ON THE EVENING OF April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson set off from the White House and made his way through the crowded, expectant streets of Washington. He was bound for Capitol Hill, where he addressed a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. The United States, he explained, had been backed into a corner; much as he hated it, there was no option left except war. Americans sought nothing for themselves, only “the vindication of right, of human right.” They would fight in response to German provocations, but they would seek something far greater than Germany’s defeat. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he declared in ringing terms that have become the speech’s, and perhaps Wilson’s, most memorable phrase. “Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion.” The United States was “but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.” Wilson’s concluding paragraph summarized America’s noble case for war in stirring, eloquent language. He finished by paraphrasing Martin Luther’s riposte to his accusers at the Diet of Worms, a rebuttal to ecclesiastical tyranny that touched off the Reformation. This was likely not an incidental reference—a man of Wilson’s religious background and knowledge would surely have realized that 1917 marked the four hundredth anniversary of Luther’s “Ninety-five Theses” protesting the indulgences of the Catholic Church. America, Wilson said, would wage war for its highest ideals. “God helping her, she can do no other.”1
Sacrifice, intervening not only for America but for all the world, fighting for the highest ideals of democracy and liberty—these were the themes that Wilson stressed repeatedly to explain why America fought. Invoking a Calvinistic sense of providence, chosenness, and Christian unselfishness, Wilson told another audience in June that Americans at war were now “an instrument in the hands of God to see that liberty is made secure for mankind.” The United States had been “allowed to become strong in the Providence of God that our strength might be used to prove, not our selfishness, but our greatness.” Sounding a note that the churches would ring constantly for the next two years, Wilson declared himself “thankful for the privilege of self-sacrifice, which is the only privilege that lends dignity to the human spirit.”2
“Through no choice of our own the American people has been drawn into the world war, and we must now bear our share of the burden and sacrifice.” To Samuel Zane Batten, a Baptist preacher and secretary of the Northern Baptist Convention’s War Commission, the United States had come to war reluctantly, unenthusiastically, and regretfully. This had long been a common theme among American clergy who favored war, from 1812 to Spain and the Philippines. According to Batten, the stakes were clear: “This war for the destruction of injustice and inhumanity is a holy crusade and a continuation of Christ’s sacrificial service for the redemption of the world.” Only the most committed of pacifists dissented from Batten’s view. The only questions remaining for the vast majority of American Christians centered on execution: How would the churches mobilize their congregants? How would they administer to the pastoral needs of soldiers in the field? How would they help coordinate plans for a postwar peace settlement? To these questions, the nation’s churches and synagogues now turned their attention. Their answers—Protestant, Catholic, and Jew alike—were largely synergistic with Wilson’s, providing the president with a key base of support, encouragement, and moral authority at a moment of confusion and controversy. In so doing, they were literally answering Wilson’s call for support from the nation’s pulpits.3
In general, Protestants supported the cause in two ways: by rallying public support and by providing organization and infrastructure. Both were equally important to the war effort, particularly at home, for they gave it the moral imprimatur of nearly all the national churches and many important regional ones. Yet objectives within Protestantism differed, especially between liberals and conservatives, in ways that would help determine the confines of U.S. foreign policy for some time to come.
CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALS and the emerging fundamentalist movement did not respond to the war with one voice. Some adhered to an unusually strict separation of church from state; these separatists viewed the government as a corrupting influence upon the church, and so refused to have anything to do with invocations of patriotism and wartime service. Others continued to embrace the New Testament’s pacifist injunctions against war and reacted to preparedness and the pre-1917 debate over U.S. intervention in much the same way as liberal pacifists. Others were more interventionist, because they despised German authoritarianism and its meddling in church affairs, or because they expressed a patriotism that demanded support for the United States in a time of crisis. Still, with their nation at war, the majority of conservatives set aside any doubts and threw their support behind Wilson. The shift by the emerging Pentecostal churches, the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ, is indicative. Led by one of the founders of the faith, Aimee Semple McPherson, habitually pacifistic and anti-statist Pentecostals accommodated themselves to the government’s wartime needs and patriotically supported its war aims.4
There was, however, one key difference between liberal and conservative Protestants: conservatives were less concerned with internationalism than they were with a more straightforward patriotism and drive to win the war. Conservatism remained diverse, yet the exigencies of war also created a standardizing effect, at least in reactions to the war and American participation, a reaction that was true of liberal modernism as well. Yet unlike liberals, fundamentalists were just beginning to assert themselves as a distinct force in American life, and their response to the war differed in important ways from the elite modernists who dominated the national discussion on religion. Conservative Protestants could be just as nationalistic and militantly anti-German as mainline modernists, but for different reasons.
Conservatives were not as preoccupied with the potential terms of a postwar settlement, and did not outline plans for world federation, collective security, or international organization. They were nationalists rather than internationalists, and so did not share the liberal view of the world as interconnected, much less interdependent. Conservatives may have distrusted the state, but they loved their country. With a strong adherence to the separation of church and state as a way to guard against the government regulation of religion and thus protect their autonomy, conservative evangelicals, premillennial dispensationalists, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals were wary of statist solutions for human frailty. As one fundamentalist put it, they feared a world order in which “government will control religion, trade, and the people themselves,” leaving “no room for freedom of thought, or independence of action in any direction whatever.” Instead, the world would be controlled by a dictator, “Satan’s super-man,” at the head of a world state. Building a postwar parliament of nations would only create a system of “centralized power in the hands of a few,” warned Presbyterian magazine, which would simply mean “the realization of the German idea by another and less direct route.”5
Fundamentalist preachers commanded large audiences and national followings. The most famous of them was Billy Sunday, a bombastic evangelist who took an especially hard, crowd-pleasing stance on the war. A former left-fielder for the Chicago White Stockings, Sunday had pledged his life to Christ one summer afternoon after hearing the old-time hymns and simple gospel of Chicago street preachers. He became a preacher himself, and rose to fame on a message that was even simpler and more direct than Dwight Moody’s and a style even more emotional than George Whitefield’s. He was also, like most conservative evangelists, an American nationalist, and his support for the American war effort was just as bombastic as his preaching. “If you turn hell upside down,” he bellowed at revivals across the nation, “you will find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.” Sunday would also outline his wartime philosophy in somewhat more detail. “I tell you it is Bill [Kaiser Wilhelm II] against Woodrow, Germany against America, Hell against Heaven,” he railed. “Either you are loyal or you are not, you are either a patriot or a black-hearted traitor.” Gentler talk “about not fighting the German people is a lot of bunk. They say we are fighting for an ideal. Well, if we are we will have to knock down the German people to get it over.”6
More thoughtful but no less bellicose was John Roach Straton, pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church in New York City and one of the early leaders of fundamentalism. Americans, he outlined in a sermon, waged holy war against Germany’s “system of autocracy and tyranny … founded upon the idea that men are not capable of ruling themselves.” Conversely, libertarian American democracy was based on the premise “that men are essentially capable of self-direction” and that “the soul is a holy thing, and that it is competent to act under God’s guidance for itself.” The American way “believes that the voice of the people is the voice of God.” These two systems, Straton concluded, “are the practical expressions of the forces of good and evil.” American democracy protected freedom of conscience and freedom of worship, liberties that nonconformist Christians such as Baptists relied on for their very existence. If the state controlled religion in America, as it purportedly did in Germany, Straton and other fundamentalists feared their form of worship would be the first to go.7
Nationalistic, conservative Protestants did not hesitate to oppose German authoritarianism, but their animus had two important additional motivations. The first was a reaction to the corrupting influence of German theology. Fundamentalists had recently begun to resist the modernist challenge to absolute biblical authority. Evolution was a primary target, but so too was biblical criticism, then en vogue in the established, usually liberal theological seminaries and divinity schools. The Bible, claimed fundamentalists, was the literal word of God, and nothing else. The innovators of biblical criticism—and thus of modernist heresy, said American fundamentalists—were German theologians and scholars. Germany’s culture, “including her destructive criticism of the word of God, is as false as hell because its fruits are as vile as hell!” pronounced Straton. How could anyone explain the “abominable utterances” of the “hitherto highly esteemed critics, theologians, and philosophers” of Germany, asked Reuben A. Torrey, dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles and another important founder of Protestant fundamentalism, “except by discerning a very brainy, very astute Devil back of them?” The war had simply verified “the terrible results of the evolutionary hypothesis when carried to its logical conclusions” and the “appalling results of German rationalism and destructive criticism.”8
Second, just as important to the fundamentalist mind was the war’s role in elevating premillennial dispensationalism to the front ranks of fundamentalism. Liberal, optimistic postmillennialism had long dominated the American religious landscape and had fueled reformist movements from abolition to temperance. Christ, the postmillennialists claimed, would return to earth only after humanity had been able to reform and perfect the world. Premillennial dispensationalists believed exactly the opposite: Christ’s return depended upon the world’s degradation. Jesus would then return to lead the armies of the Lord in battle against Satan, and a millennium of peace would follow their victory. Premillennialism had been gaining in popularity since the late nineteenth century; by seeming to fulfill biblical prophecy, the Great War gave the movement a tremendous boost, much to liberal dismay and alarm. Several books of the Bible, especially Daniel and Revelation, foretold the end of the world as a series of battles between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The Great War quickly assumed apocalyptic significance for most Christians, but for many conservative Protestants it seemed to be literally true. Germany nicely filled out the role of the Antichrist, succeeding earlier versions such as the Catholic powers Spain and France. Torrey took the lead in arguing that the war proved the validity of the word of God by fulfilling millennial prophecy. Most important was the British capture of Jerusalem from the Turks (allied to Germany) and the Balfour Declaration declaring British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which created waves of premillennialist excitement because an essential prerequisite to the end times was the Jews returning to govern the ancient land of Israel. The end was nigh, and premillennialists had the war to thank for it.9
Premillennial evangelicals and fundamentalists were also natural partners of the emerging Zionist movement. Indeed, they became Zionists before most American Jews had themselves converted to the cause. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the British capture of Jerusalem, the prospect of a restored state of Israel—all these apparent fulfillments of biblical prophecy moved conservative Christian Zionists to back Jewish nationalist plans for a new homeland in Palestine. William Blackstone, the de facto leader of Christian Zionism in America, and theologians like Charles Blanchard of Wheaton College lobbied the Wilson administration to support Zionist plans. Blackstone deemed it providential that the United States had remained on the sidelines of the war until the moment it could participate and dictate the terms of peace. Louis Brandeis and Stephen Wise, Jewish Zionists who accepted support wherever they could find it, encouraged these Christian sympathizers. Brandeis bestowed upon Blackstone the title “Father of Zionism” because, he explained to the Christian leader, “your work antedates [Theodor] Herzl.” Brandeis and Wise even orchestrated a second Blackstone Memorial, a petition presented to Wilson in June 1917. It was no coincidence that American Zionism and premillennial dispensationalism were maturing at precisely the same moment.10
Finally, the war politicized conservative Protestants as they never had been before. Partly this was because the war politicized everyone in America. Aside from raising the most important questions of war and peace, the Wilson administration mobilized public opinion to support intervention, and persecuted those who refused to go along. But conservative politicization also resulted from wartime battles with modernists, early skirmishes that would later explode in the theological civil wars of the 1920s. Modernists attacked fundamentalists for their pessimistic premillennialism, branding it little more than a way to attack needed social reform and an excuse to ignore the squalid living conditions of many Americans. Fundamentalists attacked modernists for accepting empiricist, skeptical German philosophy and theology, which, they charged, had led to the popularity of Darwinian evolution, the rise of social Darwinism, competition among the great powers, and eventually the terrible world war. Cities with significant centers of both modernism and fundamentalism, such as New York and Philadelphia, became battlegrounds for the soul of American Protestantism. Chicago saw some of the most intense, emotional arguments as the liberal University of Chicago Divinity School and the conservative Moody Bible Institute violently denounced each other for holding beliefs that were tantamount to heresy. Both sides then used the war to attack the other, charging their adversaries with insufficient patriotism or culpability in causing war in the first place. For both sides, then, expressing their utmost support for the war, its grand objectives, and the nation was not only patriotic duty but a matter of survival.11
LIBERAL PROTESTANTS also passionately supported the war, but in different ways and for different reasons. Their rallying of support was important as well, and they elevated their postmillennial rhetoric about a reformation of the world system, but they were even more instrumental in providing voluntarist institutional solutions to many of the federal government’s unprecedented organizational problems.
Pacifist exceptions remained, although by April 1917 they were very much exceptions to the overwhelmingly prowar norm. The power of the peace crusade lingered—in June, for example, Wilson withdrew plans to co-opt church services to support the war lest they become a platform for pacifist antiwar protest—but then quickly faded. The mainline churches more or less abandoned what little pacifism they had tolerated, which left it in the hands of the traditional peace churches, Christian socialists, famous individual exceptions such as Jane Addams, and fundamentalist sects that resisted all involvement with the state. This loss of support from the religious establishment made pacifism all the more ineffective. Christian pacifists in the mainline churches, moreover, were confronted with an agonizing choice of conformity or defiance. Most conformed, but some, like Arthur Dunham with his resignation from the Presbyterian Church, became independent liberal Christians who stood on conscience alone. Pacifist societies continued their work, but only a much harder core of idealists remained. While their purity may have been intact, their effectiveness was completely destroyed. The Fellowship of Reconciliation offered aid and comfort to conscientious objectors, but they also adopted a much more strident political stance, fully embracing socialism and partnering with the antiwar socialist union, the Industrial Workers of the World. Given that the IWW was anathema to most liberals, all conservatives, and both political parties, it was evident that the main pacifist organizations had fallen out of touch with the mainstream.12
In May, Congress brought in the draft when it passed the Selective Service Act. Though draft boards only recognized the most well-established pacifist denominations, such as the Society of Friends and the Mennonites, as legitimate conscientious objectors, others came forward to claim exemption from the obligations of military service, including African American Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Molokan Church of Arizona. Their claims were ignored, they were punished by the government, and they suffered popular ridicule and persecution as “shirkers” and “cowards.” Even Mennonites, duly recognized as legitimate pacifists, came under fierce attack for their alleged cowardice and lack of patriotism, particularly those who still worshipped in German; some were even flogged, tarred, and feathered. But conscientious objectors from established denominations, such as Episcopalians and Presbyterians, received even harsher treatment for selfishly turning against their brethren and country. In all, only 65,000 men claimed conscientious objector status—0.3 percent of the total number drafted. Most of these claims were recognized, and the claimants performed alternative service on farms, in hospitals, or with relief agencies such as the YMCA or the Red Cross. Nearly four thousand men were imprisoned for their beliefs because they refused to participate at all, including alternative service, and of them the vast majority—over 90 percent—were Christian pacifists. Conscientious objectors established their own relief agencies; the most celebrated, successful, and enduring was the American Friends Service Committee, which worked in tandem with Herbert Hoover, himself a practicing Quaker, in administering postwar reconstruction efforts in Europe well into the 1920s.13
As Christian pacifists discovered at their peril, a principled refusal to fight had become an overwhelmingly unpopular belief by 1917—even among Christians. Even if the kaiser and Teddy Roosevelt worshipped the same militaristic God, as the pacifist Frederick Libby charged, it was now a more popular deity than the Prince of Peace. Indeed, preaching a peace sermon from the gospels of the New Testament bordered on treason. In a contest of good versus evil, pacifism seemed an ignoble, selfish, sinful response to a crisis that demanded faith, sacrifice, and suffering. Referring to the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which effectively criminalized dissent, one critic of “pagan” pacifism rejoiced that all “forms of peace propaganda are at present justly and properly repressed by the Government as a war measure.” The New Testament was noble, but it was “not meant to play into the hands of the evil Power.” Instead of aiding the cause of Christ, pacifism “only gluts the ravenous maw of inhuman soulless tyranny” in a worldwide crisis “when incarnate evil sits in the very temple of God, setting itself forth as God, a time when the law of violence is openly avowed and exalted above the law of mercy and right, a time of the beast and false prophet.”14
Where these extremes met in the middle, they produced an early form of Christian realism, one of the most important politico-religious doctrines of the last century. Associated with Reinhold Niebuhr and his fight to secure U.S. intervention in World War II, the rough outlines of Christian realism, at least as it applied to questions of war and peace, were already visible in 1917. It was essentially another form of compromise between pacifism and militarism; though few at the time said so, it was also a revival of just war theory. As Harry Emerson Fosdick put it, “Force and love are not necessarily antithetical” so long as Americans wielded “the judicious application of force in the hands of love.” This insight was based upon two profound recognitions: that war was evil, but that sometimes injustice, tyranny, and aggression posed even greater evils than war. The world was a place of innate sin as well as progress, argued these early Christian realists. Or, as Henry Sloane Coffin lectured to students at Yale, the world was “tragic,” not necessarily hopeful, and a place of “judgment and redemption.” Christian realism offered a subtle yet powerful justification for those liberals who came to believe in America’s duty to fight in Europe. Though they would later go their separate ways, Fosdick and Coffin were two of Christian realism’s early apostles. So was Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, one of the most intellectually pugnacious supporters of the war. Mathews once accosted a former friend, the pacifist Kirby Page, by accusing him of playing the Good Samaritan by simply waiting for the thieves to beat and rob the traveler before helping him. What use was such a timid faith? “If the religion of the Quakers had become the religion of the world, war would have ceased,” Mathews reasoned elsewhere. “But it has not become the religion of the world or even an appreciable section of the world.”15
Aside from a hard core of the most idealistic Christian pacifists, then, most liberals joined the crusade against Germany, even those who themselves had once been advocates of peace (or, like Fosdick, would be in the future). Their conversion to the nobler purposes of war was especially important, as it sanctified intervention and infused it with the intense, burning idealism of Christian pacifism. Reverend Hardin was one such convert: he moved to Paris in 1918 to work for the Red Cross and believed that “all that America is doing … in this grand struggle” proved it was “the hope of humanity.” Another was Sherwood Eddy, who called himself in 1918 a “Christian militant” who claimed a “right to fight.” Eddy redefined his position as one of “peace, based upon a law of right, supported when necessary by the use of force.” Against such an immoral, aggressive enemy as Germany, “armed defence” became a “moral obligation” higher even than peace. Yet another convert was John Mott, a founding member of the ultra-pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation; in 1917, he supported U.S. intervention and oversaw the YMCA’s relief programs in Europe. Frederick Lynch now firmly supported Wilson, too, and brought the organization he headed, Church Peace Union, along with him. Washington Gladden made a similar conversion. But most astonishing was William Jennings Bryan, who despite his fifty-seven years of age immediately wrote Wilson to volunteer his services as a private in the U.S. Army.16
A critical element in mobilizing liberal Protestant support for the war, especially among those who had opposed preparedness and intervention, was the belief that the United States would use victory in war to bring nations together in a permanent settlement of world peace. In this view, the United States would have no credibility or legitimacy at all, and thus no influence, if it remained out of the war. This was an article of faith for almost all liberals, from Southern Methodist missionaries to Unitarians. If America had maintained its selfish neutrality, claimed a Minnesota Unitarian minister, it would mean that “every man’s hand would be against us” and the “world would despise us.” Instead, “America has given her answer,” to itself and to the world, by taking its rightful place “with the hosts that are battling for a great human ideal.” What was more, Americans would ennoble themselves in the eyes of the world, and of God. Robert Speer, now head of the FCC’s General War-time Commission of the Churches, framed American intervention as a progressive war “in defense of human rights, of weak nations, of innocent and inoffensive peoples, an unselfish war in which the nation seeks absolutely nothing for itself and is willing to spend everything in order that all men, including its enemies, may be free.”17
Just as critical was the conviction that the United States had intervened unwillingly, as an absolute last resort. Even if they were not committed pacifists, many mainline liberals would never support war in the first instance. War not only had to be waged with the highest, purest motives, it also could not be a matter of choice. To traditional antiwar denominations, such as the Unitarians, this was a vital distinction. “Now, in this universal Armageddon, in which we find ourselves compelled to bear our part, the choice incessantly is forced upon us,” intoned Alfred Hussey of the First Unitarian Church in Lowell, Massachusetts, in a sermon shortly before the war. “Will you throw in your lot with the forces of light or those of darkness? Will you champion truth, or falsehood, the things seen or the things unseen, God or devil?” To traditionally antiwar Unitarians, these were extraordinary questions for an extraordinary time.18
Liberals also demonized Germany as the world’s main source of tyranny and militarism, and thus as the antithesis of all that America stood and fought for. Mainline clergy sponsored boycotts of German products and turned their backs on German theology. That indefatigable crusader Lyman Abbott used the pages of The Outlook to attack the Germans mercilessly as “the Predatory Potsdam Gang.” He could not, Abbott announced, pray to “forgive them for they know not what they do” simply because “it is not true. I do not hate the Predatory Potsdam Gang because it is my enemy,” he confessed in remarkably unchristian language. “I hate it because it is a robber, a murderer, a destroyer of homes, a pillager of churches, a violater of women. I do well hate it.” When Speer, a firm supporter of the war, had the temerity to lecture an audience at Columbia University in early 1918 that the United States also had its own sins to answer for, and that Americans should love their enemies even though they fought them, he was wrongly condemned as either a seditious German sympathizer, a cowardly pacifist, or both.19
The liberal critique of German culture, however, was less straightforward than it was for conservatives because liberals had long admired Germany’s contributions to science, theology, and higher learning. Indeed, many had studied at one of the great universities in Germany and had embraced a thoroughly German approach to scholarship and Bible reading; others, including Woodrow Wilson in the doctoral program at Johns Hopkins, had imbibed German scholarship and methods from German-trained mentors. As dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, Shailer Mathews was one of liberal Protestantism’s most influential figures; as an educator at Chicago, a nerve center of modernism, he was also steeped in the empiricism of higher education. When Dean Mathews of Chicago spoke, America’s liberal Protestants listened. Which made his stunning 1918 attack on German intellectualism all the more important in the service of war. The conflict, Mathews explained, had illustrated for Americans that German thought “was born of a malignant political philosophy” which had been “implanted within our intellectual life. Liberty [was] then forgotten at the shrine of a new god, Teutonic Efficiency” while “Germans sanctified anti-internationalistic patriotism by appeal to their Kultur.” This was a significant attack, for it was Germany’s vaunted culture that had elevated its status among liberal theologians in the first place. The war had revealed Germany’s worst authoritarian tendencies, and German Kultur’s subservience to the whims of a tyrant. “A religion that thus yields itself to the will of the state is certainly far enough from the Christianity of Jesus,” an argument that enabled Mathews not only to criticize Germany but rescue modernism for American Protestants.20
Woodrow Wilson actually knew this story well: Princeton, both the University and the neighboring and more conservative Theological Seminary, had been the source of some of the fiercest attacks on German biblical criticism. Just as Wilson’s affection for Britain was rooted in his own personal history and in the heritage of Presbyterianism, then, his animus for Germany was theological as well as political.21
MAINLINE PROTESTANT SUPPORT for the war was not confined merely to individuals. Churches believed their country was fighting a heavenly fight in a righteous cause, and acted accordingly. Many decorated their churches with American flags and patriotic bunting. Typical was the Second Presbyterian Church of Richmond, Virginia, which alone sent eighty-one men into military service and four women into relief work (two were field nurses, two worked for the YWCA). Most were sent into action in Europe, and two of the men died in battle; several others, noted the church’s minister, Russell Cecil, had been gassed or severely wounded. Reverend Cecil described the attitude of his congregation as “enthusiastic” yet grounded in “the spirit of self-sacrifice.” Every Sunday, he read out a special prayer to those serving overseas; often he gave a special sermon on the moral aims of the war. For the duration of the war, a Service Flag graced one side of the pulpit, an American flag the other. Many of the church’s women volunteered for the Red Cross in a room set aside especially for that purpose. Cecil recorded this information as an everlasting testament to Second Presbyterian’s wartime devotion and sacrifice. “Finally,” he wrote, “it should be said that the members of the church and congregation evinced a true patriotic spirit; and did not spare themselves or their means when called upon by the country to defend its honor in the war, and to assist in the efforts of the entente Allies in resisting the organized attempts of Prussianism to over-run the nations of Europe and dominate the world.” Second Presbyterian had given much, but it was for a noble cause.22
Almost without exception, the large organizations of liberal Protestantism placed their services in the hands of the Wilson administration and its war campaign. This was crucial assistance for a government that had only recently decided to take on the monumental challenge of waging a world war for world peace. Protestant organizations were national in scope, with memberships and activities that reached from coast to coast; though they were concentrated in the Northeast, their presence extended into every region, including the South. Their reach was lengthened by the fact that many supporters of the ecumenical movement were laymen who were either leaders of industry (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) or government (Woodrow Wilson, John Foster Dulles). Their overall memberships were not small, either—at its height, for example, the FCC alone represented thirty-three major denominations comprising as many as two-thirds of all American Protestants—and they were able to magnify their influence by speaking through their members, the clergy, who would pass on messages and information through sermons and other communications to their congregations. By allying itself to the national mainline Protestant institutions, then, the Wilson administration found itself with a direct line to possibly the largest captive audience in the United States.23
No group benefited more than the Federal Council of Churches. Established in 1908 as the national Protestant body, the ecumenical FCC did not initially prosper, despite having the support of nearly every major mainline denomination. What plagued the FCC was the same irony that had undone ecumenical councils before it: a body devoted to religious unity could not overcome strong denominational identities and different, often contradictory, approaches to theology and politics. Before the war, these issues had not extended much into the realm of foreign affairs. The FCC had been established not only as a means to promote Protestant unity, but also as a forum to advance the Social Gospel. Yet it was mostly ineffective, a national debating society that could not command an authoritative voice even among its member churches. That is, until the war. The Great War presented the most serious challenge to Western society on all fronts. If the Protestant churches were to be politically relevant, something they desperately wanted, they needed to have a coordinated response. This desire led naturally to the FCC, which seized its opportunity.24
The Federal Council responded to the outbreak of war in Europe by sympathizing with the Allied cause but also firmly supporting American neutrality. Though its concerns had been mostly domestic, the FCC had been supportive of the pre-1914 peace movement. Its natural tendencies, then, were toward peace. After the outbreak of war in Europe, it moved quickly to send a prayer for “brotherhood and peace” to 130,000 churches in the United States and a missive to Wilson about America’s opportunity to broker a cooperative peace. A year later, Charles Macfarland of the FCC’s Executive Committee toured Europe in a vain effort to promote an early peace settlement. But the Federal Council also saw the war in stronger, moralistic terms of right and wrong, and eventually of good and evil. To their minds, Germany had clearly violated international peace, and though the British and French were not free of sin themselves, they had responded in a measured and justifiable way. Without sensing a contradiction, many members supported both peace and preparedness. The Federal Council was thus the perfect vehicle to rally “middle ground” Christians who were neither pacifists nor militarists but somewhere in between and to some extent sympathetic to both. This was the idealistic mindset that eventually led many to support American involvement in a progressive war.25
By 1917, the Federal Council was ready for war even before America joined. “I regret to urge war,” the FCC’s Worth M. Tippy counseled Wilson in March, “but I think the time has come to go in with all our power.” The Federal Council thus needed little encouragement to rally around the flag once Wilson had planted it in the soil of France and Belgium. In order to coordinate its relief and chaplaincy programs in Europe and manage its communications and prowar message in America, in 1917 the FCC established the General War-Time Commission of the Churches. Comprised of over a hundred major Protestant leaders, including clergy and laymen, the General War-Time Commission acted as the lead agency on wartime issues affecting American Protestantism. It was chaired by Robert Speer, the missionary organizer whose work with the Presbyterian mission board and the Student Volunteers had made him one of America’s leading religious figures. Speer was an ideal choice to lead an ecumenical commission: he believed in Social Gospel reform yet was also a proto-fundamentalist who prioritized the word of God above all else; he was a mainline Presbyterian who could communicate sympathetically with conservative evangelicals; he was supportive of the war but was not a militarist; and he was a missionary leader with contacts the world over. His deputy, and the true driving force behind the General War-Time Commission’s dynamic activism, was William Adams Brown of Union Theological Seminary. Members included not only other middle ground liberals like Harry Emerson Fosdick and John Mott, but also both sides of the prewar debate, including the fervent prowar advocate Shailer Mathews and the antipreparedness dissenter Henry Sloane Coffin. Speer worked hard to secure cooperative, active participation with other groups who would not assume full membership in an FCC body, such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Aware that the war had the power to transform faith in unforeseen ways, Speer also established a study group, the Committee on the War and the Religious Outlook, to consider its ramifications for American religion.26
The FCC and its General War-Time Commission were not the only ecumenical Protestant groups active during the war. Church Peace Union, flush with Carnegie’s millions, also followed a classic middle-ground path to the war, from promoting European peace in 1914–15 and opposing preparedness in 1916 to supporting U.S. intervention in 1917. Throughout, Church Peace Union tried to maintain an uneasy balance between peace advocacy and righteous war. It sponsored, for example, a peace convention in the spring of 1917 that pledged support for Wilson’s policies but also established a legal defense fund for conscientious objectors. Yet once America was at war, its tendencies became increasingly supportive of war and it pledged its assistance to fulfilling Wilson’s ambitious postwar peace agenda.
To this end, Church Peace Union and the FCC entered into something of an unholy alliance with the League to Enforce Peace and the government’s own notorious propaganda machine, the Committee on Public Information, to establish the National Committee on the Churches and the Moral Aims of the War. Frederick Lynch, Church Peace Union’s director, had misgivings about facilitating government propaganda, but justified the new committee on the grounds that it promoted the “lofty and disinterested character” of American war aims and fostered “an overwhelming resolution in the hearts of our people to insist that out of this war must come some new international order” that would make such wars “improbable, if not impossible, forever.” Even for the progressive clergy, the ends could justify the means.27
While the Federal Council and Church Peace Union acted as bridges between the Protestant churches and the government, it was another ecumenical organization, the interdenominational Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), that took the lead in administering actual war work. For this reason, it was probably the best-known American religious group during the war. Along with its sister organization the YWCA, the YMCA was also deliberately less political and did not really take a stand on the war other than to support the American and Allied efforts after April 1917. This did not, however, stop it from receiving state support. In 1915, Secretary of State Bryan did not see why Americans should be protected while traveling into a war zone, but he still put the State Department to work to secure nonbelligerent status for American Y workers in Europe. In 1917, Bryan’s successor Robert Lansing approved the Y’s plan to assist not only American soldiers, but Italian and Russian troops too. The moral and physical welfare of soldiers were the Y’s main concerns. Sherwood Eddy, by 1917 a traveling secretary for the Y, wrote from “somewhere in France” of the “enormous moral danger” to which American troops “are exposed in this far away foreign land.” Y workers aimed to furnish these lost souls with a Bible and keep them away from the usual temptations of the war camp, from prostitutes and venereal diseases to the spiritual doubts arising from alcoholism and loneliness. But State Department officials also hoped the Y’s work in Russia could act as an antidote to Bolshevism. When Mott cabled Wilson to offer the YMCA’s services the day Congress declared war on Germany, Wilson immediately accepted. A few weeks later, he issued General Order No. 57 informing the military that “official recognition is hereby given to the Young Men’s Christian Association as a valuable adjunct and asset to the service.”28
However, not all Protestant groups flourished under the pressure of war. The success of Speer at the Federal Council and Mott at the YMCA could not disguise the suffering of overseas missions. Indeed, it was no small irony that the two driving forces behind the Student Volunteer Movement, Speer and Mott, were busy with other agencies at a time when the SVM’s own health was deteriorating rapidly. By the end of the war, the Student Volunteers had entered a downward spiral of irreversible decline. Essentially, the war made missionary work impossible. Not only was much of the world at war, including traditional mission fields and the pivotal sea lanes that linked North American missionaries to the rest of the world; money now became an issue, as funds dried up and American churches and their patrons shifted donations to wartime relief. Only a week after war broke out in 1914, Mott warned missionaries in the field that mission boards and home agencies would soon be burdened under “very large and seriously crippling financial debt” and that activities would have to be drastically scaled back. With the war distracting the YMCA, the Federal Council, and denominational organizations, missions floundered. The SVM wholeheartedly supported Wilson and the war and promised to use the global reach of its missionaries to “broadcast the life-giving principles of liberty, of the infinite worth and inalienable rights of every individual child of God,” but it was of little use. After the war, with a younger generation coming into its own, the Student Volunteers underwent a self-confessed “marked change in attitude” and focused increasingly on solving “racial and international problems,” a shift that was radical even in the liberal context of modernist mainline missions. This was too much for conservatives, but strangely not enough for many increasingly skeptical liberals, who drifted out of missions altogether. For the first time since the Civil War, missions were not at the forefront of American Protestantism.29
Overall, the war had an oddly disjointed effect on mainline Protestantism. It invigorated faith, especially at the highest levels and especially by stimulating further ecumenical cooperation. The FCC and Church Peace Union, for example, cooperated together in the creation of yet another group, the inelegantly named World Alliance for the Promotion of International Friendship through the Churches, in London in 1914. In a rare partnership with the National Catholic War Council (NCWC), the Federal Council also designed a single official Church Flag to be hung in churches during the war. With the YWCA, the YMCA’s National War Work Council orchestrated the United War Work Campaign to raise funds for religious relief efforts; among its cooperating agencies was the NCWC, and by 1919 the campaign had raised the staggering sum of $188,644,230. Yet as the fate of missions illustrates, not everyone thrived. Moreover, even despite the manifest successes of the YMCA and the FCC, Protestantism was becoming even more schismatic, fractious, and disillusioned than before 1914. The war provided motivation, and then cover, for modernists and fundamentalists to wreak havoc upon the very notion of a united Protestant endeavor.30
ROMAN CATHOLICS WERE no less active than Protestants, though their efforts were tempered by the fact that America’s Catholics had to conform to a domestic culture that was still overwhelmingly Protestant. Yet paradoxically, the complexity of their status in American society ensured that the Catholic response to the war was fairly straightforward. In general, Catholics supported the government, initially by favoring neutrality and then by mobilizing behind a president who, they believed, had been forced to fight a war he had not wanted. In April 1917, not long after Congress declared war, most of the archbishops in the church gathered at Catholic University in Washington to pledge unanimously their “most sacred and sincere loyalty and patriotism toward our country, our government, and our flag” and promise to work for “the welfare of the whole nation.” James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore and the church’s leading voice on foreign affairs, called on every Catholic to maintain “an absolute and unreserved obedience to his country’s call.” To his flock in the Baltimore archdiocese, Gibbons passed on even clearer instructions: “Let it not be said that we were weighed in the balance of patriotism and found wanting.”31
More, however, was needed, at least if the Catholic hierarchy was going to fulfill these promises within the whole church, throughout the nation, because American Catholicism was too diffuse and diverse to coordinate. The best way Catholics could assist the war effort and demonstrate their patriotism was through an organization like the Protestant Federal Council. Up to this point, the Catholic Church had a well-defined hierarchy and far-reaching ecclesiastical network, but it lacked a national body that could efficiently tackle social and political as well as religious questions. There was only one Catholic Church, but within it clamored many voices, and so in some ways American Catholicism was as diverse as Protestantism. Poles, Germans, and Italians all had their own liturgical styles; many of them continued to worship in their mother tongue. (They were united, however, in their resentment of Irish dominance of the church hierarchy in the United States.) There were also authoritative Catholic laymen and lay groups—such as the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Young Men’s Association, and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul—that worked intimately with the church and yet stood outside its official hierarchy. But the war demanded a cohesive response; without one, Catholics’ voices would be drowned out. There already existed the American Federation of Catholic Societies, but it was too large and unwieldy, its constituent members too autonomous. The solution was the establishment of the National Catholic War Council, with Cardinal Gibbons as president, at a grand convention meeting at Catholic University in August 1917. The NCWC was officially incorporated in November, and with it the Catholic Church had a single agency to coordinate the massive task of assisting the national war effort.32
American Catholics strongly supported Wilson’s program, especially his decision to fight the war as an “Associate” and not an “Ally” of Britain and his vision for a League of Nations to administer a fair and permanent peace settlement. In other words, Catholics were particularly well suited to a patriotic war in defense of American interests and in pursuit of internationalist ideals because they were not especially well suited to an alliance either with Britain and Russia or against Germany. Catholics were sincere in their American patriotism, and they took pains to demonstrate that sincerity whenever they could. But many were also first- or second-generation immigrants who maintained close ties to friends and relatives in Europe. In 1916, there were nearly sixteen million Roman Catholics living in the United States. Many had recently immigrated from eastern and southern Europe, especially Poland and Italy, but many more had come from Ireland. Moreover, older Catholic populations had moved mostly from Ireland and Germany in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1851 and World War I, more than 7.5 million Irish moved to the United States, the overwhelming majority of them Roman Catholic. Figures for the population at large are imprecise, but among the hierarchy who would set the Catholic agenda during the war, the foreign connection was even stronger: 40 percent of American bishops were foreign-born, of whom half (or 20 percent of the overall total) had been born in Ireland; in total, including American-born bishops, approximately 60 percent were Irish. The connection deepens when one considers education: two-thirds of American bishops had received their training abroad, of whom 28 percent had been trained at one of the colleges or seminaries in Rome. Their American patriotism was evident, but the bishops—the same group who ran the NCWC during the war—also retained an Irish, German, or Polish perspective, and were reluctant to fight for Britain and Russia or against Germany. They would instead fight for America.33
Couched in these terms, and with the question of loyalty lingering menacingly in the national air, American Catholics were unstinting in their support of the United States and the Wilson administration at war. Catholic leaders therefore stressed many of the same themes of American patriotism and Christian unity, suffering, and righteousness as their Protestant counterparts. Archbishop John Ireland, who had supported the Spanish-American War as a way to Americanize Catholicism, threw his considerable weight behind the Great War for much the same reason (though he also decried the Germans’ destruction of Catholic churches in France and Belgium). “If we fight like heroes and pray like saints,” ran a typical Catholic statement, “soon America will overcome by greater force and conquer lust of power by the nobler powers of sacrifice and faith.” The only major difference in Catholics’ support for the war was the absence of belligerent, anti-German vitriol.34
Particularly striking was the absence of Catholic pacifism, but perhaps the most notable feature of Catholic wartime thought was the abstention, or acquiescence, of just war theory. Long abandoned by Protestant theologians and ethicists, the just war tradition had become an almost exclusively Catholic concern, at least in the United States. Before 1917, several leading authorities on just war theory had doubted whether the war in Europe qualified. As a result, they also concluded that American intervention would fail the just war test. But the combination of Wilson’s efforts to maintain neutrality with the more immediate need to demonstrate an unqualified patriotism silenced such doubts. To satisfy the requirements of just war theory, it was particularly important for Catholic leaders to portray America’s actions as defensive and reactive and its motives as disinterested and unselfish. In 1915, Father John Burke, editor of The Catholic World, had condemned war as “by no means a Christian tradition” and argued that to be “Christian means that we are pacifists.” In April 1917, however, he told his national readership that war “has been literally forced upon our country, and she is compelled to take up arms for her own honor and for justice among men.” Father Thomas J. Campbell of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York reminded his parishioners that “as Catholics” they “must be conscious of the justice and the necessity of the war in which we have engaged.” The Great War, now an American war, was now also a just war.35
Nothing illustrates the depth of American Catholic support for Wilson more than the reaction to Pope Benedict XV’s peace proposal of August 1917. Using his papal authority, Benedict called for a very Wilsoniansounding peace without victory in order to bring an immediate end to Christendom’s ultimate civil war. Europe was being ground down under the heel of war, and the Vatican worried about the consequences to European society and the Christian faith. Most of all, Benedict feared the ideological rivals that would seek to reorder a devastated continent: secularism, modernism, and communism. But even though he too had once sought a peace without victory, Wilson summarily rejected the pope’s peace proposal as unwittingly favoring Germany and Austria, who stood to benefit from an early peace now that the United States had entered the war against them. Dictates from the Vatican normally commanded instant respect from American Catholics, but this time Catholics followed Wilson. Father John A. Ryan, a progressive Catholic intellectual, was virtually alone in calling for consideration of Benedict’s peace plan. Other Catholic leaders resolved their conflicting loyalties between Rome and Washington by favorably comparing the unselfish, disinterested nature of Benedict’s vision of peace with Wilson’s but ultimately siding with the president’s position that the United States and its partners first needed to defeat the forces of German authoritarianism.36
Catholic organizations, newly consolidated because of the demands of war, also rallied to the cause. Mostly in parallel, sometimes in partnership, and occasionally in conflict with the national Protestant organizations, the National Catholic War Council and the Knights of Columbus assisted the American war effort. Nativist Protestant fears of Catholics’ dual loyalties and concerns about the separation of church and state strained relations between Catholics and the FCC and YMCA, but for the most part Protestants and Catholics maintained good relations simply by staying out of each other’s way. The Knights, along with smaller Catholic agencies, already had a wealth of experience of relief work in war-torn Europe, especially Belgium. From April 1917, they began ministering to the needs of U.S. soldiers serving in Europe. The NCWC, headquartered in Washington, was an especially important innovation because it enabled the Catholic Church to coordinate its efforts on a national basis. The NCWC ensured that Catholic views were represented and heard in the Wilson administration and that Catholic concerns were respected and addressed. In return, the NCWC mobilized American Catholic support for the war effort, both in the United States and in Europe. Given the large number of Catholics in both the general population and U.S. forces in Europe, this was an important contribution. But just as important for American Catholicism, the war galvanized the church into becoming a cohesive national institution.37
AMERICAN JEWS ARRIVED at much the same position but from a different, more circuitous route. As with Catholics, the Jewish population was composed of a small, Americanized minority with a much larger, aspirational immigrant and second-generation majority. Unlike German, Austrian, and Irish Catholics, these Jews did not face charges of dual loyalty: almost without exception, they had little affection for the pogroms and official anti-Semitism of their homelands and felt no residual ties to any European country. And though it was gathering steam, Zionism was still an inchoate movement, dominated by Europeans, and did not pose a rival to American patriotism. The war would help change this by providing hopes for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and by fostering Zionist sentiment among American Jews. Still, during the war few doubts emerged about Jews’ attachment to the United States.38
However, other trends within Judaism, mostly political rather than religious, complicated Jewish reactions to the Great War. Many Jews, especially recent immigrants, were active socialists. In Manhattan, where Jewish participation in left-wing and radical politics was especially pronounced, Jews ran in city elections as candidates for the Socialist Party. Backed by the predominantly Jewish United Cloth and Cap Makers Union and United Hebrew Trades, Jewish Socialist candidates won several seats to the New York State legislature and New York City council in the elections of 1917. They ran on the usual socialist platform of redistributed wealth, workers’ rights—and peace. In New York, as in many cities, those members of the peace movement not affiliated with a Protestant denomination were usually socialists. (In the case of some, such as Norman Thomas, they were both, but Thomas had received his entry into Socialist Party politics from Jewish mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit.) As Socialists, many Jews denounced what they saw as the capitalist and imperialist origins of the war. Through organizations such as the People’s Council, the Jewish Socialist Federation, and the Emergency Peace Federation, Jews helped merge antiwar politics with radical polemics.39
Moreover, Jews of all political persuasions—conservative and socialist, Zionist and anti-Zionist—protested American aid to the Allies not only on traditional grounds of pacifism but also in opposition to aiding czarist Russia. “What right have the Allies even to expect the sympathy of American Jews with their cause as long as Russia fails to make any pronouncement with regard to the Jewish question?” asked Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1914. “There is no disguising the fact that American Jews will not swallow with any great degree of pleasure the cause of the Allies,” wrote Cyrus Adler, a prominent conservative Jew, to his friend Solomon Schechter. “I have a decided feeling against Germany and her allies in this war and believe that the general cause of justice and human rights will be advanced by her defeat. I have a great feeling of friendliness for England and France but for the life of me I cannot get any enthusiasm about Russia and I think it a blot upon England and France that they have allied themselves with that barbarous country.”40
The Jewish peace movement was short-lived, however, and by the fall of 1917 most American Jews were firm supporters of the war and ardent promoters of their patriotism. This reversal was sudden but not surprising given the dramatic turn of events at home and in Europe. First and perhaps foremost, Jews feared that with the United States now at war, antiwar dissent would trigger a nativist, anti-Semitic backlash. Many had firsthand memories of Russian and Romanian pogroms and other, less-deadly forms of official harassment; the last thing they wanted to do was provoke a similar reaction in their adopted Golden Land. Second, like Catholics Jews were reliably loyal to the Democratic Party and were loathe to oppose Wilson—the first president to nominate a Jew, Louis Brandeis, for the Supreme Court—on an issue of such political, diplomatic, and moral importance.
Third, with the war having dragged on for three years, American Jews also worried about the fate of their fellow Jews in Europe, who endured even greater miseries than they had known in peacetime. In response, Jewish relief agencies were created to meet the need. The American Zionist Medical Unit sent volunteers to the Middle East to relieve the suffering of Jews living there, while the Jewish Welfare Board, a similar body to the YMCA or Knights of Columbus, solicited donations to fund pastoral care for Jewish American soldiers in Europe. It served, in the words of Vice Chairman Cyrus Adler, as a “method of providing religious services and comfort for the Jewish men” in the service. American Jews, moreover, made up the largest national contingent in the Jewish Legion, an all-volunteer unit of the British Army serving in the Middle East. American immigrants and their descendants felt lucky to have escaped the daily horrors and indignities of Jewish life in eastern Europe, and they felt a conscientious urge to assist those who were not so fortunate. “It is now our turn to do our share,” wrote labor leader Joseph Schlossberg in Advance, a Jewish newspaper in New York. “Most of us come from those very countries where this terrible conflagration is now raging,” he reminded his readers. “We have found a home of refuge in this country. Let us show that we are worthy of the advantages we enjoy in this country by responding to the cry of despair coming from our fellow human beings on the other side of the globe.”41
Finally, events in Europe and the tottering Ottoman Empire electrified American Jewish opinion and caused many to reverse their stance on the conflict. A war that was once perceived as benefiting only industrialists and imperialists was instantly transformed into a war for liberty, justice, and national self-determination. The hated Czar Nicholas II of Russia had been deposed in February 1917, and American Jews overwhelmingly supported the Menshevik revolutionaries who took power in his place. An alliance with that “barbarous country” Russia was no longer unpalatable. Cyrus Adler may not have had much enthusiasm for Zionism, but this was a cause he could now support. The communist Bolshevik revolution that followed in November complicated matters but strengthened the Jewish commitment to the war: the Bolsheviks had relinquished to Germany vast amounts of Russian territory, including most of the land settled by Russian Jews, and no Jew wanted to oust the Russian czar only to be ruled by a German kaiser.42
Even more important, in November 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour proclaimed Britain’s support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. American Jews had never before been especially passionate Zionists, but now, with a Jewish-ruled Israel in sight for the first time in more than two thousand years, they rallied to the cause. “The Zionist movement in this country has become another thing since the war began,” Wise reported excitedly to a friend in England. Initially wary of charges of dual loyalty and sensitive to the “100% Americanism” campaign, the American Jewish Committee found enough confidence to endorse the Balfour Declaration in early 1918. National self-determination, that very Wilsonian concept, became part of the Jewish nationalist crusade and Jewish objectives in the war across the ideological and theological spectrum, from organized labor and capital to Reform and Orthodox. “I am happy,” Alexander Marx, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, wrote to a friend in November 1918, “that we are actually approaching the end of this awful war and that we can look forward to a real restoration of our people to their homeland.”43