The Fires of Patriotism: Alaskans in the Days of the First World War 1910-1920
208
The Fires of Patriotism: Alaskans in the Days of the First World War 1910-1920
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Overview
The Fires of Patriotism explores Alaska’s wartime experience, bringing to light new stories and new characters from a decade that shook the world. This multifaceted book explores the era through engaging stories and rare photos, offering a fresh perspective on World War I from a marginal land that forged its place in the greater unity of the country.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602232051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2013 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
The Fires of Patriotism
Alaskans in the Days of the First World War 1910—1920
By Preston Jones, Neal Holland
University of Alaska Press
Copyright © 2013 University of Alaska PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-205-1
CHAPTER 1
The Alaskans
Alaska and the City
While many Americans living in the southern states during the Civil War experienced a degree of battle-related deprivation and hardship unknown to other American communities, the Great War was the first American conflict to enlist all of the nation's resources. Where an older, wealthy, and childless resident of central Maine could live through the Civil War era almost oblivious to news of the hostilities, this was not possible during the brief but intense period between the United States' declaration of war against Germany in early April 1917 and Germany's suit for peace in November of the following year. The war seemed to touch every aspect of American society. As we shall see, even Americans' efficiency in the privacy of their own homes became a topic of wartime commentary. This was all the more striking because of the great indifference many Americans displayed toward the European war through its first three years.
In the decade before the war, the United States' chief preoccupations were with problems linked to urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. That fact alone points to how life in Alaska was set apart from the broader American experience—geographically, of course, but also culturally and socially. Even communities in rural states had increasingly easy access to large cities via railroad. This was not the case in Alaska. Life in what was then a territory (Alaska did not become a U.S. state until 1959) offered particular rigors. Success in the face of Alaska's rigors spurred the idea that Alaskans comprised an especially sturdy type of person. The "ordinary Alaskan," wrote Frank Foster of McCarthy, "is physically superior to most city bred men."
Still, Alaska communities were identifiably American. This point was made in the numerous commentaries from Alaskans and visitors to the territory, which aimed to show the extent to which Alaska life did not really differ from life Outside. It was true, an observer wrote in 1912, that the residents of Nome spent months at a time in frosty darkness and experienced a degree of civic isolation unknown in any town Outside. But Nomeites knew how to occupy themselves, and their "entertainments are not by any means of the crude character that would be expected." The town's women were "just as well gowned," and its men were "just as carefully groomed as though they were in attendance at an inaugural ball at the National capital."
For many living Outside, cities were associated with pathology—excessive drinking, crime, squalor, and the loosening of moral culture. But cities were also associated with economic efficiency and the creation of wealth and opportunities. Alaska newspapers regularly carried stories touching both themes. But, for Alaskans, the ups and downs of urban life were mostly abstractions. Yes, Alaska was tied economically to Seattle, and many Alaskans had experienced city life; and, yes, Alaskans sometimes missed the Outside's easy access to electricity, bustling streets, theaters, streetcars, and the other amenities that tended to pamper the "appetite of civilization." But Alaskans had also seen the Outside's "distress ... worry ... oppression, [and] ... heart-breaking poverty." And so, as one writer put it, "with a deep and abiding disgust for the selfishness, shallowness, and meanness of it all," the Alaskan turned away from the corrupt realm of tall buildings and toward "his beloved Northland."
Yet Alaska writers regularly expressed a desire for more people, more settlements, and more development—more of what modern America had to offer. Governor John Strong echoed a general sentiment when he noted that Alaska could not and would not be developed until a comprehensive system of roads was laid. Many Alaskans wanted cities, and questions about whatever problems such population growth might lead to were rarely considered.
Once the United States entered the First World War, there were some expressions of relief that Alaska was far removed from the dangers facing American cities on the east Coast. A year into the war, Fairbanks's Alaska Citizen noted that small communities seemed to be better able to respond to the war's burdens than cities were. But the hope that Alaska would soon sprout its own urban centers persisted.
Work on Alaska's first and only substantial railroad, which would connect Seward and Fairbanks and would lead to the establishment of Anchorage and Nenana, began in 1915. Like the turn-of-the-century gold rushes, this project spurred competitive sparring over which of Alaska's settlements would prosper and become the territory's "metropolis." During the gold rush, Skagway's boosters had called their town a "city of destiny" and derided Juneau as a "dyspeptic dwarf." Residents of the soon-dead settlement of Dyea prophesied that their community of 150 businesses would become the "seaport of the gold fields, the greatest outfitting center in America, a mining point of importance—the metropolis, in fact, of the northern wonderland." On the Seward Peninsula, Teller, which would never thrive, was looked to as an up-and-coming "Queen city of the ice," while an Alaska poet wondered, with conscious overstatement, whether the "burg of Nome will rival Rome." Soon after the Great War, the english travel writer Charlotte Cameron wrote of Fairbanks as the future "Metropolis of Alaska." As for Nenana, it seemed "primitive" but "rich in possibilities," given its place along the new railroad. It was a place of friendly, literate people and hosted the "nice, clean, and comfortable" Cooney Hotel. The survival of the young town of Anchorage seemed "probable," though few without vested interests in its success saw much in the place to brag about. Anchorageites described their community as "a prospective commercial center of importance."
As for Juneau, the territory's capital, businessman Sanford Mackeever predicted a future population of one hundred thousand—about seventy thousand shy of what it would be one hundred years later. And the Seward Gateway foresaw that by 1920 the population along the train route would "probably serve a population of tens of thousands," a prediction that would be fulfilled in the 1940s. The U.S. secretary of the interior, Franklin Lane, looked forward to Alaska providing a home to "millions." Charles Tuttle, author of Alaska: Its Meaning to the World (1914), predicted the rise of a "great commercial city" on Prince William Sound that, with Seattle, would rival the regional power and influence of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Some Alaskans had gone to the territory because they were worried about or disenchanted by the problems and challenges that came with cities and industrialization. But Alaskans also fretted about the problems and challenges that came with not having cities and the industry associated with them.
Americans New and Old
In 1870, the United States' population stood at about forty million. By 1917, that number had risen to about 103 million, thanks in part to the highest levels of immigration seen in the country at that point. About half of these immigrants lived in cities like New York and Chicago. These cities now hosted large neighborhoods where English was not widely used and where poverty and the problems stemming from it prevailed in some cases.
Some immigrants went to Alaska. Indeed, nearly forty percent of the Alaska men who registered for military service in 1917 were foreign born. Some of the newcomers who went to Anchorage were named Tasaki, Tanaka, Kamada, Yokota, and Kemota. The patriarch of Nome's prominent Lomen family was an immigrant from Norway. A Russian Jew named Z. J. Loussac settled first in Juneau and later in Anchorage, where he became a community pillar. A list of names from Skagway in the year 1917 provides a sense of the ethnic variety of Alaska's towns: Abrahams, Bender, Fowler, Toyozumi, and Wurzbacher. The town's Daily Alaskan referred to itself as a "cosmopolitan" place. That term also applied to Nenana, home to Sam Geroff, Jack Hohoff, Harry Gasaloff, and Kyuzabura Saito.
While there were no organized settlement homes and few community social programs arranged for their benefit, few of Alaska's immigrants experienced hostility on account of their accent, skin tone, or place of birth. The simple reason for this was that early-twentieth-century Alaska always needed more people. The territory could hardly afford wasteful public prejudice when all capable hands were needed. It is true that there were occasional expressions of ill will, such as when foreign-born Alaska Railroad workers were collectively belittled in a newspaper editorial as "Jesus Patagaschsky and his friends," or when Mexicans were called "greasers" and Montenegrins, or Greeks and Canadians were brushed off as more interested in playing pool than building up Alaska. But by far the greater story was civility among Alaskans of different backgrounds. When Hamma Haddad of Syria petitioned in Anchorage for American citizenship, George Abraham and Frank Walsh spoke for his moral character. And William Kimura, the son of Japanese parents, remembered late in life that his childhood friends in Anchorage had been Finnish, Swedish, German, Italian, Russian, and Native. There never was anything in Alaska comparable to the keen anti-Japanese sentiment that broke out in parts of the American and Canadian west coasts.
As we will see, after the declaration of war in April 1917, Germans especially, but also Austrians and immigrants from other enemy nations, would come under scrutiny for signs of disloyalty. Some would face hostility, and at least one death was shrouded in ambiguity. Soon after the United States entered the war, a miner in La Touche, himself an immigrant, wrote about a friend who "nerly went insen" and "tore his heir and cursd the Germans" and "hasent spoken A word to a German." But in well-settled areas, personal interethnic animosity was unusual.
It is certainly true that Alaskans shared the human preoccupation with racial and ethnic difference that was not tempered, as in later times, by an interest in interracial sensitivity. In one case, "Mrs. John Bean" was held up as a model pioneer—"the first white woman to bear a thoroughbred white child in interior Alaska." And social events that would be starkly unacceptable a century later made for simple entertainment. A "Darktown" minstrel show organized in McCarthy falls into this category. And some of the language used to describe Alaska Natives—"dusky children of the wilds," "brunette children of the mossy glades," "dusky maids"—was dismissive and derogatory.
Natives
Writers' reflections on Alaska Natives were often complimentary, though sometimes backhanded. Southeastern Alaska Native women were sharp and shrewd bargainers, John Underwood wrote, even if they lacked basic economic knowledge. Natives were clever, but they were also simple-minded and "much afraid of anything which they do not understand." While the "Alaska Indians" retained "the savage ideas of workmanship in their carvings," they excelled at copying designs made by professionals Outside. In Nome, Underwood saw a picture of President Taft reproduced expertly on a walrus tusk. Considering Japan's rise as a nation, substantially as a result of its appropriation of western military and economic methods, Underwood wondered if the Alaska Natives' "efficiency at copying" lent strength to a theory that Alaska's first inhabitants had originated in Japan.
Obviously, the territory's Natives had been Alaskans long before immigrants from New York, California, Argentina, and eastern Europe assumed that identity. As was true throughout the Americas, Australasia, and parts of Africa, the descendants of Alaska's first immigrants had been confronted with the se of European civilization since the early modern period. For many Alaska Natives, the Russian colonial presence was distant and of little significance. From the American purchase of Alaska in 1867, the Yankee presence combined with the influx of immigrants was increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, to avoid.
* * *
It is possible to speak in general terms about euro-Alaska society in the First World War era. Nome's public culture differed from Anchorage's, for example, but not very much. When talking about Alaska Natives, however, generalizations are more difficult to make. The term "Alaska Native" refers to different groups speaking about twenty languages and, in some cases, separated by hundreds of miles. Given this diversity, we will focus here on relations between Natives and non-Natives.
For decades, the approach to discussions of interactions between the descendants of Alaska's first human settlers and its later American immigrants has been shaped by the rubric of victim and victimizer. There is a reason for this. The arrival in Alaska of tens of thousands of non-Natives—and their weapons, diseases, passion for gold and other natural resources, and ready supply of alcohol—brought psychological disequilibrium, social destruction, and sometimes death to Native communities. At the same time, it is important to see that Natives were not only on the receiving end of things. They were also active agents, and many non-Native Alaskans admired and adopted elements of Native culture. Natives influenced how some Alaskans dressed, talked, studied, traveled, decorated their homes, and presented themselves to the outside world.
We gain some insight into the complicated relationship between Natives and non-Natives in the correspondence of Governor John Strong. In the fall of 1917, he received a letter asking if the state of Washington could be reimbursed for the cost of educating an Alaska Eskimo who was blind. "I regret to say," the governor responded, that the law allowed payment "only for white children and, as the case mentioned by you is an Indian or Eskimo child, the law will not cover it." Strong's response reads cold and bureaucratic, but the governor offered an additional thought. He suggested that the child might be sent to a hospital in Juneau where the U.S. Bureau of education would pick up costs. Regulations bound but did not prevent him from seeking another solution. And while in later decades there would be justifiable critique of demeaning policies related to Native education, there is no reason to doubt what Strong wrote to Ralph Young, of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, about his interest in contributing to the "betterment of the native people of Alaska." (We see Strong's relative broad-mindedness at work in a different context. At a time when feelings against Chinese were high Outside, the governor wrote warmly of his Chinese cook and steward of five years as "honest, competent, loyal, always dependable" and "entirely deserving.")
The governor more directly took up the case of a ten-year-old Native girl who was fatherless and whose mother was "dissolute." Writing to the superintendent of the Sheldon Jackson School in Sitka, he asked to be informed "at as early a moment as possible" whether it was possible for the girl to be admitted to the school. And in a private letter to Ella Carr of Klukwan, in Alaska's Panhandle, Strong rued the fact that abuse of Native children was often hard to prove and prosecute as there were so many "designing men" who intimidated and manipulated witnesses. He wrote of his "sincere desire to assist ... in the uplift of natives and the enforcement of the law at all times."
Using the language typical of his day, which at a later time would seem quite patronizing, Strong wrote to the Native Presbyterian Church congratulating it on its work in "helping the native peoples to understand themselves, [and] to think and to act as members of a higher civilization." The Natives of southwest Alaska, he continued,
are among the most intelligent and industrious of the race, and the progress which they are making toward higher ideals speaks more loudly than any mere words, and illustrates forcefully what they are capable of becoming. When a primitive people emerge from almost absolute barbarism to an efficient state of civilization within a generation, the lesson to be learned therefrom is obvious. It shows unmistakably that they have within them the qualities which enable them to rise from the stepping stone of their dead selves to higher things.
This was in mid-November 1917. After a few more months of war news, Strong might have agreed with others who wondered if Europeans were not, after all, the greater brutes. When had Natives ever slaughtered one another as the advanced nations were now doing? William T. Lopp, the chief of the education Bureau's Alaska division, saw this point. In his commentary on Natives who were fashioning and selling ivory and furs to raise funds for the Red Cross, Lopp noted that the "peaceful Eskimo is sacrificing for the savage white man." And during the war, Strong praised Natives' contributions to the Red Cross. The "Indians of Alaska are to be congratulated upon the interest and intelligence they are displaying in this great conflict." Later, Governor Riggs, too, learned of Natives' contributions to the Red Cross. Riggs also learned that many Inuit "signified their willingness to go to the [battle] Front if needed."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Fires of Patriotism by Preston Jones, Neal Holland. Copyright © 2013 University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Alaska Press.
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Table of Contents
TimelinePreface and Acknowledgements
1 The Alaskans
2 The War before the War
3 Over Here –Words
4 Over Here – Deeds
5 Organizing
6 Aftermath
Appendix I: Primary Sources
Appendix II: Alaska in 1918: A Letter from Governor Strong
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index