On this day, many nations pause to remember their war dead, the soldiers who have served and fallen, especially those who served in World War One.
What the US celebrates as Veterans Day began as a peace celebration on November 11, 1918, with the end of the pitiless conflict known as World War One. The announcement that the war had ended with the signing of a multinational peace agreement, or Armistice, triggered massive spontaneous jubilees in many places worldwide. In Europe, the States, Canada, even New Zealand and Australia, vast crowds gathered in the ceremonial centers of cities to cheer the end of a struggle that had cost the warring nations many millions of lives.
This marvelous photograph shows Philadelphians celebrating the word of peace that day. Horrible as the war was, the photograph conveys a feeling of pride, even as it commemorates a sort of war unfamiliar to us today. For World War One had a definite beginning and end. When the United States entered the war on 4 April 1917, it was with a formal declaration of war from Congress. President Woodrow Wilson had struggled to maintain a stance of neutrality toward the war for the previous two-and-a-half years, during which time public sentiment in favor of the war had gradually built.
Once the US had entered the war, there was a draft. Over a million men were mobilized. By the end of the war, 18 months later, American forces had suffered some 320,000 casualties, the majority being wounded, with tens of thousands being lost to death and disease. Being at war demanded something from all society, taxing the economy to its limits and requiring sacrifice on the part of civilians, as the signs around the Philadelphia square suggest.
Hence the massive outpouring of joy when the war reached a definite end, and the blessed condition known as peace was attained for a time.
Image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Click on the image to go to the source.
An old photograph shows Charles M Schwab on top of the world.
True, the most recognizable figure in the photograph is President Woodrow Wilson, who looks down on Schwab from the platform of his special train car. The day is sunny. Wilson’s secret-service man and his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, stand in the shadows. Something has just happened or is about to happen. A large floral arrangement leans against the train’s railing, its funny shape capped with a flamboyant bow.
Edith’s presence in what appears to be an official photograph (the widowed president married her on December 18, 1915) establishes that this photograph was taken no earlier than 1916. The carefree postures of the figures and their light-colored clothing indicate that it’s spring or summer. The president, always natty, is decked out in a light-colored suit and a boater. Summer it was—sometime between Memorial and Labor Day.
Though the president is bathed in light, charisma emanates from the homely yet somehow magisterial Charles M. Schwab (1862-1939). Here, with his back to the president—as though ignorant of his presence—, Schwab looks straight into the camera, his bluff exuberance setting the tone. He and his two unidentified companions share a joke, as if they posed with the president every day. Certainly, Schwab and the younger men exude solidarity, though he is evidently more powerful than they.
As for the young men themselves, what unconventional outfits they are wearing! The one on the left wears a tie with his overalls; the one on the right, though seemingly equally careless of his dress, wears a good striped dress shirt (without the customary collar or tie) under a smock-like jacket. No belt to the pants but two large buttons on his lapel. Are they campaign buttons? No, for they contain only numbers rather than words. They are more like badges, some sort of ID.
One more figure is implied the scene: Carl T. Thoner (1888-1938), the photographer, whose name is stamped on the photograph’s corner. Thoner worked for the war department, so this scene was part of Wilson’s presidency—pertaining to governing rather than running for office. Yet the fact that the photograph bears Schwab’s signature and later ended up in the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library testifies to the personal significance the occasion had for both men.
When did the careers of Wilson and Schwab intersect? Schwab was one of the greatest industrialists of his time, a great steel man, self-made, a “master hustler,” some called him. He’d learned what he knew from the likes of J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie.
Born in Pennsylvania, Schwab had worked his way up in Carnegie’s mills, becoming president of Carnegie Steel while in his thirties. After helping to found United States Steel Corporation and being its first president, he broke out on his own to take control of a smaller competitor, Bethlehem Steel. Under Schwab’s ownership, Bethlehem Steel became the one of the world’s largest and most important heavy-manufacturing concerns.
In Schwab, a deftness with finance and industrial relations combined with innovative ideas about how to make steel. He became great by perceiving the importance of the so-called I-beam, a product that, because of its great tensile strength, made possible skyscrapers, enormous ships, better bridges—all the emblems of modernity. Hitherto, steel had been made in shorter lengths, requiring more welding and lacking the I-beam’s versatility. By retrofitting his steel works around the beam’s production and more closely integrating steel-making more generally, Schwab increased Bethlehem’s annual sales from $10 million in 1904 to $230 million in 1916. In the process, Schwab became immensely wealthy, embracing philanthropic causes but also living in a recklessly lavish style.
As part of his corporate stewardship, Schwab developed one of the nation’s most successfulearly soccer teams. Founded in 1907, Bethlehem Steel Football Club hit its stride in 1913, winning a string of national championships thereafter, thanks in part to Schwab’s recruiting top talent from Scotland. Was the man standing next to Schwab a soccer player? The players, who worked in Schwab’s plants, were given time off to practice and travel to games.
No, the key to this photograph is Schwab’s appointment to head up the nation’s Emergency Fleet Corporation in the summer of 1918. World War I was wearing on, and the nation’s program to produce a large number of ships for the merchant marine was faltering. Schwab put his own life’s work on hold to move down to Philadelphia, where the government’s new Hog Island shipyard was located. There, he reinvigorated the nation’s shipbuilding program. The completion of the Quistconck (the subject of my previous post) in record time was attributed largely to Schwab’s energy and ability.
So, this photograph, like the one I wrote about previously, was taken at Hog Island, Philadelphia, on August 5, 1918. The president and his wife had come down from Washington by train for the day, where, at noon, they presided over the Quistconck’s christening. The men flanking Schwab are shipyard workers, one almost certainly the foreman MacMillan, who had driven the first rivet of the Quistconck on Feb 18, 1918, and was being celebrated at the christening as a near-hero. The many thousand workers who had worked on the ship each contributed a mite to buy an enormous bouquet of roses, which was presented to the First Lady that day.
This photograph records the Wilsons’ final moment at the shipyard, when, just before their train pulled away, the President leaned over to give his best to Charles M. Schwab.
There were no speeches, it being a hot day. So, with a minimum of ceremony, and before a crowd of some 60,000 people, the new First Lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, clumsily christened the new cargo ship, the champagne splashing off its hull and all over her lovely dress of lavender voile. A small detail lost in the excitement of the moment, as the enormous freighter slid down the ways under the gaze of dignitaries, the tens of thousands of shipyard workers who built her, and their families. Meanwhile Edith’s husband, the President Woodrow, suddenly boylike, waved his hat in the air and led the crowd in a riotous patriotic cheer. Bands played tinny airs, almost drowned out, while flags flapped in a sultry breeze.
It was a curious phase of WWI, with the long war nearly over and America’s concomitant shipbuilding effort only just then hitting its stride. After years of maintaining its neutrality, the United States had entered the war in the spring of 1917, partly in response to Germany’s relentless U-Boat attacks upon all trans-Atlantic shipping. It was another year before the US had embarked on an ambitious breakneck program to build a whole fleet of ships to replace the many US vessels that German submarines had destroyed. (Germany sank some 6.2 million tons of Allied and neutral ships in 1917 alone.)
One result of this determination was the overnight creation of the vast Hog Island shipyard on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Built on swampy outlying land (where the Philadelphia airport stands today), the shipyard consisted of 50 enormous bays. Covering 1.25 miles of land along the Delaware River, the yard, which 30,000 workers labored in harsh winter conditions to build, was the largest of any in the world. Though something of a boondoggle (the $50-million shipyard was essentially defunct by 1921), Hog Island was at the same time a source of great national pride, a proof of what American industry and a common sense of mission could together accomplish.
(Some scholars also credit Hog Island workers, who lived in an instant city and represented many food traditions, with giving the bulky sandwich known as the hoagie to the world.)
The Quistconck was the first vessel to be launched, of the hundreds that Hog Island was expected to produce. Though some of the ships were never built (the end of the war made them unnecessary), the Hog Island shipyard produced 248 5500-ton steel vessels over a two-year period, at the unprecedented rate of one every three to four days. The shipyard was innovative in applying standardized assembly-line techniques to shipbuilding, helping to restore and modernize the nation’s inadequate and sadly decimated merchant marine. Essential to any military effort abroad, many of these ugly supply vessels saw service in WWII.
Mrs Wilson, who had been married to the president for less than a year, was given the privilege of naming many of the vessels. Believing she was descended from Pocahontas and therefore a living representative of America’s indigenous nobility, Edith Wilson gave the ships Indian names. Quistconck was Hog Island’s native Delaware name.
The Quistconck’s christening celebrated the mobilization of a whole society around the national interests perceived to be in play during WWI. Whether or not this was the whole story of the shipyard, art and photography record the vigor of patriotic sentiment that kept the crowds cheering on that hot August day.
Top image from this source. Poster by James Henry Daughetry, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Click here to see other WWI shipbuilding posters on the website
of the American Merchant Marine at War.
In 1918, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, an armistice ended World War One.
Some 1.2 million American troops were massed on the western front, in France. In the last two months, they had aggressively and successfully battled German troops for control of the Argonne Forest. This massive, culminating Allied assault, which compelled Germany to seek a negotiated peace, left some 26,000 Americans dead and another 95,000 wounded. Their commanders knew an armistice was imminent, yet nearly 11,000 Americans were lost on the war’s final day.
Cruel as the costs of the battle were, American casualties in ‘the Great War’ (1914-1918) paled beside those of Europe. France’s casualties alone totaled over 6.1 million, representing 73 percent of its mobilized force. Of these, over a half-million were listed as prisoners or missing. Britain’s casualties were more than 3.1 million, while Russia, which had mobilized 12 million men during the war (an astonishing number), saw 4.9 million wounded, 1.7 million killed.
Comprehending the magnitude of these losses and the nature and extent of the war’s damage was a social and philosophical struggle that would last for years. The nations’ profound grief found expression in many forms. Land and culture would long continue to bear the scars.
The war left soldiers without any recollection of their identity; it left psyches shattered from shell-shock, nerves damaged by gas. Faces and limbs mutilated. Corpses far too incorporeal to identify. The war truly annihilated many combatants, depriving families the consolation of reclaiming their loved one’s remains.
In response, several nations moved to enact the symbolic burial of an unknown soldier in a ceremonial Tomb. By interring a single anonymous warrior, they sought to honor and immortalize all who were lost and nameless. The Tombs offered national recognition to numberless soldiers and their families, whose losses and sacrifices History had otherwise rubbed out.
In 1920, France and England were the first to bring such plans to fruition. They interred their ‘unknowns’ in tombs at the Arc de Triomphe and Westminster Abbey. The United States followed suit in 1921, bringing the remains of an unknown American soldier back from France for ceremonial reburial at Arlington Cemetery. Workers labored for months, building the Tomb and a new Memorial Amphitheater too.
The ceremony was scheduled for November 11, which Congress declared should henceforth be known not as Armistice, but as Veterans, Day. The coffin of an unknown American who died in the war’s last battle was randomly chosen from among four specially exhumed from the American cemetery at Meuse-Argonne.
Transported across the Atlantic in the U.S.S. Olympia, the body arrived at the Navy Yard in Washington DC on November 9. General Pershing and other top brass received the body in an elaborate disembarkation ceremony. The day was rainy. The coffin lay on an upper deck under a tent of flags.
The body was taken to the Capitol, where, with the honors usually reserved for deceased presidents, it lay in state in the Rotunda, under a military guard. President Harding (at right) and others (General Pershing, at left) came to pay their respects. The bier was heaped with funeral wreaths, with more arriving every minute from all over the country.
On Veterans Day, crowds clogged the streets, leaned from windows, and climbed rooftops, to witness the funeral cortege as it rolled by. Six black horses pulled the caisson, at the head of a long procession that included President Harding, former President Woodrow Wilson, and ranks of the military.
President Wilson rode in a carriage, even though he was an auto enthusiast and horse-drawn conveyances were by then an anachronism.
Crossing the Potomac into Virginia, the procession finally neared the grave.
Crowded atop the colonnade of the new amphitheater, cameramen documented the vistas, the participants, the pageantry, the scene.
On a dais banked with flowers and festooned with funerary garlands, President Harding stood by the casket of the Unknown Soldier and addressed the crowd.
Finally, the unknown soldier was laid to rest, while, beyond the crush of attentive mourners, a peaceful countryside stretched.
Some of the day’s events were even captured on film.
Hand-colored photographs are from the E.B. Thompson Collection,
courtesy of the DC Public Library via the Commons on Flickr. Film clip courtesy of historycomestolife.
All other photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress.
A hundred years ago today, excitement gripped Washington, as crowds flooded the capital in anticipation of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration the next day.
Wilson’s swearing-in marked an unlooked-for turn in American politics. As an intellectual, a Democrat, and a Southerner, he promised to introduce a national tone quite different than what the US had been used to under his Republican predecessor, William Taft. Wilson’s election was a heady coup for the Democrats, whose victory owed much to divisions within the Republican Party, which had split apart into conservative and progressive wings, aligned around Taft and Theodore Roosevelt respectively.
Wilson, who strove to present himself as a reformer and people’s champion, understood the value of publicity. Preparations for his inaugural were elaborate and included a kind of triumphal procession toward Washington beginning from his birthplace in Staunton, Virginia. Every aspect of the undertaking was heavily publicized, including the stringing of electric lights along Pennsylvania Avenue, which was breathtakingly modern at the time.
There was just one complication Wilson hadn’t given much thought to. His idea of political progress didn’t include the ladies, who he believed shouldn’t vote, lest they become “unsexed” and manly. So, for months, mainly beyond his consciousness, a feminine maelstrom of discontent had been brewing.
A young college graduate named Alice Paul and her fellow activists were intent on organizing a vast suffrage parade, to take place in the capital on March 3, the day before Wilson’s inauguration, stealing his thunder and symbolically following the same route to power as he.
After three months of frantic planning, Paul and her committee had raised $14,908.06 in funds (at a time when the average yearly wage was $621), mobilized thousands of like-minded women all over the country, and laid the groundwork for a parade with floats, delegations, and an allegorical pageant to be performed on the steps of the Treasury Building.
Women from all over donned protest garb and walked, rode, and sailed to take part in the great Woman Suffrage Parade. There were delegations from Europe, marchers from places like Chicago, Oklahoma, New York, and Ohio, and women from all walks of life. They bore colorful banners and distributed lavishly expensive programs trumpeting the day’s official proceedings.
In the hours before the commencement of the parade, the capital’s streets became choked with people, as skeptical men and more than 5,000 female demonstrators and their allies arrived.
Police were unprepared to deal with the dense masses of spectators and protestors. Authorities viewed the effort dismissively. They had not planned to clear the streets, imagining that the sidewalks would suffice for a ladies’ parade. The streetcars were still running, as pandemonium brewed.
Finally, the streets were cleared and the parade began. The suffragettes marched several blocks unimpeded, but gradually men began surging into the street, making it almost impossible for the women to pass. The mood turned ugly and openly insulting. Marchers struggled to get past the hecklers, their path reduced to a single file. The men were emboldened by the police, who refused to protect the marchers and instead joined in their humiliation. Helen Keller, who was among the marchers, found the experience profoundly enervating and exhausting. Nearly 100 of the marchers were hospitalized.
The chief of police, realizing too late how he had miscalculated, called on Secretary of War Harold Stimson to send out an infantry regiment to restore order and control the crowd. In the wake of the Congressional inquiries that followed, that police chief would lose his job.
Wilson’s arrival in town was barely noticed that day. His inauguration, though orderly, was eclipsed by the more truly electrifying Suffrage Parade. The bold strategies of Alice Paul and her sisters succeeded brilliantly, breathing new life into women’s quest for the vote, a goal they would finally achieve in 1920.
