BY: JEFFREY C. ALFIER

The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality. Wesleyan professor Richard Slotkin analyzes the segregated ethnic units of WWI and their struggle to earn respect from a country that considered them inferior.

Richard Slotkin, Olin Professor of English at Wesleyan University, is widely known for his revisionist writings on American myths of the frontier. In Lost Battalions: The Great War and The Crisis of American Nationality, Slotkin tackles the national myths of early 20th century America amid a wider milieu where democracy had yet to resolve “the most fundamental issues of its own national organization: Who counts as ‘American,’ and what civil rights must citizenship guarantee.”

Ruling elites, mesmerized by the pseudo-science of eugenics, believed in a nation run by an original racial stock invested with intellectual and moral elitism. By the turn of the century America witnessed “the development of the most nativist movement in U.S. history” eminent in organizations such as the Immigration Restriction League and sundry groups calling themselves ‘progressive’. America’s involvement in the First World War brought these issues into heightened salience as emergent ethnic-based military units would reflect and bear the brunt of those “violent forces of nationalism, racism, and class conflict” that shaped the course of the war.

Of these ethnic military units Slotkin is primarily concerned with the 307th and 308th Infantry Regiments that were part of the American Expeditionary Force’s (AEF) 77th Division, and the African-American 369th Infantry Regiment often known as the ‘Harlem Hell fighters’. These units fought successfully in countering the German Meuse-Argonne Offensive of late 1918. They were commanded by officers who were trained under the Plattsburgh military training movement, men who approached their subordinates “imbued with the Progressive theory of heroic leadership.” One of the most famous officers – and most tragic – was Harvard-educated lawyer Charles Whittlesey. He would command what became known as the ‘Lost Battalion,’ the 308th Infantry. Because of its vast ethnic composition the 77th Division was referred to as the ‘Melting Pot’ Division, and it consisted of many newly-arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia, many of whom – particularly the Italian and Jewish immigrants – came from the lowest-paid end of working classes. The officers who mustered them into service initially looked with disdain on their recruits who were separated “from the social mainstream by the combination of social prejudice and discrimination, poverty, and differences of language and culture.”

Ethnic-based units came into existence against the background of institutional racism. Organizations such as the United States Commission on Immigration said, as early as 1907, that immigrants arriving in Ellis Island lacked the intelligence to be a true part of the American democracy, even as industrialization was luring waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, by 1917 approximately one-eighth of the US population were African-Americans who suffered institutional and social racism from their government in the form of Jim Crow laws. In 1915, the second year of the Great War, the film Birth of a Nation was released. It depicted African-Americans as “a race of semi-human brutes,” and praised lynch laws and the Ku Klux Klan. In that same year, Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, fueled more racist theories. Additional trouble would come throughout the war years, including the horrific race riots in East St. Louis in 1917 in which at least 125 African-Americans were killed. 

Racist and jingoist forces besides Jim Crow laws were also at play. The influential Theodore Roosevelt fomented a widespread ‘Gospel of progressive Nationalism’ that called for a ‘Strenuous Life’ program and a belief that war could be healthy for a nation. In his beliefs Roosevelt was not unlike many European intellectuals who, prior to 1914, believed that too much peace was causing homosexuality and bad humor, and that war could potentially cleanse Europe of so much bourgeois dross. He also believed in the racial inferiority of Blacks, once remarking how he met Germany’s Kaiser before the war, “when he was a white man.” Other leaders of American life, such as newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, also operated from malevolent or discredited racial theories. Similar attitudes prevailed among many in America amid an atmosphere repressive of basic civil rights and Constitutional liberties. The Postmaster General had the authority to ban newspapers and magazines critical of the war, a new Military Intelligence Division (MID) began spying on American citizens, while Theodore Roosevelt propagated the idea that vigilantism was an American duty. Yet, the dilemma of Anglo dominance of American social and political life was that “The Great War provoked a crisis in the way American leaders thought about the nation’s racial and ethnic diversity.” As such, at the start of the war the fundamental question for African-Americans was should they fight “to defend a nation that treated them as pariahs.” This debate ranged through the nation’s African-American leadership, for the rhetoric of much of the anti-German propaganda that fueled America’s pro-war movement could also be applied to African-Americans as well as Jewish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants, since it fostered derogation of race, culture and ethnic identity.

Training in the south, the all-Black 369th struggled under Jim Crow laws and a pervasive racism so atavistically depraved as to defy the descriptive powers of human language. In addition, the training of the 369th was not a high priority for U.S. military authorities, and when they entered combat in 1917 to counter the massive German assault that had crashed through the British 5th Army, the 369th had less preparation than any front-line unit in the AEF. But assigned to the French 16th Division they received French weaponry and equipment, and valuable training to counter mustard and phosgene gas attacks. Early in their combat experience they began to prove themselves and individual heroes began to emerge. And yet, senior-ranking White officers in the AEF were shocked by the French awarding the Croix de Guerre to Black soldiers for combat prowess. Henry Johnson, a soldier of the 369th, gained early fame when he slew several Germans in hand-to-hand combat while being seriously wounded. His exploits became noteworthy in the Stateside press and in the African-American community. “But the Henry Johnson story played into a culture that presumed that Blacks were socially inadequate until proven otherwise.”  Moreover, all-Black units were betrayed by the AEF staff who would direct their French allies to act in accord with Jim Crow customs.