1.

With the outbreak of the World War in August 1914, the mind of America suddenly became strikingly distinct from that of Europe. They were fighting; we were watching. President Wilson appealed to the United States to be “neutral in fact as in name ... impartial in thought as well as in action.” The older American stock sympathized, on the whole, with England, except for the Irish and Germans; the newer immigrants had different racial and national affinities and memories, some holding allegiance to their former governments, some, like the oppressed Russian Jews, being especially bitter against their former rulers. In this situation, American neutrality was the result, not of indifference, but of lack of understanding on the part of many groups in our population and of a stalemate between the rest.

One definite result certainly was that all these diverse groups of new and old immigrants began to feel themselves a unity, an American people. They felt their distinction from the warring nations overseas, their own interest, their own reaction to the complex problems at issue. Meanwhile, however, both parties were trying every means to bring the United States into the war on their own sides. Germany tried to bring about an embargo on munitions sold to the Allies and in default of that, to obstruct their shipment by both peaceful and warlike means. Great Britain, more especially, tried to influence American public opinion in favor of the Allies and against Germany. Within, there were pacifists and advocates of preparedness, both trying to mold opinion. This formation of an American mind, and the difficulty of determining its future direction, came to a head in the election of 1916, when the German-Americans opposed President Wilson, and when Hughes was supported by Roosevelt, the arch-interventionist. During this period we experienced the first development of what we have since grown to know intimately as “propaganda,” a deliberate, elaborate technique for influencing the mind of the group.

The declaration of war by the United States in April, 1917, unified the American mind in a manner and to a degree that were almost inconceivable. Every immigrant group began to pass resolutions favoring the government; the foreign language newspapers commenced an intensive propaganda for the prosecution of the war. Volunteers came from every section of the country and every type of origin, as many from the children of Germans as from any other group. The draft law was passed with apparent general approval; and its enforcement met with surprisingly little difficulty. Huge loans were made to the Allied governments. Tremendous bond issues were raised by the American government, with general approval and the coercion of any minority objectors. The National Council of Defense, founded in August, 1916, was able in many cases to overcome the dominant profit-motive of our society in gaining self-sacrificing patriotism of manufacturers and merchants.

Along with this voluntary and spontaneous unification of the group mind, came repression and coercion directed to forcing into agreement any unabsorbed minority groups. The Committee on Public Information was founded in September, 1917, to exert propaganda through the sources of public information, to send out favorable news and opinion, and even through censorship to suppress material considered dangerous to the general cause. The censorship exercised by the military forces on war bulletins, war correspondents and the personal letters of soldiers, was applied less strictly to the general population. The secret service, greatly expanded to cope with German spies, began hunting out strikers, radicals or any others who—in the minds of the detectives or of any other government officials—might possibly obstruct the war efforts. Emergency acts gave the President unusual power in these and other directions.

This use of force was characteristic, not only of the government, but of local groups as well. In one place a German sympathizer (real or supposed) might be made to kiss the flag; in another a strike leader might be lynched. In Milwaukee, where public opinion was sensitive on account of the large number of German-Americans, a quota of Liberty Bonds was assigned arbitrarily to every person, and he was practically forced to purchase them, irrespective of his ability to do so, by threats of ostracism, by influence of his creditors, by every sort of social pressure,—in order that Milwaukee might rank as a real American community and go “over the top” in every “drive.” The military language applied to these campaigns was matched by a growing technique of organization. Professional propagandists perfected a method of meetings, songs, card-catalogs, and quotas, by which any cause might be assured of huge sums of money. The greater propaganda of our government and foreign governments was matched by the little propaganda of every subgroup, as long as this was not in conflict with the general purpose.

A striking illustration of this is in the successful drives of the various war-work agencies, the Red Cross, American Library Association, Young Men’s Christian Association, Jewish Welfare Board, Knights of Columbus, and the rest; and especially in their enormous joint campaign just after the signing of the armistice. Every American felt that this joint campaign, first, would help the soldiers and the common cause; and second, indicated by its inclusiveness the complete unification of America. Along with this general unification came the similar process in many of the immigrant groups themselves. Professor Miller68 tells how this was reflected in the Czecho-Slovak group in America, so that bitter atheists united with Catholic priests on joint committees for national freedom in their old home in Europe.

2.

This internal unification was accomplished by a high emotional tension, a national and personal uncertainty, and a common hate. The prejudice against the various immigrant groups, arising as a result of the great wave of immigration, was abated for the moment; all the little prejudices were summed up in one great hatred of the common enemy, Germany. This was reflected in avoidance of everything German in this country as well; German instruction was withdrawn from many high schools, German music from the opera houses, German fried potatoes from the restaurants. The term, “German-American,” formerly in good repute, now became a byword, and with it every form of “hyphen.” The demand now was for “hundred per cent.” Americanism.

In the prevailing ignorance of foreign languages and peoples, or even if this ignorance had not existed in its full measure, the hatred against the Germans was transferred in part to other groups as well, even those with most reason to be anti-German or anti-Austrian. Foreign language newspapers fell under popular suspicion and official censorship much heavier than that of the English language periodicals. Some states passed laws, later declared unconstitutional, forbidding teaching, preaching or public meetings in languages other than English. Foreign sounding names attracted suspicion, and were changed in large numbers. Altogether, America begun to repeat the oppression of subject groups which had caused permanent resentment and sown the seeds of rebellion in almost every land in Europe, to create her own Ireland, Alsace-Lorraine or Poland. Americanization became a synonym for compulsory adoption of American standards and group habits.

Americanization had had a long, if somewhat unsatisfactory, trial before the war. It was the attempt, at that time, to bring American culture to the supposedly uncultured immigrant through settlements, night schools, and other cultural agencies. The attempt was satisfactory in a comparatively small proportion of the total immigrant population; and the earnest workers blamed this fact on the poorness of their textbooks, the unsuitability of their buildings, or the weariness of the people after a day of arduous labor. Now, all of these were undoubtedly true, but a more fundamental cause of the weakness of Americanization methods lay in the fact that they were all one-sided; they consisted in attempts to change the immigrant into an American, rather than attempts to join many groups together into a composite unity. Even the conference on Americanization called by the Secretary of the Interior in 1918 passed friendly and practical resolutions, but still one-sided and consequently superficial.

The few individuals who persisted in their individuality, who refused to be absorbed in the group purpose, formed no clearly marked group of themselves. They were the “conscientious objectors,” who refused any type of activity that might help the military machine; the “slackers,” who evaded the draft for selfish reasons; various religious groups, such as the Quakers; a few economic dissenters, such as the Industrial Workers of the World. They received, as they must have expected, the violent disapproval of the group, expressed in terms of mob attack, legal imprisonment, or at least, extreme social disapproval. They were the unassimilated residuum of personality in the general unification of the American group under the pressure of an external foe.

3.

Then came the armistice in November, 1918. As Dr. Drachsler remarks:

The artificial unity of war-time had no longer a purpose, and began instantly to dissolve into its component elements. But the high emotional tone of the war-time remained. Men still hated violently, but they could no longer release this hatred in battle or in sending others to battle. The repressive agencies remained in existence and in excellent running order; groups had learned how to use propaganda as an instrument; the habit of group pressure on subgroups and on different and opposing groups had been strengthened. Most of all, great masses of Americans had a new group consciousness of America as a group, with the uniformity of habit, opinion and conduct characteristic of their own subgroup taken as normal for the whole.

The first result, then, was that the original subgroups fell apart and that their opposition was stronger and more open than before the war. This was due certainly to the heightened emotional tone, not only of the American mind, but every group mind the world over. During the war men and nations lived habitually under conditions of excitement, uncertainty and tension. After the war the same emotional tone remained to color whatever group ideas might become associated with its action. So the whites who had drafted negroes to fight for them resented these same negroes coming home with the new pride of soldiers, remembering new equality of treatment they had received from the French. The daughters of the rich no longer danced with the poor, ignorant farm boys as they had in every cantonment. Prejudice against the uniform returned, and girls of certain classes would no longer care to be seen with soldiers or sailors; as they had when those men were expressing the group purpose by their very garments. And the hatred of the various immigrant groups for each other—the hatred of the older American groups against the immigrant, the Catholic and the Jew, returned with redoubled force. As the present writer found occasion to note directly after the close of the war:

This disappointment was common to many of us who had allowed our hopes to run beyond our knowledge.

Another cause of this unusual strength of group hatreds was the very repression of the war period. Individuals and sub-groups had sacrificed their prejudices for the common purpose, but they had done so without pleasure and as a sacrifice. Now they resumed their group intolerance with redoubled zest due to long repression, whether that had been voluntary or forced. The “white, gentile, Protestant American” may have resented fighting on an equality with the negro, or under the orders of a foreigner—now that resentment had its vent. Never has group feeling run higher in America than in this reaction from the sudden, violent and partially artificial unity during our participation in the World War.

One notable result of this sudden relaxation of unity, this sudden predominance of the subgroups, appeared in the phenomena of displacement. Displacement is a common matter among paranoiacs, where one object is substituted for another with the same meaning and the same feeling-tone of resentment or of pleasure. It is also a common characteristic of mobs, which may be called for this and other reasons, a sort of social paranoiacs; the lynching mob will turn from its intended victim to hang instead a public official or a bystander who objects even mildly to its program.71 In this way the hatreds of war-time were displaced. The hatred for the German was displaced to the alien as a whole. The hatred and suspicion of Russia, aroused when that nation drew out of the war, and intensified when it adopted the radical economic program of the Bolsheviki and the novel political rule of the Soviets, was displaced and applied to all economic radicals, whether Russian or American. Finally, the Jew was identified as a foreigner (even though he might be American-born and a veteran of the war); and as a radical (even though he might be an ultra-conservative capitalist). The ancient, lingering anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism of ages past appeared again; the Jew was not only a Christ-killer or a boor or a Semite,—for no accusation was ever entirely dropped—he was also an alien and a radical, an international banker and an enemy of gentile civilization.