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WAR AND THE ARTS: THE TWO FACES OF PATRIOTISM

Artists in the War

Some of the young American men who served or lived in Europe during World War I later made their marks in various arts, particularly the writers who used their war experiences as creative material. Several artists with already-established reputations were involved in the war as well. Among those who interrupted successful careers for wartime service were comic actor Buster Keaton, songwriter Irving Berlin, vaudeville cowboy wit Will Ahern, and dancer Ted Shawn. The careers of dancer Vernon Castle and poets Joyce Kilmer and Alan Seeger ended when they became war casualties. Other artists were involved in a professional capacity. Photographer Edward Steichen supervised aerial photography for the U.S. Army. Short-story writer Ring Lardner was a war correspondent in France for Collier's magazine. John Singer Sargent, an American expatriate, served as the offical wartime painter for the British government. (One resulting work, Gassed, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1919.) John Philip Sousa was put in charge of all U.S. Navy bands. Dance-band leader James Reese Europe, commissioned as an army lieutenant, directed the regimental band of the New York Fifteenth Regiment, an all-black corps that endured 191 consecutive days under fire.

The Home Front

Throughout the war more than twelve hundred American actors traveled to Europe to perform for the troops. Performers also staged wartime fund-raisers and patriotic rallies at home. In 1917 an all-star cast including Laurette Taylor, Minnie Maddern Fiske, George Arliss, George M. Cohan, and James K. Hackett toured the country in a benefit production of Out There, a patriotic play about a Red Cross nurse, raising more than $680,000 for the Red Cross. Stationed in the United States, army sergeant Irving Berlin—a Russian-Jewish immigrant who was drafted at age twenty-nine, only a month after he became a naturalized American citizen—wrote, produced, and acted in Yip, Yip Yaphank, a fund-raiser with an all-soldier cast that brought in $135,000 when it played at the Century Theatre in New York City in 1918. The show included "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," a song that became one of the biggest hits of the war, especially among enlisted men. Director D. W. Griffith chaired the Motion Picture War Service Association, which organized stars' appearances at war-bond rallies. Some celebrities—including Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Ruth St. Denis—made national tours to sell war bonds. Actress Lillian Russell raised $7,000 in a solo appearance at the Hippodrome in New York City; in Pittsburgh she headlined "Lillian Russell Recruiting Day at the Navy."

Nativism and Intolerance

Amid all this loyalty, there was an ugly side to the patriotism that swept across America during the war. The "Four Minute Men" of George Creel's Committee on Public Information—volunteers who gave four-minute talks on patriotism—made appearances between acts at Broadway and vaudeville theaters, at movie houses, at dance clubs, and even at the opera, Their speeches, along with public-service advertisements from the Creel Committee, warned Americans that the country was full of spies. The Broadway show Watch Your Neighbors (1918) echoed this theme. Any person or creative work deemed somewhat less than 100 percent American was suspect. Robert Goldstein, the producer of The Spirit of '76 (1917), a movie about the Revolutionary War, was arrested and imprisoned under the Espionage Act of 1917 because he depicted the British, allies of the United States in World War I, as evil people. Meanwhile, American movies such as Huns Within Our Gates (1918) and The Fall of a Nation (1916)—the latter about an invasion of America by brutal Germans—fueled citizens' fears of Americans of German descent. German Americans were vilified during the war years, a time when hamburger was renamed "liberty steak" and sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage."

Anti-German Fervor

The German arts were essentially removed from American culture during the war. German-language theaters in Milwaukee and Saint Louis, cities where there were large German American populations, were shut down. The New York Metropolitan Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Pittsburgh Symphony excised the works of German composers from their repertoires, and the Chicago Opera dropped its annual performance of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle. A wartime patriotic organization called the American Defense Society warned Americans that German music was one of the most dangerous forms of German propaganda because it appealed to the emotions. The cities of Pittsburgh, Washington, Baltimore, and Cleveland canceled recitals by Austrian-born violinist Fritz Kreisler. In California the state government ordered German folk songs cut out of schoolchildren's songbooks; in Marys ville, Nebraska, residents removed German-language books, including Bibles, from the school library and burned them.

The Case of Carl Muck

The worst instance of wartime intolerance in the American arts was the internment of Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Carl Muck. Because of his initial reluctance to open all of the orchestra's performances with "The Star-Spangled Banner" (considering it an inappropriate start for a program of classical music) the German-born Muck—who was actually a naturalized Swiss citizen—became the target of a hate campaign led by the Daughters of 1812 and the Daughters of the American Revolution. His mall was censored, and his home was frequently searched. Even after he added the national anthem to the orchestra's program, his performances in Washington, Baltimore, and other cities were boycotted. On 25 March 1918 he was arrested at his Boston home and sent to Georgia, where he was imprisoned as an enemy alien for more than a year. (Also interned at the same facility was the Austrian-born conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, Ernst Kumwald.) Muck and his wife were deported in August 1919. In later years several American orchestras asked Muck to conduct, but he refused to return to the United States.