So dark were the days in northern Russia by late January that daylight lasted only thirty minutes. American soldiers fighting on the frozen tundra far from the nearest city, Archangel, depended upon moonlight and the Northern Lights for most of each day, telling night from day only by reading the hands of a twenty-four-hour military clock. But the time of day was of small concern to the hollow-eyed men facing the fury of the Arctic cold and camping for weeks without shelter. Fires, which could signal the enemy, were forbidden and overcoats and blankets were their only protection from the killing temperatures. Food was scarce, as were all supplies. A shipment of four hundred rabbits from Australia arriving in January was the first meat for several months. And communications from home were severely delayed. “It is such a desolate position that we have [only now] received the tardy word that the Armistice has been signed three months ago,” wrote Sergeant Gordon W. Smith, of the 339th Infantry, Company D, in a January diary entry dedicated to his wife.
Yet something even darker than the darkness of the days and nights gripped the soldiers with the merciless intensity of a new form of plague. It was called the “northern horrors.” “All members of the gallant 339th are afflicted with it,” wrote one soldier, who described it as a “state of melancholia” brought on by a combination of the delayed mail and isolation, the long, cheerless Arctic nights, the absence of amusements, the overwhelming number of soldiers on the opposing side, and the longing for home. “They have been shunted off into that God forsaken and lonesome land to fight an unknown foe for an unknown reason,” a Detroit Free Press reporter wrote.
The mission of the Americans in northern Russia over the past six months had been vague. Roughly seven thousand American soldiers, many from Michigan, had departed the United States in August and September bound for the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangel. At the same time, thousands more—two infantry regiments from the Philippines and one from California—were transferred to Siberia, where their official purpose was to guard the Allied stores at Vladivostok. In northern Russia, the Americans were also assigned to guard Allied war supplies stored many months before for czarist troops fighting the Germans. But the reality of the American mission in Russia was far more intense than guarding stores.
With the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the war in March of 1918, the Allies did fear that the new Bolshevik government would give or sell their supplies to the Germans. Moreover, they feared that a massive movement of German troops from the Eastern Front in Russia to the Western Front in Europe could mean victory for the Germans especially if, added to their force, they had in their possession the vast stores of Allied war matériel. But soon after arriving in Russia, the American soldiers found themselves not standing guard over the Allied stores but rather fighting under British command in a civil war between the Red Army of the Bolsheviks and the White Army of the opposition. The British and French troops were fighting against the Red Army to instigate the collapse of the Bolshevik government in the hope that new leadership would bring Russia back into the war on the side of the Allies.
When the Allies first called upon Wilson to send troops, he hesitated—torn between his obligations as the leader of an Allied nation and the principle of self-determination of nations, which he so ardently espoused. But despite his principles, Wilson finally succumbed to pressure from the French and the British, who had sent in their troops as early as March of 1918. There was pressure too from American banking interests. Overthrowing the Soviet government, after all, was important to bankers who had loaned at least $86 million to czarist Russia during the war and now feared that the Bolsheviks would default.
Perhaps Wilson did it for the sake of his beloved League of Nations, surmising that he must agree to help the French and the British in their Russian campaign in order to secure their cooperation in Paris. He did try to minimize the domestic impact of the deployment by issuing a directive: the American troops were only to guard the military stores. They were not, under any circumstances, to fight the Red Army. But, at the same time, he agreed to allow the American troops in northern Russia to be placed under the command of a British general, who ignored Wilson’s directive.
By the time of the Armistice, there were at least thirteen thousand Allied troops stationed along the Murmansk Railroad and eleven thousand more encamped hundreds of miles from Archangel, not safeguarding Allied supplies but rather waiting for commands to continue with an offensive strategy. By Christmas, press dispatches were reporting details of skirmishes between American and Russian soldiers, the taking and retaking of towns, and all the gore of a full-fledged war. And by January of 1919, the Americans were not only entrenched in Russia’s civil war, but, because of the weather and the solidly frozen harbors, they were trapped in the trenches for a long while.
By January, food, munitions, and blankets were in short supply. Frostbite and pneumonia were common as was severe rheumatism caused by wearing wet clothing in the frigid temperatures. Morale was low. The American soldiers resented taking orders from British commanders. After learning of the Armistice they questioned the purpose of their presence. Why was peace not for them when the rest of the world was rejoicing?
An entry in Sergeant Silver K. Parrish’s diary spoke for the boys in Russia: “We took 16 enemy prisoners and killed 2—then we burned the village & my heart ached to have the women fall down at my feet & grab my legs and kiss my hand & beg me not to do it. But orders are orders.” In his next entry, Parrish, who was from Bay City, Michigan, wrote: “I drew up a resolution to request reason why we are fighting [Bolsheviks] & why we haven’t any Big Guns & why the English run us & why we haven’t enough to eat & why our men can’t get proper medical attention & some mail.” By the time of his next entry, Parrish had learned what Mollie Steimer and Hiram Johnson already knew: how dangerous it was to protest U.S. policy in Russia. “Some one squealed on S.K.P. [Silver K. Parrish] & I was called up before the Colonel & he read the articles of War to me & sho[w]ed me where my offence was. Punishable by death. But I knew it any how.”
Engaged in a campaign against a country that had not attacked America or any other Allied nation and against which America had not declared war, many soldiers wanted out. They feared that back home in America, where the public was cheering the return of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, they had been forgotten. On January 30, Sergeant Roger Sherman Clark, from Detroit, wrote to his wife in response to her mid-November letter, which he had just received and in which she had told him about the Armistice: “This last piece of news staggered me, truly, as I have builded great hopes upon [peace] panning out some day or other. I almost believe it will yet, if we continue patient and in good heart. Only let us all hope that Congress doesn’t forget Russia in the next few months.”
The first politician to publicly challenge the veiled invasion of Russia was Hiram Johnson, a former California governor and a U.S. senator since 1917. Johnson “discovered” the forgotten soldiers through his friend Raymond Robins, the fellow Californian who led the American Red Cross in Russia. One of California’s most successful lawyers, Johnson was the son of a schoolteacher from Syracuse, New York, and the grandson of an abolitionist and lawyer who had helped to found the New York branch of the Republican Party. An isolationist first and foremost, and then a strong Republican, he was an outspoken opponent of all that Woodrow Wilson supported, including the League of Nations and especially Wilson’s decision to send troops to Russia. Johnson was passionate about ending what he firmly believed to be an unwarranted, unjust, and undeclared war against Russia, a war initiated by a series of lies. “The first casualty when war comes, is truth,” Johnson said often in the coming months.
It was on December 12, 1918, that Senator Johnson first focused national attention on the troops in Russia by submitting Senate Resolution No. 384. At the time most Americans believed that the November 11 cease-fire had silenced all battlefields. The only mention in the media of the continued fighting in Russia had been a Detroit Free Press editorial in early December written by a professor of Russian at the University of Michigan, C. L. Meader, who expressed his dismay that the end of the war with Germany did not logically result in the withdrawal of Allied troops from Russia. Was there a policy decision that he had missed? Did the Allied nations fear they would lose their vested interests and their loans to anarchists? Did the Allies want to destroy a nation whose legal and economic principles were not the same as theirs? Were the Allies conspiring to annihilate the world’s first workers’ state before it spread to other nations? Perhaps the American public had misunderstood what the Bolshevik government was, wrote Professor Meader—not a small group of men exercising oligarchic powers but rather a government of workers and peasants councils (“soviets”) with the ultimate goal of democracy in its purest form.
In his December 12 resolution, Johnson asked the U.S. secretary of state to send to the Senate all data and documents that could explain to the Senate and to the American people why American soldiers were in Russia. For the sake of the families who had not heard from their loved ones in Russia for months and months, he wanted to know how many were there, who was there, and exactly where they were. He asked also for casualty lists. And he noted that he knew how unpopular this subject would be. These days, he said, “it is a dangerous and delicate thing to speak of Russia or to inquire concerning our activities there.”
Although he had no sympathies for the Bolshevists, Johnson knew, he said, “that a demand that American boys shall not be sacrificed to the rigors of a Russian winter and conflict with a desperate people will be termed a defense of international agitators and of the ‘red flag.’ During the war it became fashionable to call all who disagreed with any governmental policy pro-German. Now the fashion has changed: and any man who will not accept the wrongful edict of entrenched power is by that token a Bolsheviki.”
In a December letter to one of his sons, Johnson wrote, “I have raised merry Cain with my Russian resolution. My difficulty is to avoid getting mixed with the Radicals, whom I detest, and all of whom are enthusiastic about my actions.” In another letter to the son, on New Year’s Eve, he wrote, “The Russian situation is a shame and a disgrace, giving the lie to all our professions of democracy.”
By the time Johnson returned to the Senate floor on January 29 to deliver his “Bring American Boys Home from Russia” speech, a grassroots movement was noisily surfacing in Michigan. The mayor of Detroit dubbed the soldiers of the 339th “Detroit’s Own” and assembled a delegation of their parents to travel with him to Lansing to lobby the governor to cable President Wilson to recall the troops. Families of Detroit’s Own—also called the “Polar Bears”—started a petition drive. Several prominent Michigan men sent telegrams to the state’s senators and congressmen asking that they press the War Department for news of the Michigan men at Archangel and most of all that they demand their withdrawal by January 15. It was then, they stressed, that the port of Archangel was expected to freeze, thus isolating the troops until spring, which could begin as late as June in northern Russia.
Further, a public debate had begun over the condition of the soldiers. Wounded soldiers who had left Russia on November 20 were arriving home with reports of hunger, disease, and depression. The snows had begun in September; the temperatures were plummeting; the Red Army outnumbered the Allies nearly ten to one; and soldiers were stricken with a numbness of limbs and spirit. Arriving in New York harbor on the ship Adriatic, twenty-four Michigan men of the 339th Regiment commended the comforts of their cabins, which they said were high luxury after the “murderous” conditions in northern Russia.
The War Department refuted such reports, telling the press that the boys were “well supplied with food, clothing and medical attention and not in any danger of being captured or wiped out by superior forces.” The government did send out a casualty list, perhaps in response to Johnson’s plea. By January 4, 132 soldiers stationed at Archangel since September had died: sixty-four killed in action, sixty-five died of diseases, three died accidentally, and sixteen were missing in action.
On January 29, Johnson stood before the Senate and slung satchels onto the floor filled with letters from mothers and fathers and wives of men in Russia pleading with the government to end the intervention. Drawing attention again to what he viewed as Wilson’s hypocrisy of intervening in Russian affairs while preaching self-determination, he suggested, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that perhaps the public had misunderstood the concept of self-determination. Did it really mean “determination by ourselves of the kind of government others should have and then impressing that kind of government upon an unwilling and a rebellious people? With this possible explanation we may see with greater clarity the reason for our activities in Russia.”
The way the United States and its allies had dealt with Russia thus far exhibited “the crassest stupidity,” he said.
In the name of protecting military supplies, which were offered to us again and again and again and which we could have had for the asking, we shot down Russian peasants and our boys are shot down by them. No sooner had we landed at Archangel than we shot the Soviet government there, and set up a government of our own. No sooner did we go into the interior than everywhere we found a local society we shot it to death and set up our own mode of government. Then we tell our people that we intend no interference with the internal or local affairs of Russia!
How the iron must enter the souls of those who have relatives there; of the mothers and fathers and the wives of men who were drafted to fight Germany and then when the war with Germany was ended, were forced to fight a war with Russia.
In the days following his speech, the Detroit News asked its correspondent at the peace conference in Paris, Jay G. Hayden, to interview President Wilson about the plight of the Polar Bears. Why were they still in Russia? Why were communications so severely delayed? When will they return home? Wilson told Hayden that he was not ignoring the issue but that “the whole Russian problem” was entangled in international diplomacy. He favored withdrawal but to retain “harmonious relations with the Allies” he could not yet pull the troops out.
Hayden also interviewed other government officials. And in his February 4 article, he wrote, “The history of the Russian intervention revealed to me by an American authority so high that it is beyond the possibility to question its accuracy, shows the position of the troops to be the result of one of the worst possible policy blunders of the war.”
At a Detroit church, on the night of February 4, at least two thousand friends and relatives of the soldiers in Russia organized Detroit’s Own Welfare Association and started a petition drive soon to result in 110,000 signatures calling for complete troop withdrawal and the end of U.S. intervention in Russia. The next day the Michigan Senate passed a resolution demanding the same policy. Kalamazoo sent its own resolution. And in Benton Harbor, hundreds of Republicans met in solidarity, all crying out “Get Out of Russia!”
But just as the petition drives and demonstrations gained momentum, the cause of the Polar Bears was dramatically upstaged by an event that captivated and terrified the American public and the federal government. On February 5, Seattle’s mayor Ole Hanson telegraphed Secretary of War Baker informing him that by the next morning the entire city of Seattle would be shut down in the first general strike in U.S. history. Was this the beginning of the much-feared revolution?
On the morning of February 6, the word “Bolshevik” was ringing in the ears of most Americans when they heard the news that at 10 A.M. in Seattle sixty thousand workers from 110 unions, most wearing red, had left their jobs. Strikers included recently returned soldiers who were trade unionists and who, on that day, proudly wore their uniforms. Workers and trade unionists across the country applauded the boldness of their brothers while politicians and law enforcement officials saw the daunting specter of Bolshevism.
Was it possible that the power of the workers’ folded arms could bring down the capitalist system? As journalist and activist Anna Louise Strong pointed out later, no one really knew precisely what would happen. It was “like pulling the trigger of a gun without knowing with what ammunition it was loaded.” The government thought it was loaded with revolution, while labor leaders said it was loaded only with workers’ rights. The strike, after all, was called to show solidarity for the 35,000 shipyard workers who had gone on strike earlier in the year refusing to load ammunition to be sent to the Russian battle zone. The workers, like many Americans, read Strong’s provocative February 4 Seattle editorial, excerpted in the days ahead in newspapers on both coasts: “We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country, a move that will lead—No One Knows Where! We do not need hysteria! We need the iron march of labor! Labor will feed the people…Labor will care for the babies and the sick…Labor will preserve order.”
Indeed Seattle labor did just that: it organized in such a way to keep essential city services operating during the general strike. Meanwhile, the Seattle branch of the Military Intelligence Division, ordered to shut down two weeks before, reversed its direction without waiting for any new orders from Washington. Battalions of volunteers emerged from the shadows to help identify and track the “enemy.” The Minute Men Division of the American Protective League, though supposedly defunct, was on the job. Agents who could speak Finnish, Russian, and Swedish were called to the city. The mayor, hell-bent on being known as the man who stopped the revolution, sought the aid of 950 sailors and marines, 2,400 special deputies—mainly students from the University of Washington—and six hundred extra volunteer cops to quell the revolt. And, secretly during the days before the strike, Justice Department agents had rounded up fifty-four “IWW troublemakers, bearded labor fanatics, and red flag supporters” and loaded them into two cars of a train bound for Ellis Island. The immediate idea behind the train, which the press dubbed the “Red Special,” was to weaken the strike by removing potential leaders. But the long-term concept was deportation as the way to calm a nation stirred up by radical aliens and Bolshevik agitators.
The strike was over in five days. The very next day Mayor Hanson, having gained national notice, left on a lecture tour to warn the nation of the Bolshevik threat. On the other coast the second phase of the Overman Committee hearings began. This one was devoted to the investigation of Bolshevik propaganda and its promulgators. It would be in session when Hiram Johnson continued his crusade in mid-February. In fact, while Overman was lining up Americans who, having been in Russia during and after the Revolution, could testify to the cruelties and horrors of Bolshevism, piling up evidence to support strong opposition to Bolshevism, Senator Johnson was trying to persuade legislators to withdraw American troops from Russia. It was not an easy task.
At the Senate, on those days, a Republican from North Dakota refuted Johnson’s views about the situation in Russia, mentioned the Seattle strike, and called attention to what some of Senator Overman’s witnesses were revealing. Sending “an adequate force” of 250,000 or more to put an end to the rule of Lenin and Trotsky, he said, was a better plan than withdrawing American soldiers. A Republican from Illinois denounced the Bolshevists, noted also the threatening strike in Seattle, but then supported Johnson’s resolution, using it as a platform to criticize Wilson’s decision to send troops to begin with. When the vote finally came, it was a tie. The vice president, Thomas Marshall, broke the tie by voting against Johnson. In press interviews later, Johnson vowed to continue the fight until the day he could stand at the end of a gangplank and shake the hand of the first Polar Bear to return to Michigan.
In a letter to one of his sons, Johnson wrote, “The propaganda for exploiting Russia is overwhelming, and I presume I will break [illegible] butting my head against so much wealth and power. However, I was always a crank, and the big fight, when one feels right, against great odds, is after all the only fight worth while.”
On the very day the Senate rejected Johnson’s resolution, a delegation from Michigan consisting of three representatives from the Detroit’s Own association arrived in Washington with their 110,000 signatures calling for the end of intervention in Russia. The next day, they met with Secretary of War Baker for one hour. The secretary made the following points (according to the Detroit News):
“That the fortunes of war made it necessary for American troops to be in Archangel;
“That the conditions under which [the troops] were living were typical war conditions and must be endured;
“That the troops had been well outfitted for the rigors of the Russian climate; that the food was probably ‘monotonous’ as it was Army ration food, yet it was a scientific ration meant to supply sufficient nourishment;
“That if the necessity arose the troops could be withdrawn from the port of Murmansk which did not freeze completely as Archangel [did];
“That the troops could be withdrawn only after the Allies entered a general agreement to do so and that would happen when ‘their interests’ were met.”
The secretary agreed to take a list of the names of soldiers whose families had not heard from them and to investigate their status. When asked if the soldiers in the outposts south of Archangel were in danger of annihilation, he said as far as he knew, they were not.
The Michigan delegation felt that it had done the best it could. Still, the men were not exactly sure what was accomplished. The press tore into Baker for evading the issue but also said that the secretary was basically powerless because the British were in command of the American troops. “Mr. Baker and his associates should be brought up with a round turn,” said the Detroit News editor. The only hope he said was the “rising disposition of the Senate to take a hand in the matter.”
Two days later, on February 17, Secretary Baker sent an official letter to the chairman of the Military Affairs Committee in the Senate saying that the American soldiers in Russia were now closed in by the ice but would be withdrawn “at the earliest possible moment.”
This was a great victory, said Senator William Borah of Idaho, who publicly commended Senator Johnson for first drawing attention to the cause. Johnson told the press, “We cannot make whole again the maimed nor bring back the dear ones who have been killed in defiance of the law and in violation of the constitution in this miserable misadventure in Russia, but thank God American boys who are yet alive are to be returned to us.”
But what exactly was the earliest possible date for their return? The War Department had already made arrangements for the 1.8 million soldiers in France to arrive home within the next six months, transporting an average of 300,000 men across the Atlantic each month. And what of the boys in northern Russia?
“In the spring,” said Baker, unable to be more specific.
The cheering was hardly earsplitting in Michigan where there was wisdom based on experience about how late spring could be. There was also the fear that all good news out of government can evoke: the fear that with time good news could easily change to bad news. Indeed, the only battalions returning to Michigan that spring would be the troops mustered out from the Western Front.