- Today we are pleased to introduce Leslie Bellais
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
Leslie is the Wisconsin Historical Society's
curator of social history
and has been working for the society for nearly 27 years.
As the curator of social history,
she oversees the society's collections of costumes,
textiles, and personal artifacts,
which include around 2,000 dresses,
250 men's suits and coats,
children's clothing and jewelry,
among many other things.
Here today to discuss the Wisconsin home front
during World War I,
please join me in welcoming Leslie Bellais.
(applauding)
- Thank you very much.
So you might be wondering why
a curator who mainly handles clothing and textiles
is doing a talk on the Wisconsin home front
during World War I.
I want to let you know that 25 years ago
for the 75th anniversary of Wisconsin,
of the United States entering World War I,
I did an exhibit here called Over Here,
The Wisconsin Home Front During World War I.
I was asked to do it.
I was very unhappy that I was asked to do it
because what does this has to do with clothing and textiles?
But I found it to be a fascinating topic.
And more recently I've gone back to school
to get my PhD with this as my dissertation
topic with an emphasis, though,
on the question of loyalty and disloyalty in Wisconsin.
And it's called Traitor State: The Wisconsin, wait.
Crisis of Loyalty in Wisconsin During World War I.
So that's what I'm basing this talk on.
I'm taking a little bit from that exhibit
25 years ago and a little bit from my dissertation
and trying to put it together in one package.
So, obviously, I'm going to focus a little bit more
on the political situation and the politics
and not so much on the other parts of the home front.
So this is just an overview.
Now, the first thing I want to mention is that
Wisconsin did have a loyalty issue.
I think I can do it this way.
And these are quotes from newspapers
from around the country,
primarily in the spring of 1918,
that focused on Wisconsin.
And the first one I think kind of sums it up
for a lot of people in the United States at the time,
that Wisconsin was the hotbed of disloyalty.
And the Los Angeles Times even said
there's probably more disloyalty per square foot
in Wisconsin than anywhere else in the country.
So these are the kind of comments
that caught my attention
and maybe want to understand more about
why Wisconsin and why was this state
such the focus of such animosity.
So but before I go into that,
I just want to make sure we're all on the same page
in terms of World War I
and how the United States fits into that story.
So first we have the European War.
The European War really begins
or the catalyst happens in June 28, 1914,
with the assassination of Austrian Archduke
Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia by a Serbian.
He's visiting Bosnia and he gets assassinated by a Serbian.
One month later, to the day,
Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia for that action,
and then there's all these treaties that
European countries have signed that if you go to war,
I'll go to war with you.
And there's this domino effect
that puts all of Europe into war by August 4th.
And so we have a war that doesn't seem
to really have much purpose
except that people are maintaining their treaties.
So what happens is Germany also uses this
chance to put into place
a plan it had thought about for some time
about defeating Europe
and becoming sort of the owners of France especially.
And so they attack Belgium,
they attack France by going through Belgium
and kind of wiping out a lot of Belgium,
which makes people in America very
they're very concerned about the Belgium,
about the Belgium population
and what Germany is doing to it.
But most importantly what happens
is that after Germans ended up in France,
Britain is in the war, France is in the war, Italy,
Austria-Hungary are all fighting each other.
Basically what the problem is,
the defensive technology outstrips military tactics.
And what happens is that we end up with a trench warfare,
a trench warfare war where
lots of people are getting killed
but there's not a lot of land movement
in terms of actually acquiring land.
If you acquire land, you probably get pushed back
into the trenches you just came from.
So it's a stagnant war.
So for two-and-a-half years there's major stagnation.
Now, during this time, there are
some variety of opinions about
what America should be doing about the European War.
And those appear in Wisconsin.
And I picked three individuals
to represent each of the three points of view.
And we'll begin with Julia Grace Wales, on the left.
She was a pacifist.
She was an instructor in English
in the University of Wisconsin
and was basically not a very significant person
until she had this idea.
Well, first I'm just going to back up and say
pacifists, at this time,
argued that war was uncivilized
and a step backwards in human evolution.
So they felt very passionately and strongly about this.
Julia agreed with these,
with this approach and, in 1915, wrote a--
an idea out called Continuous Mediation Without Armistice.
So her idea is to continuously
mediate with the belligerents
until a settlement without military victory
could be reached.
And that was the important thing,
without military victory.
It received national, international attention.
In fact, Henry Ford was really behind it
and helped fund a lot of her
her missions to Europe so that she could promote
this in a peace court in Europe.
But President Wilson poo-pooed it
and it quickly fell by the wayside,
especially by 1916 no one was talking about
pacifism anymore in a national level.
Although, there was a peace society
in Wisconsin that still promoted it,
and it tended to be a women-run organization.
Now, the main point of view taken by most Americans,
including President Wilson and the governor of Wisconsin,
Emanuel Philipp, was neutrality.
And neutrality believed that both sides
should be treated equally
and that, as a neutral country,
the United States should provide armament
and humanitarian aid to both sides of the war.
And especially because this
state was heavily German-American,
it was actually 30% of the population
was German-American at the time.
They overwhelmingly supported neutrality.
These were people who did not want
to be fighting their relatives back in Germany.
And so there was a concern that,
a major concern in Wisconsin
among the German-American population that they stay neutral.
That the United States stays neutral.
In fact, both Wilson and Governor Philipp
were elected to office in 1916
because of their neutrality stance,
and also Philipp because of his reputation for moderation.
So this is the stand that most Americans
are behind for that two-and-a-half-year stagnation of war.
But then we have the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.
And what happened, with Americans on board.
And what happens then is the
military preparedness movement arises in the United States.
In Wisconsin, it's led by people like Wheeler Bloodgood.
And I just love his name.
So you'll see him throughout this talk.
He also was a leader
of the preparedness movement in Wisconsin.
So they supported the idea at first
that this be a military buildup
that would protect America's neutrality
and prepare the nation in case of attack.
They put out numbers showing how far behind
the United States was compared to
the British and French and German army size, navy size.
The navy was a little more important because
that's how most people would get to us.
And, in fact, they put out
even put out numbers stating that
Germany could land probably 800,000,
a little over 800,000 troops
on the east coast within 30 days
if we didn't pay attention.
They listed every belligerent
and how many troops they could get here
and how fast they could get here.
So they even did Japan,
which they thought could overrun the United States
with a quarter million troops but it would take 41 days.
So these were the kind of numbers
they were putting out there that
kind of scare people to kind of build up enthusiasm
for preparedness to build up that military
that we had let kind of wither away
after the Spanish-American War.
But then Germany, in early 1917,
this is February of 1917, they had,
for almost 18 months, maybe two years,
agreed not to attack neutral ships
in the Atlantic and let them pass freely.
But then by February of 1918,
they've realized that a lot of these neutral ships,
including American ships,
are actually sending armaments to the allies.
That's England and France primarily.
And they're not very happy.
So they decide to resume attacking
neutral ships by submarine.
And,
basically, this is what sends the United States into war,
into the European War.
So what happens first is that
the preparedness advocates demand retaliation.
They're the largest group of people
asking that America retaliate
against these sinking of these military ships.
They also think America should really
enter the war and stop being a bystander,
and that they should enter the war
on the British and French side.
The Germans are the enemy.
They're the ones who killed all those Belgium innocents.
They're the ones are behind all of this,
and they are the ones who should be punished.
They also, at the same time
on a more home front point of view,
begin to attack pacifists and neutralists
as weak, stupid, and un-American.
And those are the three things they really push.
And that's a theme that they would
continue throughout the war.
So that's Wisconsin as we're entering into,
about to enter the war.
Wisconsin's reputation as a patriotic state
is damaged even before we enter the war.
And that occurs with Robert La Follette.
What happens is in early March,
Woodrow Wilson wants to arm merchant marine ships
so that they can attack those submarines
that are attacking, the Germans submarines
that are attacking them.
Merchant marine ships are not supposed to be armed.
Robert La Follette, the senator from Wisconsin,
the senior senator of Wisconsin,
leads a filibuster that prevents that from happening.
Prevents that bill from going through.
And Woodrow Wilson, in a very famous statement,
said of La Follette and his followers
that they were a group of willful men,
representing no opinion but their own,
have rendered government of the United States
helpless and contemptible
So this is the first time La Follette is
in the public eye as someone who is not supporting the war.
And, basically at this point,
the preparedness movement people and Wilson
hold up La Follette up for contempt.
The reputation-- So this is March.
We enter the war in April.
Our reputation is further damaged
in the week that the United States goes to war
by holding a number of referendums around the state.
This one is from Monroe, Wisconsin.
And you can see that the question is,
under existing conditions,
do you favor a declaration of war by Congress?
This also happened in Sheboygan and a few other places.
Overwhelmingly,
Wisconsinites who voted on this
voted against entering the war.
In fact, Sheboygan had a 98% against the war vote.
Now, this occurred on April 5th.
April 4th is a day that Wilson
presented a bill to Congress asking them to go to war.
So this is the day after Wilson does that.
These towns all over Wisconsin
vote against entering the war,
and this becomes national news.
The day after the Congress declares war,
the socialists meet in,
the socialist party meets in St. Louis,
and Victor Berger, from Milwaukee,
he's the editor and owner of the socialist newspaper,
the Milwaukee Leader, is there,
and he is one of the leaders
in getting the socialist party
to declare that entrance into the war
would be a crime of our capitalist class
against the people of the United States
and against the nations of the world.
So that is what the socialists are saying.
This Milwaukee socialists
who are fairly active in the party
have a leading role in it, including Victor Berger.
So this is already making the news
before and as war is being declared.
Now, on April 6th, war is declared by Congress.
And Woodrow Wilson states that entering this war,
America's entrance into this war
would make the world safe for democracy.
He asks Congress to declare war on the 4th.
As you can see, there's a speech here,
war with Germany, that occurred on April 4, 1917.
You can see that right there.
So that's the same day
as Wilson is asking them to declare war.
So he speaks out against it.
And then, on April 6th, Congress votes.
La Follette obviously votes against it.
The junior senator from Wisconsin votes for it,
and then nine of the 11
congressmen from Wisconsin vote against it.
This is sort of the last nail in the coffin
for a lot of Americans
in terms of whether Wisconsin is patriotic or not.
And so here's the list of all of them.
Most of these men would be voted out
of their office at the next election.
Not La Follette, however.
So, then there needs to be,
according to the preparedness men,
they're mainly men,
there needs to be some damage control.
We need to get Wisconsin's reputation back on track.
And, in fact, the reputation becomes,
acquires a name in July of 1917
when the Princeton Daily Democrat,
which is actually in Indiana, not New Jersey,
had become by now offended by
Wisconsin's Kaiser-loving senator, as they called it,
and sickened by its pro-German attitude,
asked will Wisconsin be known
when the war is over as the traitor state?
And that becomes the term used to describe
Wisconsin from this time on throughout the war.
So preparedness advocates, like Wheeler Bloodgood,
take the lead in retaliating
against this humiliating charge against them.
This humiliating moniker, you might say.
And so, shortly after La Follette has his filibuster,
he starts proposing founding the Wisconsin Defense League.
Now, Wisconsin Defense League is out of Milwaukee.
He's a Milwaukee, like I said, a Milwaukee lawyer.
It's a volunteer organization
whose purpose was to defend Wisconsin's honor.
And, as you can see,
other people around the state
were also trying to show Wisconsin as a loyal state.
As you can see here,
this is a loyalty parade from Madison on March 31st.
So that's a week before,
about a week before the United States
declares war against Germany.
So here we are, we're starting the war.
Most Americans are still confused.
Now, why are we fighting this?
Why are we going to this?
So most Americans, including a huge majority
of Wisconsinites, still need to be convinced.
So what Woodrow Wilson does
is form the Committee on Public Information,
headed up by George Creel, who was an advertising man.
So what they did is decide to hire
professional advertisers and also professional illustrators.
Some of the best illustrators at this time
were brought into the movement because posters
became a major way of getting message across,
and having the best artists on board
really made that much easier.
So they were, they did what George Creel
later described as a vast enterprise in salesmanship,
which is to sell the war,
the reasons America should be in war,
to the American public.
And they did it in a number of ways.
One of the first ways was to put out movies,
which are still relatively new at that time,
and this one, Pershing's Crusaders,
was, as you can see,
the first official American war picture.
But mainly how they did it was through booklets and posters.
And the booklet, this is part of the Red,
White, and Blue series,
How the War Came to America,
is one of the major booklets
on describing why America had to go to war.
What most of these things do is promote the idea
promote the idea that the Prussian autocracy
is evil compared to the virtues of American democracy.
So we are fighting an autocratic evil
with the wonderfulness of democracy
and that this will eventually make the world
safe for democracy so all these countries
can lose their autocratic
heads of state and all become democracies.
So this is how Americans are convinced,
and some Wisconsinites are convinced.
In fact, a lot of Wisconsinites
are convinced that we need to be in the war.
And they do actually become active in,
Wisconsinites become active in the war effort.
And I'm just going to go over a few ways
you could become active in the war effort.
One of the first ones was food conservation.
The Food Administration was founded in June 1917
to monitor food across the United States
with the idea to conserve food for American
and allied troops, especially wheat, sugar, and meat.
Those were the three things you were expected to give up.
And the emphasis was really on
wasting less and replacing those foods sent overseas,
primarily the starches with corn and potatoes.
So they would not send corn and potatoes over.
They sent wheat and sugar over.
So this was the idea.
And the Wisconsin Food Administration
introduces the idea of meatless Tuesdays
and wheatless Wednesdays.
And you can see here, if I can make this work,
that the Hotel Wisconsin in Milwaukee
has got a menu here for meatless Tuesdays.
So Wisconsin did participate in this.
We also have a number of store windows
from Madison who helped promote food conservation
with window displays,
including this one that asks you,
Are you eating to please Uncle Sam or the Kaiser?
So there was a lot of pressure to eat appropriately.
Some of the window displays also promoted victory gardens,
which was the first time this idea was promoted.
It becomes a bigger thing in World War II.
Other conservation efforts
that Wisconsinites were asked to participate in,
including being asked not to waste fuels.
Since light consumes coal, turn the lights off.
Electric lights off.
Metals which could be used to make ammunition.
And even fruit pits, like you're seeing here,
which were used to make--
I don't know if they tell you but, yes,
it was used in respirators and it absorbs German poison gas,
supposedly.
So and then Wisconsin businesses
we know helped save coal and electricity
by observing heatless Mondays
in January and February of 1918,
which probably wasn't a lot of fun.
Another way you could participate in the war effort
was becoming a volunteer of American Red Cross.
This was mainly something women did.
And the Red Cross' goal in the war,
they saw their goal as being a major link between
the soldier and their relatives.
So they offered suggestions for troop-supporting projects,
like knit your bit,
like you're seeing over there,
and they asked women to knit sweaters,
scarves, helmet liners, and wrist mitts,
which are just little kind of short,
like the lower half of a glove or a mitten.
This was a somewhat successful project.
They found a lot of the stuff made
was not very well made and had to be,
couldn't be used or sent to soldiers.
But it made the women feel good.
They also were asked to roll bandages
and to send letters and packages
to their loved ones over in Europe.
And here we're seeing a Dunn County
Red Cross meeting at the Stout Institute to do some sewing.
I don't know what they would be sewing,
but that's what they're doing.
And then we have two sisters from Madison, Wisconsin,
who served as Red Cross volunteers during the war.
And, finally, a fourth way to
participate in the war effort
was to be on the job for victory.
Now, Wisconsin backed,
Wisconsinites backed the war effort
in their jobs in their offices,
factories, and farms.
And you could do it in any way,
but the main emphasis the government made
was that you needed to be quick and efficient
at your job and remember that
well-made war products could defeat the enemy
and keep American soldiers alive.
So don't rush so fast
that you're making something that might,
a grenade that might explode
in a soldier's hand, for example.
You want to make good quality products.
Now, Wisconsin was in a draft.
The soldiers were raised first by volunteer
and then by draft.
And so most men, most young men went off to war,
so industries began hiring women
for production and service jobs.
And you can see, in the lower right,
a woman in her coveralls
from the four-wheel drive factory in Clintonville.
And then above it is a woman's coveralls
in our collection from the World War I era.
And also the other thing is Wisconsin looked to
train, recruit and train women and teenagers
who were too young to go to the war to be farm laborers.
And so here you're seeing,
I believe this is a posed shot.
It looks too cute with her pipe in the mouth and everything.
To be farm labor.
And, actually, the outfit above
that picture is a farmerette costume
from Wisconsin in World War I era.
So you could dress up in this little outfit
to go out and help the farmer.
We do know that farming was very productive
during the war years.
And, in fact, 1917 Wisconsin
had its largest total crop production to date.
Almost all of it in wheat because that's what
the federal government was asking for to send to soldiers.
Now, all of these initiatives, maybe not the Red Cross,
but the on the job for victory,
the food conservation,
any other conservation efforts
were all run by the Wisconsin Council of Defense.
And that was the state's governmental agency
that ran the war effort.
So it's a governmental agency
as opposed to the Wisconsin Defense League,
which was a voluntary effort.
Wisconsin was very proud and whenever,
being the first state to have a Council of Defense
and whenever it was accused of being unpatriotic,
that was often mentioned,
that Wisconsin created the first Council of Defense
and began organizing the war effort within the state.
Now, one of the other major things
the Council of Defense did was run the liberty loan drives.
Now, the federal government realized
it had to raise about $30 billion to pay for the war.
The treasury secretary, William McAdoo,
decided not to raise taxes,
which is what most people thought he would do,
but instead to make the process voluntary,
which is an interesting word considering what happened,
for Americans by issuing war bonds,
which were normally called liberty bonds.
Now, four times during the war
and one time after the war liberty bond drives were held.
And they raised 24 billion.
So the other 6 billion was covered
by the federal government.
The rest was raised through liberty loan drives.
Now, unfortunately, Wisconsin did not make its quota.
Each state was given a quota
of how much money they were expected to raise
in the first and second drives,
which occurred in the spring and fall of 1917.
And those Wisconsin patriots,
who mainly made up of the preparedness movement advocates,
decided they had to find more coercive ways
to make sure all Wisconsinites
bought their fair share of bonds.
But I just want to show you some of the--
This is one of the posters that the
Committee for Public Information put out
for the fourth liberty loan drive.
And you can see how they really hit
at an emotional level here by showing
the Statue of Liberty and New York City burning.
If you don't buy your liberty bonds,
this is what could happen.
We also had liberty loan parades
throughout Wisconsin during the time that the drive was on.
The one on the top is from Waupun, and I really like it.
These are Red Cross volunteers
with a banner that says
We will take the germ out of Germany.
Whatever that means.
And then the bottom one is from Hartford
in Washington County.
And, again, I seemed to pick Red Cross volunteers.
There's several pictures
from this point of view of this march.
But it's basically Stand back of your country,
buy a liberty bond.
And that's sort of what the emphasis is.
So most of this was sort of just rah-rah,
pep rally kind of stuff.
But, like I said, in Wisconsin,
because they felt they had not lived up to their quote,
they had not lived up to their quota
in their first two drives that more coercive
measures had to be used.
And so one way it was done was
anybody who worked as a wage earner,
that means they got a paycheck,
their employers could basically threaten them
with the loss of their jobs, or, more easily,
which is what usually happened,
is they just deducted bond payments from their paycheck.
So the urban community was not such a
problematic community for raising
liberty loan bonds or paying for liberty loan bonds
as other groups were.
In small towns and rural areas,
we know that the Council of Defense members
and sometimes the Defense League members
met with the banker of that area
or the bankers of that area
and sat down and figured out what each person could afford,
and that became their bond quota.
So the idea now was not that the state
had a quota or that a county had a quota.
Now, by the third liberty bond drive,
they are getting down to individuals.
And do we have records in our collection
from different counties around the state
that show this person should be able
to afford $200 in liberty bonds.
And it goes down the list about how much they should afford.
So then what happens is
some of these people felt,
especially farmers who were self-employed,
they were hard to boss around
is what the Council of Defense members found,
is that they had to use other ways
to get them to buy their liberty bonds,
usually stigmatism and sometimes resorted of physical force.
And these pictures I have up right now show the stigmatism.
The one on the left is a newspaper article
from the, I think it's West Bend Newspaper that says,
"The names of those failing to subscribe
"to their fair share of the fourth liberty loan
"will be published here."
Now, this came out in October 1918,
and I spent a lot of time going through the rest
of the newspapers for that year
trying to find out if they did publish anybody's name.
And, actually, the war ends November 11th,
and it's really not enough time,
and so this is dropped.
But the warning is out there.
It's a little harder to see the one on the right,
but it's a sign that's put on someone's property
next to a service roll from the town of Genesee.
And those are all the men who enlisted in the army
or military from that town.
And this sign, which was another stigmatizing kind of sign,
says this person, whoever it is,
never attends patriotic meetings,
did not help his town raise first--
I think it's first aid, first, second,
or third liberty loan or fourth liberty loan.
He refused to register for war saving stamps,
and he drove his car on gas-less Sundays.
Is he 100% American?
But we also know that they did resort,
occasionally, to physical force.
And we have this letter that I found
from John Mola of Fisk, Wisconsin.
He wrote after the war about an experience he had.
This is also in October, on October 15, 1918.
So as the war is kind of winding down.
Mr. Wagstaff's mob of 42 men in automobiles
called at my home and insisted
that I should sign my mother's bond application for $200.
This mob insulted my womenfolk,
jostled me about, called me vile names,
and tried in every way to cause me to say something,
that they could then beat him up for.
Failing in this, Mr. Wagstaff said,
"We will take him to town."
So they knocked me down
and I'm struck again while I was down.
They forced me into an auto
and took me as far as my next neighbor's place.
As they were getting out of their cars,
they cried, "Let's go back
"and burn his buildings, the yellow dog."
Well, I was abducted and I paid the ransom
by signing my mother's bond application.
Then they let me go home,
and they drove on to abuse other people.
So this is kind of what's happening in Wisconsin.
It's happening around the country,
but Wisconsin probably feels it more
because it has this traitor state
moniker hanging of its head,
and there's a lot of pressure
for people to prove that that is not true.
And the people doing this are what historians
now days call hyper-patriots
So the rise of hyper-patriotism
and the hyper-patriots are really
the perpetrators of these coercive tactics.
And they can be described as
people who favored national security over civil rights
and called those who disagreed with them
unpatriotic or un-American.
And I like this cartoon
because it kind of sums up hyper-patriots in a nutshell.
So, basically, they're saying other enemies,
talking about the right of free speech,
an American right, but they're saying,
Talk is free in this land,
but there are times when we don't care to listen to it.
So all these little people,
Uncle Sam is throwing all these
little people around who are the enemies.
And, in case you can't see,
the enemies include spies,
labor and union agitators,
conscientious objectors,
pacifists, Germans, the Irish,
the Irish were anti-British
which put them on the wrong side of the war,
food speculators, socialists are down in there,
and another person I'm not quite sure
what they mean but sentimental obstructionists.
So this is what these people are creating.
They're creating treason, lies, sophistry,
and disloyalty, among other things.
So this is, in a nutshell, how the hyper-patriots
view those who are not helping the war
and also their feelings about what should be done with them.
Now, the hyper-patriots in Wisconsin
lash out at three main people or groups.
The first one of course being La Follette.
They lash out against him really right from the beginning,
as we saw with the creation of the Wisconsin Defense League.
And he really becomes the symbol of treasonous
and judicious behavior,
partly because, unlike those nine congressmen
who voted for the war, once the war was declared,
they said, okay, that's fine,
I'll support the war effort.
La Follette said no, I'm not doing that,
I'm going to be against the war
through this whole war period.
So this really got under people's skin.
So they ramped up his-- And so you can see
this is a cover of the Life magazine.
Life magazine is not the Life magazine
you might know from later,
but it was a political magazine
and it shows the Kaiser pinning
medals of honor all over La Follette.
So that was one of the things that happened.
But it really ramped up once in September of 1917.
He was misquoted as saying
that America had no grievance against Germany.
The national press just went ballistic.
But he was misquoted
and he actually had said just the opposite.
People didn't know that because the AP,
the Associated Press, published it
and every newspaper in the country ran with it.
So the United States Senate considers him treasonous
for seditious behavior and decides
to consider expelling him from Congress.
The Wisconsin legislators over in the Capitol here
pass a bill that agrees with that decision.
And...
Also the governor, Philipp,
states publicly that Wisconsin loyalty problems
primarily stem from La Follette's actions and words.
So what happens is he's hung in effigy
at the football goal post on UW campus.
And then, in February of 1918 on campus,
this round robin petition
is sent among UW faculty condemning his behavior.
400 of the 404 faculty members signed it,
including Julia Grace Wales, the pacifist.
I found her name on this list.
What this basically says
is that they are protesting La Follette,
especially against those utterances
and actions of Senator Robert La Follette
which have given aid and comfort to Germany
and her allies in the present war.
We deplore his failure loyally to support
the government and the persecution of the war.
In these respects, he has misrepresented us,
his constituents.
So that is-- He is-- In the American mind,
he is Wisconsin.
And how could Wisconsin have elected
this man to represent them?
And that really becomes the big issue.
But there's also a socialism problem.
Milwaukee has the largest and most vocal
group of socialists in the United States.
And so several government agencies,
federal and state, try to eliminate
the socialist party during the war.
Really to no avail.
So Victor Berger is the most harassed
of all of these people.
First off, the postmaster general denies his newspaper,
the Milwaukee Leader, second class mailing
privileges because its treasonous and seditious.
This means all of his papers were sent out by mail.
It was not door-to-door delivery
or the extra, extra you saw on the street.
So this destroyed his business.
He's also decided that in February of 1918
that he's indicted for treason under the Espionage Act.
Despite this, he ran for the US Senate in April of 1918,
and this is a poster of him
running for US senator that someone has defaced
and saying that he wants peace of the Russian kind.
Remember, by now Russia has stepped out of the war,
having its own revolution and has become communist.
And he's also been decorated as the Kaiser.
So he ran for senate.
He lost that but he did win the seat
in the House of Representatives
as a representative from Milwaukee that fall,
horrifying the United States Congress,
who would not let him take his seat.
And they sent him back and said he is under indictment for treason,
we will not seat him,
Milwaukee, have another election.
They reelected Victor Berger.
And then he was sent back
and Milwaukee was told to have another election.
They reelected Victor Berger.
So they weren't going to give up on Victor Berger.
At the same time, Daniel Hoan,
the mayor of Milwaukee is also a socialist,
and Wheeler Bloodgood, our favorite preparedness advocate,
declared before the April election
that if he wins, if Hoan wins,
he would ask the federal government
to impose martial law
because Milwaukee would no longer be American.
He does win, and the United States does not
impose martial law on Milwaukee.
The governor actually announces
beforehand that if Hoan wins by a plurality of votes,
he is legally mayor of Milwaukee
and that's the end of the discussion.
And then, finally, there's an anti-German
tendency throughout the country,
but Wisconsin sees a lot of it.
This is based partly on war propaganda
put out by the Committee of Public Information
that left many nervous about German spies and traitors.
Germans are generally portrayed
in their work as monsters or subhuman creatures,
like you can see in this poster Beat back the Hun.
This is not a real human, loving,
delightful human being we're seeing here.
And there's also an irrational fear
of anything German overtook America
and lasted throughout the war.
So German-Americans become known as hyphenates
because their name is hyphenated,
German-American, and as enemy aliens
And those are the two terms
that are used to describe the Germans.
They are not viewed as true Americans.
So, many rush, in Wisconsin especially,
to become naturalized citizens.
Some of them had lived there since they were infants,
coming over to the United States as infants,
grown up as Americans, but now,
having their loyalty challenged,
decide they now need to naturalize.
So there is a huge wave of Germans
getting their naturalization papers at this time.
Around Wisconsin, one of the favorite things to do
was to ban the teaching of the German language
in elementary schools.
So they removed it from elementary schools.
Allowed it to continue in high schools
but not in elementary where they felt children
wouldn't know better about
their being indoctrinated in German propaganda.
So this picture that you're seeing here,
it says, "Here lies the remains of German
"in Baraboo High School, BHS."
And this occurred the day of graduation
of Baraboo High School in 1918 when the students,
after graduation, took all the German books
out to the street and burned them.
Other things like this happened around the state.
We know that Shell Lake, Spooner, and Westby,
for example, all did a German book-burning,
usually with images of the Kaiser
thrown in in a public bonfire setting.
So the hyper-patriots in Wisconsin
decide that the Wisconsin Defense League's
name sounds too much like the Council of Defense,
and people are getting them confused.
So they changed the name to
the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion in September of 1918.
And this, on the left, is the back
of their membership card or membership,
where you fill out for registration
so that you know what you're signing up for.
And you can see all the things
that they are interested in doing.
Their main focus, when you read their papers,
is that they really wanted to focus on
education and make sure Wisconsinites
are educated about what American loyalty
and patriotism is and to replace all of
Wisconsin's disloyal representatives,
especially La Follette, with loyal ones.
But you might also note that number five
is to seek out and bring traitors to punishment.
And they frequently referred potential traitors
to the American Protective League.
The American Protective League
worked with what was not quite the FBI yet
but would become the FBI.
It was volunteer citizens, private citizens,
actually they were paid, now that I think about it,
private citizens who worked with the federal government
to identify potential traitors,
especially German sympathizers.
And on the right, you're seeing the sedition map
put out by the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion,
though here is says the league.
They got that wrong.
This appeared in the New York Sun.
Wisconsin Loyalty Legion provide this,
and it shows you the areas of sedition in Wisconsin,
which are primarily areas of heavy German population.
I was thinking when they looked at this,
this helps reinforce Wisconsin
as a disloyal state and is being put out by
the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion,
but that's their issue.
So this is one way that the Wisconsin, the hyper-patriots,
or the Loyalty Legion especially, dealt with
disloyalty and lack of patriotism in Wisconsin.
Another way, like I said, was to use coercive behavior.
Judge Becker, who was a circuit judge
in Monroe in I think that's Green County,
described the war aloud as a rich man's war.
And he warned farmers to beware of war taxes.
These words are seditious statements.
Because of these comments,
he was sentenced to a year in prison.
And this sign was put up on his property.
And it says,
this little picture of Becker holding kind of like a
pack off a stick and it says Berlin for me.
And being in yellow is very important
because yellow is the color of cowardice.
So he was actually--
The federal court eventually
reversed the conviction in 1920,
but his career was ruined.
And, finally, another way
to handle people who were not
particularly loyal
was done by the Knights of Loyalty,
a group, a self-styled group out of Ashland, Wisconsin,
who decided that the professor
who taught German at Northland College
needed to be tarred and feather, which he was.
This was the worse incidence of coercion
in Wisconsin during World War I.
When another person spoke out and said,
I know who these people are,
I knew who the Knights of Loyalty are,
they were masked kind of like KKK kind of look to them,
he was also tarred and feathered to silence him.
In the end, three people were tarred and feathered
in Northland, I mean in Ashland to prevent
by this group that had no other connection
to other hyper-patriots
to make sure the Germans in that area knew where they stood.
Now, just to kind of finish up,
the last gasp of all of this angst occurred in April 2nd,
mainly March and April of 1918.
Paul Husting, who you see here on the left,
was the junior senator from Wisconsin.
He was very pro-America into the war.
He was everything a hyper-patriot
or preparedness advocate would love.
Unfortunately, on October 21, 1917, he was on hiatus
out on a lake, duck hunting, he stood up to shoot,
well, he stood up to shoot,
well, actually, let me get this right.
He was sitting in a boat with his brother.
His brother went to shoot a duck
and he stood up to shoot a duck as well,
and the bullet went right through him
and killed him instantly.
So all the sudden Paul Husting, their advocate, is dead.
Who is going to replace him?
This causes a lot of issues.
The primary election held in March
comes down to the republicans.
You have to know that the republicans
at this time are divided into two groups
the stalwarts, who were more the preparedness,
Loyalty Legion type, and the progressives,
who support La Follette.
And there is a La Follette republican running,
and there's a lot of concern that he will win.
He does not win.
So now, as we go to the general election,
we have Joseph E Davies running for senator as a democrat,
Irvine Lenroot running as the republican.
Both of these men are considered loyal and acceptable.
It doesn't matter who wins.
The Loyalty Legion always says it's not partisan,
it's pro-loyal.
But the third person running for senate was Victor Berger.
Now this becomes a problem.
So, discussion of Wisconsin's loyalty
reaches a fevered pitch in the weeks before the election.
The Colorado Springs Gazette, for example,
writes, the unity of the nation
and the cause of humanity is on trial in Wisconsin.
The verdict is weighted with impressive patience.
The Chicago Daily News described Berger
as an anti-American candidate
who asks votes from disloyalists,
from quitters, yellow-bellies, Germans,
anti-nationalists, pacifists, and hallow-headed altruists.
There you go.
So, in the end, Lenroot won.
So the republican won.
However, Victor Berger got 25% of the vote.
This freaks people out a little bit,
and it takes them a while to decide
if Wisconsin is loyal or not,
but decides in the end,
Americans decide in the end they elected Lenroot,
so let's just let it go.
And this seems to be the end of the discussion
of Wisconsin and its loyalty issues for the most part.
So, to sum up...
During World War I
one definition of patriotism predominated.
Those who didn't agree with that definition
were ostracized by self-defined hyper-patriots.
The latter privileged unquestioning support
of the President and the US government over everything else.
The Wisconsinites they attacked
generally acted subdued in public,
which means once they learned that they could go
to prison or be brought up before a court
for saying things like the war is bad,
Wilson shouldn't have gotten us into the war,
things like that, they shut up.
However, they still had the ballot.
And this seems to be where they spoke out the most.
So Germans, socialists,
and all those who were declared as enemies
seemed to have voted for men like Victor Berger
and Daniel Hoan during the course of the war,
much to the chagrin of the Loyalty Legion.
So they prevented the Loyalty Legion
from being completely successful
and eradicating Wisconsin's disloyal politicians.
Now, after the war, Wisconsin's hyper-patriots
promoted memorials and Armistice Day celebrations,
but the peace that was supposed to make
the world safe for democracy,
according to Wilson, did not come about.
In fact, much of Europe remained unstable.
And what happens is the wisdom of La Follette
and Berger become more evident as time goes on.
So, in the end, they are the ones who are remembered
and discussed and not Wheeler Bloodgood and his folks.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)