On the first day of spring, after weeks of successive frosts killing every early flower that pushed through the hard, crusty earth, a blast of cold air swept up the East Coast. The process of spring was stymied yet again and much of the nation seemed stuck in winter. In New Jersey, despite the lingering cold, Japanese beetles were in the process of invading roughly ten thousand acres near Riverton, and the New Jersey Department of Agriculture was working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to devise a massive counterattack against this small insect known to feed on the leaves of orchard trees and to have a special fondness for roses. The plan was to create a defensive system of rings or belts of poison, surrounding the acreage at risk: one belt immediately outside the infested area and others at intervals further back. The New York Times likened the scheme to “a system of trenches much like human warfare.” The problem was that all vegetation in the vicinity of the belts would be poisoned. Alternatives were being considered.
In the morning hours, at the state courthouse on Foley Square in Manhattan, carpenters hastily nailed boards around the bottoms of witness stands, three feet up from the floor, in response to the order of a censor recently appointed by the district attorney’s office. The censor had determined that the hemlines of female witnesses appeared to be rising and as such could inappropriately influence a jury. The new boards, soon dubbed “spite fences,” would prevent any possible flashing of hosiery or leg.
A few blocks away that morning, members of the American Society of Civil Engineers were preparing for a long evening meeting that would focus on the proposed vehicular tunnel under the Hudson River at Canal Street from Manhattan to Jersey City. Although all members recognized the necessity of such a tunnel, especially since a recent ferry strike, and most had confidence in the plan recommended by General George W. Goethals, the consulting engineer for the New York State Bridge and Tunnel Commission, there was still a good deal of doubt about the project. Some engineers who had worked on a similar tunnel in Cleveland under Lake Erie had recently expressed their concerns that not all the potential trouble had been anticipated in the current design. “Leakage will most surely result if the structure is finally built,” one engineer said at the last meeting. And then there was the issue of ventilation. “Can the tunnel be cleared of poisonous gases without running into prohibitive figures for the installation and maintenance of an adequate ventilation plant?” the engineers were asking.
And at noon, in New York, Daylight Savings advocates gathered for a luncheon at the Waldorf to celebrate the recent defeat, in early March, of the repeal. At that same hour, the clock at Grand Central Station tolled one time, having been set at the new time, in advance.
The next day, like most everyone else in America, Harry Weinberger set his clocks forward one hour, but unlike most, he spent much of the day working on the cause to gain amnesty for those men and women convicted of violating wartime laws, either in prison now or awaiting the outcome of their appeals. Friends and clients of Weinberger’s, including Emma Goldman, had urged him to embark on a speaking tour to promote amnesty for all political prisoners, but Weinberger had declined. He hadn’t the money for the tour nor could he spare the time away from his clients, some of whom needed him more than ever. On this day, he added his name, after Upton Sinclair’s, to a petition seeking the pardon of Eugene Debs and all persons imprisoned for “honest expressions of opinions against America’s cause in the war.” Advocating Debs’s release and pardon on the grounds of his advanced years, “high moral character and long years of devoted service to the cause of human freedom, not withstanding his violation of law,” the petition would be cabled to President Wilson in Paris. Although Weinberger would certainly not surrender his passion for the case of his young Russian clients, the recent Supreme Court opinions reminded him that the only true remedy was a general amnesty for all political prisoners.
In Michigan, during these last days of March, there was a sense of longing that was not about the anticipation of spring and the burst of colors soon to brush across the landscape. It was about the Polar Bears and their expected return home “in spring,” as the government had told them. But by the end of the month, the families and friends of the 339th Infantry had heard nothing about a date for the soldiers’ return and few of them had heard anything from the soldiers themselves for weeks, even months.
In Archangel, on the 28th of March, Corporal Frank Douma, of Grand Rapids, wrote in his diary: “It is very very cold again. About 56 below…. Several bags of mail which we wrote more than a month ago were found in a horse stable here. A Russian driver had left them and forgotten them.”
In Detroit, beginning in late March, journalist Glenn L. Shannon, who had served in the 339th and was home now because of injuries, wrote a grueling three-part series for the Detroit Free Press about his experiences in and around Archangel. Smartly written, the series was painful to read for anyone with a son or husband or brother still in Russia. The headlines read: “Straight from the Shoulder Account of the Conditions Our Boys Are Combating—Grim and Unvarnished Truth as Vouched for by a Michigan Newspaper Man Just Returned from Archangel.” “Shannon says 339th infantry, U.S.A. suffered untold hardships.” He also said that the Allied troops in northern Russia were “beating the Bolos,” meaning the Bolsheviks.
Shannon’s news that conditions were horrific yet the campaign was successful deepened the dread of the Michiganders. How could they continue to demand withdrawal of the 339th and an end to the intervention if the mission was indeed a success? They would be viewed as symphathetic to the enemy, even more than they were now, and there would be no end to the campaign until the Bolsheviks were completely vanquished.
Worse still, on the morning of March 28, the families of Detroit’s Own learned, from the Detroit newspapers, that 1,600 sailors on four third-class cruisers had just set sail for Archangel along with an abundance of guns and ammunition, sheepskin-lined coats, sea boots, socks, and mittens. Navy officials told the press that it was a “secret operation” and that even they did not know what the government had ordered the expedition to do once it arrived in Archangel. “We do know that it is not going to bring the American fighting force at Archangel home,” the officials noted.
On the afternoon of the 28th, hundreds of relatives and friends of men in the 339th crowded into a large conference room in the building that housed the Detroit News. The meeting was called by three soldiers who had left Archangel on December 27 because of injuries and who had recently arrived home. One of the three, Sergeant Theodore Kolbe, moved to the front of the room, where he rather nervously pulled a bulging notebook out of a canvas bag. The pages of the notebook were noticeably tattered and encrusted with dirt. But to Sergeant Kolbe’s audience it was nothing less than gold, for in it seventy-five soldiers had written names and addresses of people to whom they most desired to give news of themselves, plus a message for each.
One by one Kolbe read the names and delivered the messages, sometimes adding a story or two if he knew the soldier. One wife was relieved to hear that although her husband had been wounded he was writing songs that the sergeant had heard, he said. In fact, Kolbe was of the belief that they were good enough to be hits in the States. Another soldier in the notebook was the champion middleweight in his region in Michigan and the sergeant told the soldier’s brother that “during the daytime he guards Bolshevist prisoners and at night he is boxing.” When Kolbe told a father that his son was “happy and hopeful of getting home soon,” though he had been wounded since Kolbe last saw him, the father anxiously asked, “Is there any way we can find how serious it is?” Kolbe paused and then explained the difficulty in getting information out of Russia.
Most of the guests were invited because their names were on the lists in Kolbe’s notebook. However, dozens more, hearing about Sergeant Kolbe and the gathering, which was announced in the Detroit News the day before, came in search of any news about the 339th. They brought photos of their loved ones hoping that one of the three soldiers might know something that would help them endure the long gaps between news. “The chief thing the boys worry about is that you may be worried,” Kolbe told the group. “We didn’t have any picnic out of war but after the first confusions, after arriving there, we did eventually get food and clothing and other necessities.”
In a subsequent interview with a News reporter Sergeant Kolbe, who had taken bullets in his cheeks, teeth, and knees, was more candid. When he left Archangel, he said, the worst of the problems was morale because the soldiers “have no more conception of the purpose of their expedition against the Russians than have the people back in Michigan.” One of the other two soldiers chimed in, “Contrary to all the bunk that we see in the newspapers sent down through London, the Russians in Archangel do not like the Allies nor did they welcome us in the first place. We didn’t know why we were fighting up there and couldn’t find out. To us up there, it seemed that Senator Hiram Johnson of California was the only man who seemed to have a vision that we were simply meddling with Russia’s internal affairs.”
In 1919, March came in like a lion, and went out like one too. The new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, ended his first month in office with an announcement on March 28 that Congress must replace the Espionage Act with a peacetime equivalent. The law had proven essential in safeguarding the nation, and it would become inoperative the moment the peace treaty was signed, he said. In response to the Overman Committee’s report and recommendations, he said, the Justice Department was studying the subject and would make its own recommendation to Congress for the passage of a law that “will give the Federal Government authority to proceed against those plotting against the Government.” Palmer stressed the need to protect the government “against the same influences which operated in the last four years.”
On the last day of the month, the opponents of Daylight Savings renewed their effort to repeal it. New tactics were called for. One was to bring God into the debate. In an editorial that day, one religious group wrote that “what is very serious indeed is the certainty that this iniquitous law will give deep displeasure to God.” It was God who created the sun and it is the sun that “declares in the heavens that it is 12 o’clock noon.” Thus for people to say it is 1 P.M. or any other time when according to God’s will it is noon, “is complete blasphemy.”