Category Archives: Great War centennial

Three years and counting

01 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial

≈ Leave a comment

Kaiser Wilhelm II and Emperor Franz Josef

August 1, 1917 marked the three-year anniversary of Germany’s declaration of war on Russia. Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia on July 28, but Kaiser Wilhelm II’s announcement of hostilities took things to a new level. Armies across Europe were now mobilizing with even greater urgency. For the most part Europeans and Americans were not reflecting too much in the early dog days of August 1917. The British and their allies were fully occupied against the Huns in Flanders. Austro-Hungarian troops were driving the Russians back on the Eastern Front in Galicia. Meanwhile the Wilson Administration was doing all it could getting up to speed, which was taking more time than anyone would have liked. One can imagine that the fighting in Ypres, especially for the Germans, had taken on a sense of urgency with the realization that the Americans were already trickling in. Pershing was in Paris for a full month by this time.

Still, people did pause and meditate on the events of the past thirty-six months. Much had happened and millions were already killed. Franz Josef had died in 1916 after sixty-eight years on the Austro-Hungarian throne. By August 1917 Nicholas II of Russia had been deposed; he and his family were in exile in Tsarskoye Selo, the royal palace in St. Petersburg, where the  Romanoffs were a tourist attraction for curious gawkers who came to watch them garden. The Germans seemed to be the most invested in the third anniversary. Kaiser Wilhelm II was out in public a fair amount. By this time he had a collection of 10,000 books on the Great War to go along with his trove of photographs. If contemporary accounts are to believed, Berlin’s Royal Library now held 50,000 books on the Great War published just since the war began. Despite everything, optimism in Germany was apparently holding. At the time of the third anniversary enthusiasts in Germany formed a society within the Hindenburg Museum in Posen for members to share photographs, monographs, and Great War-related memorabilia.

(image/New York Public Library)

Passchendaele 1917-2017

31 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in Governors Island, Great War centennial, Media and Web 2.0, Memory

≈ 3 Comments

I mentioned in a post the other day that American surgeon Dr. Robert D. Schrock worked for several weeks in the hospitals during the Battle of Passchendaele, or Third Ypres. Schrock and his colleagues were still at Governors Island at this point 100 years ago, but the Battle of Passchendaele began on 31 July 1917. It lasted well into November. It may be difficult for Americans to grasp the significance that the battles in Flanders have for the people of Great Britain, along with the Canadians, Aussies, and others who fought alongside them. It is analogous to Antietam and Gettysburg for Americans. I was watching some of the footage over the weekend and saw that Prince William and his wife attended the ceremonies in Flanders; today his father Prince Charles will be present. My brother took me to Belgian about ten years ago. We went to Cloth Hall and stayed not far from the Menin Gate. Britain’s Ministry of Defence made this short video to mark the 100th anniversary of the battle.

Great War film update

30 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Great War centennial

≈ 3 Comments

Yonkers, NY war memorial: the main subject of our film came from this town just north of New York City

If it seems like I went silent on the Great War film that I am making in cooperation with colleagues, that is because I did. We hit a snag in the production process in late spring and summer, and have gotten back on track over this past week. This past Thursday I had lunch here in Brooklyn with a friend of a friend. He was already on board with joining the project and we were meeting face-to-face for the first time to discuss it in detail, share audio and video files, and work out timelines. I had never meet him before but we hit it off immediately. He is a real professional, a musician and budding novelist who brings not just strong technical capabilities but an instinctive narrative sense to the film. I told him and others this morning as we were emailing some film-related news that it was destiny that he join the production. We will probably finish the film by Labor Day.

With that timeline in hand I have been planning and reaching out to various individuals about showing it this fall. The film will be 15-25 minutes. When I know more about where and when we will be showing the film, I will let everyone know here. I will also share more about the content itself. In keeping with the guidelines of the grant, all showing will be free and open to the public.

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

≈ 6 Comments

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

≈ Comments Off on An afternoon at the Library of Congress

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)

≈ Comments Off on “Farm and Arm!”

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)

≈ Comments Off on Preparing for war in Brooklyn

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

≈ 2 Comments

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

≈ 2 Comments

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

≈ 3 Comments

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.