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Hasn't this been a great conference? And this conference, in a lot of ways, is a part of this whole, much larger project that my colleagues and I have been engaged on looking at World War I centennial. We (this is some of them) have spent the last year working on this web-based project, 'Montana and the Great War', and as Bruce says you can access it from your home page, everyone got a bookmark in their packet, and that has the URL if you want to do it directly, and the website includes magazine articles, little pieces of oral history, audio, a series of interactive maps that feature images and events from across the state. And all of them are exploring the ways that the war and it's aftermath affected Montanans. So, as Bruce said, I've worked at the Montana Historical Society for a long time and so before starting this project, I thought I knew something a little bit about Montana history, and, you know, I did a little bit. I'd read Clem Work's book and Michael Punke's book and they were great, and a lot of wonderful articles by the late, great Dave Walter and others, so I had a little background. But, it's always true once you really start digging you learn a lot of new things and that's what is one of the great pleasures of my job, is that I get to do that kind of digging. So, I'm here this morning to share a little bit of that joy of discovery by sharing some of the things that I learned in the course of working on that project. Given that you all have been listening to talks on Montana and World War I for the last couple days, some of this is gonna be old news. Depending on what sessions you've attended, you'll recognize some of these stories, but I'm hoping that I can find something that will make you ponder, make you wonder, and make you think, just like they did me. And of course, I'm hoping that my talk will spur you to go and explore our website. And there's the website. The first revelation for me, really, was how sick America and Montana really was. So, like many of you I knew that five thousand Montanans had died of the flu and that almost 40,000 Montanans were sick with it or infected by it. And I also knew that in addition to being the 'Gibraltar of Unionism' and the Richest Hill on Earth', Butte was also known as a city of widows and orphans, because so many miners died young of industrial accidents, of course, but also tuberculosis. That's the flu (there we go) and here's a picture of Butte. And this picture was taken as part of a study on TB, looking at the causes, the company didn't want to admit that maybe the conditions underground were the prime cause, and of course they weren't the only cause. My colleague, Laura Ferguson, also told me that tuberculosis was endemic on Indian reservations. But I still hadn't realized how prevalent tuberculosis was. So prevalent, that it was a leading cause of discharge for disability during the war. And tuberculosis wasn't the only threat. A Missoula historian revealed to me, Kayla Blackman, told me all about venereal disease, something I hadn't really thought about much before I talked with her. And that was an even more common problem infecting one in ten enlisted men. There was a massive public health campaign to keep men fit to fight and you can go to the digitized newspapers and type in 'social disease', and you can find all sorts of articles and things like this one. Part of the fight against venereal disease was taking course of measures, and over 15,000 women across the country, mostly prostitutes, were quarantined, often without trial for the duration of the war, or until no longer contagious. And just as tuberculosis and venereal disease, that's just tuberculosis and venereal disease, according to one source I read, when the federal government began screening men for the draft they found that 30 percent of eligible men were physically unfit to serve. Another revelation was the link between patriotism and easy credit. Like many of you, I knew that farmers were encouraged to expand their operations to feed the troops and the allies, and I knew that over half the banks in Montana failed in the 1920s because so many farmers defaulted on their loans. I'd always assumed that this was due to drought. That post-war drought that began in earnest in 1918, and also the drop in commodity prices, as Europe once again began to produce grain after the war, and as they no longer needed so many crops to feed the troops. But what I didn't realize was how instrumental the Council of Defense was in securing loans, even to farmers with bad or no credit. Something that Alex Kirk he talked about yesterday. By May 1917, the Council of Defense distributed surveys reminding farmers that increasing food production was their patriotic obligation, and offering assistance. County Councils collected surveys of farmers needs and the Council of Defense created a state fund to loan farmers money for seed. But in addition, some of the County Councils urged banks to loan money even if the applicant quote "might not ordinarily be entitled to credit". Now, there was at least one County Council of Defense member who opposed this program. He said that in Prairie County, when he was from, confident farmers already had the resources they needed and that those who would avail themselves of the loans were poor credit risks. He urged the council not to publicize the program, predicting a high rate of default, and he was right. Patriotic expansion of operations facilitated by easy credit contributed to Montana's post-war economic crisis. And as Rich mentioned in his talk, we went into the Great Depression, a good ten years early earlier than the rest of the country. So, what else did I learn. Well, I knew that American Indians served in great numbers, but I didn't realize how stereotypes about Indians made their service more dangerous. Euro-Americans viewed Indians as instinctively courageous and stealthy. So, army officers assumed that they would make good scouts and runners. These positions suffered high casualty rates. William Hollowbreast was a Northern Cheyenne runner for the Battery B of the 33rd divisions, 122nd field artillery at the Samuel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. He remembered delivering messages as shells tore the battery in pieces, and the arms and legs of the men were falling at my feet. Over 10,000 plus Indians served nationwide and they suffered casualty rates five times greater than the American Expeditionary Force as a whole. Many, including Peter Barnaby of the Flathead Reservation, earned citations for distinguished service. Barnaby, company I, 26th infantry, 1st division, received the quoi de guerre for his heroism in the bloody battle of Meuse-Argonne. Now, Chief Plenty Coups is well known for encouraging Crow men to enlist during World War I, and he's shown here placing his coup stick on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the dedication ceremony in 1921, which he was invited to participate in as a representative of all Native America. But, of course, not all Indians supported Native participation in the war. I was talking to my colleague, Laura Ferguson last Wednesday, and she shared with me a poem published in April 1917, that was written by Yavapai Apache activist, Carlos Montezuma. He was a physician and a co-founder of the Society of the American Indians. And it's called 'Steady Indian Steady', and I thought it was worth sharing, so a little poetry to start your morning. The ghost craze has come and gone, the war craze is on, and if you want to fight, fight, but let no one force you in. Steady Indian, steady. In the excitement of war fury, it requires a level head not to get dizzy Steady Indian, steady. This is civilizations fight. You are tagged that verges on seeking for blood. Will it pay to prove it? Then fight. Steady Indian, steady. Fight for your country and flag is noble and grand. But have you a country? Is that your flag? With sober mind, think on it and do the right. Steady Indian, steady. Pause with calm mind; think on it. But let no one push you in it. If you do not know what you are fighting for, stay at home. Steady Indian, steady. They have taken your country. They have taken your manhood. They have imprisoned you. They have made you wards. They have stunted your faculties Steady Indian, steady. You are not entitled to the rights of man. You are not an American citizen. You are an Indian. You are nothing and that is all. Steady Indian, steady. Redskins, true Americans, you have a fight with those whom you wish to fight for. It is your birthright. Freedom, let them make good. With better heart you will fight, side-by-side under the same flag. Steady Indian, steady. Montezuma wasn't the only person skeptical about the war, of course, which brings me to my next point. Not everyone wanted to do their bit. Montana sent a larger percentage of its men to war than almost any other state, but that doesn't mean that everyone was eager to serve. Laverne Hamilton, who was a Non-Partisan League organizer, who lived near Roundup, recalled in his reminiscence that a number of men of his acquaintance on learning that the draft only applied to married men, went ahead and got married, so they could stay out of the war. There was an epidemic of weddings, he said. As one of the new bridegroom's said to me, I decided to get married and do my fighting at home. Not everyone (that's a recruitment poster that I just thought was cool) that they were resisting. Not everyone wanted to do their bit at home, either. While Maria Drennan, pictured here of Miles City, worked 1600 hours knitting 61 pairs of men's socks and 41 pairs of children's socks for the Red Cross. And the Kalispell newspaper lauded the 115 liberty-loving women who met in the basement of the Masonic Temple to sew surgeons gowns and to knit. The Roundup Record found it necessary to cascade local women. According to that paper, for the first few weeks after Roundup's Red Cross office opened, it was bustling. But now, only the truly loyal women were to be found there. And this was March, 1918, so almost a year after the U.S. entry into the war. The others could be found at card parties, teas, and other social functions. Uninterrupted by thoughts or worries for the safety of the boys from Roundup. Comparing the women of Roundup unfavorably to the women of the revolutionary and civil wars, because everyone is always better back then, the paper sternly declared in bold font with each word capitalized, the woman who neglects her duty to the soldiers for the sake of card parties and other unnecessary social functions is a slacker. Another measure of patriotism was the purchase of war bonds and Montanans bought their share, often more than their share, and here are a couple of newspaper clippings. One from Glasgow and one from Choteau, talking about how their communities are oversubscribed. But, patriotism wasn't the only thing that motivated Montanans to buy war bonds. And I think people have talked a little bit about this before, if you went to Natasha Hollenbach, I think talked about this in her session. In Columbia Falls in April 1918, a solicitude committee went house-to-house, armed with detailed information about each family, and this was in the paper, and they said they're coming, they're gonna have a card, and that card is going to include your nationality, your church, whether you are citizen, the value of your real and personal property, an estimate of indebtedness, an estimate of net worth, estimated income, former subscriptions to the Red Cross, YMCA, Knights of Columbus, and previous Liberty Loan purchases. The paper explained: Well, it's been estimated what each person should subscribe, there's nothing to prevent an over subscription. Neither will the party called upon be told what his allotment is. But he will be asked to subscribe for as much as he cares to. And if that sum does not equal the figure estimated to be his share, the matter will be taken up in a different way. So, Columbia Falls was leaving nothing to chance. Food was another area where people's resolve sometimes faltered. Historians estimate that meatless Mondays and wheatless Wednesdays, and other voluntary sacrifices allowed the U.S. to furnish an additional 18.5 million tons of food to the Allies. But, not everyone embraced the government's demand to save wheat for the fighters. Dan Cushman, and I read Dan Cushman's autobiography 'Plenty of Room and Air' on the recommendation of Dale Martin, he's a professor at Montana State University, and I contacted him early and I said, "What should I read?". He said there's this great reminiscence that gives a child's eye view of the war and I recommended it. He grew up near Harlem, Dan did, and he remembers his mother trying to make Liberty War bread with substitute flours that she was required to buy. Because while there wasn't rationing, there was this requirement that if you were going to buy wheat flour you also had to buy a certain amount of rye or corn flour. And he said nobody would eat it; it was terrible. And so she fed it to the chickens. And this was a family that was quite pro-war. It was failed and they wouldn't eat it and then after that first attempt, she didn't even bother to try to make bread, she'd just make mush, and use that as chicken feed with her substitute flours. And so he said, "We ate war bread, only in a different form as a white bread, eggs, and fried chicken; a good common-sense solution. History is about empathy and diving into the sources gave me a better understanding of how genuinely scared many Montanans were of the Industrial Workers of the World, anti-war resistance and their German neighbors, and this included Dan Cushman who remembered being convinced that the Huns were going to invade his town, Harlem. It's easy to laugh at headlines like this one: 'Your neighbor, your maid, your lawyer, your waiter, may be a German spy'. And it's easy to look back with judgment towards Montanans for going too far in their response to World War I. Now, I think we're right to condemn the burning of German textbooks, pictured here in Lewistown, and by the way this was a prelude, the prelude to this book burning was a mob pursuing men they thought were pro-German forcing them to kiss the flag and the culmination of the day's events was an evening parade joined, the newspaper reported, by two thousand people, which was about a third of the town. Also shameful is the imprisonment of 79 Montanans for sedition, including popular area farmer Theodore Klippstine, who was convicted after a one-day trial for saying that 'only the damned officials we sent to Washington and the big-moneyed men wanted war'. The father of nine served 25 months in prison. And by the way, he said these when he was there registering for the draft, right. Equally horrifying is extra legal violence against union leaders and pacifists. Frank Littles lynching is the most famous and the most brutal. But it was not a complete anomaly. According to historian Bonnie Christian, in Red Lodge, the Liberty Committee took suspected IWW leaders to the basement of the Elk Lodge, strung a rope around one of their necks, hauled him up three times before he admitted he was a wobbly and provided names of other members. And that incident ended in a horrific shooting where one of the IWW, suspected IWW Finnish miners, escaped, went home. He had a gun. He thought they were coming for him. He shot his gun. When he heard someone entering his house, it turned out to be his border. And so he murdered a woman who was living with them. Near Glendive, 12 men including the County Sheriff, and this is, I think, really important, these were not ruffians, right? This is the County Sheriff, two attorneys, a banker, and several business owners and cattlemen, went and kidnapped a local Mennonite Minister, John Franz, from a school board meeting. They drove them out to an isolated area in the Badlands where there was a large tree. They tried to put a noose around his neck. His son said that he was able to hold on to the rope, his father was able to hold on to the rope, with unexpected strength and plead with the men to not do this, plead with his lynch mob. And he addressed them and he knew directly, he said to the sheriff, He said I voted for you, because
I believed in you and trusted you. You were to give me protection if and when I needed it. Now, you are not giving me that protection. And he talked the same way to the county attorney. After much pleading, they took them back to Glendive. They locked him in the county jail. There was another plan to take him out of the county jail with a bigger mob, but they didn't. They ultimately released him under a three thousand dollar bond and years later, by the way, one of the attorneys came and asked forgiveness, which John France readily gave. None of the other twelve ever mentioned it. Because these stories, this type of story, seemed to us today like madness, I think it's especially important to put them in context. The fact is, capitalists, both Main Streeters and copper kings, professionals, like the attorneys, many farmers and ranchers, believed that left-wing radicals were a real threat. Because after all, 1917 was not only the year that the United States entered World War I, it was also the beginning of the Russian Revolution. Now, I'll give you bits and pieces of Montana's labor history, including the fact that on June 23rd, 1914, disgruntled rank-and-file members of the Butte Miners Union dynamited their own union hall, because they thought their union had sold out to the company, and that as violence escalated, Governor Stewart declared martial law and the Montana National Guard occupied a Butte. What I didn't know, was that in North Dakota, over 100 harvest Wobblies, itinerant farm workers, who were also members of the Industrial Workers of the World, borrowed a Great Northern train and headed toward Butte to support their union brothers, in which our staff ably told the story in greater detail yesterday. The left, especially the labor left, had enough power to instill fear, and I think you might have seen this headline already, but these are anartistic demonstrations in Butte broke up by quick action troops. I also haven't really realized how deliberate the fear-mongering campaign against both immigrants and radicals, and especially radical immigrants, was. Anti-immigrant and anti-radical sentiment predated the war. In 1915, for example, President Wilson called immigrants foreign-born creatures of passion disloyalty and Anarchy, who must be crushed out. According to historian, David Kennedy, conservative elements sought to suffocate troublesome immigrant and working-class elements in an avalanche of patriotism. The war provided a perfect vehicle for this, a fact that George Creel, the head of the Committee on Public Information, which was the federal agency in charge of wartime propaganda, recognized. After armistice, he reflected, 'I am not sure that if the war had to come, it did not come at the right time for the preservation and reinterpretation of American ideals. That's, I think, a really convoluted sentence, but if you take out those double negatives, what he's saying is the war came at the right time for the preservation and reinterpretation of American ideals. This poster is not one of Creels. It was part of a campaign created by the National Association of Manufacturers to promote industrial Conservation, which was a belief that there should be a closer personal, economic understanding between employer and workman. In 1917, the Association explained its motivation for promoting industrial conservation. It said, if the principle of industrial conservation is not effectively carried out in American industry, the alternative will be a form of state controlled socialism, because we do not see what other alternative there can be, For those of you in the back or maybe even in the front, man it's hard to read that poster. What you see up, is on top, right there, that bridge is the bridge that will win the war. And it's made up of ships carrying American produce supplies to Europe and cheered on by both wage earners and their bosses. And then on the bottom is the hyphen bridge, and of course the hyphen bridge is referring to hyphenated Americans, like German-Americans, or Finnish-Americans, Italian-Americans. And across the bridge was walking plots, that bridge, the hyphen bridge, plots, fires, agitation, and unrest. And the question is, 'Which bridge do you want?' Montana mirrored the nation and the nation that learned from Montana as I think many of you know in August 1917 Montana's Senator Henry Meyers of Hamilton who was a longtime anti-union conservative Some would say a company man. He introduced Senate bill 27 89 which was a law to punish inflammatory talk it targeted Industrial Workers of the world Who Meyer claims were openly preaching strikes and denouncing the war and? They were yes The bill died in committee, but less than a year later attitudes had shifted shortly after the Montana Legislature had adopted Meyers lanta language for the Montana Sedition Act in February 1918 an almost identical bill passed Congress by large majorities and this cartoon For those of you who can't see the wording, there's a flag over the Capitol, and it says 'sedition law passed', and then among them Uncle Sam is rounding up undesirables. There's a beast like IWW down there at the bottom left, a traitor, a spy, and a member of the Irish national organization, Sinn Fein. So, it's within this context, aggravated by sensationalist and unvetted newspaper reports, including the suggestion that German agents might have been responsible for the Speculator Mine disaster, and that German agents had set up a communication station near Paradise. Because, we all know, that's where German agents would want to set up, right? As well as actual sabotage, that people came to fear German spies and the IWW in their midst, and they were genuinely scared. In an interview many years later, Northern Pacific telephone operator, Minda McNally, insisted mistakenly that IWW spies would derail trains by throwing a switch at the wrong time. These spies for Germany could do anything to delay a troop train or injure our troops. I think....and that's Minda, there, in her high school yearbook photograph, she's bottom right. I think most of us would like to believe that we would have resisted the worst of this propaganda, and we would have stood with people like Judge Portland and Attorney General Burton K. Wheeler, in opposing the trampling of civil liberties. But, hindsight is 20/20. Explaining this context isn't to excuse the violence, arrests, civil liberties violations. But it is to begin to understand it and to recognize how much of the tensions or class tensions, and how much of the fear was engineered in order to protect capitalism. While the National Association of Manufacturing were promoting their version of a hundred percent Americans, organizations like the Nonpartisan League tried to offer competing definition of patriotism, one that included a socialist vision with state control of grain elevators, banks, and other industries to reduce the power of corporate interests. And I don't know if you can see this, again, but this is a cartoon published in the Nonpartisan League Producers News, which under the editorship of red flag Charlie Taylor, became a communist party's agricultural newspaper in the 1920's. And in this picture, and this was Armistice Day, the soldiers marching home and saying, 'Now to get back home and help dad and the boys clean out a few autocrats there. You know, I think it's fair to say that the Nonpartisan League lost that rhetorical war. There's a lot of interesting stories, so many that it was hard to choose these few to feature. And a lot of them are sober. You know, I feel a little bad, breakfast talk, it's been a downer, and that's because World War I kind of is a downer. But, if I had more time I'd tell you about (and many think this was good not to talk too much about at breakfast), how awful it would have been to be a nurse, though apparently many of the women who served loved it, despite of, or perhaps because of, the 14-hour days changing dressings, and irrigating and disinfecting wounds, while listening to the whistling of bombs. And I was, every time I study history, I am really, really, really grateful for the invention of penicillin. Just...changed my life. And aside, in terms of being a nurse, I didn't know that the field of plastic surgery came out of World War I. I don't know if you did? And I learned that, when I was researching Baker, Montana nurse Violet Hobson, who worked as chief nurse for Dr. V. P. Blair, who specialized in facial reconstruction and became known as a father of plastic surgery. And it was Rich Arstad who explained to me why facial reconstruction was so important during World War I, and it is because it's trench warfare, and so that's what's gonna get shot I'd tell you about the English and French agents who traveled to Montana to purchase horses, if we had more time. When French representatives arrived in Ekalaka in 1915, they paid $115 for cavalry, $140 for Gunners, and $155 for artillery horses. Horses, I learned, were particularly vulnerable to the machine gun and artillery fire of modern warfare. And so we're not... So, they were primarily used for hauling supplies behind the lines. The U.S. exported a million horses to its allies, and an additional 182,000 horses accompanied the American Expeditionary Force to France. And I'd introduced you to Emil Christensen. A German immigrant who had moved to Bozeman in the years before World War I, sent to fight overseas with Montana 2nd Infantry. Christensen served in a field hospital during the Argonne offensive, and after the war he guarded German POW's. When one POW asked Christensen why he chose to fight for the U.S., even though he was a German citizen, Christensen responded because America is my home. But time is short, so as Bruce said, I invite you to make your own discoveries. As Bruce already has done by spending some time on our website, listening to selections from the oral histories and Minda's is on there, as is Christensen's, although his is really hard to understand, but we also have transcripts. Downloading and reading articles from Montana, The Magazine of Western History and other sources, and of course, exploring the story and map. But I'd also invite you to step away from your computer, take the special 'Doing Our Bit' tour, that Bobby Harris and Maggie Gordon created for the original governor's mansion, and to visit the new World War I exhibit here at the Montana Historical Society, when it opens in a few months, or one of the other commemorative exhibits around the state. And, I'm really looking forward to listening to Rafael Chacon this afternoon and getting over to Missoula to look at the exhibit they created. And of course, I look forward to joining you and discovery at the rest of this morning sessions. Thank you.
