A platoon of infantrymen from the 18th Infantry, 1st Division, marches across the border of France into Luxembourg on their path into Germany and occupation duty, November 1918.
I'm starting this post on Monday, November 12, which of course is Veteran's Day (for 2018) in the United States and Remembrance Day in Canada. I've never been in Canada for this day, so I don't know how well remembered it is there. Better than in the U.S., I suspect, as World War One in Canada, as in Australia, is part of the country's foundational myth much like the Civil War is for the United States.
This 1918 photograph speaks for itself. Taken at Walter Reed Hospital.
Perhaps excluding the Revolution, the Civil War, World War Two and Vietnam, every American war is claimed to be a "forgotten war", or even "the forgotten war", by somebody. And some are darned near forgotten, except by historians. Americans are, overall, fairly ignorant of their own history anyhow for some inexplicable reason. Some will blame our education system for that, but then from personal knowledge I know that the schools do at least touch on even the events which Americans somehow forget. In an era when a large percentage of Americans do attend college or university, some of that can definitely be attributed to post high school education which, in my view, has declined in universality of education and even quality of education considerably since the 1960s. Indeed, as I noted in my recent post that pretty heavily dissed Reddit (probably unfairly, as I was wishing that I could still post on the 100 Years Ago subreddit and some others and therefore re-subscribed), history departments themselves have to some degree surrendered to a degree of absurdity. I know that a friend of mine had a college aged daughter who majored in history at a really substantial university and was basically forced to convert her thesis, which was on a 19th Century military topic, to one about women's roles in the same conflict, thereby converting legitimate research that she wanted to do into social research she didn't want to do. And, and here's where the Reddit comment came in, one of the Reddit moderators on the Ask Historians subreddit which is well done but which features extremely heavy handed moderation is a grad student working on the historiography of the history of sex, a completely and utterly worthless topic that won't every be looked at seriously by anyone outside of his thesis committee and which renders a person unfit to moderate anything.
Caissons pulled by truck, Camp Meade (later Ft. Meade), Washington, 1918. Only about half of the 4,000,000 Americans drafted during World War One made it overseas. . . but 2,000,000 men is still a lot. Some of the late draftees served as occupation troops in Germany in 1919.
Anyhow, one of the things that can be a bit irritating, but really shouldn't be, about American Veterans Day, at least on the centennial of the ending of the war that featured the bloodiest American battle of all time, is its absolute focus on World War Two. It's unrelenting, but understandable.
U.S. troops in eastern Russia, 1918. The American military commitment, and the dangers associated with it, in Russia carried on after November 11, 1918 even though they never had any clear mission. Americans have almost completely forgotten about their two deployments to Russia during the Russian Civil War, just as they've also forgotten about their two major interventions in Mexico in the two years leading up to our entry in World War One. Neither the Russians nor the Mexicans have forgotten them.
We still have a lot of World War Two veterans with us, although we will not for much longer. Starting in the 1980s the generation that came of age in the 1960s started to engage massively in a lot of hagiography about that generation, which was the generation of their parents. It's been odd, as they were heavily at odd with their parents generation all through the 1960s and 1970s and into the mid 1980s, when it suddenly changed and they rose their parents up on pedestals from which they still support. them. We'll take a look at that earlier, but one of the effects of that is to have converted Veterans Day into "Remember World War Two and Vietnam Day", followed by December 7 every year which has turned into "Remember World War Two Veterans Day", followed by Memorial Day, which is "Remember World War Two Veterans Day".
American soldier Pvt. Frank Sovicki, a Polish immigrant who was captured by the Germans in France and then escaped to Switzerland.
Now, WWII was horrific and the American focus on it is understandable. But it actually has caused a shadow so large that World War One can't be seen from hardly at all, even when a really significant historical anniversary comes by regarding it. And just flat out forget the Korean War. Even the half century mark on the war in Korea was hardly noticed at all. It would take a second Korean War for Americans to remember the first one, assuming that a second one wouldn't cause them to forget the first completely.
Okay, enough whining, I guess.
One of the things that has come up due to the focus on World War Two is that every year we tend to hear a lot of Tom Brokaw type "the greatest generation" type commentary, which in some ways tends to point out, not terribly accurately, that "they were better than us", while at the same time suggest that, as the generation that coined that term were the children of those to whom it has been given, that they are just like us. They aren't. But what about earlier generations?
American soldiers in a trench in France, 1918.
With the exception of World War Two, I don't think we look at earlier generations all that much anymore and try to draw parallels with ourselves. But we should, as that's really worthy research (a lot more useful than a thesis on the historiography of the history of sex, which will gather dust on some shelf until a library cleaning fifteen years from now tosses it in the circular file).
In other words who were those people who came from the U.S. and fought in World War One? Are we still them, even partially? Should we wish that we were. . . as we tend to view the past as universally better than the present if we dwell on the past, or should be be glad that we're not. . . or both?
Well, something like that would go from a thesis to a book (take note history departments and students. . . something that people might actually refer to and not be regarded as a joke outside of the history department) but we'll try to take a brief look at it here.
Some of these troops who marched through Luxembourg on their way into Germany would fight their way through the first and into the second about twenty-five years later. Many would have sons and daughters in the service in World War Two.
There were only twenty-three years between the end of the fighting in World War One and the beginning of the American involvement in World War Two. That's not much time at all. Our current war in Afghanistan shows ever sign of running that long in and of itself, or at least crowding it. Given that, you'd think that there wouldn't be much difference between the solders that are universally praised and admired for World War Two and the ones that fought in World War One.
But there are.
The period between 1918 and 1941 was one of change at a rate that's hard for us to even grasp now. We like to imagine that our own lives have been turned upside down by the computer, and they in fact stand to be going forward, but no living person born after 1950 has experienced a rate of change in day to day living like those who lived before 1950 did. Indeed, my time period is really unfair as the type of really blistering change that I've noted here really started around 1903, more or less, and roared on until around 1950, more or less. Nearly a full have century of constant change. For the generation that fought World War One, and to a degree World War Two, that was a fact of life to which they became acclimated to, but it's one that we need to appreciate in order to grasp what the American soldier of World War One was like.
African American infantrymen of the 25th Infantry, Ft. Keogh Montana, 1890. The younger career soldiers in this photograph could still have been in the Army in 1917-18 and its certain that at least some of their junior officers were. Not one thing depicted in this photograph, from uniforms to weapons, remained current issue when the U.S. entered World War One.
Americans old enough to fight in World War One were born for the most part no later than 1900. As 4,000,000 men were drafted, and that's a lot of men, it's actually the case that the overwhelming bulk of conscripts were born in the 1890s but some had been born in the 1880s. Career officers in the U.S. Army who were senior officers in World War One were all born in the 19th Century and the oldest of them had entered the Army during the Frontier period and quite a few had seen service in late Frontier campaigns. Most of them (MacArthur was the exception) had seen field service in the Spanish American War. Nearly all of them had seen service in the Philippine Insurrection.
Gen. Pershing on a balcony watching, with the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, American troops passing by on their way into Germany, November 1918. Pershing was 58 years old at the time and had entered the U.S. Army, following his graduation from West Point, in 1886. At this point, he had commanded troops in the Indian Wars, the Philippine Insurrection, and in the Punitive Expedition. The big war, in terms of societal memories, of his youth would have been the Civil War, which ended when he was a young child. The Indian Wars would have been an ongoing national fact for over the first thirty years of his life.
There are some really significant aspects of that which we often tend not to note.
The United States was already an industrial nation by 1917, when we entered the war, but it was also much, much more rural than it is now. The pace of urbanization had been dramatically accelerating in the early 20th Century, something that Theodore Roosevelt was both noting as inevitable and lamenting, privately, in his two terms as President.
But, while the urban population was increasing nearly daily, the fact is that the United States, through the Great War, was heavily urban in most places, but with some great cities and industrial areas. Nearly any city, however, had a rural area very closely associated with it.
By 1918 farming had even entered Alaska, as evidenced by this photograph of the same.
Agriculture at the time remained horse powered almost exclusively. Tractors were coming in, along with machines that tractors could pull, by World War One but the overwhelming majority of farms did not own them Horses dominated farms and were hugely dominant in regards to ranches, where automobiles of any kind really had not made an appearance. Farming in 1917-18 was closer to farming in 1817-18 than it is to farming today.
Harrowing on a Maryland farm, 1936. The Great Depression seriously retarded the mechanization of agriculture, setting it back about twenty years.
And that meant a lot of small farms that were family owned, and a lot of small farm towns to serve them. This in turn meant that a lot of Americans lived on small farms, or that they lived in small towns. Commuting fifty or more miles to work was not a thing, so when I say live there, they lived and worked there. And this meant those little towns were much more viable than they are today. They weren't bedroom communities for anything, save for farms themselves in regions of the country that had been settled by Irish or German rural immigrants, from whom land was too valuable to build a house on where they came from, so they lived in little towns and traveled out to their fields.
People did live and work in towns and cities of course, so it isn't as if the United States was one giant agrarian paradise (or a paradise at all) prior to 1920 or something. And a lot of that work was much different than now by a long shot. In order to consider that, we likely have to take a look at classes of workers, those being industrial workers, shopkeepers, office workers, and the wealthy.
Even as late as the 1960s 1/3 of all Americans were employed in industry. This isn't close to being true anymore. And industrial conditions aren't even remotely similar to what they once were.
Ford Motors employees, 1916.
Heavy industrial labor was dirty and dangerous and everybody who was employed in it knew that. A struggle was going on between labor and capital, as its classically put, over those conditions and had been for some time. Perhaps barely noted in our accounts of the Great War here, labor wasn't wholly supportive of the government during World War One and strikes were common. This was height of a real divide between labor and capital and the same forces that were playing themselves out violently in Russia and Germany were present in the United States and the United Kingdom, but as it would turn out in a much less revolutionary fashion. Nonetheless, the governments of most democratic nations feared labor and for really solid reasons. That fear would prove to be misplaced in the case of the US and the UK, as well as France, but it would prove not to be misplaced in Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy and other regions. It would take the Great Depression to really play that all out, but in truth it was the Great Depression, a decade away when World War One ended, that would sort much of these difficulties out in the liberal democracies in a permanent fashion.
Wheelwrights, 1903.
At this time, these things had not been sorted out which meant that working conditions were often very rough for laborers even if they were in fact changing and, moreover, had changed in part due to sympathetic Federal legislation started in the Theodore Roosevelt administration and which had spread to states, including Wyoming, which was on the verge of adopting one of the country's first Workers Compensation laws, ironically based on the German workers compensation laws that had come in under Bismarck. Still, there was a long ways to go, particularly when we consider that employer supplied insurance was not the national norm until World War Two (although company hospitals were already a thing).
In additional to industrial laborers, of course, and laborers of all types there were many many people who worked in small offices and businesses of all types.
Of course many people still do. The majority of American businesses today are small businesses. But working for small businesses worked differently than it does today.
To give a couple of examples of this, a couple of years ago I heard an interview of an author who had written a book on World War One veterans. One he interviewed, then over 100 years old, had graduated from high school (more than that in a moment), gone to work in a very near by town as a clerk in an insurance brokerage office, and worked their his entire life, but for his service in World War One. He went from clerk to agent.
That sort of thing was common. My paternal grandfather, for example, left his home in Dyersville Iowa at age 13 (1915) and traveled to San Francisco, where he went to work as an office boy for the Cunard Ship Line, moving from that to the meat packing industry, and ended up owning his own plant in Wyoming. My maternal great grandfather started as an office boy for the Anglo Canadian Insurance Company and ended up owning it. Andrew Carnegie, the super rich philanthropist, started off as a railroad telegrapher in one of the companies he'd ultimately own.
Dyersville Iowa, 1912.
The point isn't that rags to riches stories were the rule, but rather that starting off as office workers and making it a viable career was pretty common.
Of course you can't have offices without having people who own small businesses, and rather obviously I've blended the two here because people went from the telegrapher room to the front office, or from the grocery stocker to the owner.* Not everyone did, of course, but quite a few did. But the point here is that the number of small businesses of all types was much higher than it is today, even if today most businesses remain small businesses.
One of the most popular entries here is the about the 1916 founding of Piggly Wiggly. But what makes that even relevant to anything? Well, Piggly Wiggly was the first modern grocery store, and that illustrates a point.
In the decade we're talking about and those before that the large conglomerated retail outlets we're all so familiar with today simply didn't exist. . . very much. There were some, but they were fairly small and not all that old. Entities like J. C. Penney's for example were up and running. And ordering stuff from catalogs, the big late 19th Century and 20th Century equivalent of ordering from Amazon, was already a thing.
Block of ice in front of grocery store, 1912.
But by and large, if you were going to buy something, you bought local, and you didn't have to try to be making some Localist or Distributist point by doing that. You had to.
That meant that there were a lot of small retail outlets of all types, literally all types. And in the economics of the day, those small businesses all supported families. It was the era of family businesses and many middle class Americans owned such outlets. Indeed, while it was prior to their generation, my grandparents on my father's side hailed from families which, prior to their generation, had owned small businesses. Indeed, my grandfathers on both sides of my family did as well. In at least one of the industries they were employed in, local businesses of the type he owned are a thing of the past and no longer exist.
Fourteen year old store clerk working in a cigar store, 1917.
Into the mix of small businessmen were professionals, which at that time more strictly were defined by the traditional definitions.** By professionals in this context we mean lawyers and medical men,including in that latter category dentists.
In more recent times these have all come to be associated with wealth, and indeed were at the time. The association has never actually been accurate and all of these professions are middle class professions and were at the time. . . only more so.
Woman doctor, very unusual at the time, Margaret Farwell serving during World War One in the Red Cross.
There were, to be sure, "rich" lawyers and "rich doctors" (probably not "rich dentists") but all of these professions were much, much less lucrative at the time than they would later come to be.***Indeed, all of them have always had not only a strong middle class basis, but also they were unusual in that they had roots in minority populations (which they still do).
These professions, however, are unique in that unlike business professions, they generally were starting to become strongly associated with a professional education, and indeed in the case of medicine, including dentistry, they already completely were. This was not true of any other occupation in the United States. That is, unlike every other occupation, medicine and dentistry had no other path into the occupation except through obtaining an advanced degree and passing a state test for licensure. Law had not reached the point where this was universally true, but it was starting to become the case that more and more lawyers were graduates of law schools. Wyoming did not have its own law school yet. . . the only professional college it would ever form (assuming no formations of new ones in the future), but even it soon would when the University of Wyoming would establish its College of Law in 1920. The fact that even highly rural Wyoming would feel compelled in this era to establish a law school says something about the status of the field.
Lawyer and Wilson cabinet member, G. W. Wickersham in typical lawyer attire for the era. Wickersham had been the U.S. Attorney under Taft and had accepted a wartime appointment to the War Trade board to Cuba during World War One. After WWI he went on to chair the Wickersham Commission under Hoover to study the U.S. criminal justice system which would unfortunately come to employ Communist spy Alger Hiss. His son served as a distinguished officer in the New York National Guard in the Punitive Expedition, World War One, and World War Two.
That status caused the occupation of the profession of law to be a near absolute guaranty that a soldier serving in World War One would receive officer status, keeping in mind that you did not need a college degree to be an officer in World War One. This gives us the reason that a unit like the "Lost Battalion" would have at least three Harvard Law graduates in its officer ranks.
New York lawyer Charles White Wittlesey, commander of the "Lost Battalion". Whittlesey had worked as a logger before attending college and was a member of the Harvard Law School class of 1908. He was always a constitutionally nervous person and is believed to have walked off the deck of a ship at night in 1921.
George G. McMurtry of the "Lost Battalion", Harvard law graduate of 1899.
Doctors and dentists of course went into the medical corps during the Great War. As we've already seen, the medical branch of the U.S. Army was so poorly established during this time period that the Red Cross hospital units were basically taken into the Army wholesale. The contrast may be demonstrated, in part, by the fact that late in World War Two to hold a law or medical degree no longer meant automatic commissioning.
This latter topic brings up the nature of societal economic status, which is also important for us to consider, as well as education. That latter topic brings up ethnicity, so we'll turn to all of those now.
Americans living at the present time live in a really odd time in American history as it's possible to argue, although not very well, that this is the first time in American history that the majority of the American population is not in the middle class.
I've posted on the "declining middle class" and the middle class in general, quite a bit on this blog and I don't intend to repeat that in this post. I think the general assumption that the majority of Americans are not in the middle class is an error any way its looked at, but what definitely is different about the period of a century ago is that the middle class as a group lived much, much closer to slipping into poverty than it does now. Supposedly, although I'd question it, its' nearly impossible for a member of the middle class to slip into poverty today, without some effort to it, but a century ago, this was not true as they weren't far from it to start from. Conversely, while some people were hugely rich, they were a tiny minority. Every town, of course, had its rich people, but even a lot of those people lived closure to slipping back down to the middle class than generally imagined.****
An aspect of this is that there was no "safety net" a century ago of any kind.
Children of the poor gleaning coal, 1913.
There was no Social Security, no Medicaid, no Medicare and no unemployment insurance in the decade of the 1910s in the United States. If you lost your job, there was no state or Federal agency to fall back on. Falling back, if you could, had to be falling back to your family and whatever other networks you personally had. For some people, falling back meant falling out and west, as the Homestead Acts were still up and running. Again, the decade we're speaking of would be the one which would feature peak homesteading, not a decade in the 19th Century. Even that was very dicey, however, as successful homesteading actually involved the use of quite a bit of cash as a rule. Not that everyone was successful, most were not. Indeed, a farming boom which featured many inexperienced farmers during World War One would result in devastating post war economic and environmental consequences in the many Western states.
There was also, as a rule, no health insurance if you became ill.
Operation being conducted in open for medical students at a medical college, December 10, 1902.
Now, health insurance of various types did exist, but most Americans didn't purchase it and really couldn't afford to. It didn't really take off in the U.S. until the 1920s and didn't exactly take off at rocket pace then. It would take World War Two to make that transition, when employers were able to start offering as a benefit to attempt to offset caps is wages designed to keep a labor shortage induced inflation from taking off. So for the most part, if you were sick and injured, it was up to you. Exceptions did exist for some occupations, however, which had banded together, such as firemen and even farmers, to form insurance associations. And some large companies had established their own medical systems staffed by their own doctors and nurses and even featuring their own hospitals. Most Americans, however, didn't work in that environment.
That also meant, of course, that the way medical care was provided was quite a bit different. Being a doctor, we've already noted, was not an occupation that was guaranteed to take you up out of the middle class (it still isn't, but that's more the case today than it was a century ago). Doctors provided more general care and commonly did things like house calls as a rule.
Retirement was also generally non existent, although pensions were beginning to become more common for people who worked for large companies, so they weren't wholly non existent. Employees of the Federal government, including soldiers, could earn a pension for years of service. . . thirty years was required for military retirement at the time, which truly made government service, including service for local governments, quite attractive. We're sort of oddly returning to that era or that status in a way, although, very importantly, Social Security did not exist at the time.^
Of course one thing that should be obvious to readers of this blog or students of this era in general is that education was considerably different at the time.
People like to look back, not without some justification, to education of the past and lament about how it was better "back then". This is generally untrue at the public school level, but you can find individual areas of study that were tougher in the past than now. Depending upon where a person went to school. . . or rather if, as we shall see, a person might have been expected to memorize certain historical dates that aren't touched on now, or to learn the basics of a foreign language, to include Latin, which many schools don't offer now at all.
What's missed, however, is that a huge percentage of people didn't complete public school, or I should say, given that certain demographics were strongly associated with private schools, school at at all.
In fact World War One came at the onset of what is known as the High School Movement, a movement that emphasized and developed high school education which historians date back to 1910 and is regarded as running to 1940. During that period of time the modern high school really developed.
This can be seen in a lot of places simply because that's the period their high schools date back to. And that would mean that we really start to see high school graduates from what we'd regard as modern high schools. That can't be emphasized enough as high schools were, in a way, sort of precursors to junior colleges, and indeed, while now forgotten, in the West there were Land Grant high schools, not just Land Grant universities.
The existence of high schools and the emphasis put on them boosted the interest in University and college education. As early as 1914 50% of graduates from public high schools indicated that their goal was to go on to university or other institutions. The figure was lower for graduates of public and private high schools, which probably reflects the existence of Catholic high schools in the mix. Such schools had a good reputation, but very few Catholics continued on to higher education at the time. From private schools the rate intending to go on was 35% overall, but 45% for males, which was quite high at the time and frankly really impressive. A real education boom as on.
Be that as it may, while there was suddenly a great interest in education, it was still the case that high school degrees were the exception rather than the rule. In 1910 only about 15% of Americans graduated from high school. By 1918, interestingly enough, about 25% of high school aged Americans graduated from high school, an impressive leap, but that still means that 75% of Americans left school prior to that point. It wouldn't be until the early 1930s that over half of Americans graduated from high school, although that reflected a steep increase in the number of students that did just that.
At the same time enrollment in universities was rapidly accelerating. The college population about doubled between 1910 and 1920, reflecting the same trend as noted above. Still, with the majority of Americans not attending high school to completion, fairly obviously most didn't go on to obtain university degrees. The real boom in college attendance came after World War Two when colleges opened up to new demographics.
Which brings us back around to something hinted at above and which is addressed elsewhere in this blog. While many lament, with some cause, that the American "melting pot" seems to be breaking, American society in the decade of the First World War was much more segregated in all ways than it is now, something which others ironically lament the passing of as well.
When I say "segregated", I don't refer to legal segregation, but cultural segregation, which is a considerably broader use of the term. Americans of a century ago were much more likely than now to live and work with people who were of the same race, culture and religion than they are now, although mixing of all certainly occurred.
In the 1910s, the founding demographic of the country, those of English protestant background, were the dominant demographic in the country. It was already the case that members of other demographics had done well in the country, but even a cursory glance at who held power in the country in one way or another reveals that to be the case. People now commonly refer to "whites, blacks and Hispanics", but at the time people were very comfortable with breaking ethnic classifications down much further.
The way that this worked at the time would tend to surprise most current Americans and shock more than a few. While there was diversity, to be sure, the level of diversity was not what it is now and this made real differences in people's daily lives in all sorts of ways.
The term "Anglo Saxon" was in common use by the educated class to describe the founding demographic of the nation and when used it was implicit that the demographic was superior to others. In many parts of the country this reflected itself in a variety of ways, indulging that membership in the Episcopal Church was often a move that people made from other faiths in order to essentially announce or attempt to secure their social and economic status. Other Christian churches were certainly strong, although its an error to believe, as people tend to do, that there was 100% church attendance at the time or anything approaching it, but the Episcopal Church had status that other churches lacked in these regards. Indeed, a long time co-worker of mine related that his father, who was a later generation, had moved from the Presbyterian Church to the Episcopal Church at the insistence of his bride, with that being a precondition of the marriage. We still see things like that, but it tends to be back and forth between members of Protestant churches and the Apostolic Churches today, which have huge doctrinal differences.
Membership in certain secret fraternal organizations, most particularly the Masons, also reflected itself in this fashion, as that barred Catholics. And as already noted in other entries here, most Catholics not only did not seek higher education, but they couldn't seek it at Ivy League schools and schools like them which had a chapel requirement, reflecting their origin as essentially Protestant seminaries.
All of this meant Americans of the day were much more likely to draw distinctions about being somebody being Irish, German, English or Scots, etc., than they are today. Many people lived in neighborhoods, particularly in the cities of the East, but even in towns of the East and Mid West (this was much less common in the West) that strongly reflected an ethnic heritage. An Irish American growing up in Chicago or New York was likely to live in an Irish neighborhood where Irish immigrants were common along with second or third generation Irish Americans, meaning that the Irishness of the group was reinforced.^^ This is just an example and was not unique to the Irish by any means. Entire regions of the country were dominated by one or another ethnic groups in a way that is not very common now except among new immigrants. Many big cities had such things as Polish neighborhoods, Latvian neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, Chinese neighborhoods, etc,. in a way that is much less common than it is now.^^^
One final thing I should note is that when I'm referring to work, as I have done above, I'm mostly referring to men. Indeed, when I'm referring to soldiers, I mostly am too.
I've discussed the recent trend towards incorporating female service women into combat roles, which I frankly do not approve of, but when we're looking at this era, not only are we not discussing that, it wasn't though of. And for the most part, most work was male.
This has also been a topic that's been heavily discussed here and I don't mean to go back over. For those interested in it, our earlier entry remains the one to go to. As that entry relates, women did go to work during the Great War, and in every domestic occupation and some military ones. But after the war they largely returned to their prior roles for reasons that have everything to do with the burdens that of daily living in the pre domestic machinery age. That wouldn't really change until after World War Two. But what that means for us here should be touched upon.
Most women, as we've already discussed, worked at home in domestic roles. Those women who did work outside of their own homes tended to work in domestic maintenance roles in the homes of others, heavy work indeed. For the most part, women who worked outside of the homes did so due to financial need as it also meant that they were doing the same roles, usually, in their own homes (unless they were resident servants). In other words, working as a domestic for women was nearly always a byproduct of poverty. Otherwise women worked in their own homes.
This goes to the point that a century ago most males were at some point able to occupy jobs, often manual labor jobs, that provided for an entire family, and usually a family that was at least somewhat larger than families are now. We addressed this the other day but a real factor arguing for a decline in the economic power of average Americans is that whereas the workforce has nearly doubled by percentage of available workers, now that women commonly work, earning power has dramatically declined so that for most families, they now have to. That wasn't the case a century ago.
Of course, as this implies, the overwhelming majority of Americans lived in families that comprised of a married couple and their children, although this may be slightly deceptive. Having children out of wedlock was absolutely scandalous and extremely frowned upon, so almost all people were brought up largely in married families. Those who were not tended to be an exception due to death of one of the parents although almost all widowed people remarried, although not all did. Death due to accident, however, was so common that nearly as many Americans spent some time in a "single parent" home as they do now.^* On the other side of things, young unmarried people lived at home for a long time. The perception that this is a new thing is wholly incorrect. Unmarried men that did not travel away from their homes to find employment nearly always lived in their parents homes until married. Unmarried women were very unlikely to leave home and start their own.^** In the unusual instance in which a person never married they were likely to never leave home. There are certainly numerous exceptions, however.
Okay, so this entry is becoming endless. What does all of this mean?
Well this, I think.
The American soldier of 1917-1918 was much more likely to be of rural or near rural origin than the average American today (although oddly not necessarily the modern American volunteer solider of today). They were generally very healthy and fit, a fact which impressed and somewhat stunned our Allies who were actually cheered by the arrival of Americans simply because of their mere physicality. They were much less likely to be as educated as most Americans today, which is interesting in numerous ways as having left school was not, in any fashion, a reflection on their intelligence, motivation or drive so much as it was their social status and career plans.
On careers, they tend to resemble, as I have already noted, Generation X much more than any generation after them as they were flexible in occupation as they had to be. Changing jobs was common for them. In an era in which pensions and the like were mostly nonexistent, the incentive for moving jobs, if a better job was in the offering, was high. They were much more likely to work in a local jobs. They were more likely to own their own enterprises, and those enterprises were likely to be small. Many more of them worked with their hands and nearly all of them knew how to.
They were also highly accustomed to the concept that work was dangerous or could be, and early death by accident and disease was common and expected.
They were much more likely to be like those they had grown up with, not only in race, but in religion and ethnicity. They were also much more likely to be prejudiced against those not like themselves and to be the victims of prejudice.
As average people, they were often much like those who lived in the lands that they were being sent to in order to fight in. American soldiers of 1917-1918 were impressed with the French and horrified by their suffering at the hands of the Germans. They married French women in large numbers, showing that the ethnic differences were fairly rapidly overcome, in no small part because French civilians did not live very differently than they did at home. American soldiers on occupation duty in Germany started to do the same with the Germans and had to be cautioned that the Germans had lately been their enemy. Even American soldiers in rural Russia started to marry Russian brides.
All of this would be true, of course, for Americans serving around the globe in World War Two, but impressions were quite different. Americans tended to find rural France to be quite backwards in the Second World War, which they did not in World War One. The conditions Italians lived in during World War Two shocked Americans who came to regard them as hopelessly backwards (until Italian film noire, Claudia Cardinale, and Sophia Loren changed their minds in the late 50s and 60s) where as during World War One the Italians had really been celebrated. It was the Americans who had changed, not the Italians or rural French.
And, by all measures, the American soldier of the Great War seems to have accepted suffering and death in a way that no Americans have since. The casualty rate for Americans during World War One was absolutely horrific. If any American commander had suffered losses at the rate that Pershing did after World War One he would have been cashiered. During the Great War it as widely circulated that the American Army had issued an order that men fleeting battle (of which there were few) should be shot on the spot, an order that was illegal but which may very well have been issued. In contrast, Gen. Patton was nearly relieved for slapping two soldiers during World War Two (only one such instances is commonly remembered, but there were two).
The acceptance of life being hard, in every level of society, seems to have been a given. The generation has famously been called "The Lost Generation" due to the horror of World War One, but there's real reason to doubt the characterization. They seem to have simply accepted that a hard life and early death was a feature of life, and if that hardship and death came in war, that too was part of the way things were.
Greatest generation? I don't know which one that would be, if there is one. But they were certainly a pretty great generation.
Retirement was also generally non existent, although pensions were beginning to become more common for people who worked for large companies, so they weren't wholly non existent. Employees of the Federal government, including soldiers, could earn a pension for years of service. . . thirty years was required for military retirement at the time, which truly made government service, including service for local governments, quite attractive. We're sort of oddly returning to that era or that status in a way, although, very importantly, Social Security did not exist at the time.^
Of course one thing that should be obvious to readers of this blog or students of this era in general is that education was considerably different at the time.
Home economics in high school, 1911. This was right at the start of a huge boom in public education. Many now would look at this photograph and regard it as quaint or even sexist, but the girls in this photograph were actually learning a skill that was practically necessitated by their status in life and which they no doubt all employed to some degree. 1911 was still in the era in which not all clothing was mass produced by any means.
People like to look back, not without some justification, to education of the past and lament about how it was better "back then". This is generally untrue at the public school level, but you can find individual areas of study that were tougher in the past than now. Depending upon where a person went to school. . . or rather if, as we shall see, a person might have been expected to memorize certain historical dates that aren't touched on now, or to learn the basics of a foreign language, to include Latin, which many schools don't offer now at all.
Student machining an artillery shell in a technical high school, 1917. While this is more than a bit shocking, lathe operation varies little based on what is being produced and is a technical skill. This student was graduating into an era when these skills would have remained fully employable his entire life. Indeed, currently there is a shortage of skilled machinist. Technical classes remained common in high schools well into the 1980s when they seem to have really dropped off.
What's missed, however, is that a huge percentage of people didn't complete public school, or I should say, given that certain demographics were strongly associated with private schools, school at at all.
In fact World War One came at the onset of what is known as the High School Movement, a movement that emphasized and developed high school education which historians date back to 1910 and is regarded as running to 1940. During that period of time the modern high school really developed.
Burning high school German textbooks, 1917. This kind of behavior during World War One was both incredibly common and really stupid. Perhaps balancing it out slightly, but only slightly, is the fact that the residents of this town in Wisconsin probably had a lot of native German speakers to start with so the act didn't quite mean what it would now.
This can be seen in a lot of places simply because that's the period their high schools date back to. And that would mean that we really start to see high school graduates from what we'd regard as modern high schools. That can't be emphasized enough as high schools were, in a way, sort of precursors to junior colleges, and indeed, while now forgotten, in the West there were Land Grant high schools, not just Land Grant universities.
Hughes High School in the 1910s. This Cincinnati high school features the Gothic architecture which was highly common for high schools of the era which sought to resemble universities and English public schools in appearance.
The existence of high schools and the emphasis put on them boosted the interest in University and college education. As early as 1914 50% of graduates from public high schools indicated that their goal was to go on to university or other institutions. The figure was lower for graduates of public and private high schools, which probably reflects the existence of Catholic high schools in the mix. Such schools had a good reputation, but very few Catholics continued on to higher education at the time. From private schools the rate intending to go on was 35% overall, but 45% for males, which was quite high at the time and frankly really impressive. A real education boom as on.
Be that as it may, while there was suddenly a great interest in education, it was still the case that high school degrees were the exception rather than the rule. In 1910 only about 15% of Americans graduated from high school. By 1918, interestingly enough, about 25% of high school aged Americans graduated from high school, an impressive leap, but that still means that 75% of Americans left school prior to that point. It wouldn't be until the early 1930s that over half of Americans graduated from high school, although that reflected a steep increase in the number of students that did just that.
"Old Main" at the University of Wyoming in 1908. The structure dates to 1886. UW is a Land Grant college and reflects the very early stages in the boom in education that would commence at the university level in the late 19th Century and greatly expand in the 20th Century.
At the same time enrollment in universities was rapidly accelerating. The college population about doubled between 1910 and 1920, reflecting the same trend as noted above. Still, with the majority of Americans not attending high school to completion, fairly obviously most didn't go on to obtain university degrees. The real boom in college attendance came after World War Two when colleges opened up to new demographics.
Which brings us back around to something hinted at above and which is addressed elsewhere in this blog. While many lament, with some cause, that the American "melting pot" seems to be breaking, American society in the decade of the First World War was much more segregated in all ways than it is now, something which others ironically lament the passing of as well.
St. Joseph's Polish Catholic Church, Denver Colorado. Built in 1902, the church existed in a neighborhood which already had a Catholic church within eyesight which had been built for a South Slavic population. This Polish Catholic church still has a school which still teaches Polish, presumably as a second language. Schools such as the one that was supported by this church were extremely common at one time as very large percentages of Catholic attended Catholic schools. Almost none of the graduates from Catholic schools went on to university until after World War Two in spite of the high quality of their education.
In the 1910s, the founding demographic of the country, those of English protestant background, were the dominant demographic in the country. It was already the case that members of other demographics had done well in the country, but even a cursory glance at who held power in the country in one way or another reveals that to be the case. People now commonly refer to "whites, blacks and Hispanics", but at the time people were very comfortable with breaking ethnic classifications down much further.
The way that this worked at the time would tend to surprise most current Americans and shock more than a few. While there was diversity, to be sure, the level of diversity was not what it is now and this made real differences in people's daily lives in all sorts of ways.
The term "Anglo Saxon" was in common use by the educated class to describe the founding demographic of the nation and when used it was implicit that the demographic was superior to others. In many parts of the country this reflected itself in a variety of ways, indulging that membership in the Episcopal Church was often a move that people made from other faiths in order to essentially announce or attempt to secure their social and economic status. Other Christian churches were certainly strong, although its an error to believe, as people tend to do, that there was 100% church attendance at the time or anything approaching it, but the Episcopal Church had status that other churches lacked in these regards. Indeed, a long time co-worker of mine related that his father, who was a later generation, had moved from the Presbyterian Church to the Episcopal Church at the insistence of his bride, with that being a precondition of the marriage. We still see things like that, but it tends to be back and forth between members of Protestant churches and the Apostolic Churches today, which have huge doctrinal differences.
The impressive Gothic style Episcopal Church, St. Mark's, in Cheyenne Wyoming. This church was built in 1888 and is patterned after a church in England.
All of this meant Americans of the day were much more likely to draw distinctions about being somebody being Irish, German, English or Scots, etc., than they are today. Many people lived in neighborhoods, particularly in the cities of the East, but even in towns of the East and Mid West (this was much less common in the West) that strongly reflected an ethnic heritage. An Irish American growing up in Chicago or New York was likely to live in an Irish neighborhood where Irish immigrants were common along with second or third generation Irish Americans, meaning that the Irishness of the group was reinforced.^^ This is just an example and was not unique to the Irish by any means. Entire regions of the country were dominated by one or another ethnic groups in a way that is not very common now except among new immigrants. Many big cities had such things as Polish neighborhoods, Latvian neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, Chinese neighborhoods, etc,. in a way that is much less common than it is now.^^^
Lt. Col. "Wild Bill" Donovan and Father Francis P. Duffy. Both men are emblematic of the ethnicity in the United States in this period to a degree. Both Catholic men entered the U.S. Army through the legendary "Irish" New York National Guard unit, the "Fighting 69th" and achieved legendary status in it. Donovan went on to lead the OSS during World War Two. The Canadian born Duffy had already been a chaplain in the Spanish American War.
One final thing I should note is that when I'm referring to work, as I have done above, I'm mostly referring to men. Indeed, when I'm referring to soldiers, I mostly am too.
I've discussed the recent trend towards incorporating female service women into combat roles, which I frankly do not approve of, but when we're looking at this era, not only are we not discussing that, it wasn't though of. And for the most part, most work was male.
Women's Mounted Emergency Corps. At the start of World War One, and indeed as early as the Platsburg movement, women began to look for various roles to serve the country during the conflict. Various unofficial reserve units such as this formed, but it would be in clerical, driving and nursing roles that women would find wartime employment in the service and semi official service units.
There was a large scale effort during the Great War to replace male labor with female labor for the period of the war. That's what ended up occurring. That is, it was for the duration of the war only, for the most part.
This goes to the point that a century ago most males were at some point able to occupy jobs, often manual labor jobs, that provided for an entire family, and usually a family that was at least somewhat larger than families are now. We addressed this the other day but a real factor arguing for a decline in the economic power of average Americans is that whereas the workforce has nearly doubled by percentage of available workers, now that women commonly work, earning power has dramatically declined so that for most families, they now have to. That wasn't the case a century ago.
Of course, as this implies, the overwhelming majority of Americans lived in families that comprised of a married couple and their children, although this may be slightly deceptive. Having children out of wedlock was absolutely scandalous and extremely frowned upon, so almost all people were brought up largely in married families. Those who were not tended to be an exception due to death of one of the parents although almost all widowed people remarried, although not all did. Death due to accident, however, was so common that nearly as many Americans spent some time in a "single parent" home as they do now.^* On the other side of things, young unmarried people lived at home for a long time. The perception that this is a new thing is wholly incorrect. Unmarried men that did not travel away from their homes to find employment nearly always lived in their parents homes until married. Unmarried women were very unlikely to leave home and start their own.^** In the unusual instance in which a person never married they were likely to never leave home. There are certainly numerous exceptions, however.
Okay, so this entry is becoming endless. What does all of this mean?
Well this, I think.
The American soldier of 1917-1918 was much more likely to be of rural or near rural origin than the average American today (although oddly not necessarily the modern American volunteer solider of today). They were generally very healthy and fit, a fact which impressed and somewhat stunned our Allies who were actually cheered by the arrival of Americans simply because of their mere physicality. They were much less likely to be as educated as most Americans today, which is interesting in numerous ways as having left school was not, in any fashion, a reflection on their intelligence, motivation or drive so much as it was their social status and career plans.
On careers, they tend to resemble, as I have already noted, Generation X much more than any generation after them as they were flexible in occupation as they had to be. Changing jobs was common for them. In an era in which pensions and the like were mostly nonexistent, the incentive for moving jobs, if a better job was in the offering, was high. They were much more likely to work in a local jobs. They were more likely to own their own enterprises, and those enterprises were likely to be small. Many more of them worked with their hands and nearly all of them knew how to.
They were also highly accustomed to the concept that work was dangerous or could be, and early death by accident and disease was common and expected.
They were much more likely to be like those they had grown up with, not only in race, but in religion and ethnicity. They were also much more likely to be prejudiced against those not like themselves and to be the victims of prejudice.
As average people, they were often much like those who lived in the lands that they were being sent to in order to fight in. American soldiers of 1917-1918 were impressed with the French and horrified by their suffering at the hands of the Germans. They married French women in large numbers, showing that the ethnic differences were fairly rapidly overcome, in no small part because French civilians did not live very differently than they did at home. American soldiers on occupation duty in Germany started to do the same with the Germans and had to be cautioned that the Germans had lately been their enemy. Even American soldiers in rural Russia started to marry Russian brides.
All of this would be true, of course, for Americans serving around the globe in World War Two, but impressions were quite different. Americans tended to find rural France to be quite backwards in the Second World War, which they did not in World War One. The conditions Italians lived in during World War Two shocked Americans who came to regard them as hopelessly backwards (until Italian film noire, Claudia Cardinale, and Sophia Loren changed their minds in the late 50s and 60s) where as during World War One the Italians had really been celebrated. It was the Americans who had changed, not the Italians or rural French.
And, by all measures, the American soldier of the Great War seems to have accepted suffering and death in a way that no Americans have since. The casualty rate for Americans during World War One was absolutely horrific. If any American commander had suffered losses at the rate that Pershing did after World War One he would have been cashiered. During the Great War it as widely circulated that the American Army had issued an order that men fleeting battle (of which there were few) should be shot on the spot, an order that was illegal but which may very well have been issued. In contrast, Gen. Patton was nearly relieved for slapping two soldiers during World War Two (only one such instances is commonly remembered, but there were two).
The acceptance of life being hard, in every level of society, seems to have been a given. The generation has famously been called "The Lost Generation" due to the horror of World War One, but there's real reason to doubt the characterization. They seem to have simply accepted that a hard life and early death was a feature of life, and if that hardship and death came in war, that too was part of the way things were.
Greatest generation? I don't know which one that would be, if there is one. But they were certainly a pretty great generation.
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*The film Marty, set in the 1950s, portrays this well in its later stages.
**The "Professions" were the Law, Medicine and the Clergy at Common Law, all occupations which "professed".
***Although at least in the case of the law the overall profession never became anywhere near as lucrative as imagined and that status peaked at least two decades ago before going into steep decline.
****That's actually true today as well. The number of people who are statistically wealthy is higher than before, but many of those people slip back and forth between wealthy and the upper middle class without even knowing it and never actually regard themselves as wealthy. Indeed a majority of theose in the bottom end of "wealth" regard themselves as solidly middle class.
^It had, however, already been mentioned by a Presidential candidate as a goal, that candidate being Theodore Roosevelt who brought up the idea in his final Presidential run.
The existence of Social Security is frankly a big deal and without it many Americans could never retire today. While its really popular for people to state "it' won't be there when I retire", it will be and people clearly act in expectation that it will be. The program has expanded enormously since it was introduced during Franklin Roosevelt's administration and now forms part of a large social safety net.
^^As an example, my father's father was born in the Mid West; Iowa to be exact. He was from a town that was all Westphalian and spoke German as a second language as he had learned it at home, even though he was a third generation American. He married, however, in Denver and when he did he married my grandmother, who was of 100% Irish extraction (her mother was from Ireland), which shows that things were a bit broader in the West.
My mother was born in a suburb of Montreal which was principally occupied by English speaking Irish Catholics, although that was already a big broader as her mother was of Irish, French and Scot's extraction.
^^^The passing of this has come to be oddly lamented in some quarters in recent times, particularly among traditionalist Catholics, some of whom view the passing of strongly ethnic Catholic neighborhoods in the 1960s to be nearly conspiratorial in nature. Their passing was a fact and came about mostly due to inevitable social and economic trends following World War Two which accompanied the incorporation of American Catholics into the larger society, but the loss of these strongly ethnic and Catholic areas, while a feature of social and economic isolation, has come to be a matter of suspicion by some.
^*Economics played into this as well as social norms to some degree. Women who were "shamed" by men, very often male employers of younger female domestics, were regarded with pity but it was practically impossible for them to afford to raise children that came about this way. Very commonly this resulted in their being given up for adoption, but in a surprising number of cases a young woman compromised in this fashion actually found themselves the recipient of a proposal from a young unmarried man and the circumstances of birth were simply passed over. A long time friend of mine knows, for example, that in this era a female ancestor of his was raped by a male employer where she worked as a domestic and she was soon the recipient of a proposal by the man she married, who raised the child as his own without question.
^**My mother had two aunts who never married, one of whom did in fact leave home and had for World War One, where she served as a Canadian nurse. The other lived with her father for the remainder of his life when she inherited the house and some money and lived there until her own death.
