Entangling Alliances

Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

Susan Zeiger

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814797259
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied but at times from enemy nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the “allied” war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. GIs also met and married former “enemy” women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions.

In this comprehensive, complex history of war brides in 20th-century American history, Susan Zeiger uses relationships between American male soldiers and foreign women as a lens to view larger issues of sexuality, race, and gender in United States foreign relations. Entangling Alliances draws on a rich array of sources to trace how war and postwar anxieties about power and national identity have long been projected onto war brides, and how these anxieties translate into public policies, particularly immigration.

1
“Cupid in the AEF”

U.S. Soldiers and Women abroad in World War I

Mad’moiselle from Armentieres,
Parlez-vous.
Mad’moiselle from Armentieres,
Parlez-vous.
Mad’moiselle from Armentieres,
She hadn’t been hugged in a thousand years,
Hinky-dinky parlez-vous.
...
With her I flirted, I confess,
But she got revenge when she said yes,
Hinky-dinky, parlez-vous.¹

“American or French Girls, which is best?” The American Expeditionary Force (AEF) edition of the Chicago Tribune posed this question to its doughboy readership in November 1918, soon after the armistice. As it turned out, American soldiers had strong and varied opinions on the subject, and their responses filled the “letters” column for weeks. Many rose to the defense of American womanhood, praising the home front sweethearts they soon hoped to see. Others, like this anonymous American officer, cast a strong vote for the French: “If the American girl is jealous of the French girl today, she has good reason to be. … If [American] girls do not change and learn to be more attentive and appreciative of our men than they have been in the past, they are going to have more time for knitting. … the fellows … will go out with their little French girls when they want a really interesting evening.”²

This seemingly lighthearted exchange of letters in fact highlighted several important but subterranean features of the American experience in the First World War. First, the letters acknowledged a reality that the U.S. government worked hard to obscure during the months of fighting: that American soldiers were indeed having intimate relationships with local women in the context of military service overseas. This reality clashed with the carefully managed image of the AEF as the world’s “cleanest” army, an underpinning of the Wilson administration’s war effort. The idealization of the American soldier in World War I, “the knight in the crusade for democracy,” demanded “rigid prescription for upright behavior overseas.”³ Evidence of intercultural intimacy was unsettling to many Americans, who had been assured that the American doughboy would stay chaste and sober in France, saving himself for the American sweetheart he had left behind. Public outrage was acute for this reason when the American press circulated an outlandish rumor in the spring of 1919 that 200,000 American soldiers planned to stay in Europe and settle down with French wives and lovers.⁴

Of course, the French woman who could give an American soldier “a really interesting evening” was precisely the kind of woman that soldiers’ families and moral reformers most wanted the men to avoid. In American political and cultural discourse, France and other European countries were alien places that threatened the moral standards and certitudes of the United States. Foreign women had long been seen as both sexually desirable and readily available, women of loose moral conduct and erotic sophistication. This was the view, for example, of reformers in the nineteenth-century anti-immigrant and antiprostitution campaigns, and later, of evangelical citizens who demanded government action to “protect” American soldiers from prostitution in foreign lands. As American doughboys deployed in Europe began to interact with local women, this view also animated the initial responses of AEF leaders: that the women were “gold diggers” or prostitutes scheming to take advantage of naïve American “boys.”

For the leaders of the U.S. military effort in World War I, relations between U.S. soldiers and local women posed a largely unprecedented set of questions with military, diplomatic, and domestic implications. AEF leaders were unprepared for the range of policy problems they were asked to face, from the licensure of brothels to the resolution of paternity disputes. Marriage, the most public and visible of these problems, was among the most vexing. Many within the military establishment advocated a ban on soldier marriage overseas. There were many reasons to support marriage, however. What proved to be most significant was pressure from Allied leaders, who were outraged by mounting evidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and fears for the future of young women abandoned by American “boyfriends.” General John Pershing, commander in chief of the AEF, ultimately took a stand in favor of marriage for U.S. troops under his command and created policies to facilitate intercultural marriage. Pershing acted to extend protection not to American soldiers or to foreign women but to the reputation of the armed services and the American state. At the conclusion of the First World War, more than 5,000 American soldiers were wed to foreign wives—the first foreign “war brides” recognized by the U.S. government. The state had established the legal right of American soldiers to marry and developed procedures for them to do so—though not without qualifications or reservations. All together, the U.S. military’s first steps toward resolving these concerns set the stage for soldier marriage to foreign women in subsequent military conflicts.

“Pure and Clean Through and Through”: Military Service and Moral Reform in the Progressive Era

World War I brought the modern military draft to the United States, created a wartime apparatus of federal agencies with extensive political and economic authority, and eventually propelled nearly 2 million Americans, including uniformed women, into military service overseas. It was a transforming event in American history by any measure. From the vantage point of 1914, however, Americans viewed the cataclysm across the Atlantic as neither the “Great War” nor the “war to end war,” but the “European War.” The conflict seemed so foreign, so distant from American concerns, that Army War College scenarios on file as late as April 1917 posited no major role for American troops overseas.⁵ When the American Expeditionary Force was created in May 1917 and the Selective Service Act passed, many Americans worried about what might happen to their nation, and to their young men, in a foreign war.

While American families were certainly and appropriately fearful that their sons might lose their lives in battle, they fretted as well about the moral and psychological dangers of military service, “lewd women” and strong drink in particular. Historically, military encampments had held a reputation as a “corrupt and immoral environment,” a perception dating back to the Civil War and earlier. World War I reawakened these concerns. Among evangelicals and conservative moral reformers—groups that viewed Wilson’s foreign crusade with considerable skepticism—the fears were especially pronounced. One Oregon mother put Secretary of War Newton Baker on notice: “We are willing to sacrifice our boys, if need be … but we rebel and protest against their being returned to us ruined in body and ideals”—a coded phrase referring to promiscuity and sexually transmitted disease.⁶ Congressional debate of the Selective Service Act in May 1917 echoed these public concerns. Many insisted that military service required the maturity and stability of older men and posed excessive danger to the young. These critics succeeded in setting the draft age at a relatively high twenty-one, with the purpose of protecting vulnerable youths.⁷

Many Americans worried in particular about the impact that foreign military service might have on young soldiers. France was, to many, an especially disturbing destination. In Anglo-American culture, the twin reputations of France as a center of high culture and low life had coexisted since the end of the eighteenth century. “No American should come to Europe under thirty years of age,” Thomas Jefferson had cautioned; the young, he feared, would succumb too easily to its overpowering moral and social temptations, a characterization that paralleled the self-image of the American nation as a young, boyish innocent facing the corruption of old Europe. France offered many temptations to American innocents. The brothels, dance halls, and gambling houses of Paris were legendary in the American imagination by the second half of the nineteenth century, their reputation spread through underground guidebooks such as Paris at Night (1875), which described the intricate social scale of the French sex industry, the loquettes and cocottes, and where and how sex could be purchased. Mainstream mass publications for the middle class picked up on this theme, titillating their readers with accounts of the French demimonde. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century forward, historian Harvey Levenstein explains, Americans considered France the “capital of naughtiness” in the world. This reputation helps to explain why a YMCA leader might warn an American official in 1918 that “America has as much to fear from the French women of Paris” as from its German foe.⁸

American moral reform organizations that carried out international work further fed public anxiety over the fate of American youths in a foreign war. Women in the international “purity” campaign took the lead in highlighting the problem of prostitution overseas. Some took the analysis even further, describing the interrelationship between militarism, sexual promiscuity, alcohol consumption, and the degradation of foreign women. As evidence of military corruption, leaders of the international Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) pointed to the British army in India, for example, where native prostitutes serviced troops in regulated brothels. Closer to home in the United States, the recent border war with Mexico furnished compelling evidence of war’s corrupting influence. Widespread and negative publicity in the American popular media, as well as the Christian press and reform publications, gave a lurid account of the drinking and prostitution that were practiced by U.S. troops. The “vice problem” in the Mexico campaign of 1916 was so concerning that it prompted Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to commission an extensive investigation.⁹

While U.S. civilian and moral reformers worried hypothetically about the impact of foreign military service on American troops, American military leaders had already made a number of firsthand observations of the moral behavior of regular army troops in foreign deployments. There prostitution was regarded as a fact of army life. In Cuba, Haiti, and the Philippines, relationships between American soldiers and local women were endemic but not discussed beyond the close confines of regular army circles.¹⁰ Interestingly, one incident that threatened to open these relations to wider public view was a sex scandal that involved a prominent army officer in 1906—none other than John J. Pershing, the soon-to-be leader of the world’s cleanest army. When President Roosevelt nominated Pershing for brigadier general, Pershing’s political enemies spread a rumor that he had lived with a Filipina mistress during his service with the U.S. First Cavalry in the Philippines and had fathered several “half-breed” children with her. Pershing’s career was salvaged by the woman’s sworn denial of the charges and by the unstinting support of Pershing’s wife.¹¹ But the controversy, whether unfounded or not, uncovered a universe of intercultural interaction between American soldiers and women overseas.

As President Wilson crafted a vision of the new conscript army to share with the American people, the prior problems of troops abroad and the vigorously expressed concerns of moral reformers shaped his approach. Wilson’s evocation of a fighting force “pure and clean through and through” was remarkably idealistic even by Wilsonian standards.¹² Several factors, all of them intertwined with Progressive Era ideology, contributed to this vision. First and foremost was his own progressive reform outlook and that of his war cabinet, particularly his secretary of war Newton D. Baker, who earlier, as mayor of Cleveland, had placed the positive moral guardianship of young people at the center of his concerns.¹³ Political considerations also played a role, chiefly President Wilson’s need to steer unsettled public opinion in support of the European war; an army with high moral standards was an important condition of war support for many American voters, especially evangelicals. Likewise, progressive leaders in medicine and public health were determined to build an army that was “fit to fight” both physically and morally. The campaign against venereal disease in the Army Medical Department dovetailed with the concerns of moral reformers and evangelicals.

The Wilson administration’s main policy response to concerns about the moral and sexual health of the troops was a vigorous “social purity” program aligned with the opening of military training camps across the country. The program had two parts: a law enforcement effort to repress prostitution and drinking surrounding the camps, and an extensive infrastructure of soldier recreation, education, and diversion to take the place of less healthy activities. The master strategist in this campaign was Raymond Fosdick, appointed by Secretary Baker to head the newly formed Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) under the aegis of the War Department. A social investigator in his youth and a former resident of the Henry Street settlement in New York City’s Lower East Side, Fosdick had outstanding progressive reform credentials. Fosdick had also been the chief investigator of moral conditions in the Mexican border war and arguably knew more about sex in the armed services than almost any other American civilian. Despite the realistic and startling report he had produced for the War Department, Fosdick was insistent that “sexual vice” could be suppressed in the military. The American soldier’s “inherent sense of decency,” he insisted, was an “invisible armor” of protection—though one, apparently, that needed much attending to. Some congressional and military leaders ridiculed the CTCA, but Wilson and Baker sincerely believed in the program’s efficacy. Fosdick was dispatched to France alongside the earliest of Pershing’s troops to establish an equivalent “army welfare” program for the AEF.¹⁴

The Wilson administration’s “clean army” campaign derived crucial support as well from the army’s Medical Department and its own vigorous efforts to suppress venereal disease. The impulse to apply science and efficiency in addressing social problems was another key dimension of the Progressive Era long recognized by historians. In World War I, military medical leaders created a strong and effective alliance with the nation’s leading antivenereal organization, the American Society for Social Hygiene, to advance the case for a comprehensive “social purity” campaign among American troops. The program they crafted placed primary emphasis on the suppression of sexual relations, while for the first time distributing prophylaxis kits.

Military officials urged American soldiers to practice sexual abstinence, both as a patriotic duty and as a public health measure. Bulletin 54, required reading for all AEF personnel, asserted that “sexual continence is the plain duty of members of the A.E.F., both for the vigorous conduct of the war and for the clean health of the American people after the war.” Medical research was marshaled to underscore and reassure that “sexual intercourse is not necessary for good health and complete continence is wholly possible.”¹⁵

As the United States prepared to launch a full-scale military force for Europe in the summer of 1917, military and civilian leaders drew upon a pre-established set of beliefs to help construct an expeditionary army. Domestic political pressure from families and reformers for a “chaste” armed services; assumptions about American (male) innocence and foreign (female) immorality; and prior experiences with foreign people and populations in the fledgling American empire all profoundly influenced wartime policies related to the social and moral lives of American troops. Despite all this prior consideration, the AEF, under the command of General John J. Pershing, was unprepared for the range of social relationships that would emerge almost as soon as Americans disembarked on European shores.

“Franco-Yanko Romance”

The American doughboys were “no hermits” overseas, according to writer and First World War veteran Dixon Wecter. As early as November 1917, just months after the arrival of U.S. forces, a journalist commented on the rising phenomenon of “Franco-Yanko Romance.” “The French girls like the American boys,” he reported, and apparently their feelings were reciprocated. Romances like one between a U.S. Army enlisted man and a young French factory worker were typical. Recuperating from an illness in an army hospital in Orleans, Private Robert Scudder was sufficiently recovered to sit in the park one Sunday; there he saw and spoke with a French girl, who was on a promenade with a group of friends. The next Sunday they had a planned rendezvous at the Joan of Arc statue and went on a date to the movies, and soon she took him home to meet her parents. “I thought a lot of her because she seemed to be a very good girl, a home girl,” Scudder wrote. By mid-January, he had asked her to marry him.¹⁶

AEF commanders sought to minimize the opportunities for contact between army personnel and local women. But with Americans posted in scores of cities and towns throughout France and England, it proved impossible to segregate soldiers. Relationships with local women were widespread and took a variety of forms. Social class background and military rank frequently determined how American men encountered women overseas, and the social class of the women they met. For working-class enlisted men like Robert Scudder, the streets, parks, and cafés of France were the mother lode of dating opportunities. In towns and cities, groups of American soldiers gathered on the streets and attempted to flirt with young women passing by. The cultural conditions of French urban life, with its public sociability, were conducive to such casual meetings. French women frequented the nation’s cafés and theaters, reopened after the first six months of the war—though their convivial behavior was scrutinized and sometimes criticized by the French guardians of ...