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The Great War at Home in Wisconsin: Part III

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome. My name is Kevin Hampton. I’m the curator of history at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. And thank you for joining us for our third and final session on Wisconsin and the Great War. Today we are joined by Rebecca Matzke of Ripon College, who will be speaking on the “Pamphlet War in the Great War: British Propaganda to a Wisconsin Audience.” Amy Fels of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who’s speaking on “Oshkosh on the Home Front: Activities and Attitudes During World War I.” And Jennifer Zoebelein, Kansas State University, who is speaking on “Into the Brutal Blast the American War Experience as Seen in the Poetry of Byron Comstock.” I’ll begin with Rebecca. (audience applauds)

– Thanks very much, Kevin, and thanks for being here everybody. World War I’s often described as one of the first total wars involving the mobilization of all of the nation’s resources both military and civilian. Propaganda of course was then considered by all the belligerents in the war as something that was a vital auxiliary to what was going on on the battlefield. So between 1914 and 1918, the British government, in particular, decided that propaganda needed to be systematized. The government needed to control it, and mobilize it, in order to mobilize consent in the nation and hopefully to influence countries other than just the home front, as well. There had been propaganda before in wars, mostly left to the private sector. So this is sort of a change that happens in World War I. Both the British and the German governments target the United States during World War I with propaganda, I’m just gonna concentrate on the British one today. Their efforts are really multi-faceted, and the part that I’m going to be paying attention to is the so-called pamphlet war for American public opinion. You see some examples up there of the various pamphlets that I’ll be talking about. Pamphlet propaganda was headed up by Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau, usually known as Wellington House, because of the building it was housed in.

It was begun in secret by a friend of the prime minister Charles Masterman, who was a publicist and a writer. He was assisted by Sir Gilbert Parker, who’s the one over there on the right, who was in charge of propaganda to the Dominions and to the United States. Parker was a Canadian author, he was a British MP, and his wife was an American. So he had connections that were gonna be useful. Now the War Propaganda Bureau targeted a bunch of very popular British authors in order to write or edit pamphlets. A lot of times the pamphlets would reprint news articles, or pubic speeches, or documents, or things like that that put Britain in a good light. So here we have John Buchan, who’s a famous thriller writer at the time. General Smuts, South African general, well-known to a lot of people. Pamphlets also tended to use the works of American authors. They might reprint, as you see here, American news articles by American reporters, or other people who had American connections in order to be persuasive. So again, the entire time Wellington House hid the origins of these documents.

They were designed to be secret. In fact, the British government got a lot of criticism during the war for not doing enough to try to persuade people, because they continued to keep this whole operation secret. Why are they keeping this secret from the Americans where it’s coming from? They’re pretty convinced the Americans have turned against German propaganda, because it was very ham-handed and obviously government driven. So they were not going to give them that excuse and instead they have all of the pamphlets printed by private publishers. They’re all sent direct mail to people in the United States from private individuals and public figures in the UK. They did not target this kind of propaganda at the masses. They were aiming at what they called opinion makers. So for example, Parker goes through the American volume of Who’s Who in America and puts together a list of some 13,000 professionals, academics, political leaders, journalists, who would receive these disguised mailings that apparently came from individuals in the UK. There may have been as many as 260,000 of these people on the list by the end of the war.

They also sent pamphlets to organizations like clubs, or YMCAs, public libraries, and universities throughout the war, as well. Oftentimes they would send these things with these little enclosure cards inside the front cover, saying they were being sent compliments of so and so, so Sir Gilbert Parker, Professor Dixon of the University of Glasgow who was his successor there. Because, again, they were trying to disguise their origins. They were coming from concerned individuals in the UK. And they claim that the best propaganda in these pamphlets for this type of elite audience they were going for, was facts and arguments based upon facts, as they said. They thought that educated people could clearly see through any kind of emotional appeals, so they were going to keep it very scholarly. Thus, everything is visually very boring, because plain paper covers, very few illustrations, this emphasized how serious and scholarly, and sort of objective all of these things were. You don’t see all of those wonderful colorful and kind of scandalous propaganda posters. That kind of artwork does not come up in these pamphlets.

So, why am I dealing with these kinds of things? Well, dozens of these pamphlets wound up in the small central Wisconsin town of Ripon, where I happen to teach, between 1915 and 1919. So Ripon was a town of about 5,000 in this period. All of these pamphlets were eventually collected by the Ripon Historical Society, which doesn’t have any kind of record of their origins. But I suspect they were collected by Samuel Pedrick, who was a local lawyer, very involved in the town. He was an amateur historian. He happened to be a Democrat in a very Republican area of the state. And once the United States got involved in the war, he was one of the leaders of the local Council of Defense, and also a member of the Four-Minute-Men, so very involved in the war effort once it came. Ripon, by the way, may have been targeted because it was deemed a Republican territory. Maybe you didn’t know this, but it’s the historic birthplace, claims to be the historic birthplace of the Republican Party.

And, it was a very Republican heavy area. So you might need some convincing to go along with Wilson and the Democrats, even after the US joined the war. You might see in the picture over on the right, Ripon also had a strong tradition of military service by this period. The First Wisconsin Calvary mustered in the Civil War in Ripon. Lots of Ripon Civil War veterans were still left. In 1916 Ripon actually hosted a big festival of all the Wisconsin Civil War veterans. So that’s the flag, the living flag they made during the parade there. Company D of the National Guard that was in Ripon served in the Spanish-American War and also then served in the Mexican Border Expedition, as well, in 1916. Another possibility was that these were sent to someone at Ripon College, which had been founded in 1851, liberal arts college, obviously still there.

And maybe to its president, Silas Evans, who was actually a– He was a minister and a well-known speaker on international affairs around the country, in fact. And, he was a self-admitted Wilsonian liberal himself. Ripon had a very popular and actually the oldest college newspaper in the country, which tended again to go along with what the president liked to say, as well. So what was the purpose of all of these pamphlets? Why were the coming to the United States into a town like Ripon? What kinds of topics did these propagandists think would be persuasive to American audiences? Well, early in the war most of the pamphlets intended to praise the US for being neutral and to keep it neutral. Later, they did try a little more clearly to influence Americans to support Britain. Interestingly, none of the pamphlets that I’ve read ever directly asks the US to join the war, at all. Obviously the pamphlets continued to come even after the US does join the war. So that seems to say the British still thought that the Americans could use some reassurance, that they were fighting on the right side. So within those larger goals, the pamphlets also had to address immediate war time concerns, like American protests over the British blockade of Germany.

It was interfering with American trade. They also tended to be opportunistic. The Germans would do something bad during the war and a pamphlet would come out that exposed that and made Germany look bad. More broadly, the pamphlets, I think, are aimed at creating this sense of affinity between Americans and the British that would serve the British during the war, but would also serve them after the war, and get the US to see perhaps some kind of what we all know as a special relationship between the US and Britain. That sort of thing, by the way, is not a given in 1914, whether it’s ever existed actually. Throughout the whole 19th century Britain and the US are rivals at best. There are several times when they almost go to war over border issues. They argue over what becomes the Panama Canal. Here’s a cartoon, an American cartoon, protesting British potential intervention in the Civil War, so they are not natural friends.

The governments are not. Wider political culture is not, as well. And as many people have mentioned in this conference, there are obviously large populations of German immigrants and their descendants, Irish immigrants and their descendants in the US. These people have no natural love for Britain, particularly in Wisconsin. But things are also changing by the period before World War I. Relations had improved somewhat. The British expressed satisfaction with the way that the US handles the Spanish-American War, and of course that war marks the expansion of the United States and its holdings outside of North America, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, et cetera. The navy of the United States expands to protect all of those. The Panama Canal is opened just after all of the European declarations of war in 1914.

So the British government looks at these sorts of things and sees a challenge, a growing world power, so in both the short-term war context and the longer-term rivalry context, these pamphlets would help to make the argument that, hey we’re all kind of the same. We can get along and work together as the war is going on, and maybe we can be partners when it’s done. So the war, just to give you a little background there. The pamphlets that come to Ripon, we have about 240 of them. They range in date from 1915 to 1918. And again, most of them seem to be aimed at subtle persuasion. They are laying out information, as they say, so that readers can make up their own minds. So what are some of the things that they cover? There are a whole lot that cover naval issues. I would say some 70 to 75 pamphlets talk about naval related things.

Defending Britain’s practices during the war. And also trying to defend Britain’s long-standing dominance of the world’s oceans and trade, which the US has relied on. Now, early on many of the pamphlets had to reassure Americans that the British were actually doing something. Because one of the complaints is that the English are apathetic, they have these lovely battleships, everybody knew these battle fleets were supposed to be fighting each other, and that hadn’t happened. So Americans are sort of suspicious of that. So they come up with all kinds of pamphlets like, “What is the Matter with England?” There’s another one called “Is England Apathetic?” There’s a bunch of these titles that sort of say, yes, yes, we know we haven’t fought a big fight, however, we’re stopping German commerce. We’ve locked their fleet into harbor. The navy’s doing a great job. There are other pamphlets that tell these sort of heroic stories of British seamen, and officers, it’s kind of an adventure or travel writing.

Those are pretty fascinating too. All of the British officers come up as stiff upper-lip types, and all of those seamen are out there doing their duty in hazardous conditions, not making a fuss. You have a lot of pamphlets of course that address the British blockade, giving you a little map here of where the blockade was located, the sea blockade. The Wilson Administration of course protested loudly against this. It was something that really bothered a lot of Americans. So pamphlets make all kinds of cases for why the Americans should sit tight, and put up with the blockade. So there are lots of pamphlets about how, “No, it’s perfectly legal,” “it’s not so bad, in fact we’re being very courteous.” The pamphlet that I have up here is actually a rare one with an illustration inside of it, and I love this illustration. It’s the officer in charge having boarded a ship, very courteously, talking to the mates on the ship that they’ve just boarded as part of the blockade. And the text below, which you can’t really read, says, “And all officers are given instructions to treat everyone fairly and nicely.” So that’s what gets shown in this as well.

They also tended to say, “look at all of the sneaky ways that people are getting contraband to the Germans.” So of course we have to do the blockade. So it’s a big deal. British propagandists of course also know that the best defense is a good offense, and the blockade looks a lot better if you compare it with German’s unrestricted submarine warfare. So there are lots of pamphlets that go after the subs. They charge Germany with willful murder on the high seas, talk about how they sink neutral ships. They sink hospital ships. They leave survivors of sunken ships in open boats to die of exposure. One even was an expose of Germany’s creation of a commemorative medal about the Lusitania, that was sure to make American’s blood boil. Added to the subs, you had all kinds of other propaganda that was focused on atrocities.

So we’ve heard some about that too. Reports on German actions against non-combatants in places like Belgium. So you’ve got pamphlets that addressed deportation of Belgian civilians, the famous two-volume Bryce Report by the former US Ambassador to the United States investigating, “Alleged German outrages in Belgium.” There are also pamphlets about the Eastern Front by the way. There’s one called, “The Destruction of Poland: A Study in German Efficiency.” That was a good one. The Armenians, the deportations by the Ottoman Empire, and the genocide against the Armenians. There are several of these pamphlets as well, including the one that I have up here by Esther Mugerditchian who had escaped in the course of this, and told her tale as she said to appeal to the goodwill of Armenians now living in America. And so this sort of hooks in with efforts for relief in the Near East that were going on. So again, the point of all the atrocity pamphlets is to link American and British ideals about humanitarianism and to make it clear that Germany and its allies were barbarian war criminals who did not know how to play fair. The empire, British Empire, comes up a lot in pamphlets.

So London apparently assumes that Americans need to be reassured that the empire was a good thing. Also there had been German propaganda accusing Britain of treating its colonies brutally, so they had to defend against that. So you get, again, a variety of pamphlets covering imperial concerns. They would print things by Indian and Irish authors that would talk about their loyalty to the British Empire, their selfless wartime service, and their happiness with British rule. “The Verdict on India,” by the way says, Indian’s are, of course, proud of being British citizens. The Germans were all wrong in their propaganda. Here another sort of unusual illustration inside the front cover of one called “The Gathering of the Clans.” It has Dominion troops gathered around the guy on horseback with the Union Jack showing the loyalty of all British subjects. There are also a bunch of pamphlets that talk about the empire’s civilizing effects. So there’s one by historian Ramsey Muir who says, “the backward peoples of the earth would have stagnated forever in the barbarism in which they had remained since the beginning if Britain had not come and taken over.” Some of the most obviously directed at Americans were the pamphlets that included American opinions, including this one with the material from the rather expansionist former president, Teddy Roosevelt.

Who cheer Britain’s benevolent rule, and in fact sometimes they make equations between say what the US needs to be doing in the Philippines and what the British do in their colonies. So obviously making that connection for a newly imperial United States. That there’s a right way to do colonies, that’s the British, and a wrong way, because they also talk about all the nasty things that the German’s do in their colonies. And the final theme tends to be ideals. There are lots of appeals to American ideals of liberty, towards what the British, not Wilson, call self-determination but people choosing who rules them. And all these portray these ideals as both British and American put together. So War of Liberation talks about German despotism, for example, and pamphlets used Wilson’s own words, or the British version of Wilson’s own words. So this is an American postcard, very obviously, after Wilson won the 1916 election. But there are pamphlets that sort of then play on this and without using quotation marks, say that the US is joining Britain to make the world safe for democracy, again, the British version of that phrase.

And also reassuring everybody in America that all the allies agree on Wilson’s statement that this is a war for human liberty. So using his own words and putting those in the propaganda. Lots of pamphlets also cover nationalist movements for independence. In Eastern Europe, Czechs, Poles, Romanians, and both Arab nationalist and Zionist movements to create national independent states in areas of the Ottoman Empire. So throughout all of these you’re getting the same sort of rhetoric all the time that links Britain and America. They use the word civilization constantly, and associate that with Britain. They use barbarism in association with German. They actually use the word Hun relatively little, that seems to be a little too much for them. It’s a little too subjective.

But lots of civilization versus barbarism. Again, they refer to the United States directly in many, many works. So people talking about the navy will quote Alfred Thayer Mahan, famous American naval theorist. Writers on the blockade talk about the Union’s blockade of the Confederacy, and you know, hey we’re not that bad, right? You guys did it too. Pamphleteers stressed that both nations value liberty. They’re both naval powers, which obviously have much more freedom, and are much more peaceable than land powers like Germany. There’s also a racial tinge to a lot of the pamphlets, as well. One proclaims that when talking about the Monroe Doctrine, thinks it’s a good thing, it’s a sign of cooperation, because it means, “Mother and daughter are sitting hand in hand in the great Council Chamber of the world.” One praises sailors in the US Navy, says they’re gonna be just as good as sailors in the Royal Navy, because, “Blood will tell.” So you have all this sort of Anglo-Saxonism stuff. This is a reprint of the speech after the US enters the war by the American ambassador, Ambassador Page to Britain.

And he talks about the coming together of the two great English speaking parts of the world. So again, this sort of Anglo-Saxon idea that they’re all coming together. Again, all this is to encourage American audiences, at least at the elite level, to see that Britain had a special relationship with the US. These two liberal powers working for civilization would make the world a better place. And then you could ask the question, how did Ripon respond to these, right? They got 240 of them in the town. And the short answer is we don’t know. (laughs) I have done a lot of looking at various materials that we have from the time of the war, it’s very hard to tell. You do not see obviously people commenting on these. I live in the hope that I would find somebody’s letters saying, “I’ve read this amazing pamphlet, and the US needs to go to war now.” Nobody says that. Ripon is not pushing for war before the US actually enters, or even for preparedness at all. I can talk a little bit more about the town in the Q and A time. But again, it’s hard even to this date to determine how propaganda effects public opinion. And there were no opinion polls or anything back in 1916. Did British messages about a special relationship get through to people in Ripon? Again, we can’t know for sure, but the pamphlet war did its best to make them stick, thank you. (audience applauds)

– Good afternoon everyone. My topic is “Oshkosh on the Home Front, Activities and Attitudes During World War I.” And this project came out of a research paper that I did as an undergraduate, and as an internship that I had the fortune to hold at the Oshkosh Public Museum a couple summers ago. And what I wanted to really look at was this idea of a local home front. Home fronts really developed for the first time in World War I because it was a total war. And a lot of times is discussed on broader national scales, but we don’t ever really look at it in terms of a very local focused term of perspective.

And so what I did for this particular project, while by no means exhaustive, is to look at the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern as my foundational source for my research. And founded in 1860 and published daily from 1868 onward, the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern soon developed a reputation for being the city’s largest and most respected paper for local, national, and international news. And prior, to the end of the 19th century, the paper actually became the first in Wisconsin outside the city of Milwaukee to have a direct connection to the Associated Press. So it was a fairly large and reputable paper. And given that the Daily Northwestern was Oshkosh residents’ primary newspaper its coverage of World War I events abroad likely influenced the city’s overall attitude toward the war. At the same time, the Daily Northwestern thoroughly reported the home front activities that occurred in Oshkosh during WWI and therefore, provides us with a uniquely direct perspective in regards to understanding the attitude of the city’s population throughout the war. And although interest in the European conflict seems to have been relatively high prior to the United States entering World War I, evidence of widespread home front activity in Oshkosh is minimal. The headlines of the Daily Northwestern are filled with updates about the current conditions in Europe and negatively characterized Germany as an aggressor. And following Germany’s declaration of war in August 1914, the Daily Northwestern actually features an image of Kaiser Wilhelm II on the front page under the caption, “Europe’s War Lord Strikes.” But beyond that first page, discussion of the war is almost entirely replaced by articles of domestic concerns.

The one column of interest regarding local reaction to the outbreak of war is found near the end of an August 3rd issue. Several local Protestant pastors offered prayers and hopeful sentiments that peace would be reached before any real fighting occurred, and the pastor of the city’s Christ Lutheran church expressed hope that “victory would again be given to Germany “without the causing of too much suffering.” This article is interesting for two reasons. One, it provides evidence of early sympathy among the extensive German-American population in Oshkosh. The sympathetic sentiment is then contrasted with the paper’s description of Wilhelm II as a war lord and lays the foundation for this nuanced ethnic tension within the city’s population exhibited later in the war. It also indicates a local desire to avoid conflict that manifests later as the possibility of the United States entering the war becomes more likely. Further evidence that we have of an active German-American population in Oshkosh is also seen a few months after World War I began in Europe, when a local chapter of the German-American Association called for donations for the relief of widows and soldiers in Germany and Austria in December of 1914. But beyond that, the relative absence of advertisements or articles in the newspapers asking for donations toward war relief efforts suggests that Oshkosh’s home front was generally nonexistent during the beginning stages of the war. And although reports of European conflict in the Daily Northwestern were commonplace as the fighting overseas escalated, they retained a fairly objective tone before 1917. Instead, much greater concern was directed toward the 1916 Mexican American border conflict, as the Wisconsin National Guard was mobilized in June and then sent south to take part in the fighting there.

However, once the conflict with Mexico ended and the threat of entering the world war became more prominent in the opening weeks of 1917, the individuals behind the Daily Northwestern became much more vocal in expressing their desire for neutrality, writing that quote, the United States “Safely may pass through this crisis without becoming involved in the war maelstrom is the sincere hope of every patriotic citizen.” Similarly, while the paper does not outrightly criticize President Wilson, its tone suggests a reluctance for the United States to, “Abandon its time-honored policies of isolation and rejecting tangling alliances.” So while the Daily Northwestern is merely one perspective, it nevertheless suggests that the city of Oshkosh and its citizens, at least in part, were in no rush to join World War I. This apparent commitment to neutrality in January 1917 is then starkly contrasted by the explosion of home front activities in support of the war effort that occurred once the United States formally entered WWI in April that same year and perhaps makes Oshkosh’s significant efforts all the more noteworthy. But to better understand Oshkosh’s extensive home front activities, the city is best considered as this microcosm of enthusiasm within an equally active and complex state.

By April 12, 1917, less than a week after the United States declared war, Wisconsin actually became the first state in the country to organize a state council for defense in accordance with the federal government’s request. Not only was Wisconsin’s state council extensively praised for its organization, and its organization then recommended as a model for other states, Wisconsin was also the first state to create additional county and city defense councils. And furthermore, Wisconsin also exceeded its liberty loan drive quotas and became the first state to organize state and county history commissions to preserve records of these wartime activities. But in addition to these generally more positively seen activities there existed a darker side to Wisconsin’s home front activities. The existence of anti-German sentiment or nearly fanatic patriotism in many areas across the state manifested itself through organizations like the American Protective League and the Loyalty Legion. While the APL was technically a vigilante organization operated by volunteers it was given official consent by the Department of Justice to take action against individuals thought to be pacifists, German sympathizers or spies, or individuals harboring anti-war ideas that posed an apparent threat to the American war effort.

Members often intimidated, harassed, or spied on their suspects, a vast majority of whom were perfectly ordinary and innocent citizens. Similarly, the Loyalty Legion sought to eliminate disloyalty during World War I and punish those found guilty while also promoting more innocuous efforts, like Red Cross efforts or Liberty Loan drives. So altogether, the broader themes that seemed to characterize Wisconsin’s statewide home front also occurred in Oshkosh. Returning then to Oshkosh’s home front in particular, the world war that was once to be entirely avoided if possible suddenly became “a fight for all humanity” in which the “democracy of the world was to be vindicated” after the United States declared war on April 6, 1917. Patriotism no longer meant hoping to maintain neutrality. Instead, it meant mobilizing the home front as quickly as possible to provide the greatest contributions to the American war effort. And the people of Oshkosh responded urgently to this and held a very large parade in a show of “intense patriotism” on April 27, 1917 pictured here. Approximately 15,000 people from the city of Oshkosh participated in this parade while others watched them parade through the streets. A few weeks later, the Daily Northwestern featured a patriotic poem titled The Voice of Washington that called for Americans to “Strike at the altars of freedom” and “strike at barbarian coils” to “finish the work” George Washington had begun in the American Revolution.

The same issue also published advertisements urging Oshkosh citizens to do your bit and join the expanding Oshkosh chapter of the Red Cross that had been formally organized in October of 1916. The Oshkosh chapter of the Red Cross was actually one of the city’s most active home front organizations during the war. On July 14, 1917, according to the paper, the Red Cross presented 371 comfort kits to members of the local National Guard that were soon to go into federal service. And these kits were like cloth bags that consisted of personal items like toothbrushes, paper and envelopes, and soap. And in addition to these original 371, nearly 500 more of these kits were sent out just before Christmas of that same year. And later into the summer, the Red Cross established itself inside a local school and continued to knit and sew items for soldiers or hospitals from scraps of yarn and cloth. Women of all ages were involved in the work, and young children were often assigned to sorting the pieces of fabric that they used, which indicates that Oshkosh’s home front activities were not just confined to one age demographic. In addition to creating tangible aid for the soldiers, local Red Cross members also hosted fundraisers to finance their activities. A New Year’s Day celebration hosted in nearby Omro raised nearly $100 for the Red Cross fund and therefore, and then highlights the dual purpose of these social interactions that emerged as part of the war effort.

Social events then in Oshkosh during World War I were no longer simply recreational gatherings. Instead, they became another way for individuals to show their support for their country and local servicemen, as evidenced by a Patriotic May Ball that was hosted a little more than a month after war was declared. A variety of such dances, concerts, and parties continued to be promoted in the Daily Northwestern under the auspices of patriotism throughout the war. These dances and concerts were hosted by both organized groups and individuals, further indicating that the desire to contribute to the home front was widely disseminated among Oshkosh citizens. The July 3rd issue of the newspaper, for example, features an advertisement for a Patriotic May Ball hosted by the Company B Boys at one of the city’s armories. By comparison, in May 1918, tickets were sold to the public for a concert held in the home of Edgar Sawyer, who was a prominent and wealthy Oshkosh citizen, to raise money for overseas hospitals. A large number of these events took place in Oshkosh during the war, particularly around holidays, and suggests that they were both a popular form of entertainment and an effective way to raise funds for the war effort. In addition to recognizable group names, like the Red Cross, several other groups emerged during World War I that played a significant role in forming Oshkosh’s home front both in terms of attitude and activity. In July 1917, the Daily Northwestern featured a lengthy column calling for teenage boys in Winnebago County to join the Boys’ Working Reserve, which was a national service organization designed to give boys at home a chance to “Show their loyalty” and feel they have done their part in these strenuous times.

While the column does not detail the type of work that the boys would actually do, it instead emphasizes the privileges of membership, like gaining awards and badges kind of similar to what the Boy Scouts do. However, the girls in Oshkosh were also active on the home front and given recognition for their efforts. The Oshkosh Girls’ Club, according to the Daily Northwestern, worked closely with the Red Cross and hosted classes to teach girls to knit and make surgical dressings. The presence of both the Boys’ Reserve and the Girls’ Club in Oshkosh indicates that community members of all ages were involved in the war effort. Additionally, the newspaper’s attention to their activities suggests that the city was proud to publicize their work and strengthens the notion that a strong patriotic sentiment prevailed throughout Oshkosh even as the war continued with no real end in sight. Furthermore, groups like the Oshkosh Food Conservation Committee [FCC] published recipes in the Daily Northwestern and hosted educational events regarding the importance of not wasting food in wartime or how to go about substituting ingredients that were in short supply. The local chapter of the Loyalty Legion held meetings and organized door-to-door pledge drives designed to generate patriotic sentiment and determine who in the city posed an anti-American threat to the war effort. Individuals who refused to sign this pledge or give money to the various war efforts in Oshkosh were characterized both by the Daily Northwestern and local citizens as “Exhibiting socialistic tendencies” or “disloyalty in pro-Germanism.” Which this is a clip from the Daily Northwestern that highlights that. In a similar vein, the Oshkosh chapter of the APL consisted of over 100 men determined to eradicate this local German propaganda and sympathizers.

And between 1917 and ’18, they filed more than 300 reports with the national government, against individuals they believed who held these tendencies. But the overwhelming majority of these accusations were found to be unfounded. And this is a food conservation committee one of these educational events that they held in the city. And so the simultaneous existence of these three groups exhibits the wide range of war front activities that occurred in Oshkosh and contributes to the complexity of the overall image of the city’s home front. The FCC, on one hand, discouraged wastefulness and encouraged resourcefulness, which are ideals and attitudes that would still be considered positive in a community today. On the other hand, the Loyalty Legion and the APL were heralded as patriotic during WWI, but in reality their activities were discriminatory and their methods often very invasive. Apart from the highly publicized social events and larger group contributions, support for the war effort also became ingrained in the community in a variety of smaller ways. The Oshkosh Normal School raised several hundred dollars from within its own student body for the local YMCA chapter’s war work and unveiled a service flag commemorating the 17 students and two teachers who had left the school to join the military. Similarly, the Oshkosh Equitable Fraternal Union dedicated a commemorative flag in July 1918.

Able-bodied men who remained in Oshkosh registered for volunteer farm work positions outside the city that had been vacated by men leaving for military service. A local department store featured an offer for a free booklet of knitting patterns to encourage women to make sweaters or other articles of clothing for servicemen. But as you can see, the wide variety of events covered in advertisements published in the Daily Northwestern suggests that the opportunities to contribute to the war effort were made accessible to all members of the community, which is perhaps what made Oshkosh’s home front so active and effective, whether positively or negatively. The city’s mobilization of its home front was thorough and its calls for support for the war effort omnipresent. Therefore, what I conclude from this research is that the entrance of the United States into World War I catalyzed the emergence of an intense patriotic sentiment and a flurry of home front activity in Oshkosh that persisted throughout the remaining duration of the war. And though by no means exhaustive, the extensive coverage and promotion of these home front efforts in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern suggests that they were widespread and affected the entire Oshkosh community. So the people of Oshkosh, whatever their motivations or modes of action, proudly committed themselves to supporting American victory in World War I. Thank you. (audience applauds)

– Good afternoon. 100 years ago this April, the United States formally entered the First World War, a conflict that raged for four years and cost the lives of over 10 million men in arms. Horrific in nature, the war nonetheless represents a high point in literature, as countless men and women attempted to make sense of and remember their war experiences, on and away from the front lines. While the voices of British writers remain strong, the same cannot be said for their American counterparts. Familiarity with American writers is often confined to those that achieved some degree of fame during the interwar period, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, for example, due in part to their open disillusionment with the war’s outcome and effect on society. This narrow focus greatly simplifies the diverse and multifaceted American war experience and its effect on American literature, while marginalizing or ignoring the works of hundreds of ordinary soldier poets. One such poet is Byron H. Comstock, one of seven soldier poets I examined in my dissertation, which looks at how the United States remembered the First World War. His personal biography is limited, although his volume of poetry, “The Log of the Devil Dog and Other Verses,” is digitized and openly available on HathiTrust, further information is only accessible through Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com, both subscription databases. From all indications, Comstock was proud of his service, yet it is clear he opposed the heroic and glorifying language used by politicians and civilians to describe the war. Lacking both overt patriotism and outright disillusionment, this poetic voice thus enhances our knowledge of the American war experience while also expanding our understanding of American literature in the early twentieth century.

Byron Herbert Comstock was born on October 31, 1893, in Portage, Wisconsin. The details of his childhood and adolescence are unknown, but reading Comstock’s poetry, it is evident he had a college education. Though not employing the technique of someone like Alan Seeger, a graduate of Harvard and trained poet, Comstock’s diction and language is more advanced than the average American soldier writing of his war experiences. There are also two direct links to this city and UW. First, there is the headline of a 1920 Madison newspaper, published upon the release of Comstock’s volume of poetry, characterizing him as an Ex-Varsity Man, though they do not list the sport that he played. Second, Comstock briefly appears in the February 1921 issue of the Wisconsin Alumni Magazine, confirming the poet’s presence at this institution, though not the years he attended. Following the United States’ declaration of war on April 6, 1917, thousands of young men rushed to enter military service. Despite the lack of information on Comstock’s life, the poet himself offers an explanation regarding his decision to enlist. In the opening poem, from which the collection takes its name, he states that, “It wasn’t so much the picture, but the idea of waiting the call that got my goat, so I up and wrote my name above them all.” The waiting he speaks of is likely a reference to the draft, implemented by the Wilson administration immediately following America’s entry into the war.

Comstock’s words in this stanza and throughout the rest of the poem lend credence to my claim that despite his subtle methods of protest regarding the language describing war, the Wisconsinite supported American involvement in the conflict, writing of his experiences with grittiness but not overt pessimism or hostility. After enlisting in the Marines on June 2, 1917, Comstock was sent to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina. 11 weeks later, he was transferred to 84th Company, 6th Regiment, stationed at the Marine Barracks Quantico in Virginia. In late October, he and his unit traveled to Philadelphia, where they boarded the USS Von Steuben a former German passenger liner turned auxiliary cruiser, seized by the U.S., and outfitted as a troop transport ship on its first transatlantic voyage under the American flag. Carrying over 1,000 soldiers and civilians, the ship arrived in France on November 20, 1917. Two months later, Comstock’s unit, along with two other Marine units, joined the American Expeditionary Force’s Second Division. After joining the AEF, the Marines spent most of the next six months training with the French, seeing some actions near Verdun before taking up positions south of Belleau Wood, outside Chateau-Thierry. Ordered to attack and seize the woods on June 6, 1918, the Marines endured difficult conditions and heavy losses before finally achieving their objective nearly a month later. Comstock’s fight, however, lasted only the first day, taken out of action by a severe gunshot wound to the head.

Although the record is silent on how long Comstock may have lingered on the battlefield without medical attention, he did ultimately reach a hospital, with the military notifying his father of his wounding several weeks later. The Wisconsinite rejoined his unit on July 11, but then disappears from the record, once again, until resurfacing in October 1918, during the height of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the largest American operation on the Western Front and a major element of the final Allied offensive of the First World War. Only one week before the Armistice, Comstock was wounded a second time, near Bayonville. Unlike at Belleau Wood, where the record is silent regarding his transport to a hospital, Comstock’s record after Bayonville indicates he was evacuated and spent the rest of his time in France in replacement units. Whether he accompanied the 6th Marines to Germany for occupation duty in December 1918 is unknown, but U.S. Army Transport Service records show Comstock departing Brest, France with his unit on July 19, 1919, arriving in Hoboken, New Jersey five days later. On July 15, 1919, Comstock was discharged, and returned to Portage, having served twenty-two months overseas and attaining the rank of corporal. A year after returning home, Comstock self-published his volume of poetry, “The Log of the Devil Dog and Other Verses.” With titles including “The Song of the Shells,” “Going Home,” and “Gassed,” it is likely Comstock wrote the poems while recovering from his wounds and then immediately following his return to the United States. The work itself consists of a prologue, two narrative poems that serve as bookends, and 28 thematic poems. From the outset, Comstock sought to reveal the war to readers, the second line of the prologue states he has “Seen the vivid heart of it, and I want to show it to you.” Clearly, Comstock felt a responsibility to accurately depict his, and by default, fellow soldiers’, war experiences.

This is not to say, however, that Comstock did so in the manner of John Dos Passos’ “Three Soldiers,” a 1921 novel that at one blast disposed of oceans of romance and blather and changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war. Instead, the Wisconsinite subtly rejected the oft-used diction of poets like Alan Seeger, directly and indirectly challenging their perceptions of the war. In doing so Comstock represents an important bridge between the heroic and patriotic language of 1917, 1918 and the more disillusioned literature of the mid-1920s. Many of Comstock’s poems contain sentiments that illustrate the harsh realities of war, but several explicitly oppose the positive view of the war held by many Americans. The first that stands out is “The Skyman,” a poem that, as the name suggests, addressed air combat. A new field of battle during the First World War, air warfare appeared glamorous and heroic to civilians and troops in the trenches. Pilots encouraged this through their dress, behavior, and statements to newspapers. As a Marine on the Western Front, Comstock likely witnessed numerous dogfights, but unlike many front-line soldiers, did not walk away awed by their supposed valor. Avoiding romantic diction in writing about arguably the most romanticized aspect of the war, Comstock depicts less the arrogant, self-assured pilot, but rather one at war with himself.

Recognizing his position as a king in the great blue ring of the vast and cloud-piled sky, the pilot remarks on his ability to see men fall but does not hear them yell, a stark conveyance of airmen’s attitudes regarding their separation from the horrors below. They are responsible for death, but they do not feel its repercussions. Or do they? Comstock then transitions to a back-and-forth exchange where the pilot simultaneously asserts and questions his power and or authority to kill. “Although his purpose is to kill and he longs to see blood spill, the slaughter drives me mad.” This inner turmoil continues further in the poem, with the pilot forced to justify his actions and minimize the effects they have on his psyche, “I would not do the things I do, I swear not, but I must.” “What to me is earth’s red sea and those specks in the lowly dust?” Killing is morally wrong, but acceptable under present conditions, and he deflects personal responsibility for that killing through the characterization of men as specks. The climax of the poem, however, is possibly Comstock’s best refutation of the heroism of air warfare. The lines describe one of the famous dogfights, but not in the manners readers typically heard.

And it is worth reading in its entirety. “Then up there soars and above the roars I hear the spiteful spit. Two madmen fly in the empty sky, in their game of nerve and wit. A sickening crash, an oily splash. My God the tank is hit. A crackling sound I dare not look ’round, why does the plane shake so? In a burst of flame no hand can tame, the plane drops hard and low. A skyman lost, I pay the cost, from Heaven to Hell I go.” Without mincing words, Comstock directly illustrates the horrific brutality of air combat. There is no swagger, no glory, no entertaining flying circus. Just death, experienced in as gruesome a manner as experienced by men in the trenches. In a similar manner, Comstock addresses the Armistice and the Paris Peace Conference, casting it in far starker terms than the joyous occasion celebrated by many on the Western Front and Americans at home. We Have Won opens with death, a terrible figure, in cowl and gown stalking across the now silent battlefield, grinning as one who sees his work well done in the battle’s red rage. Here, it is death, not the living or Allied armies, that have achieved victory.

Comstock’s gruesome portrayal of victory lies in sharp contrast to the intellects of nations gathering at Versailles outside Paris, to determine what will be written on the final page. Here too, Comstock ignores the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Paris Peace Conference, painting the meeting in more realistic terms, largely ignorant of the war’s true effects, a select group of men– in this case Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau– are set to determine the nature of the peace. Comstock continues in this vein in the second stanza, once more contrasting the horrific aftermath of the war with events occurring in Paris. He writes of winter covering the dead, our rotting glory, only to have the warmth of spring, typically seen in a positive light, expose grim relics of twisted steel and here and there, a decayed hand reaches forth from shallow grave. There is a clear skepticism here, with Comstock indirectly challenging the very cause for which he himself fought for. This cynicism and sarcasm is brought home in the final lines of the poem, where he states, “In a famous hall, the learned have written victory on our page, and we have won.” There is no joy here, no cause for celebration. Rather, Comstock emphasizes the hollowness of victory, questioning what in fact has been won. A final poem to draw attention to is “Snap Out Of It,” a satirical depiction of the life awaiting returning soldiers. Despite soldiers’ struggles with poverty, the loss of loved ones either having gone off to war and come back and they’ve been with someone else, or coming back different, or strange, the effects of shell shock, and the horrors of war, society expected men to snap out of it, to leave the war behind and resume a normal civilian life.

This sentiment is a direct result of Americans’ understanding of the war, with the war’s horrors largely concealed from the American public, and the war’s end ushering in parades, civilians’ grasp of what soldiers truly experienced in France was simply not in line with reality. Comstock’s awareness and frustration with this knowledge gap, though evident throughout his volume, is possibly best expressed in this poem. Comstock, like his fellow veterans, appeared to have privately struggled with the memories of his war experience, with three poems, The Vision,” “Arm Chair Reveries,” and “Old Pal,” attesting to the author’s inability to forget the war and its horrors. Perhaps intended as a veiled criticism of the continued use of heroic depictions of war in public commemorative efforts, the final stanza of “Old Pal” reads, “All honor and glory from war are stripped, by those who know. No luster lurks in the cannon’s roar, nor in the saber’s blow.” Nonetheless, Comstock’s available biography portrays a man who achieved personal and professional success. After publishing “The Log of the Devil Dog,” Comstock left Portage for Kirksville, Missouri, where he met and married his first wife and attended the American School of Osteopathy. He and his family, his son Byron H. Comstock, Jr. was born in 1923, later moved to Lakeland, Florida, where Comstock remarried and practiced osteopathy. From all indications, he was well-liked and an active member in the community.

The one-time soldier poet and Portage native died on November 20, 1977, and is buried at Oak Hill Burial Park in Lakeland. Byron Comstock’s “The Log of the Devil Dog” is unlikely to join its more famous counterparts as required reading in English classrooms, yet its literary and commemorative significance cannot be ignored. Through the recovery of his poetry, the diverse nature of Americans’ response to the First World War is revealed a response far more complicated than is typically recognized. Comstock is patriotic, but conflicted. He is neither Alan Seeger nor Ernest Hemingway, but rather the gray area in between, the bridge connecting romanticized patriotic rhetoric with gritty, even shocking, disillusionment. His poetry also provides a more nuanced understanding of American commemorative efforts, as war memorials regardless of their architectural design or purpose represent a sanitized or acceptable lens through which Americans could remember and reflect upon the conflict. In shedding light on this little-known but important soldier poet, I hope to have furthered the understanding of American’s diverse war experience and its effect on those left out or sometimes even dismissed from the historical record. Thank you very much. (audience applauds)