World War I Army Training by San Francisco Bay by Barbara Wilcox

Author:Barbara Wilcox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2016-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Hostess House, designed by noted architect Julia Morgan, allowed troops to meet sweethearts or female relatives in comfort. Menlo Park Historical Association, Hazel Rasor scrapbook.

Moved to Palo Alto after the war, Hostess House became America’s first municipal community center and later the MacArthur Park restaurant. Stanford University Archives.

Many such reports seem to have been filed and forgotten, but Palo Alto’s postmaster forwarded to investigators a shopkeeper’s report on a Waverly Street woman whose work giving classes “in German or French” made her an object of suspicion. “Complainant says Mrs. Diesel called up to give him an order, then told him over the phone that ‘the Kaiser is not near so bad as President Wilson, and one government is as good as another.’” Camp Fremont’s intelligence office placed both Mrs. Diesel and her husband under investigation for “disloyal utterances” in violation of the Espionage Act.53

Many thoughtful people, including Stanford’s Ellen Elliott, tried to analyze the tension of the times and found it partly generational. Elliott’s own distaste for war was influenced by her parents’ experience in the Civil War. She understood why young people lacking this perspective had fewer reservations and ventured out to save a world gone mad. In contrast, many members of “the skipped generation,” as the Committee on Public Information dubbed the middle-aged in a Red Cross recruitment ad, underwent a complex mixture of feelings as they saw young men off to battle. Some envied the spotlight’s shift to the young.

The CPI had a cure for this midlife malaise. “Men of large affairs” who answered the call for Red Cross service, the CPI argued, need not feel passed over. Applying their managerial talents overseas, they could rescue “starving little children” and “mothers numb with horror” in a “great net of mercy drawn through an ocean of unspeakable pain.” It was a new and heroic role and an implicitly political one, because it depended on and projected America’s new geopolitical force. Herbert Hoover was the template for this type of civilian, and thousands followed his cue. Among them was cattleman D.O. Lively, formerly the Panama-Pacific International Exposition’s director of livestock. Lively was cast at loose ends when the army took over his acreage for Camp Fremont’s artillery range. He became an international aid executive at the age of fifty, coupling his skills with adventure that life behind a desk had denied him.

As New Year’s Day 1920 dawned on the Siberian port city of Vladivostok, Lively, division manager of the American National Red Cross, penned a cheery list of New Year’s resolutions for his staff. Harried by U.S. civilians seeking repatriation, if not by the Bolsheviks who would in four weeks impose martial law, Lively urged his team to resolve that “sunshine and cheerfulness shall be your playmates.” Czechs aligned with anti-Bolshevik Russians, the very people Woodrow Wilson sent five thousand Camp Fremont men to protect, were extorting large sums from Lively’s staff in one part of the interior. A blockade in the name of the Allies hindered aid distributions elsewhere.

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