CT - A new era for Cincinnati Catholics: World War I

A new era for Cincinnati Catholics: World War I

By David J. Merkowitz

(fourth in a series)

Far from American shores - but in the homeland of many of our nation's newest residents - a war broke out. At that moment in July of 1914, European nations controlled most of the world's surface and represented the pinnacle of history - or so many of them thought.

These nations began killing one other; at the end of four years, an old world had disappeared and a new one had come into being. Today, we are still dealing with the aftereffects of this experiment in total warfare.

On Sept. 15, 1918, this cartoon was published in The Catholic Telegraph.

The coming of the American century was a complicated affair and one that most Americans were not ready for in 1914 or 1917. In the pages of The Catholic Telegraph, one senses that Catholics in southwest Ohio were not immediately drawn toward a leading role in world affairs for the United States. But once the vagaries of history had brought the United States into the war, the Telegraph and its readers tried to envision an America that could take on and defeat the great European powers.

One valuable way to wrap one's mind around what was going on in America from World War I into the 1920s is to see it as "a first try." The United States was trying to be an international power. It was trying to create the sort of national unity needed to fight total war while still being a democracy.

The era that immediately preceded World War I is generally labeled the Progressive Era by historians. Out of this time came two issues, women's suffrage and Prohibition, and these would get almost as much attention from the Telegraph as did World War I. During the war, the battle for Prohibition (banning the production and sale of alcohol) moved forward along with that of women's suffrage, the right of women to vote. The Telegraph consistently opposed women's suffrage, but after it passed in 1920, the paper reversed field and encouraged women to become actively engaged in the political process by bringing their values and interests to the attention of the politicians.

Prohibition deserved a more complicated response. On the one hand, The Catholic Telegraph and the archbishops of Cincinnati had long favored temperance, especially in their ministry to the Irish. However, the paper and the bishops were well aware of the cultural significance that the German Catholic community gave to beer drinking. The tradition of Sunday afternoons at the local beer garden was the high point of a German-American family's week. Prohibition and the push for blue laws - enforced Sunday or Sabbath closing laws - were felt to be a direct attack on the rights of the German-American community. The Telegraph also feared that Prohibition would prevent the church from having access to wine for Communion.

Unfortunately for Cincinnati, a city filled with many successful brewers and their employees, Prohibition passed late in the war and dealt a serious blow to the city and one of its leading ethnic communities.

As the war started in 1914, The Catholic Telegraph expressed the widely held feeling that this war would come to no good end. It would be the cause of many deaths and a massive waste of resources. As the United States moved to assert its neutrality, the Telegraph followed suit and regularly commented on its efforts at maintaining a fair and balanced attitude toward the warring parties and their American supporters. However, there were moments when the paper shared its impression that one side or the other seemed to be carrying on in egregious manner and deserved reprobation.

The Telegraph expressed its neutrality most directly by refusing to comment on the news of the war, both in Europe and in the United States.

This pattern generally held through the beginning of 1917, when a perceptible change occurred in the paper, and it moved firmly toward a more nationalist position and one that was generally more favorable to the Allies, Great Britain, France, Russia (for a short while) and Italy, with whom the United States was in the process of joining in battle against the Central Powers, the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. While the United States would officially join the First World War against all the Central Powers, U.S. citizens felt that they were most at war with Germany and the Kaiser. The other Central Powers were not seen as the primary enemy, and their immigrants in the United States were not treated with the same sort of suspicion that the German-Americans were.

One of the signal events of the wartime experience was the intense wave of anti-German feeling and activity. When historians have tried to understand what happened, two camps emerge. The first sees the anti-German outburst as a form of war fever, an almost irrational hysteria that accompanied the intense desire for national unity in time of war. This group tends to emphasize the highly assimilated position of most German-Americans in society and the fact that German sabotage on American shores all but ceased with U.S. entry into the war. They describe these events as an unfortunate part of war that German-Americans did not deserve.

The other group of historians, generally those who studied closely the activities of the national German-American organizations and the German-language newspapers, place more blame on the German-Americans for moving so far from the mainstream of American opinion. These historians argue that we should not be surprised the German-American community would come under attack in those parlous times. They describe a situation in which a small minority of Germans, essentially those most involved in German organizational life, came to see Germany as being incapable of wrong and that only through insidious conspiracy or irrational prejudice could America possibly side with the Allies. These German-Americans directed their ire toward the British.

As this was one of many outbursts of intense nativism in the period between 1914 and 1928, it is clear that Americans were having a difficult time coming to terms with changes in their society. Many Americans looked around them and saw a nation that had become too urban, too foreign, too Catholic, too Jewish, too unionized and just too different from some imagined America of old. While the anti-German hysteria fit into the broader pattern of nativism, combining the actions of the German government and those of their supporters in the United States makes it easier to see why the German-Americans became the targets of such intense antipathy. In a nation knocked off-balance by the war, German-Americans seemed to represent a clear and present danger, a cancer on the body politic that undermined the national unity needed to fight the war.

In the spring of 1917, The Catholic Telegraph took a clear step to show its love and support for America. Starting on March 8, the newspaper placed the flag of the United States with a short excerpt from "the Star-Spangled Banner" in a prominent place on its editorial page. This flag would remain there throughout the1920s. And as war fever rose, the Telegraph shifted its editorial line. The paper made more direct calls for all good Catholics to show their support for President Woodrow Wilson.

As in previous war efforts, The Telegraph exalted the Catholic contribution to the war. The paper focused on the large number of American Catholic men serving in the armed forces and the work that the Catholic Church and her organization did to support the troops. The Knights of Columbus were especially active in supporting Catholic troops at camps in the United States and in France.

When autumn came around in 1917, the United States had moved onto a full war footing. The mobilization for war was another example of the successes and failures that came with trying to redirect and then plan an economy for the first time. There was much fear of war profiteering, which the Telegraph regularly decried.

The century's second decade was a period of exceptional union activity, which caused The Telegraph quite a bit of heartache; it was torn between its traditional support for unions and workers and a desire to show support for the war effort. The paper never really resolved that quandary.

A couple of interesting tidbits about the coverage of the war are worth mentioning. First, The Catholic Telegraph printed announcements of retreats that Archbishop Henry Moeller would be having for all the troops being sent off to war. Initially, there was to be a diocesan-wide three-day retreat in Cincinnati, but it eventually was carried out in each region of the diocese as a one-day event.

Second, once the war really got going in the late spring of 1918, The Telegraph regularly carried letters from soldiers stationed both in the United States and in France. The letters often were updates on life in the military or thanks for having the Telegraph available to read on base.

Finally, the paper made a strong effort to encourage its readers to buy liberty bonds. It included the plea on the masthead of the paper and included statements by the archbishop and other religious leaders to the effect of encouraging Ohioans to buy liberty bonds as a sign of their love for the country.

With U.S. involvement in the war, attention turned toward those German-Americans who seemed insufficiently patriotic. The anti-German sentiment had been building throughout the war, but it took dramatic turn for the worse in the fall of 1917 and continued to be a serious issue through the summer of 1919. Some of the earliest targets of anti-German activity included the prohibition of German-language instruction in schools. Ohio even passed a law outlawing German in schools during this period. It would eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court, but the symbolism of the action is unchanged. The significance of this action cannot be overstated, as the German language was seen by even the most assimilated German-Americans as one of the primary sources of ethnic cohesion. The banning of German-language instruction along with Prohibition was a profound attack on German-American cultural and community life. The Germans never really recovered from these attacks and slowly drifted into the mainstream of American Catholic life.

Other forms of anti-German activity included changing the names of streets. One can travel around Cincinnati today and clearly see where street names were changed. Sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage" in a fit of anti-German feeling. German language books were removed from the library. Many German-Americans, especially immigrants, were forced to sign loyalty oaths pledging their fidelity to the United States. German-language newspapers were prevented from being delivered. There were a couple of lynchings of German-Americans who failed to assuage the anger of the crowds by proving their patriotism.

These actions hit the German-American community in Cincinnati area hard. One could argue that the traumatic effects of this outbreak contributed to the long-term decline of Cincinnati by undercutting the commitment of German-Americans to the broader city in which they lived. For many of German descent today, the World War I period stands out as a moment of particular importance in family lore. Many families changed their names to avoid the stigma of being German, while others have stories of family members losing jobs or otherwise being intimidated because of German ancestry. While German-American culture and community continued on after the war, there was a definite break during World War I that could not be healed.

When the war finally ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, America did not simply return to normal nor did the rest of the world. Over the next decade Americans would be whipped into rages of anti-radicalism in the Red Scare that overtook the anti-German hysteria in mid-1919. As that died down, the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, along with a number of strongly anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic developments across the country, contributed to the pervasive sense that America was no longer interested in being a pluralistic nation but rather sought to enforce a rather strict homogeneity.

Much of the discussion during the 1920s centered on how much immigration the United States should accept and "which sort of people" should be allowed to come. The final decision was to end large-scale immigration and to all but eliminate it from those areas considered to have a "lesser racial stock," southern and Eastern Europe, along with a total ban on Asians. During the immediate post-war period one of the great outbreaks of racial violence took place across the nation as whites attacked black communities in Chicago, Tulsa, and East St. Louis among others. All these events filled the pages of The Catholic Telegraph.

There is one more trend that actually starts as early as the period of the Spanish-American War and continued to gain strength into the Great Depression of the 1930s: The creation of a separatist American Catholic world. Older Catholics may remember a Catholic world that seemed to end with the Second Vatican Council. As will be discussed next week, this was not how American Catholicism always was, but rather, this was a development of the first three decades of the twentieth century. The combination of direction from Rome and the outright rejection of Catholics by many Americans contributed greatly to the creation of a fortress Catholicism that sought to isolate itself from American society and create a self-contained community that had little need for the institutions of mainstream society.