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Tag Archives: World War I

Firing a Seattle teacher

30 Thursday Jun 2022

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1919, Americanism, conscientious objection, critical thinking, dismissal, schoolteacher, Seattle, Selective Service Act, World War I

Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

In late February 1919, the Seattle Times reported that someone had run an advertisement attacking a West Seattle High School history teacher for being a “Hun” and “un-American.” The first charge almost certainly stemmed from ignorance concerning his name; he was Swiss, not German. As for his “Americanism,” he had declined to salute the flag, a refusal he ascribed to the ceremony itself, and which he’d later recanted.

However, he was also an avowed conscientious objector; his enemies said he “fed ideas” to his classes.

A blind poll among his ninety or so students showed a twenty-to-one margin of support. Nevertheless, the school board fired him, saying that they couldn’t have a conscientious objector as a teacher; what if everyone had been a conscientious objector when the nation declared war?

The newspaper reports leave much unsaid, as they always do. But you sense that the teacher’s real crime was encouraging his students to think critically, which the vast majority of them appreciated.

Men registering for the draft in New York City, June 5, 1917 (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s more, according to the Selective Service Act of 1917 and its revisions, he’d most likely done nothing wrong. If he’d passed his thirtieth birthday, he wouldn’t have had to register for the draft until mid-September 1918, and not at all if he’d reached the age of forty-five. Further, failing to register would have attracted attention and left him open to punishment, yet the newspaper reports said nothing about this. Finally, the act did allow for conscientious objection, though only on religious grounds.

Consequently, I’m guessing this teacher’s viewpoint was entirely theoretical, maybe spoken of in class to spark discussion. With nothing else to hang him for, his enemies fixed on it, and the school board went along.

So much for academic freedom and the war to make the world safe for democracy.

The young women in white

02 Thursday Jun 2022

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1917, defending womanhood, enlistment, invasion of Belgium, propaganda, rape, sex, white as purity, World War I

Building on last week’s post about the Seattle parade, here’s more historical background for my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

In the parade, the white horses, white flower petals, and young women in white dresses all played to symbolism of feminine purity. Why?

Not for the first time in history, but in a context particular to the First World War, belligerents sought to persuade their able-bodied male citizens that they must fight to save womanhood. The idea pervaded recruitment propaganda in Britain and the United States, likely because neither country had been invaded, and so had no self-evident reason to fight.

When Congress declared war in April 1917, American recruiters had to rouse a nation comfortably at peace. To do so, they evoked wartime events that had not budged neutrality one inch when they happened but were now recast to prompt every man to do his duty or risk being called less than a man. A key reference point was the German invasion of Belgium in 1914.

While the invasion was happening, the press failed to convey its true horror and went for the sensational. Though the invaders executed thousands of Belgian civilians, committing arson and pillage, alleged rapes and mutilations of nuns, women, and young girls were what made headlines. Even as American newspapers exploited these lurid stories for the shock value, most reserved judgment, doubting that the disciplined German Army could have permitted such outrages.

Then, in May 1915, a German submarine sank the liner Lusitania, killing almost 1200 people, including 128 Americans. In what amounted to a publicist’s perfect storm, a week later, the British government published an official account of the Belgian invasion atrocities, mentioning the firing squads, burning, and looting but once again playing up accusations of rapes and mutilation, which rested on hearsay evidence from unsworn witnesses.

That lapse went largely unnoticed, and the report electrified American opinion. If the Germans could sink the Lusitania, mightn’t they have committed sexual atrocities in Belgium? Isolationists could argue that was still none of America’s business, but the perceived outrages would not go away. For instance, the New York Tribune, a pro-Allied paper, printed a drawing of a Belgian widow comforting a weeping Miss Columbia. The caption suggests attitudes common to the time: “At Least They Only Drown Your Women.”

Come 1917, then, American recruiters had no trouble tapping into beliefs about German sexual atrocities and, tacitly or explicitly, using them to goad to action any man who called himself a man. This poster, promoted by the Hollywood film industry, employs blatant sexual imagery, with a half-clad Miss Columbia–in white, of course.

Schneck, 1917, Acme Litho. Co. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

But the propagandists were just getting started.

More Subversion, Please: Wolf Hollow

03 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, children's literature, E. B. White, historical fiction, home front, hypocrisy, Lauren Wolk, literary fiction, Pennsylvania, prejudice, shell shock, subversion, twentieth century, World War I, World War II

Review: Wolf Hollow, by Lauren Wolk
Dutton, 2016. 291 pp. $17

Eleven-year-old Annabelle McBride learns to lie because a sadistic newcomer to her rural Pennsylvania town pushes her to it. Betty Glengarry is several years older and uses her superior size, strength, and aggressiveness to work her will. She demands money, threatens Annabelle’s younger brothers if Annabelle doesn’t comply, and dishes out punishment that suggests what she’s capable of. Since it’s 1943, and everyone’s thinking about the war effort against Germany, it’s a nice touch to portray a young girl confronting a bully at home.

War Food Administration poster by Morley, 1945 (courtesy War Food Administration, Agriculture Department, via Wikimedia Commons)

In this engaging, evocative novel meant chiefly (but not solely) for children, I wish Wolk had taken more care to connect the dots, of which the bullying theme provides one example. Annabelle never once thinks about what purpose the war might have, or whether the adults around her live up to their patriotism. She doesn’t even recognize that the McBrides, as a farm family, can feed themselves more generously than city folk, whose lives are more strictly rationed–another opportunity missed.

Even so, Wolk derives power from small moments writ large. The key character here is Toby, a veteran of the previous war who’s never recovered from whatever he saw and did in battle. Toby strikes most people as odd, but, never having hurt anyone, he lives as he likes, as a hermit in the woods, and his eccentricities have never roused anything more hostile than gossip. Now, however, as Betty’s cruelties multiply, Toby becomes a convenient suspect. Annabelle gathers that Betty’s trying to frame him, and most people implicitly accept his guilt, preferring to blame a misfit rather than a sweet, innocent girl.

Annabelle therefore takes it upon herself to protect a man she knows as fragile and frightened, kind when you allow him to be. It outrages her particularly that her Aunt Lily ranks among his most outspoken (and wrongheaded) critics. But to protect Toby requires more and more deceit, which makes Annabelle uncomfortable, so there’s that. And as the net around him tightens, the more she discovers that adults whom she’d trusted to believe in fairness or justice seem ready to let their prejudices guide them instead. This too is a nice touch; she faces down a bully, whereas they attack the victim.

I like both the moral meat implied here and the manner in which Wolk serves it. Her clear, lucid prose makes me think that she believes in E. B. White’s rules for cherishing the English language; and her careful, loving portrayal of rural life evokes one of his favorite subjects and philosophy. Consider this passage:

Our old barn taught me one of the most important lessons I was ever to learn: that the extraordinary can live in the simplest things.
Each season meant a world refashioned inside its stalls and storerooms.
Pockets of warmth in winter, the milk cows and draft horses like furnaces, their heat banked by straw bedding and new manure.
In spring, swallows fledged from muddy nests wedged in crannies overhead, and kittens fresh and soft staggered between hooves and attacked the tails of tackle hanging from stable pegs.

But, as White also understood, children’s literature is no good without a strong element of subversion. Children see adult hypocrisy, cruelty, irrationality, and faithlessness more clearly than anyone else, because they’re tuned to it and suffer from it the most–think of Huckleberry Finn, Alice puzzling her way through Wonderland, or, more recently, Harry Potter’s struggles with evil incarnate. Wolk has the moral setup, for sure, delivered with admirable economy. Without fuss or heavy lifting, she gives you good versus evil, truth versus lies, the suffering of the innocents, and betrayal. What more could you want?

Answer: depth and ambiguity. Toby, Annabelle, and just about all her family are 100 percent good, despite a minor failing or two, whereas Betty is all bad, without a redeeming feature. Moreover, it’s not just that she’s bad; she’s a sociopath, a cliché that has ruined many a novel. As my seventeen-year-old astutely observed–he read the book over my shoulder during a long plane ride–Wolf Hollow would be far more gripping and believable had Annabelle rejected Betty’s friendly overtures, prompting a reaction. That would have redressed the balance between the characters, which Wolk could have fleshed out further had Betty’s cruelties seemed more like acting out or an attempt to get attention rather than cold-blooded violence. Instead, Betty has an accomplice in her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, with whom she gets up to who knows what, so she becomes that kind of girl–another cliché. And to overturn this axis of evil, Annabelle pulls off some rather improbable stunts, especially miraculous from so young a protagonist.

I give Wolk credit for daring to hurt her characters, both good and bad–she’s willing to show that life isn’t fair. But she’d have written a much better book had she not ducked two subversive truths: Good and bad aren’t always easy to see, and doing the right thing is usually more complicated than it appears.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lethal Delusions: The German War

17 Thursday Mar 2016

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Adolf Hitler, air raids, anti-Semitism, attitudes, delusions, Germany, Holocaust, home front, Jews, Nazism, Nicholas Stargardt, propaganda, SD, World War I, World War II

Review: The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945, by Nicholas Stargardt
Basic, 2015. 570 pp. $35

Some books, no matter how harrowing their subject, how unrelenting, or how complex, display such mastery, vivid detail, and fresh perspective that they demand a reading. To me, The German War is one, though I shuddered and cringed my way through, sometimes cursing or even shouting in anger. That’s what happens when terrible history feels as if it took place yesterday.

Stargardt, who teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford, asks a question that many other historians have posed: How did the German people feel about the war they waged between 1939 and 1945?

That deceptively simple inquiry involves many interlocking pieces, among them the Holocaust, Allied bombing, euthanasia, rationing, German leadership, and Nazi ideology. Stargardt covers these and more, plumbing private letters, government documents, newspapers, film, and court cases. Perhaps most revealing about public attitudes, he cites reports from the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security arm of the SS, which gathered what people were saying among themselves. Having sifted through this stunning amount of material, the author conveys not only the implications of political and military decisions at the highest level, but how they affected the lives of sixteen individual Germans, in their own words.

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Stargardt has a myth-busting mission, which at times makes his narrative more than a little polemical. However, I think he succeeds, and it would be picky to condemn him for imperfect pitch when he shows why the most popular, accepted tunes are based on flat notes.

For instance, he demonstrates how the overwhelming majority of Germans supported both Hitler and the war effort, even to the end, even if they felt no sympathy with Nazism. This can be hard to understand, because most foreigners have grown up believing–or being taught–that the Nazis had somehow “brainwashed” an entire nation, that Germans obeyed out of fear, and that merely a fraction knew about the crimes committed in their names, let alone perpetrated them.

Not so, says Stargardt. Hitler was widely revered, and his radio broadcasts warmed the populace, lending them strength to bear ever-increasing sacrifices, even in the war’s final weeks. Many people assumed that if he’d only known of the daily injustices and hardships they suffered, he’d have corrected them. (The SD, as the Propaganda Ministry insisted, tolerated grumbling, so long as it betrayed no disloyalty.) Nobody welcomed the outbreak of war in 1939, except for the few who thought it an adventure, but, on the other hand, nobody questioned that the war was necessary to break the stranglehold of enemies threatening to destroy the Reich. Devout Christians, Catholic or Protestant, may have deplored the Nazi scorn for religion, but they agreed that Jews, as part of an “international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy,” must be destroyed. Even in the last weeks, German forces bled freely for every inch of ground they yielded, as they had for almost six years. That tenacious, steadfast bravery could not have come from fear. Rather, the nation was determined not to surrender, as it had in 1918. Many fought on past the point of hopelessness to wipe away what they considered that old stain on the national honor.

As for what would later be called the Holocaust, the German public learned about it early and often. Not only did Hitler publicly promise on several occasions that Jewry would be wiped out, but on the Eastern Front, the army took part in mass killings, which were treated as perfectly natural. Soldiers described them in letters and took photos, which they showed to friends and family. The home front heard of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and so forth as death camps, though exactly how they functioned remained secret. Few people even cared until Allied air raids began causing serious destruction and loss of life, at which time many Germans assumed that these were retribution for killing Jews. Many also believed that the Jews were behind the raids, whose perceived intent was to exterminate Germany. By the same logic, Germans implicitly accepted that they were victims, not perpetrators, and even after 1945, insisted they had fought a legitimate war of self-defense. Some 37 percent still believed that their security had demanded the murder of “non-Aryans.”

If there’s one thing missing in Stargardt’s account–hard to believe, given its length and depth–it’s how certain German attitudes remained unchanged from the First World War. The notion that Britain had conspired to “encircle” and “strangle” Germany out of jealousy dates from then, as do the mantra of a defensive war compelling invasion of other countries and the belief in German victimhood. Hitler didn’t have to fabricate these popular narratives, only recall them from his own days as an ardent soldier in a Bavarian regiment.

The German War can be hard going because of its subject matter. But I’m glad I read it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

“A Promising Future”: Jack of Spies, by David Downing

29 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1913, Britain, China, David Downing, Germany, historical accuracy, historical fiction, Irish nationalism, Tsingtau, World War I

Review: Jack of Spies, by David Downing
Soho, 2014. 338 pp. $28

“The automobile business,” muses Jack McColl, the engaging British protagonist of this excellent thriller, “was not what it had been even two years before. . . . Spying, on the other hand, seemed an occupation with a promising future.”

If nothing else, Jack is prescient, for the year is 1913, and the infant secret services of Britain and Germany are gearing up for a war of which most Europeans have no inkling. It will be a global war, he senses, and indeed, his first assignment is to track German warships that have put in at Tsingtau, a German colony in China with its requisite population of spies. Jack’s being watched more carefully than he knows.

The harbor at Tsingtau, 1912. (Courtesy Bundesarchiv, Bild 116-424-127 / CC-BY-SA)

The harbor at Tsingtau, 1912. (Courtesy Bundesarchiv, Bild 116-424-127 / CC-BY-SA)

But he enjoys a dash of danger. Further, he realizes that selling luxury automobiles, his main job, will soon go the way of the dodo, thanks to Henry Ford and his Model T. Jack wants–or thinks he wants–a full-time position with his espionage organization, vaguely connected to the British Admiralty. But he goes back and forth, because his work to protect the empire challenges his political and moral beliefs in the rights of the poor and disenfranchised.

Already, this feels like new ground: a would-be spy who reflects on the bodies that fall in his wake. He tries to reconcile what he’s seen and done with the more abstract threat from German militarism and its leaders’ disrespect for the rights of others, and sometimes, he comes up empty. Even better, Jack’s work conflicts with his passion for the exquisite Caitlin Hanley, an American journalist he meets in China; among other tasks, he’s assigned to investigate links between German agents and Irish separatists whom Caitlin’s family supports. Her combination of progressive politics, will to change the world, and career ambition have smitten him, but for once, this is a spy novel in which the hero worries that the woman of his dreams doesn’t love him. She likely won’t if she learns who he really is.

Then there’s the spy stuff, which Jack has to learn on the job. He’s a quick study, but his opponents sometimes outwit him, and he has several narrow escapes. His social gifts and ability to speak nine languages let him assume false identities with relative ease. But he also feels out of his depth, which makes him human, a refreshingly anti-James Bond. Like the prototypical spy, Jack trots the world, from China to San Francisco to New York and beyond, but Downing’s grasp of history keeps the travel suitably difficult and the connections unreliable.

A few critics have taken the author to task, saying that he should concentrate on Jack’s on-the-job training and damp down the history. Fie, say I, and not just because I’m a historian of that era and love that stuff. Jack and Caitlin read newspapers avidly because they care deeply about politics, also the hub of their respective professions. I never felt as if they were batting headlines back and forth to dump information on the reader or paint a backdrop.

As for historical accuracy, it’s impressive, especially considering the wealth of detail. The narrative does suggest that conscription existed in Britain then, which isn’t true (not until 1916), and Jack’s surveillance of a German agent in New York would have been hampered by having to crank his Model T to start the engine.

But these nits are worth mentioning only because of discussions I’ve seen recently in the blogosphere that even one petty detail got wrong can ruin a book. Really? There isn’t a historian writing today who doesn’t accept the chances of error, so why should novelists be held to a higher standard? Imagination trumps pedantry, any day.

Sorry for my digression. Read Jack of Spies. You won’t be disappointed.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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