The War at Home

Perspectives on the Arkansas Experience during World War I

Mark K. Christ

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781682261262
• eBook ISBN: 9781610756853
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The War at Home brings together some of the state's leading historians to examine the connections between Arkansas and World War I. These essays explore how historical entities and important events such as Camp Pike, the Little Rock Picric Acid Plant, and the Elaine Race Massacre were related to the conflict as they investigate the issues of gender, race, and public health. This collection sheds new light on the ways that Arkansas participated in the war as well as the ways the war affected Arkansas then and still does today.

1

Arkansas and the Great War

Southern Soldiers Fight for a National Victory

SHAWN FISHER

One hundred years ago, the world was engaged in a great combat, a “fiery trial” as President Woodrow Wilson called it. This war, Wilson said, was a “distressing and oppressive duty,” but it was a war worth fighting, a war “for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations . . . for peace and safety to all nations and [to] make the world itself at last free.”¹

And yet, America’s entrance into the Great War was met with overwhelmingly exuberance, even a lightheartedness. One Arkansas soldier, a draftee named Thomas Gibson of Judsonia, wrote home in August 1917, and perhaps exemplified America’s national feeling of confidence at the outset of the war. Gibson told his mother, “One of my friends told me that the war would not last long. I asked him why and he said that his brother joined [the army] and that he was never known to hold a job more than two months.”² This good-natured greeting of the Great War, however, was much contrasted with the feeling in Europe by 1917.

When the Great War began in Europe with the German invasion of Belgium on August 4, 1914, many blamed the immediate crisis on Bosnian separatists who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the conflict had been brewing for many years. The origins of the war might sit squarely on the rise of the German state under Otto von Bismarck, whose demand for “blood and iron” marked a change in the diplomatic fortunes of Europe. But German aggression was met by equally bellicose French, English, and Russian maneuvering. The old Concert of Europe with its “spheres of influence” had given way to the unfettered lust of Weltpolitik——power politics played with one goal in mind: hegemony over all of Europe, and beyond. Emboldened by vast colonial resources and rapid industrialization, the great powers were capable of manufacturing prodigious amounts of war materiel. In short order, they cast aside their fear of continent-wide war and embraced a final showdown.

As much as anything else, the technologies of the era brought the nations into direct conflict. Waging war with battleships, submarines, trains, “wireless” radio communications, rapid-fire field artillery, airships, and even primitive airplanes promised a quick, decisive, and permanent end to war on the European continent. Never was a prediction more wrong. Within months, the continent was bogged down in trench warfare. The combat, far from quick and decisive, devolved into a bloody fight of attrition in which gains won yesterday were lost quickly tomorrow, only to be won and lost again and again.

In the United States, President Wilson hoped that if America entered the war, American fighting men would save France and Belgium, defeat the German military, and bring about his ultimate goal:—the end of war through the arbitration with the establishment of the League of Nations. The president asked Congress to approve a declaration of war in 1917, three years after the war began, for two primary reasons. First, the German navy’s unrestricted submarine warfare continued to sink American ships despite the strident declarations of American nonbelligerency. Second, the British government had intercepted a telegram from German diplomat Arthur Zimmermann offering Mexico support if it invaded the United States. Another factor in Wilson’s thinking was that the Russian government had collapsed and the tsar had been replaced with what at the time resembled a democratic government. Finally, in April, as the tide shifted toward war, Wilson intoned, “The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”³

It is a commonplace assertion that the Great War was the turning point of the modern world. Up until 1914, the arc of history—at least recent Western history—had bent toward progress, but after the war the world seemed broken, with all its faults and failings laid bare for inspection and derision. The noted military historian John Keegan stated that the First World War “destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent.”⁴ Certainly fascism and socialism took root during the war and after; certainly the war brought to Europe a cultural rot, a sort of intellectual gangrene that required an excision so massive that it left behind a quadriplegic. Winston Churchill said afterward that the war had left Europe in shambles: “the nations were broken . . . empires shattered . . . . Europe was ruined.”⁵

The Great War crushed the dreams of the Progressive movement in the United States, too, whose advocates believed that with just the right social programs and institutions, a rising and inevitable utopia was at hand. One such advocate, Washington Gladden, wrote in his bestseller Christianity and Socialism in 1905 that “international wars are less common than they once were; their methods and implements have become so destructive that rulers shrink appalled from venturing upon them [and may make] war impossible, and to hasten the day of universal arbitration.”⁶

Of course, the utopia they envisioned never existed, much less materialized, despite the fin de siècle optimism of the Progressives. Republicans in the Senate repudiated Wilson for the League of Nations and never approved the treaty. The last gasp of the Progressives was Prohibition; little need be mentioned of that failed social experiment. The “great crusade” which President Wilson and the nation embarked upon in 1917 was “the war to end all wars,” but it became a corrupting fiasco. Just five years later, on September 18, 1922, Adolf Hitler, a decorated Great War corporal, said in a political rally in Munich that launched the rise of his National Socialist party: “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain . . . . No, we do not pardon, we demand—vengeance!”⁷

That desire for revenge saw the whole continent swallowed up in yet another war, one which caused five times more deaths than the Great War. English poet Herbert Read, looking back at the whole bloody period of wars, wrote:

Happy are those who can relieve

suffering with prayer

Happy those who can rely on God

to see them through. They can wait patiently for the end.

But we who have put our faith

in the goodness of man

and now see man’s image debas’d

lower than the wolf or the hog—Where can we turn for

consolation?⁸

The Great War did debase mankind to new lows. And it did usher in a new age of destruction. Hitler’s vengeance was begat by the Great War and its technological progeny; the new death machines introduced during the Great War made Hitler’s revenge easier still.

Each innovation of the war had its counterparts in all wars that came after: machine guns, tanks, combat aircraft, mobile radio, submarines, chemical warfare, flamethrowers, mortars, and so on. The Great War was the first great proving ground for just how far Western science and industry had truly come, or, perhaps, had sunk. As one historian put it, “The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass death that the Second [World War] brought to a pitiless consummation.”⁹

The armies of the First World War were gigantic, and the U.S. forces were no exception. Within nineteen months, the U.S. Army grew from 107,641 Regular Army and 132,000 National Guard soldiers to nearly four million, and managed to send nearly two million to Europe in what was called the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). This was a major undertaking. The U.S. military was small at the outset of the war and required many months of all-out effort to bring its divisions on line, struggling all the while to clothe and arm troops for the trench fighting in Europe. The army was inexperienced as well, mostly draftees and newly minted officers. By the time of the Armistice, however, there were forty-two American combat divisions in France.¹⁰ Some men volunteered, some were drafted, but all fought, according to historian Edward A. Gutièrrez, “for honor, manhood, comrades, and adventure, but especially for duty.”¹¹ Over 4.7 million Americans served in the military during World War I; some 61,000 Arkansans served in the various branches of the armed forces.¹²

Nationally, during the war years 1917–1918 there were 116,516 recorded deaths among U.S. service members. That was about 0.1% of the U.S. population at the time, with an average of 279 deaths each day. Actual combat deaths—rather than deaths from disease, accident, or natural causes—were much lower, with 48,000 dying of their wounds.¹³ Of that number, 404 Arkansans were killed in combat. Over 224,000 American doughboys, of which there were some 1,751 Arkansans, were wounded in combat; according to the War Department, a merciful number, five out of six of them, returned to duty.¹⁴

Arkansans fought on the land, at sea, and in the skies to defend the United States and the people of France and Belgium—and in Wilson’s estimation, “civilization itself.”¹⁵ Soldiers, sailors, and marines from Arkansas were involved in some of fiercest fighting of the war, including the first fight between American and German troops. When the war came to a close, at least twenty-six Arkansans earned the nation’s second-highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross; two soldiers—Field E. Kindley and Abe Short—won the medal twice (that is, with oak leaf cluster).¹⁶ Field E. Kindley of Gravette, Arkansas, shot down eleven aircraft during his service in the 148th Aero Squadron, placing him number three behind the top U.S. ace, Eddie Rickenbacker; Sergeant Abe Short of Aurora, Arkansas, was honored for two different actions while serving in Company H, 38th Infantry.¹⁷ Only 111 in the nation received Distinguished Service Cross with oak leaf cluster in WWI.¹⁸

A scourge far deadlier than combat was the Spanish flu. Some 40,000 U.S. fighting men died of pneumonia related to the flu during the war.¹⁹ The Spanish flu killed some seventy-five million people worldwide over a period of about four years, and ranks as one of the most deadly disasters in history, natural or manmade. In Arkansas the statewide death toll is often cited as 7,000, but some doubt remains as to its accuracy, since rural death records were never systemically collected.²⁰ A total of 417 troops from Arkansas died from disease in the American Expeditionary Forces in France, and while no figures exist for the exact number taken by influenza, it is possible that 80% or more of that number died from the flu.²¹

By comparison, some 60,000 Arkansans served the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the state counted some 10,000 dead. Of course, those figures belie the great difference in population between 1860 and 1920—in fact, only 4% of the state population of 1.75 million served in the First World War; however, during the Civil War, of the white population of 325,000, some 20% served in some fashion.

From One War to Another

Clearly the numbers mentioned here reveal something important—specifically, that the Great War was significantly less intense for Arkansas than had been the Civil War. There are several reasons for this. First, America entered World War I late, three years late to be exact. For most of this period, the Civil War and its aftermath loomed large in the minds of the Southerners, not the distant war in Europe.

In the South, the social event of the year for many decades was the reunion of the United Confederate Veterans. In 1911, the reunion was held in Little Rock and some 100,000 attended, which was a population approximately twice the size of the city at that time.²² In 1913, there had been the “sheathing of the sabers” at the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, with some 50,000 gray-bearded veterans gathering in Gettysburg over the July 4th weekend to camp in the field as two great armies; it was the largest reunion of Civil War soldiers of both sides.²³ There were parades and marching, singing and bands, fireworks and shooting matches, and even a movie was made of the event. The film depicted the grizzled survivors of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia shaking hands for the camera, reaching across the stone wall at “the angle” in the center of the battlefield, where Pickett’s Confederate division was demolished.²⁴

President Woodrow Wilson gave the July 4th reunion address; he himself was a proud Virginian and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He said, “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 | Arkansas and the Great War: Southern Soldiers Fight for a National Victory
• 2 | Arkansas’s Women and the Great War
• 3 | Gearing Up Over Here for “Over There”: Manufacturing in Arkansas during World War I
• 4 | “Fighting, Protesting, and Organizing”: African Americans in World War I Arkansas
• 5 | “To Carry Forward the Training Program”: Camp Pike in the Great War and the Legacy of the Post
• 6 | Soldiers and Veterans at the Elaine Race Massacre
• 7 | Epidemic!: The Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Its Legacy for Arkansas
• 8 | World War I and Woman’s Suffrage in Arkansas
• 9 | Paris to Pearl in Print: Arkansas’s Experience of the March from the Armistice to the Second World War through the Newspaper Media
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index