry Regiment, a great deal over the next two years, from its basic training in Spartanburg, South Carolina through its coming home after the Armistice. The 27th is a natural choice for me; it was the only division sent to France comprised of units from only one state, New York. Its 23rd Regiment was from Brooklyn and its armory is today on the National Register of Historic Places. The 23rd served on the Texas border during the Punitive Expedition in 1916. Its unit chaplain was the Reverend S. Parkes Cadman. When the regiment was called into federal service during the Great War it became the 106th. There were so many men, regiments, and divisions that fought in the war that it seems the best way to tell a doughboy story is by finding the general in the particular. That’s why I selected the 27th. Plus, they fought with the British, which gives me a chance to better explore the international aspects of the war.

Yesterday when we were at the Library of Congress I saw a man standing in front of a wooden trunk outside the exhibit hall. As it turned out, he was a volunteer and the trunk held the accoutrements of a Brooklyn doughboy named Christian F. Stensen, a private in the 23rd. I had an interesting conversation with the man from the Library of Congress, who graciously showed me Private Stensen’s belongings. We did not know for sure, but we were speculating that the Indian was adopted as a logo because the division’s Orion symbol looks something like a tomahawk. I’ll have more on the Orion symbol itself in a future post. You never know what you will see if you get out there. Whether it is the Park Service, the Library of Congress, or some other institution, yesterday’s experience was testimony to the special role that volunteers play in the telling of our history.

An afternoon at the Library of Congress

16 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Great War centennial, Libraries, World War One Centennial Committee for New York City, WW2

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I was having a conversation with someone last night who noted how many of the images I have used recently on the blog have come from the Library of Congress. I try to mix up the sources, but indeed most of the best photographs for recent posts have come from the LOC’s extensive collections. As a librarian myself, I understand how valuable these resources are to our nation. Not only have I used the library’s image collections, I have utilized the Library of Congress manuscript collections for my book projects as well. And the best thing is, with the internet at our fingertips many of these resources are available to us regardless of where we live or work. They do such a great job, we almost–almost–take it all for granted. Well today I had the good fortune to go with the Hayfoot to the Jefferson Building to see Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I. The curators did a fine job not just discussing the battles, but the economic, political, and social consequences of the war as well. With our country facing so many issues and uncertainties in our own historical moment, it is comforting to know that we as a nation have weathered times of uncertainty in the past. The challenges vary only in the details.

It is hard to believe the the World War I Centennial Commission Trade Show was three years ago this week, and right here in Washington D.C. no less. Approaching others is not something that comes easily to me, but I made certain at that event to talk to the representatives at every table. I remember having discussions with staff from various museums and cultural institutions, including some people from the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center. The friend with whom I was speaking last night lost his father, a veteran, not long ago. His father was buried in a military cemetery in a Southern state. I was telling my friend that waiting for my bus in Manhattan yesterday morning I struck up a conversation with a man wearing a WW2 cap. He too was waiting for the bus and was headed to Bethesda to see his daughter and her family, presumably for Father’s Day Weekend. Over our coffees I asked him if he had fought in Europe or the Pacific and he said Europe. He said he was nineteen when he entered the war, which would put him now in his early 90s. He looked more like seventy-five at the oldest. I told him I wrote my master thesis on Dwight Eisenhower and he told me he met the general one time. Eisenhower had come to speak to his unit of about 100 men to explain in person why their transport ship home would be delayed for a week. I know my WW2 well enough to know that troop transport delays homeward immediately after V-E Day were a major snag, though I didn’t say that to the veteran that at the coffee shop. Hearing the man tell the story was an incredible experience I will never forget.

I say all this because I noticed in the outstanding exhibit today that the curators incorporated a good deal of material from the Veterans History Project into Echoes of the Great War. Frank Buckles was the last of the American WW1 veterans, and he himself died over six years ago. If you have a chance, make sure to check out the Library of Congress’s outstanding Echoes of the Great War, which runs through January 2019.

“Farm and Arm!”

28 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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In January 2016 I wrote a piece for Mike Hanlon’s Roads to the Great War about how the Great War’s grain crisis was one of the immediate causes of Prohibition. Advocates for Temperance had been active for decades dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, but their moment arrived with the coming of the war in Europe. Herbert Hoover had bee active in feeding the starving masses Over There for years before America joined the Allied cause. When war finally came for the Americans in April 1917, the call for conserving American grain became only louder. One man leading that charge was Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.

At a gathering of the Long Island Farmers’ Club on April 21 Roosevelt stressed the importance of prohibiting the use of grains in distilled sprits for the duration of the war. Roosevelt had powerful like-minded allies. Senator Albert B. Cummins, a Republican from the breadbasket of Iowa no less, initiated a measure in Congress that same day that would have done that very thing. For the time being however, things remained as they were.

Europeans had been working on the problem on their own for some time. One day prior to all this, authorities in London announced that 850,000 acres of land had been repurposed over the past year across Great Britain for the planting of grains. Everyone knew the consequences. Just weeks earlier German mines and torpedoes had sunk the Belgian Relief Commission vessels the Anna Fosteness and Trevier, sending thousands of tons of grain and other foodstuffs to the ocean floor just off the coast of the Netherlands. These were only two of the most recent German attacks, which were coming almost weekly by now.

One hundred years ago today, 28 April 1917, Theodore Roosevelt was speaking to an audience of thousands at the Chicago Stock Yards. His message was much the same as it had been in Mineola when speaking to the Long Island farmers the previous week. He could not have spoken more clearly, imploring his audience to “Farm and Arm” for the fight against the Kaiser. It was not a coincidence that the Colonel had ventured to Chicago. The West had been much more apathetic to Preparedness in the leadup to America’s entry into the war. Most internationalists resided in the Northeast, where of course Roosevelt himself lived.

(image/U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)

 

 

Preparing for war in Brooklyn

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial, Preparedness (WW1)

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Originally the City Hall of the independent municipality of Brooklyn, Borough Hall was where the Brooklyn Section of Mayor Mitchel’s Committee on National Defense appointed Dykman to be chair on 17 April 1917. The wider commiitee held its meetings at the Manhattan Municipal Building.

Colonel William N. Dykman was appointed chairman of the executive committee for the Brooklyn Section of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel’s Committee on National Defense one hundred years ago today. The meeting of two dozen committee members met at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, though oddly enough Dykman himself was not in attendance. That his colleagues would appoint him in absentia leads one to think he had agreed to take the post in advance. Mayor Mitchel’s National Defense Committee dated back to November 1915, when pacifist sentiment was strong in the United States. Cleveland H. Dodge, Elihu, Root, and Al Smith were just some of the prominent New Yorkers involved in the Mayor’s Committee on National Defense (MCND). The mayor’s group was an offshoot of Governors Charles S. Whitman’s New York State Committee on National Defense, which had been formed in late October 1915. The now aged Joseph H. Choate brought the statewide principals together at a meeting a few weeks later to see about creating a committee specific to New York City.

The Mayor’s Committee on National Defense advocated for preparedness in the 1 1/2 year lead-up to American involvement in the First World War. Lest one forget however, the United States had been involved in another expedition in the meanwhile; from March 1916 to February 1917 a Regular Army force of 15,000 supported by at least 100,000 National Guardsmen were engaged on the Mexican border. Of the National Guard troops, about 10,000 were from the Empire State. The Mayor’s Committee was determined to learn from the mistakes of the Mexican Punitive Expedition. One way it did this was by conducting a survey of the Guardsmen’s experience. This included questionnaires asking the troops what most frustrated them during their deployment to Texas, as well as a study of the Guardsmen’s civilian employers. The Committee was interested in such things as if the men received civilian pay when called to active service, if their jobs were held for them, and the disposition of civilian employers to losing workers to the call-up. Dykman had been active in all of these endeavors and was eager to put this knowledge to practical use in what would be the significantly larger task of training and equipping men to join the fight in France.

 

Easter 1917

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial

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Germans had just survived the Turnip Winter of 1916-17 when an Easter cold snap threatened the spring 1917 crop. (New York Tribune, 12 April 1917)

Easter Sunday 1917 fell on April 8, just two days after the American declaration of war. Americans were not caught off guard by the measure; most citizens had reconciled themselves in March and early April that the declaration was a formality by this point. Traveling south for a tournament on April 4 and realizing war was imminent, the Yale baseball team announced that it would disband upon returning to New Haven. Building managers across New York and Philadelphia, inspired by a call from the American Review of Reviews, turned off lights in their skyscrapers to form Crosses of Light over Easter weekend. The New York Tribune had been doing this during Christmas for several years at their Park Row headquarters and others found Easter 1917 a good moment to expand the gesture. Holiday enthusiasm was muted. The Fifth Avenue Easter parade was an understated affair, with crowds staying home due to the seriousness of the moment and the unseasonably cold weather.

The churches were full that first Sunday after the declaration of war. Mayor John Purroy Mitchel attended services at St. Francis Xavier on 16th Street. Vanderbilt, Harrimans and other prominent families were represented at services throughout the city. People grasped the historical moment. It also would not have been lost on many older Americans that the assassination and death of Abraham Lincoln had fallen on Good Friday and Holy Saturday fifty-two years earlier. Brooklyn’s Reverend Dr. S. Parkes Cadman gave a Good Friday address at St. Johns Methodist Episcopal Church in Manhattan asking the congregation to “pray for the United States” and to think of the soul of the nation as well as their own. The ubiquitous Cadman delivered the Easter sermon at his home church, Central Congregational, that Sunday.

Happy Easter, everyone.

 

 

Wilson asks for war

02 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial, Woodrow Wilson

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The men of the 23rd’s Third Battalion were the first from New York State to enter Federal service in the Great War.

I’m sorry about the lack of posts this past week. Things have been so busy with the semester in full swing and spring break coming next week that there has not been much time for posting. I did something I rarely do and took a full day off yesterday: no work, no writing, no anything. Instead I went into the city and did a few things. Among other things I went to The Strand and bought a copy of Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Some might know Snyder’s best known work Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. I remember ordering it for our library when it came out five years ago. I am always pleased to note that it circs well too.

Speaking of historians and books I’ve ordered, I am going to see Anne Applebaum, the author of Gulag: A History, lecture tomorrow night at the CUNY Graduate Center on the future of the West. Though I am wary of drawing “lessons” from history, circumstances are always more complex and varied to draw exact parallels between historical moments, the past can inform of us where we are and how we got here. There is comfort too in the awareness that the people before us faced challenges just as we ourselves do today.

Speaking of historical moments, today marks one of the most pivotal days in the history of the Great War. It was on Monday 2 April 1917 that President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress asking for a declaration of war on Germany. I don’t think I realized until recently that the country was already on a war footing in the weeks and days prior to Wilson address. Here in the city the men of Manhattan’s 71st Regiment and a battalion of Brooklyn’s 23rd became the first units from the Empire State to enter national service when they mobilized over the weekend. For its outsized role in the war New York was surprisingly a little late to the game. Men from around the nation had already been doing so for much of the past week at least.

(image/Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection)

The 4th film shoot

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Great War centennial, New York City

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It was colder than I thought it would be when I met a colleague this morning at the CUNY Graduate Center to take some location footage for our WW1 documentary. We shot here for a bit before moving down to 30th Street to get a better angle to film the Empire State Building. I got my masters degree here over a decade ago. One thing that is so unique about the Grad Center is that it has no campus per se, You felt less detached and more connected to the metropolis that was going on just outside while you were sitting there in class. I always found that comforting and felt it gave what I studied more immediacy. People who know Old New York may recognize this building as the site of the B. Altman’s department store. I believe my grandmother took my aunts here when they would visit the city back in the day. I’m sure they followed their excursions with a trip to the Automat.

Back in Brooklyn we filmed some exteriors at our own campus. Again, the school has that urban feel with a strong energy and so much going on all around it. Speaking of our campus, I received the good news today that our library will almost likely receive a significant Great War display from a particular European organization this coming September-October. If it seems like I am being a little vague that’s because I am. I will go into greater detail when things are truly finalized. I cannot tell you how excited we are about this. The Great War is proving a timely opportunity to raise public awareness of this shared history; with various public officials unduly straining our relations with long time allies, it seems up to those interested in public history to remind the public of the historical ties that bind us to others.

The second film shoot

03 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Great War centennial, Monuments and Statuary

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Our small group was out again today, this time in Yonkers for the second film shoot in the World War 1 documentary we are making. Today was more about exterior shots than interviews. It was cold with the wind blowing off the Hudson River. As the project moves along I will talk more in depth about our doughboy himself. In the meantime I wanted to share a few images from the day.

Here are a few of us filming in from of the Yonkers City Hall.

Here are a few of us filming in from of the Yonkers City Hall.

Here is another angle. This Great War memorial was dedicated in 1922. I took more still images for eventual submission to the WW1 Memorial Inventory Project.

Here is another angle. This Great War memorial was dedicated in 1922. I took more still images for eventual submission to the WW1 Memorial Inventory Project.

One of our number has a gift for choosing the best camera spots, in this case a traffic median triangle.

One of our number has a gift for choosing the best camera spots, in this case a traffic median triangle.

Again a different angle. This stretch of roads was the site of Memorial and Veterans Day parades for decades. Our doughboy, his five sons, and many of his grandchildren marched along this way.

Again another angle. This stretch of road was the site of Memorial and Veterans Day parades for decades. Our doughboy, his five sons, and many of his grandchildren marched along this way.

Gold Star Mothers. This monument was dedicated in 2006 and stands across from the Yonkers train station.

Gold Star Mothers. This monument was dedicated in 2006 and stands across from the Yonkers train station.

Alas logistics got in the way of taking a group photo of our entire party of six but here are some of us after our group had lunch at a local micro brewery. All in all not a bad way to spend the day. And productive too.

Alas logistics got in the way of taking a group photo of our entire party of six, but here are some of us after we finished up in the afternoon. One can see how cold and windy it was. Still the sun was bright and the snow held off. Overall a fun and productive day. Thanks everyone for help making it happen.

 

Turning to Lincoln on the brink of war

12 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial, Memory, Woodrow Wilson

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Lincoln to Wilson, 12 February 1917: "Let us have faith that right makes might . . ."

Lincoln to Wilson, 12 February 1917: “Let us have faith that right makes might . . .”

I wrote last week of the dramatic turn in American diplomacy after the German renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare in late January 1917. Today is February 12, Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday, and as the United States drifted toward war one hundred years ago Americans took pause to think of Lincoln and his legacy. It is important to remember that this was only fifty-two years after the Great Emancipator’s death and that there were still many people living who remembered the sixteenth president first hand. That remembrance was not always positive. This was both the nadir of Jim Crowism and the High Water Mark for the Lost Cause. How the sons and grandsons of those defeated by Mr. Lincoln’s Army might respond to a draft and an overseas deployment was of concern to many. Lincoln’s oldest son Robert was himself still around and rigorously guarding his father’s legacy. The Lincoln Memorial was still five years off.

The Monday 12 February 1917 Brooklyn Daily Eagle captured the gist of prominent clergyman Samuel Parkes Cadman's talk about Lincoln and the increasing threat of war.

The Monday 12 February 1917 Brooklyn Daily Eagle captured the gist of prominent clergyman Samuel Parkes Cadman’s talk about Lincoln and the increasing threat of war.

The newspapers, pulpits, and public spaces were full of stories about Lincoln that week. The Sunday 11 February 1917 New York Times ran an article about Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech, which the presidential candidate from Illinois had given in February 1860 when it looked like America might well go to war against itself. That article was accompanied by an extended excerpt from muckraker Ida Minerva Tarbell’s ongoing biography of Lincoln. The Reverend Dr. S. Parkes Cadman of Brooklyn’s Congregational Church gave a talk that same day at a local YMCA pondering what Lincoln might do if he were in Woodrow Wilson’s place. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recounted the next day, Cadman concluded that he had no idea. Cartoonist Edwin Marcus captured Wilson’s plight as he sits at his desk turning the calendar from February 11th to Monday the 12th with Lincoln’s ghost hovering above. The text is difficulty to make out but it is the closing line of Lincoln’s February 1860 speech at the Cooper Institute: “Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. Lincoln.” Intentionally or not, Marcus captures the loneliness of Wilson’s predicament.

(images/top, Library of Congress; bottom, Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

 

3 February 1917: a turning point

03 Friday Feb 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Woodrow Wilson, WW1

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President Wilson speaks to Congress on 3 February 1917 announcing the severing of relations with Germany

President Wilson speaks to Congress on 3 February 1917 announcing the severing of relations with Germany

The Great War reached a major turning point in the first week of February 1917. To the horror of German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, on January 31 Kaiser Wilhelm II allowed his military leadership to resume unrestricted submarine warfare against the Allies and their supporters. It was not quite the final straw for the United States; the pacifist sentiment among a majority of Americans was still too great. The New York Peace Party, for one, implored President Wilson to explore every measure for avoiding entrance into the war. Wilson was caught in the middle of several competing military and political forces, domestically and abroad. One hundred years ago today at 2:00 pm President Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress announcing the severing of diplomatic relations with Imperial Germany.

For all the talk among Preparedness advocates–not least Theodore Roosevelt–that Wilson was doing too little, the sitting president had been increasing America’s military readiness for much of the past year, especially with the appointment of Newton Baker as Secretary of War the previous March. It would take a few sinkings and the Zimmerman Telegram to finally bring America fully into the war. No one knew it at the time of course, but Wilson would address Congress asking for a declaration of war less than two months later on April 2.

(image/Library of Congress)