Savage Peace by Ann Hagedorn

Author:Ann Hagedorn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

When they finally arrived at Belle Isle on Independence Day, the men with “Russia” stenciled on their helmets, “NR” (Northern Russia) stitched on their sleeves, and white polar bears silk-screened on their armbands were all given flyers informing them of the many services, events, and speeches in their honor that day. Ask any of the Detroit’s Own committeemen, the flyer said, “for anything in the world except a marriage license.” There were baseball games, boat rides, swimming, and eating, mostly ice cream and chicken. The Belle Isle bathhouse passed out free swimming suits and the Detroit Yacht Club offered all services as it would to its members. There were seven band concerts throughout the day. A dance band played at one end of the island beginning at 2:30 P.M., continuing into the night. Politicians from thirty-seven cities attended. The 339th’s Sergeant Theodore Kolbe, who had spoken so openly in December about conditions in Russia, was there, as he was now the deputy county treasurer in Detroit. And there were many speeches. “You fought under the greatest of all odds,” said Detroit’s mayor, James Couzens. “You fought doubts in your own hearts; doubts that Headquarters remembered your predicament, that the folks at home knew whether you still lived, that they had received your letters, that relief could ever reach you through the ice-locked sea.”

California’s Senator Hiram Johnson, the champion of their cause, came to Detroit on the train from Washington to greet the 339th. Upon his arrival at Michigan Central Station at 7:45 A.M. on the Fourth, he told the press that he came purely for “sentimental reasons” and without any intention of speaking about his latest cause, which, as an ardent isolationist, was to defeat the League of Nations and to flay Wilson’s international policy any chance he could. Nor did he intend to discuss his opinions on the Paris Peace Conference, of which he was very critical, or the several thousand more American soldiers in Russia who were still fighting in Siberia and would not return until the spring of 1920, or his plans to run for president in 1920, of which he was very optimistic, or his views on Bolshevism, which he hated. He had no canned speech and he preferred eating breakfast to talking to the press, he told a Detroit News writer who asked him specifically about his opinion on the “bolshevik question.” “The question of their [the 339th’s] removal from Russia was purely American and had nothing else in it,” said Johnson. “This country has nothing to fear from any idiotic, fantastic thing like Bolshevism.”

Later in the day, however, at Belle Isle, after Mayor Couzens introduced Johnson as “the greatest possibility for the next President of the United States” and “the man who stood up so valiantly in the Senate to demand that the boys of the 339th be released from the terribly isolated country to which they had been sent without any explanation from their Government,” Johnson, wiping sweat from his brow and rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt, spoke of more than the homecoming of the Polar Bears.

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