Making Judaism Safe for America

World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism

Jessica Cooperman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479895991
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

A compelling story of how Judaism became integrated into mainstream American religion In 1956, the sociologist Will Herberg described the United States as a “triple-melting pot,” a country in which “three religious communities - Protestant, Catholic, Jewish – are America.” This description of an American society in which Judaism and Catholicism stood as equal partners to Protestantism begs explanation, as Protestantism had long been the dominant religious force in the U.S. How did Americans come to embrace Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism as “the three facets of American religion?”Historians have often turned to the experiences of World War II in order to explain this transformation. However, World War I’s impact on changing conceptions of American religion is too often overlooked. This book argues that World War I programs designed to protect the moral welfare of American servicemen brought new ideas about religious pluralism into structures of the military. Jessica Cooperman shines a light on how Jewish organizations were able to convince both military and civilian leaders that Jewish organizations, alongside Christian ones, played a necessary role in the moral and spiritual welfare of America’s fighting forces. This alone was significant, because acceptance within the military was useful in modeling acceptance in the larger society. The leaders of the newly formed Jewish Welfare Board, which became the military’s exclusive Jewish partner in the effort to maintain moral welfare among soldiers, used the opportunities created by war to negotiate a new place for Judaism in American society. Using the previously unexplored archival collections of the JWB, as well as soldiers’ letters, memoirs and War Department correspondence, Jessica Cooperman shows that the Board was able to exert strong control over expressions of Judaism within the military. By introducing young soldiers to what it saw as appropriately Americanized forms of Judaism and Jewish identity, the JWB hoped to prepare a generation of American Jewish men to assume positions of Jewish leadership while fitting comfortably into American society. This volume shows how, at this crucial turning point in world history, the JWB managed to use the policies and power of the U.S. government to advance its own agenda: to shape the future of American Judaism and to assert its place as a truly American religion.

1

Border Conflicts

Looking back on his experiences leading the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in Europe during World War I, General John J. Pershing lamented what he saw as a dangerous lack of military preparation. In an article published after the war, Pershing wrote, “Our plunge into the World War, in the face of all our handicaps, was extremely courageous, but quite pathetic. . . . Only he who has witnessed the result of throwing half-trained officers and men into battle . . . and he who has been directly responsible for the employment of such troops in battle can appreciate the wickedness of unpreparedness.”1

General Pershing had a point: The United States was not entirely prepared for entry into WWI or for the enormous changes that mass mobilization would bring to American society. As late as 1916, two years after war exploded in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson remained committed to keeping the United States on a path of neutrality. As the war ground on to deadly stalemate in 1915 and 1916, Wilson argued that, by staying out of the fight, the United States could gain the moral high ground necessary to position itself as the world’s peacemaker while simultaneously building the financial and industrial bases that would allow it to challenge war-ravaged Europe’s economic dominance.2 The president had enough support on the issue of neutrality to win reelection in 1916 with the slogan “He kept us out of the war,” but while Wilson and his supporters preached the virtues of peace and neutrality, other voices raised alarms that the United States Armed Forces were not ready for modern military conflict.3 Some supporters of US military “preparedness” focused on the need to expand the size of the standing army, reorganize the National Guard, and increase the development of military technology. Others, however, saw military service as a means to fortify the health and character of American men. In 1916, unexpected conflict on the Mexican border forced preparedness advocates and members of the Wilson administration, as well as religious organizations anxious to prove what they could contribute to the moral well-being of American men, to take a hard look at the US military and assess its ability to safeguard the country and the character of its citizens.4

The Punitive Expedition

As early as 1911, prominent political and military leaders advocated for the reorganization and modernization of the American military and for the creation of a system of universal military training for white American men. Theodore Roosevelt, former US president and lieutenant colonel of the famous Rough Riders volunteer cavalry unit, was perhaps the best-known supporter of military preparedness. Yet many others, including former army chief of staff General Leonard Wood, worked doggedly to persuade the Wilson administration that the United States needed to reform its military and institute programs of civilian military training, which would both prepare soldiers to fight and uplift the character and morals of American citizens. General Wood had graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1880 and entered the army as a physician. Scholar Michael Pearlman, in his study of the military preparedness movement, argues that Wood saw military training as a therapeutic device that could be used to cure both social and physical ills. Wood subscribed to a school of thought that Pearlman calls “Christian pathology,” which understood disease to be caused primarily by sin. Building upon the medical wisdom of seventeenth-century Protestant clergy who considered virtue to be the primary source of vigor, Wood believed that universal military training could promote both physical and spiritual improvement. According to his supporters, the hardy “physical culture features of military training [would] develop a new and better [form of] American manhood,” while attention to “character building” within programs of military training would sustain and encourage the virtue required of truly American men.5

Historian Nancy Gentile Ford notes that General Wood and his political allies saw military training as necessary to the proper development of the moral, physical, and social health of the nation as a whole, as well as to that of the individual.6 Concerns about the health of American society were thus embedded within the project of military preparedness, and its supporters focused particularly on the physical and moral decay that they saw spreading within the United States’ increasingly foreign-born and urban-based citizenry. Roosevelt spoke and wrote widely about the need to protect the “virile fighting virtues” of white American manhood. Where once these virtues had been sustained through conquest of the American frontier, he argued, men now needed to pursue moral and physical health though a “strenuous life” defined by military service. Historian Gail Bederman has argued that Roosevelt understood the health of the country as resting upon the ability of white men to take up the “burden” of civilization and, in the absence of a frontier to conquer and natives to subdue, its forceful promotion through American military imperialism.7 To preparedness advocates such as Roosevelt and Wood, the military offered a means through which the country’s power could be asserted while developing the manly virtue of its white, male citizens.

President Wilson was no less concerned with the United States’ ability to wield power in the world than his predecessor, but he saw the strength of the country in its ability to offer moral and ideological leadership rather than in its military might.8 As World War I devastated Europe, President Wilson and his supporters rejected the call for preparedness as an unnecessary and even dangerous embrace of the sort of militarism that had led to the European conflict in the first place. Many members of his administration, however, shared the concern that, in order to protect the moral welfare of the country, its citizens needed to be better educated in the virtues of Americanism.

Massive waves of immigration since the late 1870s had made the United States more racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse and divided than ever before. Social Progressives such as Wilson embraced the idea that rational government operating for the good of the country could cure society’s ills and uplift the nation through a combination of technical expertise and what historian Steven Diner describes as a “powerful if vaguely defined faith in Christian morality.”9 Wilson’s administration resisted the overt militarism of Roosevelt and the preparedness movement, but it mirrored both their belief that Protestantism served as the underlying basis of American morality and their desire to improve the health and character of American men.

Revolution in Mexico, which had destabilized successive governments and threatened American investments in the region, challenged Wilson’s reluctance to engage in military conflict. On March 9, 1916—in retaliation for US support of his rival for power, President Venustiano Carranza—Francisco “Pancho” Villa led a small group of men in an attack on the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, and the unit of the Thirteenth US Cavalry stationed there. By March 11, the New York Times reported, twenty-three American soldiers and civilians had been killed in the raid, and Congress was “practically unanimous” in its support of military action against Villa. Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst of Arizona was quoted as proclaiming, “I think the army ought to be sent into Mexico to bring Pancho Villa and his murderous cutthroats back dead or alive. They should be brought to Columbus, where they made a funeral pyre of American men and women, and there be shot on the spot. In other words, I favor using grape shot and not grape juice.”10 The attack on Columbus outraged the public and raised concerns about border security. Wilson felt compelled to exercise American military power in order to seek justice for the Americans killed and to safeguard both the United States’ reputation and American property.11 With both Congress and public opinion demanding immediate action, Wilson sent Brigadier General John J. Pershing into Mexico with orders to capture or kill Pancho Villa.12

Pershing had been promoted to brigadier general by President Roosevelt in 1906, and he seemed to embody exactly the sort of military manhood that Roosevelt held up as an American ideal. He had fought against Geronimo and his Apache fighters on the frontier, earned his nickname “Black Jack” by leading the segregated African American Tenth Cavalry Regiment in the Spanish-American War, and rose to national prominence by subduing rebellion and serving as military governor of Moro Province in the Philippines.13 Pershing led ten thousand Regular Army soldiers into Mexico in pursuit of Villa, while nearly one hundred thousand National Guardsmen were called to the border to defend against further attack.

The so-called Punitive Expedition against Mexico produced little by way of military glory. Villa was never captured, but the expedition bolstered the cause of military preparedness by revealing profound gaps in the army’s state of readiness. Aside from the obvious lack of border security that had allowed Villa to successfully carry out his raid, the conflict exposed flaws in the army’s ability to arm, transport, feed, house, and care for its men. Motorized trucks, for example, were used to carry military supplies, but little attention had been paid to their maintenance or to the training of drivers and mechanics. These oversights, combined with poor roads, no railroad lines to fall back on, and resentful local populations, meant that Pershing’s forces inside Mexico often lacked supplies, including food for both soldiers and horses. One history of the expedition quotes an officer as saying, “I have been in three wars, and for unmitigated hardships, the Punitive Expedition was worst of all.”14

The conflict with Mexico assured the passage of the National Defense Act of 1916 in June. The bill fell short of achieving the full range of reforms that preparedness advocates had hoped for, particularly universal military training, but it did expand the size of the Regular Army and the National Guard, provided federal funding for summer camps to train sixteen thousand civilians, and created a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, on college campuses in order to maintain a ready pool of trained men and officers.15 Beyond these immediate changes, the Mexican Expedition convinced key members of the Wilson administration that the United States needed to prepare for military conflict. National security, it seemed, required policies and mechanisms designed to facilitate the fast and efficient mobilization of the country’s military, industrial, financial, and social resources.

Among those persuaded was the newly appointed secretary of war, Newton D. Baker. Baker was new to Washington, DC. Wilson had tried to lure him to federal office earlier, but Baker insisted on first fulfilling his term as mayor of Cleveland, where he strove to eliminate vice and crime by building alcohol-free dance halls and amusement parks and by sponsoring pageants and programs that would provide Cleveland’s citizens with entertainment wholesome enough to deter them from immoral behavior. With his term completed, the well-respected mayor arrived in Washington and was sworn in as secretary of war on March 7, just days before the mobilization of troops against Villa. Baker brought a deep commitment to Progressive social reform with him. Although he had previously supported American neutrality, in his new office, he embraced both the need to prepare for the possibility of war and the unique opportunities that the military created for promoting the moral and physical welfare of American citizens.16

The Welfare of Soldiers

Baker had no experience in the military or with military administration when he took over the post of secretary of war, and he was deeply disturbed by what he learned of the realities of army camp life. Reports of deplorably low moral conditions along the Mexican border poured into his office. The American Social Hygiene Association, an organization formed in 1914 by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other social- and moral-reform advocates in order to combat the spread of venereal disease, sent accounts contending that bars and brothels surrounded the camps and that incidents of drunkenness, debauchery, and sexually transmitted infection ran high among the troops.17 Baker saw the presence of alcohol and prostitution in military camps as a threat to the effectiveness of the army, as well as a moral and physical danger to soldiers and the women and children to whom they might return after their service.18 He responded by appointing Raymond Fosdick of the Rockefeller Foundation to investigate conditions in the camps.

Fosdick came from an old-stock American family. Both his mother and father could trace their lineage to English immigrants who had arrived in the American colonies in the 1630s. They kept a deeply religious home, and Fosdick recalled that “from our earliest days, religion was for us children a vital part of the air we breathed.”19 His older brother, Harry Emerson Fosdick, became one of the twentieth century’s most noted liberal Protestant theologians. Raymond Fosdick studied at Princeton University, where he first met the charismatic professor Woodrow Wilson. After completing his law degree at New York University, Fosdick went to work for the Bureau of Social Hygiene, which Rockefeller had founded to conduct research and influence public policy on venereal disease, crime, and delinquency. After World War I, he would go on to serve as president of the Rockefeller Foundation and long-term adviser to Rockefeller. Both he and his brother would work with Rockefeller to create the ecumenical Interchurch World Movement.20

By 1916, Fosdick had made his mark at the Bureau of Social Hygiene by investigating European and American police systems, and through this work he became acquainted with Baker.21 Fosdick was an able investigator, and he shared Baker’s profound concern for the deleterious impact of loose morals among the troops. He admired Baker, whom he described in his memoirs as possessing a “deep social insight, a supreme ability to articulate his ideas in felicitous words, and a superb courage . . . [with] a singularly serene and gracious mind,” and was eager to work with him on confronting the issue of vice among the troops.22

To social reformers such as Baker and Fosdick, conditions on the Mexican border revealed dangerous problems within the military and convinced them of the need for effective government intervention to promote character building among American soldiers. For some reformers, in fact, this opportunity almost made the entire Mexican Expedition worthwhile. According to biographer Frederick Palmer, Baker thought about preparing soldiers in “broader terms than sheer material efficiency.” He hoped that “some good might be wrought out of the evil of war through the effect of the right kind of army régime on the recruit. If he escaped permanently disabling wounds and disease, then proper nutrition, exercise, and regular hours might improve him physically; the tone of his associations might give him a sounder and broader sense of civic duty and human fellowship.”23 Baker and Fosdick approached their work with a commitment to advancing reforms that would protect America’s soldiers from vice and take advantage of the possibilities that military life created for increasing virtue among American soldiers and citizens.

After several weeks of inspecting conditions in and around military camps, Fosdick testified before the House Committee on Military Affairs that his tour of the Mexican border revealed “an almost unrelieved story of army camps surrounded by growing batteries of saloons and houses of prostitution.”24 More privately, Fosdick and Baker were concerned that the United States might soon enter a far larger military arena, and they began discussing ways to address the disorder on the bo...