In 1916, EVM attended a pro-Irish street rally in Manhattan: years later he recalled “thousands of people of all nationalities, addressed by Irish men and women . . . the speeches were for liberty—for tolerance—for an Irish homeland!” A year later the US entered World War I—simultaneously with the launch of the country’s first anti-red scare. “In 1917 many of my best teachers were subjected to a red-baiting investigation,” EVM later recalled, “all the result of war hysteria.” At DeWitt Clinton, EVM would have been exposed to arguments among pacifists, patriots, pro- and anti-German and pro- and anti-British voices. When the US entered the war, EVM took the lead in raising the funds to purchase a DeWitt Clinton High School ambulance to send to the front in Europe. He then enlisted, determined to drive the ambulance himself, though at the time he was still some months short of his eighteenth birthday, and under the minimum legal age for service.
In later years EVM proudly declared himself—especially on his campaign literature—a “veteran of World War One” and always boasted of his membership in the Jewish War Veterans, though he never spared its leadership the benefits of his criticism. The story we heard was that when his concealment of his real age (an expression of his patriotic zeal) was discovered, he was sent home, but immediately re-enlisted (legally) and was about to be shipped off to France when the war ended. “The Kaiser heard I was coming so he surrendered,” he used to tell my mother.
But the papers in the leather case hint at a more complicated, enigmatic tale. In “This Assimilation Business” EVM explains that when he first enlisted in the ambulance corps he found himself the only Jew in the outfit. “It would take volumes to cover my two months’ experience in this company,” he writes. “Let it suffice to say that I arranged for a transfer because of anti-semitic feeling.” When he re-enlisted—in the signal corps—he was posted to a battalion of six hundred, of whom twelve were Jews.
I had a dispute with the top sergeant and managed to get him alone in the barracks. I voiced my disapproval of the manner in which the Jewish boys were treated, especially concerning holiday leaves. He was very frank about the situation. He said to me that he was a member of the United Christian Brethren. That he honestly and firmly believed that the only salvation that existed was that every man in his outfit, should he unfortunately be killed, would at least, as he put it, “die a Good Christian.” I retorted very bluntly that the only thing I was certain about in this war was that the twelve Jews in this outfit would die as Jews.
On his discharge from the army in January 1919, EVM was required to return to DeWitt Clinton for a full year to complete the studies he had abandoned when he enlisted. Finally, in 1920, he received his diploma from Dr Paul, to whom he then wrote a lengthy, pained and accusatory letter in which his military experiences appear in a more candid—and confused—light. Clearly, there had been an angry rupture between the principal and the headstrong pupil, and it had something to do with the war. “Whatever there is that we could actually hold each other accountable for, at least I owe you my sincere thanks for your kindness in giving me my diploma,” he writes, then adds bitterly that he did resent “sitting idly in class a full year just to make up time.” Even as he offers the hand of reconciliation, he insists, “My views have not changed . . . I believed in independence of thought and action. Every concession that I have made, every new angle of thought, was of my own desire. I never could be browbeat into accepting dogma or creeds.” There follows what is probably the most candid account of his time in the army and his attempt to escape from it:
I won’t attempt to justify my war record. Let it suffice that after making a mistake of judgement and not conscience I re-enlisted, not that my ideas had changed but I felt that I owed it to my future to go through with the thing according to schedule. That was a hard thing to do. I had no love for the army, in fact I detested it. The army is a man’s game, and I was a boy . . . My ambulance company was anti-semitic, so much so that I sacrificed my reputation, your friendship and a whole lot besides to get out. To stay in meant a living hell. Once out, I appreciated my situation. Who in the frenzy of war hysteria would have believed my story? So I went back . . . There is much that has not been told. Some day, God granting, I shall try and tell it . . . Remember, petted and pampered as I was, a leader in my school, it was hard to be yelled at and to clean pots. Of course there were a million others like myself . . . Your opinions are your own, so shall mine ever be. Really, should I have suffered for mine? I said I would not talk war, but I have.
Did EVM use his under-age enlistment to get himself out of the army after those two bitter weeks in the ambulance corps? Initially, he was not given an honorable discharge; only in 1925 did Congress pass an act granting honorable discharges to those who’d concealed their minority status at enlistment, thus enabling EVM to boast later that he was “the proud possessor of two honorable discharges from the same war.” What seems clear is that his precipitate return to New York—along with the bitter opinions about the war and the army he seems to have expressed at the time—profoundly displeased Dr Paul (who for his part must have known of EVM’s under-age enlistment from the start). “I prided myself on your friendship. There is much I resent . . . some of the things you stand for and some of your views are still unalterably not to my liking. I admit my radical tendencies have become less red. I still maintain my right to be called a real American.” He ends the letter expressing confidence that he is now on “firmer ground” and that the future holds much for him.
I intend to go into politics. I want to try and shape the destiny of this land as much as any one man can, and I hope to succeed. I want a place in the sun. You see, I have not changed, I still have the ego. But that is a necessity if one is to be a politician. I learned that lesson in the General Organization.
In a letter to a friend written some years later he says: “I wouldn’t join the infantry because the thought of plunging a bayonet into somebody chilled me. I was willing to string wires and run a wireless and take chances. [They] never came.” What did come, though EVM never wrote a word about it, was a military experience of a different kind, in its own way as gruesome as the carnage at the front.
According to the record, EVM was stationed at Camp Devens, a complex of barracks and warehouses outside Boston, from August 1918 to January 1919. At this time the camp was home to 50,000 men, twice the number it was built for. Some were undergoing training in anticipation of being shipped out to the front, and some were on their way back from it. The first influenza cases were reported in early September. The onset of symptoms was abrupt: headache, sore throat, runny nose, fever. Even more abrupt was the deterioration into pneumonia and death, sometimes within forty-eight hours of the first sniffle. Reddish-brown spots would appear on the cheekbones of the doomed, then spread across the face until, a young doctor observed, “it was hard to tell a colored man from a white one.” By the end of September, the epidemic had brought military life in the camp to a standstill. The hospital built to hold 2,000 patients was now crammed with four times that number. While influenza generally preys on the old or the very young, the strain of 1918 seemed to target those in the prime of life. “This infection,” wrote Dr Victor Vaughan, an epidemiologist sent to Devens, “like war, kills the young, vigorous, robust adults.” Coffins ran short and bodies piled up in the makeshift morgue. “It beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle,” another doctor noted. In the midst of all this, a US district court judge arrived in camp to administer the oath of citizenship to more than 2,000 soldiers, new immigrants recruited off the streets of New York and Boston.
At Camp Devens, Victor Vaughan was disturbed by his calculations. “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration,” he wrote, “civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth.” But within a month, the epidemic began to recede. In the end, its disappearance was as stealthy and inexplicable as its onset. And though it had taken 20 million lives worldwide, as it receded it was crowded out of the popular memory.13 The disease did not fit the prevailing paradigms of war and heroism, and so, like other historical realities that undermine the stories