11

Loyal, True, Straight and Square

IN 1880, THERE WERE fewer than fifty million people living in the United States of America.

Between 1881 and the start of World War I, some twenty million more would arrive as immigrants.

Historians and others regard this period as the golden age of immigration, a time when so many came and so few were turned away. Not all were welcome; Chinese and Japanese, for example, were barred entirely. And not everyone in America welcomed those who were admitted. Often, the new immigrants were most fiercely spurned by first-generation Americans, the children of immigrants. Their resistance to the newcomers took many forms, from boisterous rallies and incendiary pamphlets to employers and landlords who refused to hire or rent to Irish, or to Germans, or Jews, or Italians, or Poles, or Greeks, or Bohemians, or Norwegians, or Russians, or Hungarians, or, maybe, to all of them. Still, if you wanted to come to America back then (and you weren’t Chinese or Japanese), chances were very good that America wouldn’t make much of a fuss about letting you in.

Once you got through the gates, though, you faced immediate and unrelenting pressure to conform, to assimilate, to stop being whatever you used to be, and all that entailed, and start being American. Proudly, fervently, and only American. Even Theodore Roosevelt, that great progressive, had no use for what he (and many others) called, derisively, “hyphenated Americans.” He insisted that immigrants should start speaking the language as soon as they arrived; “Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or to leave the country,” he once told a newspaper. On another occasion, he declared: “It is our boast that we admit the immigrant to full fellowship and equality with the native-born. In return we demand that he shall share our undivided allegiance to the one flag which floats over all of us.” Most did, and gladly.

But even those immigrants who undertook Americanization with zeal, who anglicized their names and mastered the English language quickly and adopted western clothing and slang and attitudes and became more patriotic than most natives, had to contend with a society that saw nothing wrong with mocking them at every turn. Back then, American humor was, essentially, ethnic humor; the most successful vaudeville comedy acts were ethnic acts, in which the players assumed exaggerated accents, acted out stereotypes, and mangled the language. It was tremendously popular, even with immigrants in the audience who didn’t happen to be among the groups being made fun of at that particular moment. And, strange as it may seem, even the objects of derision sometimes appreciated it; perhaps they were being mocked, but at least they were being acknowledged. They were represented.

And not just on the vaudeville stage. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, political organizations like Tammany Hall had been courting the immigrants’ favor, shrewdly recognizing that, newcomers though they were, they nevertheless would soon represent votes; it took much less time to become a citizen back then than it does today. By the early twentieth century, most of the recent immigrant groups had sent some of their own to city council, statehouse, and Capitol. Perhaps the most notable of these “immigrant” congressmen was Fiorello La Guardia, born in Manhattan in 1882 to an Italian father and Jewish mother, both recent arrivals. La Guardia understood immigrant concerns and, more important, culture; he spent several years working as an interpreter at Ellis Island. And when, in 1916, he first ran for Congress from East Harlem, he addressed his prospective constituents in their native tongues—Italian, Yiddish, German, even Croatian. He won handily.

From the start, La Guardia was a progressive firebrand, not the type one would expect to favor American participation in a conflict between crumbling old empires thousands of miles away. And yet, when America did enter the war, he was commissioned an officer in the United States Army Air Service. Barely five feet tall (his first name means “little flower” in Italian), he flew bombers over Austria-Hungary and Italy. The war, it seems, was all but irresistible.

People did resist, of course. But most often, their resistance—their opposition to the war—proved very troublesome for them. And costly.

Actually, “opposing the war” was so easy that it was entirely possible to do so unwittingly. Before America entered the war, there was lots of room for disagreement on the subject. And those who disapproved of American involvement were by no means a small minority; the notion of getting into the fight was so unpopular in the United States in 1916 that President Wilson liberally deployed the slogan “He kept us out of war” to get himself reelected that year. But just a few weeks after his reinauguration, America was in it, and suddenly, prevailing attitudes changed entirely. Not about the war itself; most people can’t change their deeply held beliefs so quickly, especially about a matter so grave. But literally almost overnight, it became unacceptable for people in the United States of America to voice their beliefs if they happened, still, to oppose the war. To be accurate, it wasn’t even acceptable to hold such beliefs any longer, though if you kept them to yourself and never hinted at their existence, you might just get away with it. Then again, you might not. Even silence was often read as opposition; to be really safe, you had to be openly, loudly, boisterously in favor of the war.

And if, by some chance, you should happen to express an unfavorable opinion about it? Twenty-seven of the country’s forty-eight states enacted sedition laws during the war, and most of them were used, among other things, to send dissenters to prison. One case I find particularly chilling is that of a traveling salesman who, while passing through Montana, made the mistake of referring, in conversation, to Mr. Hoover’s food regulations as a “big joke”; he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a term of seven to twenty years in prison. In all, nearly eighty men and women were convicted of sedition in Montana by the time the war ended. If you find yourself outraged over this, you may be gratified to learn that Montana’s governor did, eventually, grant them all pardons.

In 2006.

Montana’s law was particularly severe, which might explain why the federal government used it as the model for its own statute, the Sedition Act of 1918. That law, in turn, was actually a set of amendments to the Espionage Act of 1917, which starts off pretty reasonably—no passing on to the enemy any information about fortifications, ships, weaponry, movements, etc.—but then, in Section 3, decrees the following:

Whoever, when the United States is at war . . . shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.

This might seem reasonable too, at least at first; the problem was that it was just vague enough to cover almost any kind of statement that wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about the war and every last thing connected to it. Say you were in a bar somewhere, and happened to tell an old friend that sometimes you wondered if this war was worth all that trouble. Theoretically, your comment might be overheard by some young man who had yet to enlist; and if your remark should make him reconsider whether or not he should actually go through with it . . . well, then, you just obstructed the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States. And if, instead, you should call Mr. Hoover’s food-conservation initiatives a “big joke,” and someone who eats food should overhear you and, as a result, stop observing Meatless Mondays, the resultant smaller portion of beef on a doughboy’s plate could lead to a refusal of duty on his part, and that mutiny would be traceable to you.

And the 1918 act cast an even wider net:

Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall . . . say or do anything except by way of bona fide and not disloyal advice to an investor or investors, with intent to obstruct the sale by the United States of bonds or other securities of the United States or the making of loans by or to the United States . . . [or] willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute, or shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any language intended to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies, or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully by utterance, writing, printing, publication, or language spoken, urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things, product or products, necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war in which the United States may be engaged . . . and whoever shall willfully advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated, and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or the imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both: Provided, That any employee or official of the United States Government who commits any disloyal act or utters any unpatriotic or disloyal language, or who, in an abusive and violent manner criticizes the Army or Navy or the flag of the United States shall be at once dismissed from the service.

And that really covered just about anything you could say or do short of belting out “Over There” at the top of your lungs. You could be arrested for possession of an Austrian flag, or for saying you thought the Navy’s uniforms, with those oversized floppy hats and enormous bell-bottoms, were ugly. A lot of people—according to some estimates, as many as fifteen hundred of them—were sent to prison for saying something injudicious within earshot of a government official or informer. The most prominent of these was Eugene Victor Debs, the renowned labor leader who had already run for president four times on the Socialist Party ticket. Debs gave a speech in June, 1918, in which he implied he was dismayed that nearby, three fellow Socialists were rotting in prison for speaking out against the war; a few days later he was arrested, tried on ten counts of sedition, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison. He ran for president a fifth time, in 1920, from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and won nearly a million votes—3.5 percent of the electorate. A New York radio station was named WEVD in his honor.

Debs may have been popular with his followers, but his antiwar stance rendered him anathema to a great many others. Even more unpopular was Robert La Follette, a former governor of Wisconsin who was first elected to the United States Senate in 1906. La Follette, who called himself a progressive (technically, his party affiliation was Republican), was an unwavering opponent of the war and everything connected with it, including the Espionage Act, and he was not shy about expressing his opinions on the floor of the Senate. His fellow senators weren’t shy, either: They attacked him virulently on that same floor, called him a traitor and a madman and a German agent, likened him to Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot, said that he should be hauled off to an internment camp, that he would be better suited to presiding over Germany’s parliament. Theodore Roosevelt—a fellow progressive—referred to him as a skunk “who ought to be hung.” Almost all of La Follette’s friends abandoned him.

The people of Wisconsin didn’t, though, and thus his job was secure. Sadly, the same was not true for the hundreds of Americans who were locked up under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, or the thousands who applied for deferments as conscientious objectors, a great many of whom were denied and faced the choice of going off to the trenches or to prison. Others, whose applications were approved, were not sent home but rather ordered to work in war-supportive industries under the auspices of the military; those who refused were also sent to prison, where they were often underfed, beaten, and put in solitary confinement. And countless others, who said and did nothing wrong at all, lost their jobs anyway because they spoke with suspicious accents or were regarded as “slackers.”

And while all this was going on, America watched in virtual silence. The newspapers, ordinarily guardians of free speech, didn’t condemn the Espionage and Sedition Acts; many, in fact, supported them, having previously secured a promise that the government would leave them alone. Intellectuals, by and large, kept mum. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University—the main library on campus is named for him—had opposed the war in 1916; in 1917, he called opposition to it “treason,” and declared that there was no place among his faculty for anyone who didn’t wholeheartedly support it. Senator La Follette’s many friends in academia were among the first to distance themselves from him. I guess if Teddy Roosevelt wants to have you hanged, you should expect to be forsaken by professors.

You ask: How could such things happen in America?

They couldn’t have without two things: the war; and President Wilson.

The latter seems a strange thing to say given that, at this distance, Wilson is remembered as a progressive, a lone Democrat in a sea of Republican presidents, an idealist who kept the United States out of war as long as he could and then set to work on a plan to prevent all future wars, which he lamentably failed to sell to his more vengeful allies. But Wilson was also prickly and, as a knowledgeable source once told me, “remarkably thin-skinned.” Abraham Lincoln, the country’s last wartime president (unless you count McKinley, which you shouldn’t, as his war wasn’t much of one), was famous for being able to take an insult; political enemies and rivals called him everything from an idiot to a demon to a baboon, and worse. But Woodrow Wilson—well, he just couldn’t take criticism of any kind: not of him, nor of his war, nor of any of his decisions. He didn’t just support the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918; he conceived them. “If there should be disloyalty,” he warned, “it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” And by disloyalty, he meant criticism. Freedom of speech? No, thanks, he said. Those who were less than fully “loyal,” as he would have put it, “sacrificed their right to civil liberties.”

So, if you’re wondering why nobody wrote another “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” after 1916—there you have it. Instead, they cranked out stirring numbers like “Our Wilson Is the Greatest Man The World Has Ever Known,” and “If You Don’t Like Our President Wilson (You Knife the Land That Feeds Us All).”

Harder to sing along with than “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” But much safer.

The best estimates hold that some two thousand people were tried under the Espionage and Sedition Acts during the nineteen months Uncle Sam was at war with the Kaiser. About two-thirds of them were convicted. Nearly all of those went to prison. And not for sixty days, either; the typical sentence was three to twenty years. The government was methodical and ruthless in pursuing violators: In addition to its own secret agents, it depended upon the services of vigilante organizations with names like the Liberty League, the National Security League, the Home Defense League, the Anti–Yellow Dog League, and, to mix things up a bit, the Knights of Liberty. The Boy Spies of America—really—employed the nation’s youth in ferreting out the unfaithful; another posse, the Sedition Slammers, sounds more like a baseball team. (I wonder if they played in the same league with all those other leagues; the Loyalty League, maybe?) My favorite, at least in terms of nomenclature: the Terrible Threateners. Did they make terrible threats, or threaten terrible characters? Or was it that they were terrible at threatening?

The largest of these groups, the American Protective League, or APL, boasted a quarter of a million members in more than five hundred American cities. Founded in early 1917, it was officially sanctioned by US Attorney General Thomas Gregory (as were many of the other, smaller organizations); its members carried badges that read “American Protective League—Secret Service.” To those paying attention, though, it might have seemed like they did more attacking than protecting—spying on individuals and groups, infiltrating factories and unions, breaking up labor and Socialist rallies, investigating shopkeepers and customers to make sure they adhered to food and fuel regulations, and stopping passersby and demanding to see their draft-registration cards. Often they would infiltrate bars undercover and try to entrap patrons into making illegal statements about the war, the president, the rules of the day. Not infrequently, they succeeded.

The environment they fostered in 1917 and 1918, saturated with fear and suspicion and distrust, was hazardous enough for average citizens; for immigrants, whose American-ness was new and precarious, things were far worse. Their accents—whatever they might be—rendered them suspect. So did their funny-sounding names, their ridiculous clothing, the weird foods and spices they ate, the cacophonous languages they sometimes lapsed into, the way they couldn’t talk softly or without waving their hands all over the place, and the fact that they were here, in America, trying so hard to be just like everyone else—which is, of course, exactly what everyone else told them to do. If all Americans were at risk of being collared by a federal agent or someone from the APL, it seemed that the children and grandchildren of immigrants were at even greater risk, and actual immigrants at much greater risk still. Unless, that is, you were an English immigrant; the English, apparently, were a protected class, in part because they were America’s ally, and in part because America has always been infected with a peculiar Anglophilia borne, I suppose, out of guilt over the Revolution. So protected, in fact, were the British that when, in early 1917, a new motion picture titled The Spirit of ’76 cast them in an unflattering light—in 1776—the government decided to prosecute the insult to its ally. Interestingly, they didn’t go after the film’s screenwriter or its director—just its producer, Robert Goldstein. An immigrant.

If the film had only been released a year earlier, in 1916, it might have garnered its producer a serious payday instead of a serious prison sentence. Pluggers Howard Johnson and Joe McCarthy had a big hit that year with their song “It’s Not Your Nationality (It’s Simply You),” the lyrics of which proclaim:

Ev’rybody has a native land in the North, South, East or West

And it’s only right your native land should be the place you love the best.

Now, it makes no diff’rence what you are, don’t wait for fame to come

Just go and get it, and they’ll give you credit, no matter where you’re from.

So if you’ve got the spirit, never mind your name, they tell us at the end of the first verse. Folks will hear it, if you play the game.

That, though, was 1916. When the war came to America a few months later, it suddenly made a whole lot of diff’rence what you were. Immigrants weren’t merely more likely to be arrested for sedition—they were more likely to be suspected of it, too. On April 6, 1917, the day that the United States of America declared war on Germany, the Honorable Joseph Buffington, senior judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, swore in a group of immigrants in Philadelphia as new citizens and took the opportunity to lecture them on the matter of loyalty; his speech was later reprinted in a booklet (available, according to its back cover, “in Bohemian, Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian and Russian”), published by—who else?—the Committee on Public Information, under the ironically ominous title Friendly Words to the Foreign Born. “To-day there are 14,500,000 of men in America of foreign birth,” Judge Buffington’s talk begins. “There are 14,000,000 who are the children of those of foreign birth.” He himself, he tells us, has been turning immigrants into citizens for a quarter century, through which work he has been brought “into close touch with the foreign-born, have learned to understand them, have believed in them, and have always said that when war faced us that these foreign-born men would prove themselves Americans. The crux is not the fact of the hyphen, but whether the man’s heart is at the American end of the hyphen.” The CPI chose to boldface that passage, as it did the following: “Remember what was only foolish and unwise in word and deed last week, in peace, may be treason when war comes.” Buffington’s “friendly advice” is:

to keep clear of any disloyalty; keep clear of any one who counsels or advises it. Indeed, anyone, native, naturalized, or alien, who knows of such disloyal plans, purposes, or schemes is already on dangerous ground, although he may not himself have done a thing; for as your friend I should tell you that there is not only treason which consists of overt acts, but there is a lesser treason which consists in knowing of treason by others against the United States and not making it known. . . .

It is not necessary for me to tell you the many forms treason may take, for treason will always find a hundred different secret ways in which it can give aid and sympathy to the enemy. But right can take but one plain course. Be loyal, true, straight and square to the Government, and you will be sure you are not committing treason. . . .

My advice to every foreign-born man who comes to me will be: Put a flag at your door, another on your coat, and above all keep one in your heart.

That was probably more flags than the typical native-born American even owned, but then again, immigrants felt—were made to feel—that “being American” required much more of them than it did of those who were fortunate enough to have been born on American soil. To the immigrant, it was portrayed as a state of grace that they had to work hard to achieve, and then to maintain; and the government, which fostered this aspiration, wasn’t shy about exploiting it, too, most brazenly when it came to selling bonds. “Remember Your First Thrill of American Liberty” beckons one poster for the Second Liberty Loan of 1917, over a scene of immigrants up on deck, catching a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. “YOUR DUTY—Buy United States Government Bonds.” Another, featuring an image of a family—the man’s archaic cravat and the woman’s headscarf identify them as immigrants, although the ship behind them doesn’t hurt—orders: “Remember! The Flag of Liberty—Support It!” That flag fills the top right corner of the poster; the father, clearly moved, holds his exotic-looking hat over his heart and gazes earnestly into the distance. (There’s a son, too, who looks like a bit of a dullard: immigrants!) And then there’s the poster for the Third Liberty Loan featuring an eagle, a couple of flags, a couple of howitzers, and these words:

ARE YOU 100%

AMERICAN?

PROVE IT!

BUY

US GOVERNMENT BONDS

Immigrants had to prove it, and prove it, and prove it again. “What Kind of an American Are You?” demanded a 1917 song by Lew Brown and Charles McCarron; the sheet music’s cover, with its scowling Uncle Sam pointing a craggy finger right in your face, features the question that was now on every native-born American’s mind: “What are you doing over here?” (Interestingly, the song’s composer was the Teutonically monickered Albert Von Tilzer; but since he was the younger brother of Harry Von Tilzer, one of the most successful pluggers and music publishers in American history, and since he, Albert, had written the music for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” I guess he got a pass.) We welcome ev’ry stranger, and we help him all we can, the song declares, and now that we’re in danger, we depend on ev’ry man. That’s certainly fair enough, though the song takes it a few steps further when it demands:

If the Star-Spangled Banner don’t make you stand and cheer,

Then what are you doing over here?

As another song title declaimed: “Loyalty Is the Word Today—Loyalty to the U.S.A.”

That one was written by Dee Dooling Cahill, in collaboration with composer J. E. Andino, whose name must have seemed suspiciously foreign to many. Of course, many of the nation’s pluggers were immigrants—a much greater proportion, even, than the American population as a whole, which was 15 percent foreign-born in 1910, and even more so by 1917. There are no such statistics for the denizens of Tin Pan Alley, sadly, but judging from what I’ve seen and read, I wouldn’t be surprised if something very close to a majority of them were immigrants themselves. This makes sense, in its way: The typical plugger lived in a city and was largely self-educated; many of them were men and women whose access to more “conventional” middle-class professions was blocked in some way or other. And the more immigrants who were able to make a good living writing and selling songs—and thus attain a high profile for having done so—the more who flocked to that little, increasingly overcrowded stretch of West Twenty-eighth Street.

The apex of American songwriting was occupied (some would say still is) by an immigrant who had come over from Russia in 1893, at the age of five. Legend has it that little Israel “Izzy” Baline’s shtetl had been burned to the ground by Cossacks, forcing the family to seek refuge across the ocean. Whether that’s true or not—that sort of thing did happen, and not rarely—there can be no doubt that the family fared much better on the Lower East Side of Manhattan than they had in the Russian Pale of Settlement. As Jews in Russia, they had virtually no civil rights to speak of, and could essentially be slaughtered with impunity; in Manhattan, they might be called Kikes and Sheenies by their gentile neighbors, might have to toil twelve-hour days in overcrowded sweatshops and come home to overcrowded tenements, but at least their lives were protected by the law. They could even become American citizens, and own property, and vote.

I don’t know if, as an adult and the world’s most famous and successful songwriter, Izzy Baline—now going by Irving Berlin—thought about that fact every day. Certainly, no immigrant was ever prouder to be an American. Given how many odes he wrote to his adopted country, and how many of them he just gave away for little or nothing, I don’t think you can make a case that he was a patriot for profit. His war, though, was an unusual one. Drafted at the age of twenty-nine, Berlin was sent to Camp Upton, in the town of Yaphank (pronounced “Yap-Hank”) on Long Island, along with thousands of other immigrants from the city of New York; unlike all of them, though, he was plucked from the infantry and made the center of a special troupe whose objective was not to get the scalp of Mr. Kaiser Man, but to put together a musical revue. This he did: Yip-Yip-Yaphank, a Military Musical Mess debuted on Broadway the following year. It featured a number of songs that have long since been forgotten, including “Kitchen Police,” “I Can Always Find a Little Sunshine at the Y.M.C.A.,” and “You Can’t Stay Up on Bevo,” perhaps the only ode to nonalcoholic beer ever written. The show’s breakout hit was “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” which is ironic considering that Berlin struck a deal with the Army that enabled him to ignore reveille and awaken when it suited him.

He also wrote a great many war songs beyond Yip-Yip-Yaphank, including “For Your Country and My Country,” which informs Americans of every background: It’s your duty, and my duty, to speak with the sword not the pen. Other songs, though, were aimed specifically at Berlin’s fellow immigrants, perhaps none of them more blunt than 1917’s “Let’s All Be Americans Now,” the chorus of which ends with: You swore that you would so be true to your vow / Let’s all be Americans now—that vow, presumably, being the oath of citizenship. It’s the second verse, though, where things really get pointed:

Lincoln, Grant and Washington, they were peaceful men each one,

Still they took the sword and gun,

When real trouble came;

And I feel somehow, they are wond’ring now,

If we’ll do the same.

I’m sure there are other interpretations, but when I hear these words, nearly a century after Berlin wrote them, I feel strongly that the “we” in that last line is not the American people as a whole, but he, Israel Baline, and his fellow immigrants. I think he really believed, palpably, that America had saved his life, that without it some Cossack would have long ago split open his head; he was deeply grateful to his adopted country for every day of life it had given him, and believed fervently that his fellow immigrants—Jew or gentile, Irish or Russian or Greek or Hungarian or Italian or Pole or whatever—should feel the same, and act on those feelings.

And maybe, rich and famous and acclaimed though he was, he felt, too, what every immigrant surely felt on some level: that other Americans, native-born Americans, were disinclined to regard them as real Americans, but rather as Micks or Wops or Sheenies or Bohunks or Polacks—and that, to compensate, they would have to do more than just their bit. No matter that nearly 20 percent of the Army’s doughboys were foreign-born; Berlin, I suspect, would have liked that figure to have been 80 percent. Let’s all be Americans now.

He, at least, was subtle. Other pluggers, many of whom had made a good living writing “ethnic” songs before the war, were not. Some of their fruits, like “The Army’s Full of Irish,” are actually somewhat complimentary toward the groups they mock; others, like “When Tony Goes Over the Top”—well, not so much. The Tony in question is an immigrant from Italy, a barber who shaves and cuts-a the hair. When the war caught up with him in America, though, He said skabooch, to his Mariooch, he’s gonna fight “Over There.” (I’m guessing his Mariooch is the woman he married, and skabooch is another form of “See ya!”)

Tony’s a real live one; when he goes over the top, He no think of the barber shop. Rather, He grab-a-da gun / and chase-a-da hun / And make ’em all run like a son-of-a-gun. No need to question his loyalty; With a fire in his eyes / He’ll capture the Kais’ / He don’t care if he dies. And: With a rope of spagett / And-a big-a-stilette / He’ll make-a the Germans sweat. It almost sounds as if the songwriters—Alex Marr, Billy Frisch, and Archie Fletcher—actually admire Tony. Sure, he talks funny and carries a switchblade; but in the trenches, he’s a real corker. An American.

Almost:

When Tony goes over the top

Keep your eyes on that fighting wop.

It wasn’t until years after I first stumbled upon this song that I connected it to the fact that the very first World War I veteran I interviewed back in 2003 was, in fact, an Italian immigrant. Named Tony.

He was gone by then.

I had the opportunity to interview three immigrants who served in the American military during World War I. The first, of course, was Anthony Pierro; the other two, men who had never met and who lived hundreds of miles apart, came from very similar backgrounds and had surprisingly similar stories to tell. I met the first of them, Stanley Lane, in late August of 2003, about six weeks after I had first interviewed Mr. Pierro; he was living then in a pleasant nursing home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He’d been born Samuel (or, more accurately, Shmuel, or Szmul) Levine in Warsaw, Poland, on October 1, 1901, which fact makes him the youngest of all the World War I veterans I interviewed. He and his mother, Sarah, and his brothers, Edward and Oscar, sailed to America on the Mauretania—the Lusitania’s sister ship—arriving in New York in April, 1908. His father, Bernard, had come across earlier, settling in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, setting up shop repairing shoes and saving his earnings until he had enough to bring over his wife and young sons. It’s a common tale, except that Hell’s Kitchen was not the Lower East Side; it was, rather, a predominantly Irish and Italian neighborhood. “Where all the longshoremen lived,” Stanley Lane explained to me ninety-five years later. The Irish and Italians didn’t pick on the Jews, he said, or at least not on him; “I was only a kid,” he recalled, “and they didn’t bother me.” Even so, he told me, when it came time for him to attend school—one block up and another to the east—“my mother would walk us . . . because if you went from one block to the other, the kids might bother you. ‘Hey, what block are you from?’” Their apartment, he said, was a tenement—a third- or fourth-floor walkup without heat, or hot water, or electricity. “Gaslights on the stairways,” he recalled. “Open flames.”

Nearly a decade later, the family had moved up to the Bronx, and Samuel Levine, then a teenager, had left school and “was working as a shipping clerk for a dress manufacturer named Jacobson . . . He only made wedding dresses, so he had a sort of a national reputation.” He was making eight or nine dollars a week—good money back then for a boy his age. (“The average only made about five.”) The office had a nice view, too; “We overlooked the armory of the 612th National Guard of New York,” he recalled. That armory, on Lexington Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Streets, is still there, and is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful in the city, and quite possibly the country. In 1913, it was the site of a now-legendary art show that marked the debut of modern art in the United States.

The 612th—the “Fighting 612th,” as it was then known—was an old unit. For World War I, it was absorbed into the 42nd Division, known as the “Rainbow Division” because, at a time when most Army divisions—like the YD—were regional in composition, the 42nd contained units from twenty-six states. Its nickname was coined by a young major named Douglas MacArthur. The Rainbow Division went on to become famous fighting at the Marne and Château-Thierry, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne.

Back to Samuel Levine, working at a wedding dress factory on Lexington Avenue and gazing out the window at that armory. “We could see the roof,” he recalled, “and they had just come back from Mexico, and they were lounging around the roof and we could see what they were doing there all of the time. I don’t know, somehow it must have interested me. I used to read novels by Bret Harte, and people like that. They wrote about all the western stories, about the guides who, you know, went around with the settlers and showed them where to live and all that. That sort of thing interested me somehow. I read all those novels. And later on in that period, some kid or friend of mine enlisted—I guess he couldn’t enlist somehow in the American Army, but he got into the Canadian Army, and he was only fifteen years old. And I heard about it. So I said, it’s a pretty good idea. I just walked into the recruitment office in New York, and it was no problem. They didn’t ask me anything. And I enlisted there.”

I asked him how old he was at the time; “I was exactly sixteen,” he said. It was October of 1917. No one at the recruiting station had asked to see his birth certificate, or any other proof that he was old enough to serve.

“And what did your mother think about that?” I asked him.

“I didn’t tell them, see,” he said. “When I enlisted there in that office, they sent me directly from there to Fort Slocum, where all the recruits went, so I didn’t have to go home and tell them anything.”

Straight from the recruiting office to boot camp, without a stop at home? I found that pretty surprising, and turned to Mr. Lane’s son, Bruce, who was sitting nearby, to see if his face betrayed the fact that his father might be embellishing the tale a bit. It didn’t.

Fort Slocum, on an island in Long Island Sound just off the coast of New Rochelle, New York, was only the first stop. As a volunteer, he was allowed to choose which type of unit he wanted to serve with. Having read all that Bret Harte, he said he wanted to be a horse soldier. The Army sent him to Fort Oglethorpe, in Georgia, to serve with the 22nd Cavalry. “Had you ever ridden a horse before?” I asked him.

“Never saw one before,” he said, and smiled. He really took to riding, though, and shooting. But then the Army sent the 22nd Cavalry down to China Spring, Texas, and converted it to an artillery unit. Samuel Levine was made a signalman—“I was supposed to handle the radio and the flag, the semaphore; I could do all of that, you see”—which he enjoyed pretty well, too. Then the Army shipped them all back east, to Fort McClellan, near Anniston, Alabama, and Samuel Levine never got any closer to France, at least not in that war. He stayed in the Army for the rest of his career, more or less, serving through World War II—when he did make it overseas—and the Korean War, and rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He spent most of that career as Stanley Lane, having changed his name in 1930; in the peacetime Army, he told me, he’d felt he had to in order to move up.

Sam Goldberg, on the other hand, never changed his, at least not after he got to America. His American name—bestowed upon him by his father when, at the age of seven, the son came across from Lodz, Poland—was Samuel Benedict Goldberg. Or, as he pronounced it when I asked: “Sam-ewe-elle, Ben-eh-dic-T, Gol-D-ber-G.” The man had the best diction of anyone I have ever met, and he was 106 years old. Back in Lodz, his name had been Shmuel Baruch Goldberg, or, as he pronounced it that day in May, 2006: “SHMU-elle, Bar-OUKKKH, Gol-D-ber-G. And don’t laugh at it,” he continued—for the record, I hadn’t—“because all the Jewish kids I met when I came to Rhode Island thought, ‘Oh, Benjamin wasn’t good enough for him.’ But Shmuel Baruch”—and here he spelled it out for me—“the dictionary said that Baruch was ‘Benedict.’” Baruch means “blessed” in Hebrew.

His mind was no less crisp than his tongue; he had, it seemed to me, near-total recall. He knew the precise date the family had arrived in America (December 27, 1907), the name of the ship that brought him over (the Cunard Line’s Campania), every address at which he’d lived in America—from Newark to Hartford to Atlanta and, finally, Rhode Island, where he was still living when we met—precisely how long he’d lived at each one, every employer he’d ever had, how long he had worked for each of them, and how much they’d paid him. It was, truly, a thing to behold. He had lots of memories of life in Poland, too, though not many of those seemed terribly positive. (Russia didn’t hold the patent on pogroms.) He remembered his father’s iron shop, in Newark (“In those days, they made fire escapes . . . There were no fire escapes in this country at that time. Then all of a sudden every city got an ordinance: fire escapes. Too many people were being killed jumping out the window. And if you opened an iron shop and made fire escapes, you had it made.”), his stumbles in learning English (“A couple of months after we arrived there, I got a hold of a penny or two and five or six of the kids my age, we went to the candy store and they picked what they wanted and I said, ‘I want for two cents these,’ and they laughed. And I said ‘Well, how do you say it?’ And they said, ‘I want two cents’ worth of these.’ Well, after that, I wasn’t talking Jewish.”), and the time President Taft came to town (“I saw him personally dedicate the statue of Abraham Lincoln. I didn’t get too close, but I was looking over.”).

He grew up to be a slight young man, five feet two or three and blond. He’d never had any trouble, he said, as a Jewish kid living in a predominantly Irish neighborhood; on the contrary, he told me, he’d actually developed a brogue. He left the public schools to go to trade school, then left trade school to go to work. He was good with numbers, tended to get jobs at manufacturers where he could use his accounting skills. He was working for the Willys-Overland automobile company in Atlanta when he joined up. “May 6, 1918,” he recalled.

“Why did you enlist?” I asked him.

“Because the excitement appealed to me,” he explained. “You know, I wanted to enlist in the signal corps because that was a dangerous corps. You exposed yourself by sending signals.” The recruiting sergeant, though—on orders from above, or maybe his own initiative—tried to steer new enlistees to another branch of the service. “He said, ‘Kid, join the cavalry. You know, ride a horse.’” The minimum weight for the cavalry was 116 pounds; Sam Goldberg weighed 104. The recruiter got him a waiver, and assigned him to M Troop of the 12th Cavalry, one of Arthur Guy Empey’s old outfits. He went to Fort Oglethorpe for a week—Samuel Levine was long gone by then—and then on to Leon Springs, Texas. But the 12th, unlike the 22nd, was allowed to remain a cavalry unit, and after two months of training in Texas, it moved on to New Mexico, where it was assigned to guard the border against a Mexican invasion.

In those days, there was actually some reason to worry, if not quite fear, that Mexicans might come streaming over the border with intent to do Americans harm. On March 9, 1916, some five hundred armed Mexican revolutionaries, under orders from their leader, Pancho Villa, attacked the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing eighteen Americans—ten of them civilians—and burning down much of the place. Historians differ on why, exactly, Villa did this; some say he was angry at the United States for backing a rival of his, or for selling him defective bullets, or both, while others claim he needed provisions. It seems possible that all are correct, but whatever the case, Villa took the worst of it—he gravely underestimated the size of the Army garrison in Columbus, and lost eighty men there, at a time when he had only about two thousand in total. Nevertheless, his raid terrorized the United States, which sent General Pershing and his troops down to capture Villa. But they couldn’t, and Villa sent his men over the border several more times, killing a handful of American soldiers in Texas in the summer of 1916. Then came the Zimmermann Telegram incident of March 1917, when Germany was caught trying to entice Mexico into attacking the United States should America enter the war, which it did shortly thereafter. So when the Army sent Sam Goldberg and the 12th Cavalry to Hachita, New Mexico—just fifty miles or so from Columbus—he had reason to think he might actually get to see some action.

He didn’t. By the summer of 1918, Pancho Villa was off doing other things, and no one else in Mexico seemed interested, or in any event able, to take Herr Zimmermann up on his offer. Nevertheless, his service in the cavalry did give Sam Goldberg an appreciation of horses; his own didn’t have a name—“his number was 93. But I called my horse Chickamauga,” he explained, “because he was so old, he was in the Battle of Chickamauga. He was a good horse.” More important, though, the cavalry was his admission ticket to the great diorama that was, and remains, America. It was a dying institution, but still proud, and it had an unusual ratio of old-timers to novices. His drill sergeant—“a Polack from Chicago”—was one of the former; when Sam arrived in M Troop, the sergeant, calling out the name “Goldberg” in the roll, laughed and said: “A Jew in the cavalry? That’s gone too far.” Private Goldberg didn’t take it too hard, since the same sergeant, who had served in the Pacific during the Spanish-American War, also picked on him for being so small. “In the Philippines,” he told Sam once, “they would issue a blanket with a little boy like you.”

“Get it?” Mr. Goldberg asked me. I didn’t. “They issue a blanket,” he elaborated. “A little boy like me would be grabbed by a lot of the Filipinos, like priests do to boys.”

“I see,” I said.

“I knew what he meant,” he continued. “I was quite sophisticated. And I said, ‘Well, Sergeant’—just like this, with a smile on my face—‘where I come from, a remark like that coming from you would indicate that you might possibly be a sissy.’ In those days we called a homosexual a ‘sissy.’ And the guy, I could see him flush. Big guy. And he walks toward me, and he says, ‘What did you say?’ Now, I knew he wasn’t going to punch me, that’s against the rules . . . so I said, ‘Well, Sergeant, I heard what you said and now you heard what I said. I don’t need to repeat it. So my best opinion is that you should go back and teach us to be soldiers, not to poke fun at me, because you’re going to get it back.’ And he walked back.” Apparently he’d been no less feisty at eighteen than he was at 106.

There were, he recalled, a great many “Polacks from Chicago” in the cavalry; for some reason, he said, they had gravitated there. “Every troop had a Polish cook,” he told me. His troop’s cook, Kluzinski, was notoriously ill-tempered. Once, when Private Goldberg hit him up for a piece of pie, Kluzinski responded, “You get the hell out of here! You see this cleaver? I’ll chop your head off.” The hungry little private, though, was undeterred. “I said, ‘All right, all right, OK, Klu, put it down. It’s all right.’ And I get to the door and I said, ‘You know what Blackey Mitchell, the sergeant major, and the four other guys in headquarters call me?’ And he says, ‘What?’ ‘The little Polack.’ [In fact, what everyone really called him was Goldie.] And he says, ‘Why do they call you that?’ ‘Because Blackey Mitchell looked up my service record and it says born in Poland.’ ‘Born in Poland?’ And I says, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Where in Poland?’ And I said, ‘Lodz’ . . . And I said, ‘See ya later, Klu.’ And he says, ‘Hey kid, get back here.’ There’s a big piece of pie . . . I walk into headquarters and they say, ‘Where did you get that pie?’ And I said, ‘Klu gave it to me.’ And he said, ‘How did you manage that?’ And I said, ‘Diplomacy.’”

There were all kinds in the cavalry, as he would discover—Irish from New York and “hillbillies” from Tennessee, Australians and Englishmen, Okies and cowboys, gentlemen from refined families and tough city kids. At one point, he even told me, “We had a homosexual problem.” Four men, he explained, were caught fooling around under the bunk one night. “Dishonorably discharged,” he recalled. “The leader was given three years in Leavenworth Penitentiary. The other two were given two years.” The fourth, he said, got off on “a technicality. Seemed like they punched him around too much, a confession and so on.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise, at least at first, was that “each of those troops”—that is, I Troop, K Troop, L Troop, and M Troop—“had one Jewish soldier . . . One was Harry Schneider in one troop, the other was Dan Smith, and the other was Mose Jacobson. Three of them, they all came from Louisville, Kentucky. They enlisted in 1916. They by now were career guys. Smith and the other guy, Schneider, they were tough guys. Not nasty, not at all. They were middleweight champs; they boxed all over the place . . . Jacobson was the obvious schlemiel. He couldn’t be more of a jerk. He was just, I imagine that they were all on the same street and two of them said let’s join—oh, they joined when Pancho Villa shot up Columbus. They joined, and Jacobson said, ‘Me, too.’ He was the last over the fence. They placed them each in different [troops], so when I joined, there was one Jew in each troop.” And then there was the time when he found himself being trained at the rifle range. “Now, you get a sergeant to coach you,” he recalled. “He sits and I’m sitting, aiming so on, and coaches you. And the guy coaching me was a sergeant, didn’t give me his name. Handsome sort of guy. If you had to wonder what he looked like, you’d say, well, good-looking Greek, a good-looking Polack, and so on . . . And he sat with me, a couple of hours, no recognition, no hello, no buddy-buddy, nothing.” Later, he learned the man’s name. “Sergeant Levine,” he told me. “L-E-V-I-N-E. Jewish. Handsome. He’d been there ten years, and somebody said, a sergeant said, ‘That Levine, best cavalryman in the Army’ . . . And he coached me in rifle. Never said to me, ‘Oh, you’re a Jewish kid.’ Never identified himself. I didn’t learn his name till quite a while after.”

Clearly, it filled Private Goldberg with pride to hear a fellow Jew referred to as the “best cavalryman in the Army.” And I’m sure it made him prouder still to hear, that fall, of the exploits of another Polish Jew, Abraham Krotoshinsky, in France. Krotoshinsky had immigrated to New York in 1912 because, he said later, he did not wish to be drafted into the army of the anti-Semitic czar, whom he despised. Five years later, while working as a barber, he was drafted into Company K of the 307th Infantry Regiment of the 77th Division of the Army of the United States of America, in which he was glad to serve. The 77th was a storied division; composed entirely of draftees, most of them from the city of New York, it was the first division of American draftees sent Over There, and was seen as a model for those that followed. Because it came from New York, and because so many of the men in its ranks were immigrants, it was nicknamed the “Statue of Liberty Division,” although the press sometimes referred to it as the “Melting Pot Division” or the “Metropolitan Division,” and devoted a great deal of space to how well the Irish and Jews and Italians and Poles and Greeks and Ukrainians and Magyars were getting along under the banner of Uncle Sam. The 77th went into action at Château-Thierry in July, 1918, and later played a critical role at the Meuse-Argonne. It was there, on October 2, that 554 men from the 77th found themselves cut off from the rest of the AEF, trapped in a forest ravine and surrounded by Germans. Newspapers, learning of their plight, dubbed them the “Lost Battalion”; they were picked off by both German snipers and poorly aimed American artillery, and had no way of communicating with headquarters except by carrier pigeon, as the Germans killed every runner they tried to send through the lines. Desperately short of food, water, and medical supplies—they took bandages off the dead to use on the wounded but still breathing—their position looked hopeless, not least to the Germans, who couldn’t believe the Americans wouldn’t just surrender. On October 7, they sent back a captured American, blindfolded and bearing a note that read, in part:

It would be quite useless to resist any more, in view of the present conditions. The suffering of your wounded men can be heard over here in the German lines, and we are appealing to your humane sentiments to stop. A white flag shown by one of your men will tell us that you agree with these conditions.

It was signed: THE GERMAN COMMANDING OFFICER.

The American commanding officer, Major Charles Whittlesey, ignored the plea. Instead, he called once again for a volunteer to try to make it through the German lines and bring back reinforcements. Given what had happened to the previous runners, he must have wondered what kind of man might volunteer for such a mission. Private Abraham Krotoshinsky did.

Krotoshinsky managed to evade German fire, though it wasn’t easy; at one point, sensing he was surrounded, he lay down on the ground, pretending to be dead. A German patrol came upon him. The American certainly looked dead. A soldier stepped on his hand anyway, just to make sure. Nothing. They moved on. Krotoshinsky waited a while, then hopped up, shook out his hand (or so I imagine), and was able, somehow, to find a hole in the German lines; he made his way through to headquarters, and led a rescue mission the next day. The Lost Battalion was saved. Nearly 200 of them had been killed; another 150 or so had been taken prisoner or gone missing. Only 194 of the original 554 were able to walk out of that ravine.

There’s a lot more to the story, of course, but many of the newspapers focused on Krotoshinsky—the private, the barber, the immigrant, the hero. He was exalted as a symbol of the New American, the man who came here by choice and made good, who proved his American-ness with blood, or at least tremendous courage and resourcefulness and a crushed hand. In New York, before the war, he may have been a greenhorn, a Polack, a Yid; in the Army, he was a Yank. And if he took any abuse in the ranks on account of his origins, it was nothing compared to what immigrants were still dealing with back home.

And that, strange as it seems, made them—all of them—feel better.

I visited with Sam Goldberg for more than four hours that day in 2006, and he told me quite a few stories. I’ve shared some of them here. The one that has stuck with me the most, though, was this one:

One day, I’m alone on the parade ground, there wasn’t much of anything around. There was one soldier, Sergeant Moellering, you might say the handsomest soldier in the US Army. He had unusual white, silver-blond hair, white-like, if you’ve seen that color. Light complexion, blue eyes, about five-eleven tall. Ten years in the service. He was twenty-eight years old. M troop, my troop, hundred-yard dash he could outrun everybody. He used to be a bugler in Washington, and once in a while taps would blow and you’d hear this bugle almost sing, somebody would say Moldie was up . . . He was a soldier’s soldier. Middleweight boxer, but a gentle sort of a guy. He’s standing about that distance away from me, we two were alone, and he says to me, “Hey, Avrumchik.” Avrumchik is, “Avrum” is Abraham and “chik” means, like, “Jimmy” [i.e., a diminutive]. And I walked over and said, “Hey, Sergeant.” Sergeants don’t talk that way to recruits. And I said, “How come?” He said, “Well, I’m from St. Louis and that’s a German city. We lived next door to a Jewish family.” And he says, “I can speak Jewish.” And he did. And we started, we became friends. It was the most peculiar friendship. It just didn’t happen, normally. Here’s a ten-year soldier and he’s the best buddy with a guy who’s in a little less than a year. It just didn’t make sense. And I remember how proud I was when somebody said in my presence, “Whenever you see Moldie, you see Goldie.” We were buddies . . . we became absolutely like he was my big brother.

It was bad to be German in the United States of America in 1918, worse by far than to have been British in 1776, or a Southerner (or Yankee) in 1863, or Spanish in 1898. Never mind that Germans had lived in America in large numbers since colonial times. Never mind that in 1918 more Americans could trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country. (This is still the case today, actually.) America was at war with Germany, and all things discernibly German—no matter how faint or tenuous the connection—were suspect. In a move that foreshadowed 2003’s “Freedom Fries” craze, sauerkraut producers even renamed their product “Liberty Cabbage.” Fortunately, that trend didn’t survive the war.

And I don’t think many sauerkraut magnates were hurt too badly, at least not compared to ordinary Americans of German extraction. It’s safe to say that a disproportionately large number of those targeted by the American Protective League and its fellow vigilante organizations—probably quite disproportionate—bore suspiciously Teutonic surnames. They didn’t have to say, do, or even think anything suspicious; often it was enough merely to have that blood in you somewhere. German American professors and teachers were pulled from the classroom, or even fired; symphonies let German American musicians, and even conductors, go. They also stopped playing music by German composers. (Mostly Wagner, from what I’ve read, so that actually may have worked out well.) Libraries pulled German books off their shelves. The American Red Cross refused to hire anyone with a German surname, even as a volunteer; it was rumored that German American saboteurs were putting ground glass into bandages. I suppose it never occurred to anyone at that organization that a really good German American saboteur might adopt, say, a Scottish nom de guerre.

The entire state of California banned the teaching of German in its public schools, decreeing it “a language that disseminates the ideals of autocracy, brutality, and hatred.” (Maybe it’s all those guttural consonants?) Nebraska, not satisfied to leave it at that, made it illegal to teach any language other than English. Iowa banned foreign languages—not just the teaching of, but the speaking of—in schools and other public places. In Minnesota, a minister was dragged outside and tarred and feathered after being overheard praying in German with a dying woman. And in southern Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, a German immigrant named Robert Prager—who had tried to enlist in the US Navy but was turned away because he had only one eye—was lynched by an anti-German mob of about two hundred shortly after midnight on April 5, 1918. Prager, a former baker and miner, was described by many who knew him as ornery, which was not, at the time, a hanging offense in Illinois. Being German, though, apparently was. Before they strung him up, the mob allowed him to write a brief note to his parents back in Germany, and then say a prayer. How nice; perhaps that’s why the dozen men who were later tried for the lynching were summarily acquitted. “The lesson of [Prager’s] death has had a wholesome effect on the Germanists of Collinsville and the rest of the nation,” wrote a local newspaper publisher after the trial.

Good Americans never had to lynch another German after that. Instead, untold thousands of German Americans, many of whom just couldn’t get work or even credit to buy bread, anglicized their names—names that had, in some cases, remained unchanged in America for two or even three hundred years.

But not Sergeant Edward Moellering, of the 12th United States Cavalry. He didn’t need to.

It is strange to think of the Army, an institution that is by definition hierarchical and authoritarian, as being more progressive, more sensitive, more caring than the society it protects; and yet, that’s exactly how things were in America during the First World War. In those days, in peacetime, when the Army was small, it was also thoroughly native; it was illegal, at those times, for anyone who was not a citizen to serve in the American military. But in wartime—especially big wars, like that one—that restriction evaporated. It didn’t happen slowly, either; in April, 1917, the War Department changed its policy almost overnight from eschewing immigrants to actually soliciting them. The impetus wasn’t philosophical or ideological. It was strictly practical. These immigrants, these men, these warm bodies—they were needed, very badly. As I said, nearly 20 percent of the troops in the American Expeditionary Forces were not born in America; had the war dragged on longer, that figure surely would have grown larger. Twenty percent of even four million is an awful lot of manpower.

To its credit, someone at the War Department realized this fact very early in the war, and did more than just decide to let foreign-born men serve in the AEF; they did more even than actively recruit immigrants for service. They actually set out to make immigrants feel welcome, and valued, and comfortable in the United States Army. They didn’t merely train recruiters to speak Italian, and Yiddish, and Magyar, and Polish, and Greek, and Czech, and Serbo-Croatian, and even German; they set up an entire bureau—specifically, the Foreign-speaking Soldier Subsection (or FSS), part of the Military Morale Section of the department’s Military Intelligence Division—dedicated to servicing the particular needs of immigrants. The FSS recruited ethnicity-specific clergy, brought in specialized foods and foreign-language newspapers (carefully screened, of course—at least, the newspapers were), worked with organizations like the Jewish Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, and the Order and Liberty Alliance (dedicated to assisting “foreign-speaking men”), and even sought, whenever possible, to commission foreign-born, foreign-speaking officers from the ranks. You know those World War II movies where the heroic platoon is composed of one of everybody? That ethic, that aspiration, was borne out of the previous war. Only the accents changed in the interim.

In 1917, it took an immigrant to the United States at least five years to earn American citizenship; unless, that is, he was serving in the military. Immigrant Army recruits were offered a fast track to citizenship and strongly (if benignly) encouraged to accept it, not as a test of their loyalty or even a reward for their service, but because it was believed that they would fight harder for a country in which they were fully invested.

Even Germans.

In some cases, German-born United States Army soldiers—or those born in other enemy lands, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire—had to have their commanding officer vouch for their loyalty in order to stay in the service; and a few were yanked out of their units temporarily while their loyalty, often without cause, was investigated. But many German immigrants did go to war for their adopted country, as did many, many more who, like Sergeant Moellering, were born in America of German ancestry. They made a profound and invaluable contribution to the war effort. They all did—immigrants and the sons and grandsons of immigrants—no matter what country they’d been born in.

How strange to think that, while everywhere else in America they were subject to scorn and suspicion and derision and detention and even violence, these huddled masses, wretched refuse, were, all in all, being treated infinitely better in the Army. And so, too, were the destitute, the hungry, the unemployed and orphaned and directionless and, in general, downtrodden.

With one really big exception.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are reproduced courtesy of the veterans, their families, and the author.

Anthony Pierro, 1918, aged 22.

Anthony Pierro in Swampscott, Massachusetts, July 19, 2003, aged 107.

J. Laurence Moffitt, June, 1917, aged 20.

J. Laurence Moffitt in Orleans, Massachusetts, November 11, 2003, aged 106. He is wearing his original Army helmet from World War I.

A publicity shot of Arthur Guy Empey, taken in early 1918 on the set of Over the Top, the film version of his 1917 memoir of the same name, the best-selling American book about the war. In addition to starring in the picture, Empey also wrote the screenplay—and, in his spare time, gave demonstrations of trench warfare at Carnegie Hall.

This full-color, full-page ad for the Victor Victrola appeared in American magazines in 1918. “Thousands of miles from home in a land torn by battle, our boys yet listen to the spiritual voice of Art,” its text proclaims. If they ever really did, it probably wasn’t in a dugout, few of which were as dry and well lit as the one pictured.

Arthur Fiala, 1918, aged 19.

Arthur Fiala in Kewaunee, Wisconsin, April 30, 2005, aged 106

Lloyd Brown in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, November 18, 2004, aged 103.

Lloyd Brown, 1918, aged 17.

The hundreds (maybe thousands) of songs Tin Pan Alley cranked out during the nineteen months the United States was at war with Germany exalted American leaders, doughboys, and dear old Mom, while vilifying the enemy, slackers and cheapskates.

Ernest Pusey in Bradenton, Florida, June 15, 2004, aged 109.

Ernest Pusey, date unknown.

Eugene Lee, April, 1917, aged 18. Inset: Eugene Lee in Syracuse, New York, December 3, 2003, aged 104.

During the war, the Chicago Daily News issued a series of postcards featuring photographs taken at the front in France. It’s not clear who selected these two pictures (and another one titled “American Wounded after Bombardment”), or why they thought the folks back home might like to receive such a thing in the mail.

Howard Ramsey in Portland, Oregon, October 19, 2003, aged 105.

Howard Ramsey (center), 1918, aged 20.

Reuben Law, 1918, aged 20.

Reuben Law in Carson City, Nevada, July 1, 2004, aged 105.

Yeomanettes. In 1917, the Navy became the first branch of the US military to admit women; by 1918, 11,000 had signed up. All were discharged after the armistice, whether they wanted out or not. (National Archives)

Soldiers of the highly decorated 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hellfighters, posing with their Croix de Guerre. The 369th was one of the few colored American regiments permitted to fight the Germans—but only in French uniforms, under French commanders. (National Archives)

Samuel Goldberg (with his horse, Chickamauga), 1918, aged 18

Samuel Goldberg in Greenville, Rhode Island, May 16, 2006, aged 106.

George Johnson, 1918, aged 24. The nurse is his sister, Levinia.

Moses Hardy in Aberdeen, Mississippi, January 6, 2006, on his 113th birthday. No photos of Mr. Hardy in uniform, or from the World War I era, are known to exist.

George Johnson in Richmond, California, October 14, 2005, aged 111.

Eugene Lee’s mess kit cover, unearthed by a collector in the woods near the French village of Lucy-le-Bocage some eighty years after Private Lee dropped it during the Battle of Belleau Wood. The rough inscription reads: “William E. Lee, 51 Co. US.”

Frank Buckles’s Gott Mit Uns belt buckle (complete with belt). These buckles were the most sought-after souvenirs of the war; few German soldiers willingly parted with them.

A display case filled with unearthed American artifacts at Gilles Lagin’s Belleau Wood Museum in Marigny-en-Orxois. It holds everything from a helmet and a boot to first-aid kits and tobacco tins.

This unexploded shell surfaced one morning in a field outside Romagne more than nine decades after it was fired. Nearby were bullets, cartridges, a comb, and a uniform button. These kinds of things pop up every time fields are plowed in this part of France.

William J. Lake, likely 1919, aged 23.

John Henry Foster Babcock (front row, center), 1916, aged 15, with other soldiers from Canada’s 146th Over-Seas Battalion.

William J. Lake in Yakima, Washington, October 20, 2003, aged 107.

John Babcock in Spokane, Washington, July 20, 2004, aged 104.

Doughboy and poilu shake hands on Thiaucourt's World War I monument.

Soldiers of the 102nd Infantry Regiment captured by the Germans at Seicheprey, France, April 20, 1918. They were photographed by their captors later that day in nearby Thiaucourt.

Homemade memorial mounted on Seicheprey’s World War I monument—a common sight throughout France.

Warren Hileman, 1919, aged 18. The coat and hat were officia AEF Siberia issue.

Warren Hileman in Anna, Illinois, June 10, 2004, aged 102.

Hildegarde Anderson (right) in Washington, D.C., 1918, aged 19.

Hildegarde Anderson Schan in Plymouth, Massachusetts, May 17, 2006, aged 107.

1919 postcard: “View of the Argonne Cemetery at Romagne.” Still under construction, it would eventually contain the bodies of more than 23,000 American soldiers.

Today the Meuse-Argonne contains some 14,000 graves. It is the largest American military cemetery in Europe.

L’Ossuaire, the ossuary at Douaumont, France. It is said to contain the bones of some 130,000 French and German soldiers killed at the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

Homemade memorial in the German military cemetery at Consenvoye, France, to 25-year-old Jakob Berger, killed on May 22, 1916, at Verdun. He is buried in the mass grave underneath.

George and Germaine Briant, date unknown.

George and Germaine Briant in Hammond, Louisiana, September 18, 2004, aged 103 and 101.

Frank Buckles, 1917, aged 16.

Frank Buckles in Charles Town, West Virginia, March 20, 2008, aged 107.