The Illusion of Victory (18 page)

In spite of these noble words, most of America’s blacks remained skeptical of, if not antagonistic to, Wilson’s claim that the United States was fighting to make the world safe for democracy. After the war, an African American writer admitted that many blacks who “whooped it up for Uncle Sam” would not have been terribly upset if the kaiser took charge of Memphis and other cities in the South. “Any number of intelligent Negroes expressed the opinion under their breath that a good beating would be an excellent thing for the soul of America.”

Black idealism did not improve in June 1917, when the Confederate veterans held a reunion in Washington, D.C., and were received with rapturous acclaim by Congress and the president. Francis J. Grimke, the leading black cleric in the capital, wondered how patriotic orators could work themselves into “spasms of indignation” over German atrocities and remain unmoved by “the equally atrocious conduct of southern lynchers.”

The Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation began to monitor “Negro activities,” beginning a pattern of surveillance that would continue throughout the war. The fear that German agents were recruiting blacks to join a Mexican army persisted. When 150 black men appeared at the railroad station in Memphis to go North in search of jobs in the booming war economy, they were forbidden to leave town until the authorities made sure they were not heading for Mexico. A BI agent reported 700 blacks had recently left for Cincinnati, their railroad tickets paid for, and wondered if disloyal German-Americans in that city had recruited them for some nefarious purpose. In New Orleans the BI interrogated a black man who said he would gladly join the kaiser’s army tomorrow and shoot white American soldiers with pleasure.
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These simmering tensions exploded in East St. Louis, Illinois, on the state’s southwestern border. The city had attracted thousands of Southern blacks to work in its mills and factories. Some had come as strikebreakers, which angered not a few white workers. Labor unions told the mayor they wanted “drastic action” to get rid of recently arrived blacks. Adding tension to the city’s already volatile race relations was a rumor that 300,000 Negroes, who mostly voted Republican, had been “colonized” in Illinois, Ohio and Indiana to swing the states into the GOP camp in the 1916 presidential election. When Illinois went Republican in 1916, the Wilson justice department ostentatiously investigated claims that thousands of blacks had registered illegally in the months before Election Day. Black-white clashes in May 1917 forced the governor to send in National Guard troops to keep order in East St. Louis. On July 2, two carloads of white men roared through the city’s black neighborhoods, shooting into homes and stores. No was hurt or killed, but blacks reached for their guns. When more cars with whites appeared, the blacks opened fire, killing two detectives. A reporter riding with the victims published a vivid account of the crime, with pictures of the riddled patrol car.

The next day, hundreds of armed white workers invaded black neighborhoods, beating and shooting blacks, including women and children, and setting three hundred of the mostly wooden houses on fire. At least 39 and possibly 110 blacks were killed, and hundreds wounded. Eight whites also died. Smaller riots erupted in New York, Chester, Pennsylvania, and other cities.

The federal investigation in East Saint Louis was superficial and hid behind a suggestion that the upheaval had been triggered by German agents. Investigators did not interview a single black person. The NAACP newspaper,
The Crisis,
embarrassed the Wilson administration by publishing a twenty-page report replete with dozens of eyewitnesses, black and white.
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The riot created a crisis among African-Americans. In Chicago, attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett, whose wife, Ida Wells-Barnett, had long led a crusade against lynching in the South, declared that the time had come for blacks to arm themselves. The local BI division superintendent responded by smearing Barnett as “rabidly pro-German.” the BI was ordered to find grounds to arrest the lawyer, but it failed to persuade a single black person to testify against him.

Throughout the uproar, Woodrow Wilson said nothing. When prominent African Americans journeyed to Washington to complain in person, he refused to see them. The only major white politician to speak out was Theodore Roosevelt. On July 6, appearing on a program to greet representatives of the new democratic government of Russia, the former president called the riot “an appalling outbreak of savagery” and demanded that Wilson take action. Samuel Gompers, the ardently pro-war head of the American Federation of Labor, was also on the program. When he tried to blame the violence on black strikebreakers, Roosevelt all but dismembered him in public. He asked Gompers how he could try to excuse such “unspeakable brutalities committed upon colored men and women” at a meeting to hail the birth of freedom and justice in Russia.
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On July 28, 8,000 black New Yorkers marched down Fifth Avenue to the beat of muffled drums, carrying banners that read,“Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” and “Your Hands Are Full of Blood.” the police confiscated one banner, a blowup of a newspaper cartoon showing Wilson holding a speech on democracy while a black mother and two children pleaded for help in the ruins of their burned home. Two weeks later, on August 15, Wilson issued a statement deploring black-white violence. Most blacks thought it was much too late and too little in the bargain. It did nothing to counteract the “lukewarm aloofness” with which the president had approached the situation.

Events soon suggested the blacks were right. On August 22, trouble erupted in Houston when white police officers raided a black crap game. The blacks were all members of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, one of four black regular regiments that had been in the army since the Civil War, serving mostly in the West. The soldiers already resented Houston’s segregation and white hostility. When some of the gamblers fled to the home of a nearby black woman, a Houston policeman abused her verbally and perhaps physically. One of the black soldiers got into a fistfight with the cop and was arrested. Later in the day, a military policeman from the regiment was shot at and arrested by the same policeman.

In their camp outside Houston, members of the Twenty-Fourth Regiment’s third battalion seized their guns and headed for the city, where they began shooting every white they saw. By the time order was restored by white troops rushed to the scene, fifteen whites and four blacks were dead. Forty-one black regulars were sentenced to long terms in the army prison at Fort Leavenworth, and thirteen were hanged almost as soon as the court martial board handed down the sentences, making an appeal impossible.

Secretary of War Baker informed Wilson that “some feeling was aroused” by the speedy executions. He suggested henceforth that military death sentences ought to be reviewed in Washington. During the Civil War, this policy had been routine. It was hard for most people to believe that Baker and Wilson did not know this.
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In a black newspaper in San Antonio, an article praised the executed men for trying “to protect a Negro woman from the insult of a southern brute in the form of a policeman.” the editor of the paper was arrested and given two years in Leavenworth under the Espionage Act.
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On June 8, General Pershing and his staff arrived in England to be greeted by a few dignitaries and an honor guard of the Royal Welch Fusileers. While his baggage was being unloaded, Pershing was embarrassed into a press conference by waiting reporters. He said he and his men were glad to participate “in this great war for civilization.” Ashore, he sent a cable to the War Department, asking for absolute power to censor anything and everything reporters wrote about him. This was ingratitude, at the very least. The journalists had lavished extravagant phrases on the general. Heywood Broun said: “No man ever looked more the ordained leader of fighting men.” Floyd Gibbons called him “lean, clean, keen.”
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The next day, Pershing met King George V at Buckingham Palace. The king, illustrating how much moonshine was floating between the two allies, said he looked forward to seeing some of the 50,000 planes the Americans had produced while waiting to get into the war. Pershing cleared his throat and informed His Majesty that the U.S. Army Air Service had a grand total of fifty-five training planes. He might have added, but probably didn’t, that most of them were obsolete.
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Pershing also met Admiral William Sims, who informed him that the British were losing the war at sea; 1.5 million tons of ships had gone to Davy Jones’s locker in April and May. This news cast grave doubt on the possibility of bringing a large American army to France. Equally worrisome was a meeting with General Sir William “Wully” Robertson, chief of the imperial staff. Robertson was Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s boss and the gruff defender of Haig’s mass slaughters in Flanders. Robertson immediately urged Pershing to bring his men to the British sector of the Western Front. When Pershing informed Wully that he and his staff had decided to operate in Lorraine, on the right flank of the French army, Robertson became visibly less charming. He curtly informed Pershing that there was no hope of finding enough ships to bring an American army to France. Equally unencouraging was a visit with Prime Minister Lloyd George, who told Pershing the British were going to need every available ship to feed their home front.

Pershing and his chief of staff, Major James Harbord, also visited a British training camp. There they got a quick lesson in trench warfare, with its emphasis on hand grenades and mortars, two weapons that were receiving scant attention in the U.S. Army. Harbord was appalled by the undernourished, uninspired draftees, a glimpse of what the British class system produced in the slums of London and other cities.
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After five days in England, the Americans headed for France aboard a channel steamer. At Boulogne they endured a ceremonial reception that took hours. Harbord confided to his diary that even Pershing questioned out of the corner of his mouth how many times the band was going to play the “Star-Spangled Banner” and the “Marseillaise.” There were endless speeches in French, which neither Pershing nor 99 percent of his staff understood. But they got the essential message: The French were extremely glad to see them.

One reason for the long ceremony was the French desire to have Pershing reach Paris as people were finishing their day’s work. The government wanted the maximum number of
citoyens
to see him. Arriving at the Gare du Nord (the huge, vault-roofed train station) at 5:20 P.M., Pershing and his staff endured another rendition of the two national anthems and joined the top politicians in the French government, plus Marshal Joffre and other generals, in a motorcade to the Hôtel Crillon.
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The two-mile journey should have taken fifteen minutes. Instead it consumed an hour of the most frantic emotion that the dazed Americans had ever witnessed. Streets, rooftops, windows, were packed with French men and women who wept Niagaras of tears and screamed,“
Vive l’Amérique!
” and “
Pair-shang!
” until it seemed as if the din would shatter glass and even concrete, not to mention eardrums. Men and women burst through the police lines to kiss the hands and cheeks of officers and enlisted men and shower them with roses.

Major Harbord, riding in the second car, lost sight of Pershing in the car ahead of him as the berserk French engulfed the motorcade. Harbord began to wonder somewhat nervously if people climbing onto his car thought he was Pershing. One enlisted man almost had his arm wrenched off when he tried to shake hands with the swarming welcomers. The motorcars, not built to run in low gear for long periods, began smoking ominously.“Though I live a thousand years,” Harbord later wrote,“I shall never forget that crowded hour.”

In front of the Crillon, thousands more people were packed shoulder to shoulder in the immense Place de la Concorde, screaming, “
Pair-shang! Pair-shang!
” French officials prevailed on the general to step out on a balcony to acknowledge the frantic cheers and prevent the crowd from storming the building. There were French and American flags at each end of the balcony. A breeze blew the Tricolor toward Pershing. Though he usually froze when confronted by a large crowd, this time his presence of mind did not desert him. He kissed the fluttering folds and the crowd erupted into even wilder frenzy.
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Pershing found the demonstration immensely touching—and alarming. These people obviously regarded him as the savior of France. How could he manage that feat with a single division? The general’s uneasiness intensified later that night, when U.S. Ambassador William C. Sharp gave a dinner for Pershing and a roster of French and American dignitaries. In a brief speech, the ambassador hailed the soldiers’ arrival and closed with an unnerving “I hope you have not come too late.”
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The Germans made it clear that this was precisely their opinion.“The arrival of the general without an army was turned into a triumphal march,” sneered Berlin’s press bureau. If the kaiser’s men had seen a memorandum inserted into the U.S. Army files on May 28, their sneers would have been even more triumphant—and the French might have greeted Pershing with curses rather than cheers. Acting Chief of Staff Tasker Bliss (Chief of Staff Hugh Scott had been sent to Russia with a U.S. mission) wrote that “General Pershing’s expedition is being sent . . . to produce a
moral
effect. . . . Our general staff has made no [other] plans for prompt dispatch . . . of considerable forces to France.”
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Two days later, Pershing met the writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an old friend from the days when he headed the ROTC at the University of Nebraska. Fisher had been living in France for several years. She told him the French were as good as beaten. They had lost 2 million men to wounds and death in the last three years.“There is a limit to what flesh and blood . . . can stand . . . and the French have just about reached that limit,” mrs. Fisher said.