0.2 The great war (part i)  (Page 9/14)

Over fifty members of the House agreed with Rankin, to include the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Claude Kitchin (D-NC). Kitchin rejected the call to war believing that those who will be called to fight and die will not be the ones who declared the war to begin with: “Let me once remind the House that it takes neither moral nor physical courage to declare a war for others to fight.” The US was simply not prepared to fight a protracted European conflict, which some Americans seem well aware of. The author of The Klansman (turned into the movie Birth of a Nation ) wrote a sequel that was turned into a movie in 1916 called Fall of a Nation , portraying goose-stepping, spiked-helmet-sporting Germans marching over this country. The movie was a clear shot at US pacifists in general, and President Wilson in particular.

General Leonard Wood, a one-time US military commander of Cuba, was Wilson’s Chief of Staff until 1914. Wilson and Wood diverged on their interpretations of US preparation for war with the former fearing that preparing for war would necessarily lead to war and the latter a proponent of creating and maintaining a standing army as a matter of policy in general.

One immediate concern that Wilson tackled was the diversity of Americans (especially all those German immigrants). Thus, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Led by George Creel, the CPI was tasked with ensuring that American opinion favored US intervention and supported a possible protracted conflict. One thing the CPI did was to work with Hollywood and produce a series of huber -patriotic movies depicting clear and explicit differences between the liberty-loving Americans and the German animals, such as “The Claws of the Hun” and “The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin”.

Creel created a pool of amateur speakers who were tasked with giving targeted speeches to specific ethnic crowds in support of the US war effort. These speakers were supposed to make their points in no more than four minutes and thus in an homage to the Revolution, Creel named these on-call speakers, “Four-Minute Men.” According to Creel, over 75,000 speakers gave an estimated 7.5 million speeches. Major ethnic groups such as Jews, Germans, and even American Indians were targeted to ensure their support for the war. Rabbi A.G. Robinson of New York reported that Jewish speakers reached “about 25,000 people per week. We expect soon to have every Jewish audience in a motion-picture house or a Jewish playhouse addressed by a Jewish playhouse addressed by a Jewish speaker.”

German-American communities were asked to take “The Pledge” (a pledge supporting the US against the Huns). Progressive era groups, such as the American Protective Association, targeted homes with German sounding names to ensure that there were no pictures of the Kaiser on their walls. American flags blossomed all over the country, like tulips and daffodils in the spring. A new group, the Boy Scouts of America, sold war bonds and collected money, rubber, and tin in support of the war effort. German groups and clubs were banned, closed, and at times burned by those liberty and justice-loving Americans.