New York at War by Steven H. Jaffe

Author:Steven H. Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

June 5, 1917, dawned fair and cool in New York. Through the morning and afternoon, thousands of men lined up outside neighborhood schools, barbershops, and storefronts to register for Selective Service. America had finally joined the Allied war against Germany. President Wilson had asked Congress to declare war in April, after the Germans resumed unrestricted U-boat warfare against all vessels, including American freighters and passenger ships, heading for Allied ports, and after British naval intelligence divulged intercepted cable messages that proved that German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann was secretly trying to lure Mexico and possibly Japan into a surprise attack on the United States. America’s war, Wilson intoned, would be a war “to make the world safe for democracy.”40

Now the test had come. Would America’s population of immigrants and their sons step forward to register for the nation’s first mandatory draft since the Civil War? Somewhat nervously, the New York Tribune recalled the Draft Riot of 1863. People recognized that neither Congress nor the public unanimously supported entry into the war. But the day passed without major problems. Although thousands of “slackers” failed to appear as summoned, six hundred thousand New Yorkers and over nine million others nationwide came forward to register.41

Never far below the surface, the city’s ethnic tensions caused scattered incidents, as thirty-eight thousand registrants were picked by lottery for the draft during the summer. While standing in line for his draft board physical, Russian Jewish immigrant Meyer Siegel joked about a gruff policeman nearby. “What did you say about me, you dirty kike?” the policeman shouted as he arrested Siegel for disturbing the peace. But a judge threw the case out of court, and Siegel was able to share the mix of excitement and bewilderment felt by millions of other young draftees. “Here I am,” he wrote, “one day, a student of law; the next day, learning how to kill my adversary and be killed. Some change-over!”42

Sixty miles east of Manhattan, in the woods of Yaphank, Long Island, thousands of drafted New Yorkers were training at the army’s newly built Camp Upton by the fall of 1917; other draftees occupied barracks at Camp Merritt in northern New Jersey. By the time Upton’s and Merritt’s troops started boarding transport ships at the Hoboken docks over the winter and spring for the passage to France, ethnic pride as well as American patriotism infused the esprit de corps of new units and traditional regiments alike. In addition to the Upper East Side “blue bloods” of the National Guard’s Seventh Regiment, and the tough Irish teamsters and stevedores from Hell’s Kitchen in the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, a mix of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, Slavs and Italians, natives and immigrants filled the ranks of the Seventy-Seventh, or “Melting Pot” Division, whose insignia bore an image of the Statue of Liberty.43

Flag-waving crowds cheered the “hardy back woodsmen from the Bowery, Fifth Avenue and Hester Street” as they marched through Manhattan in preparation for the voyage to Europe. Among them were many bearing German names and some who spoke with a German accent.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.