Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry C. Frick, and Vincent Astor, all residents of Fifth Avenue in New York, were given special guards. Men from the Secret Service and the Department of Justice were prepared. The New York State Guard was ready. The entire police force of the city of New York was called to duty, for three full days. And churches, the stock exchange and city hall were under surveillance. “Never before was the city better guarded,” the New York Times reported.
On this the Fourth of July, the first day of the much heralded “reign of terror,” America was well prepared for the possibility of violence. In Chicago, mounted police stood by industrial plants, stockyards, and public officials’ homes, and Illinois reserve militiamen were stationed citywide. In Washington state, troops were called to Spokane to protect it against “radical outbreaks.” In Pittsburgh, where police suspected that “radical agents” had possibly been stealing dynamite during the month of June, the state of Pennsylvania sent special troops to guard industrial plants. And in Boston, which was on high alert, two brothers—one sixteen years old and the other twenty—were arrested after a neighbor reported “mysterious activities” in a workshop at the rear of the boys’ house. When police raided the home, they discovered that the young men had been making “bombs”—two-to three-inch gas pipes filled with black powder and with a fuse attached. The brothers told police they were making the devices for a big Independence Day celebration in their neighborhood. The boys were released later in the day.
On July 4, the nation waited for the bombs. “We have received so many notices and got so much information that it has almost come to be accepted as a fact that on a certain day in the future, which we have been advised of, there will be another serious and probably much larger effort of the same character which the wild fellows of this movement describe as a revolution, a proposition to use up and destroy the Government at one fell swoop,” Attorney General Palmer had told the Senate in June. And Bureau of Investigation chief William Flynn more then once had let it slip that the big day was July 4, although he later denied that he had designated a particular day. Whatever Flynn’s memory of what he had uttered to the press, the Fourth of July was designated as the day when the carnage “might take place.”
In the late days of June and the first three days of July, urgent meetings were called, and every law enforcement agency and bureau in the nation was alerted. On the Sunday before Independence Day (which fell on a Friday) Flynn and cohorts solidified the design for cooperation of federal, state, and municipal police authorities in “handling the possible outbreak by the ‘red flag’ elements of the population.” And throughout that week before, at least half a dozen bills were discussed in Congress as part of a comprehensive program to curb Bolshevism and radicalism—one that the Christian Science Monitor called “a program of an extreme character.” Central to the discussions was the big question of whether the current revolutionary propaganda circulating throughout the nation necessitated a law similar to if not the same as the Espionage Act. A Republican senator from South Dakota said he believed that this would be necessary in order to strengthen “the hands of the government in dealing with open disloyalty to the Constitution and the laws of the country.” The bill that would soon be presented to the Senate would ban the red flag at all gatherings, prohibit under heavy penalty the distribution of anarchistic literature through the mails, and criminalize any expression of advocacy of revolution. The bill would also call for the deportation of any aliens violating any part of it. Further, a Democrat senator from Utah proposed that the penalty for sending bombs such as those mailed recently should be execution.
On Friday, the Fourth, temperatures in New York broke the record at 98 degrees. Despite the rays of burning sun, uniformed law enforcement officials patrolled the city and “inspected” the local “haunts” of at least twenty groups considered to be anarchistic and possibly dangerous. Buildings were searched and all reading materials found in them were seized. On the most wanted list of publications were the writings of Leon Trotsky and V. I. Lenin and any issues of the radical publication The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin. The occupants of the buildings were searched but no arrests were made. In other cities too there were raids without violence or resistance, and with few, if any, arrests.
The revolution didn’t happen that day. The reign of terror did not begin. “Bomb ‘Plot’ Is a Fizzle” read one headline. The biggest news of July 4 seemed to be the record high temperatures in most of the nation: 100 in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. So hot was the day in Boston that people claimed they saw molasses from the January explosion bubbling up from the cracks in the sidewalks.
Generally, it was a sane, serene Fourth of July in all of America—except perhaps in Ohio. There, in Toledo, Americans unable yet to shift out of war mode got their pugilistic fix at the battle for the world heavyweight boxing title. What some people would henceforth call “The Slaughter of Toledo” took place at Bay View Park where, at the moment the fight began, the temperature was 110 degrees. At least fifty thousand spectators, soaking in sweat, sat in concentric circles around the sun-baked boxing ring where Jack Dempsey would try to wrest the world title from Jess Willard. Known as the “savior of the white race” for having smashed and battered big black Jack Johnson, Willard was confident he would keep his title. “Superior punching” would win him the title, he told a reporter on July 2. Dempsey was even more confident that Willard would lose the title.
Despite the blazing sun, or perhaps because of it, the audience was “electrified,” as one newspaper put it. Jack Dempsey, whose real name was William Harrison Dempsey and who was born in Manassa, Colorado—the ninth of eleven children—was twenty-four years old, six foot one inch, weighed 187 pounds, and had won his five previous challenges in 1919, each time in the first round. As early as 1916, sportswriter Damon Runyon called him the “Manassa Mauler.” Willard, a Kansan from Pottawatomie, was thirty-seven years old, six foot seven inches, 245 pounds, and had held the world heavyweight title since 1915. First into the ring, Dempsey, in his white shorts and tan body, radiated confidence and power. Willard wore black and was hardly as fit as he had been four years before when he had defeated Johnson.
The fight lasted nine minutes. Dempsey knocked down Willard seven times in the first round, leaving him hanging on the ropes. Dempsey broke Willard’s jaw, knocked out four of his teeth, smashed his nose and cracked at least two ribs. At the start of the fourth round, Willard, eyes swollen shut, mouth bubbling with blood, body dripping with blood and sweat, sat down. Dempsey told the press he was horrified at what he had done to Willard: “I’ll never fight again as long as I live. I’ll never pull on another glove. I’m through with the game. My God, what a terrible sensation to hit a defenseless man. Even in the hour of my own success, I sympathize with him.” But Dempsey was a warrior who would not stop fighting until he too was defeated. In later years, sportswriter Red Smith would describe Dempsey as “187 pounds of unbridled violence” and “the best of all pugilists.”
In Detroit, where the temperature hit 101 at noon, another event far upstaged “The Slaughter of Toledo,” the threat of terrorism, and even the heat of the day. The Polar Bears—nearly half of them anyhow—were home. And the entire state of Michigan, it seemed, had converged on the 982-acre island known as Belle Isle in the Detroit River for a day of celebrating.
By July 4, millions of soldiers had returned and thousands of cities, towns, and villages had welcomed them. Homecoming parades were so frequent that small businesses had formed for the planning of them. While the thrill of soldiers reuniting with their loved ones never waned, the celebrations had become predictable and mundane. The return of Detroit’s Own from Arctic Russia, however, stood out. Trying to understand the difference, one Detroit News reporter wrote that perhaps it felt more dramatic because “no other unit came back bringing with it so strong a sense that it was returning from the dead.” How odd it was, another reporter wrote, to be hailing the return of men who had been fighting an undeclared, effectively unconstitutional war, who should never have spent a day in northern Russia.
Of the seven thousand soldiers who had arrived in Archangel and Murmansk in September 1918, 4,500 were coming home. One hundred eighty-four would never return. Of those, 112 had been killed in action and 72 were dead from diseases. Sixty of those had died from the influenza. The rest would remain in Russia for several more months.
When in June the government informed the families of the 339th that most of the soldiers were no longer in Russia, some greeted the news with skepticism, especially because they did not know when exactly the troops would land in New York harbor. They did know that by June the ice of northern Russia had melted. The ports had opened. The railways were repaired. And, able to ride the rails to the port of Archangel, the 339th had shipped out in early June on the steamer Czar, arriving eight days later at Brest. From there they would soon sail for America. While in France, the men from Michigan stayed at an army debarkation camp at nearby Pontanezen and spent a good deal of time bathing, so wrote Jay Hayden, the Detroit News correspondent who had covered the story for months.
At Pontanezen too, Hayden interviewed soldiers about their nine months in Russia. It was cold. It was dirty. It was dangerous. The food was terrible. The rice and meal were usually moldy and the dried vegetables often spoiled. There was never fresh meat. The regiment remained on the front lines without a break but the worst part of it, they told Hayden, was not knowing why in fact they were there. They were first told they were guarding supplies and then they were sent to front lines of Russia’s civil war for months, hundreds of miles from Archangel. The British, Hayden wrote, distributed leaflets saying that the purpose of the expedition was “the saving of the Russians from themselves.” In the opinion of several soldiers who spoke freely and at length to Hayden, it was not “any of their business to attempt to tell the Russians what to do in their internal affairs.”
From the moment the Polar Bears had arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, on the morning of June 30, a misty disbelief seemed to envelop them. On both sides of the Hudson River that day, men, women, and children stood waiting, many having come as early as 2 A.M. And when the ship docked, some screamed the names of their loved ones, straining their necks and eyes for a glimpse of a familiar face. But others, as if unable to believe what was happening, stood in silence. So often during the past eight months had they believed that hunger, disease, or the Arctic cold had wiped out the 339th, that every one of the regiment had been massacred by the Bolsheviks, who they were told outnumbered the Americans forty to one, and that there would be no survivor to report who had died last. So often had they heard such dismal reports and so rarely had they received letters out of Russia that now it was hard to believe that the men about to disembark were in fact alive.
Among the quiet ones that day were the sister, brother, and mother of Private J. A. Brusseau. As they stood on the pier and watched as crewmen tossed the anchors into New York harbor, the mother gripped ever tighter the letter her son had sent to the Detroit Free Press and to her in May, appearing in the paper immediately after its arrival on June 10.
Dear Sir: Thinking perhaps you wouldn’t mind having a little news from the far north for the people of Detroit, I consider it a pleasure to write you to tell you that at last the 339th is standing some show of getting out of the venerable country it has been in for such an un-predetermined period of time…. I know it’s hard for the people of Detroit to get the real “dope” from Russia, but we can hope only for the luck of our letters getting through. We write what we think will pass censor, but whether it does or not is another question…. I have just come back to the railroad front after a three months’ tramp through the jungles of forests and snow, with some experiences that are worthwhile knowing. I know well what it is to be rapidly freezing to death (or rather on the way there) to go hungry, tired and sleepy. To sleep in the snow is but a trifle as that is possibly better than mud and water. I know many other things, too, which I wouldn’t dare mention here. Maybe it will be just as well to get in good old Detroit again. Now this time it’s no rumor, no fooling—we are going home very very soon. It’s honest to goodness true, take it from me. We should be home the beginning of July, sometime. I’ll surely have heart disease all the way over. My heart is beating faster now than it has been.
When they finally arrived at Belle Isle on Independence Day, the men with “Russia” stenciled on their helmets, “NR” (Northern Russia) stitched on their sleeves, and white polar bears silk-screened on their armbands were all given flyers informing them of the many services, events, and speeches in their honor that day. Ask any of the Detroit’s Own committeemen, the flyer said, “for anything in the world except a marriage license.” There were baseball games, boat rides, swimming, and eating, mostly ice cream and chicken. The Belle Isle bathhouse passed out free swimming suits and the Detroit Yacht Club offered all services as it would to its members. There were seven band concerts throughout the day. A dance band played at one end of the island beginning at 2:30 P.M., continuing into the night. Politicians from thirty-seven cities attended. The 339th’s Sergeant Theodore Kolbe, who had spoken so openly in December about conditions in Russia, was there, as he was now the deputy county treasurer in Detroit. And there were many speeches. “You fought under the greatest of all odds,” said Detroit’s mayor, James Couzens. “You fought doubts in your own hearts; doubts that Headquarters remembered your predicament, that the folks at home knew whether you still lived, that they had received your letters, that relief could ever reach you through the ice-locked sea.”
California’s Senator Hiram Johnson, the champion of their cause, came to Detroit on the train from Washington to greet the 339th. Upon his arrival at Michigan Central Station at 7:45 A.M. on the Fourth, he told the press that he came purely for “sentimental reasons” and without any intention of speaking about his latest cause, which, as an ardent isolationist, was to defeat the League of Nations and to flay Wilson’s international policy any chance he could. Nor did he intend to discuss his opinions on the Paris Peace Conference, of which he was very critical, or the several thousand more American soldiers in Russia who were still fighting in Siberia and would not return until the spring of 1920, or his plans to run for president in 1920, of which he was very optimistic, or his views on Bolshevism, which he hated. He had no canned speech and he preferred eating breakfast to talking to the press, he told a Detroit News writer who asked him specifically about his opinion on the “bolshevik question.” “The question of their [the 339th’s] removal from Russia was purely American and had nothing else in it,” said Johnson. “This country has nothing to fear from any idiotic, fantastic thing like Bolshevism.”
Later in the day, however, at Belle Isle, after Mayor Couzens introduced Johnson as “the greatest possibility for the next President of the United States” and “the man who stood up so valiantly in the Senate to demand that the boys of the 339th be released from the terribly isolated country to which they had been sent without any explanation from their Government,” Johnson, wiping sweat from his brow and rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt, spoke of more than the homecoming of the Polar Bears.
And now if this day has any lesson for any of us, for all whose hearts beat with Americanism, it means that you and I and all of us must solemnly dedicate ourselves on this happy homecoming day to the pledge that boys from America must not be embroiled in European troubles unless America’s rights are invaded. We are facing today one of the greatest crises that ever came to this country. We are standing at the crossroads, and one leads to imperialistic control, and the other is the straight and narrow path of Americanism. As I think of the hardships you men suffered, and as I come face to face with you here I know that you will join me in consecrating ourselves to the aim that this nation shall be American and American alone.
On the Fourth of July, President Wilson gave his own speech to soldiers and sailors and seven French war brides on board the George Washington. This Fourth of July was the most important of all, he said, even more crucial than the very first one when the free nation of America was established with the intention of serving liberty for all mankind, within or outside its borders. Now, Americans had shown the world that they were true to their pledge “to be the servants of humanity and of free men everywhere, to tend to the troubles of other peoples whose freedoms were threatened…. My confident ambition for the United States is that she will know in the future how to make each Fourth of July as it comes grow more distinguished and more glorious than its predecessor by showing that she, at any rate, understands the laws of freedom by understanding the laws of service and that mankind may always confidently look to her as a friend, as a cooperator, as one who will stand shoulder to shoulder with free men everywhere in the world to assert the right…. This is the most tremendous Fourth of July that men ever imagined, for we have opened its franchises to all the world.”
Neither Johnson nor Wilson mentioned the other reason for celebration that day, which surely affected every returning soldier. The flu epidemic was effectively over, although the government would not officially announce the end for several more months. In the first six months of 1919, in the third wave, approximately 190,000 men and women had died in America from the flu and its companion killer, pneumonia. Between September of 1918 and June of 1919—the second and third waves of the pandemic—the best estimate of deaths from flu and pneumonia, both civilian and military, had been 675,000 Americans. Even the worst effects of the war and the most difficult struggles of its aftermath could not compare with the devastation caused by the flu.
This group of returning soldiers would not face such threats, but, like all troops coming home, they would have to tackle the huge challenge of making a life in postwar America. Beyond the uplifting, reassuring, self-serving orations of Johnson and Wilson was the reality that the millions of troops arriving in New York harbor were causing shock waves as they returned to a nation that had not yet adjusted to peace—one whose munitions factories had not yet reconverted to peacetime production, whose laborers were underpaid, whose cost of living had reached an unprecedented high, and whose returning soldiers needed work. Never before had the nation experienced such a huge demobilization of soldiers. In the first three months after the close of the Civil War, 640,806 soldiers were mustered out of service as compared with 1,246,374 during the three months from November 11, 1918, to February 15, 1919. And the government did not have a well-conceived plan for adjusting to their return.
Indeed, for a while in demobilization camps discharges were delayed to prevent the overwhelming supply of labor from exceeding its already threatening levels. In March of 1919, Life magazine published a cartoon that showed Uncle Sam saying to a soldier “Nothing is too good for you, my boy! What would you like?” And the soldier responded, “A job.”
The labor surplus added to race tensions and allowed employers to take advantage of the easily replaceable workers. Low wages and long hours—often twelve-hour workdays—and the quest for the right to organize to achieve better working conditions were all reasons for the rising number of labor strikes each month. In March there had been 175 strikes, in April 248, in May 388, in June 303, and now in July there would be 360. While the government blamed pro-German propaganda, the IWW, and the Bolsheviks for the worker unrest, the vise of low wages and rising living costs was tightening for American workers. In the previous five years food prices, for example, had risen more than 80 percent, clothing more than 100 percent, and furniture 125 percent. During the war, limited supplies of commodities had driven up the prices and because of the war people were willing to pay more. But now, manufacturers were not lowering prices. Some were even hoarding products to drive up the demand and thus maintain an excessively high price. The average American family was facing a cost of living that was 99 percent higher than it had been in 1914 when the war began. In May and June the soaring cost of living had caused such a stir that twenty-six Democratic members of Congress in conjunction with the Democratic Club of Massachusetts sent a cablegram to President Wilson in Paris urging him to come home: “The citizens of the United States want you home to help reduce the high cost of living, which we consider far more important than the League of Nations.”
On Independence Day, the U.S. president was halfway between France and America, on his way home.