One day, soon after he got to the United States, when Rocco Pierro was still on the job of putting up telegraph poles next to train tracks, one of the non-Italian workers asked him if he would come home to meet his father. “My dad, he’s never seen an Italian before,” the guy told Rocco. When the two of them got to the house, they found the father in bed—whether sick or feeble or just old Rocco didn’t know. The son introduced Rocco as a genuine Italian, and the father looked him up and down with a wide, surprised gaze. “What do you know,” the old man said. “And I thought all Italians were black.” The Pierro family still talks about it.
That old guy was not the only one to harbor strange ideas about immigrants. The massive influx spawned suspicion, anxiety, curiosity, fear, loathing, and outright hatred at all levels of society. Henry James, returning to the United States in 1904 after an absence of twenty-one years, was stunned at how the nation, and especially New York, was being transformed by “this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social.” In The American Scene, the book in which he recorded the impressions of his journey, James wrote at length of the “dense Yiddish quarter” of the Lower East Side: “There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start, and the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds.” Aghast and amused, James felt himself wading helplessly through “some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of overdeveloped proboscis, were to bump together, for ever, amid heaped spoils of the sea.” On the “electric cars” that plied Broadway and the Bowery he found nothing but foreign faces—“a row of faces, up and down, testifying, without exception, to alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and unashamed.” “What meaning,” James demanded, “in the presence of such impressions, can continue to attach to such a term as the ‘American’ character?—what type, as the result of such a prodigious amalgam, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients, is to be conceived as shaping itself?”
In James’s imagination, “the great inscrutable answer” to such questions hung obscurely “in the vast American sky.” Others of his class and background, however, had no trouble making it out. “These Southern and Eastern Europeans are of a very different type from the Northern Europeans who preceded them,” wrote New York educator Ellwood P. Cubberley in 1909. “Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative, and not possessing Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order and government, their coming has corrupted our civic life.” Woodrow Wilson, before taking office as president, wrote in disgust of the southern European countries that were “disburdening themselves of the more sordid and helpless elements of the population.” Harvard zoologist Charles Davenport, founder of a research center into human heredity called the Eugenics Record Office, wrote in 1911 that the mixing of southeastern Europeans with America’s old British and northern European stock would result in a strain of smaller, darker, inferior Americans prone to murder, theft, and sexual immorality. It’s worth noting that eugenics grew out of the Progressive Movement as a biological theory aimed at social reform, and that many eugenicists, including early birth-control activist Margaret Sanger, were motivated by a desire to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. The horrors advocated under the banner of eugenics, however, have overshadowed these distinctions. In a hugely popular bestseller of 1916 entitled The Passing of the Great Race, New York lawyer Madison Grant, chairman of the New York Zoological Society and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, argued that a “dark Mediterranean subspecies” was diluting the “splendid fighting and moral qualities” of the old stock and pushing the nation to the edge of a “racial abyss.” With unchecked immigration, the soldiers, sailors, rulers, explorers, and aristocratic adventurers of the “great race” would be replaced by “the weak, the broken and mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos.” Uncannily anticipating Hitler (who called The Passing of the Great Race “my Bible”), Grant warned: “If the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with inferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall.” “The most influential tract of American scientific racism,” Stephen Jay Gould later wrote of Grant’s book.
Madison Grant’s venom did not reach Meyer Epstein on East Broadway or the Pierros on Shelton Road. Grant’s close friend Teddy Roosevelt, however, took up some of these ideas, gave them a manly patriotic twist, and broadcast them on the national stage. Unlike Grant, Roosevelt was not concerned with the taint of inferior racial strains on America’s Nordic purity: the president firmly believed that the new immigrants could become good Americans, even good warriors—but only if they cleansed themselves of any allegiance to their countries of origin. “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country,” said Roosevelt. “There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else. . . . The foreign-born population of this country must be an Americanized population—no other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace. . . . We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language . . . and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.” All this thundering about battles and allegiance and loyalty might have seemed odd, even a touch paranoid, when the nation was at peace. But war was coming. Roosevelt, practically alone among his countrymen, could smell it. And relish it. England, Germany, and France, having carved up the world, were armed to the teeth and waiting for an excuse to march on each other. How could the United States remain on the sidelines if it wanted to fulfill its destiny as a great—as the great—world power? But when war came at last, woe betide the nation if its armies had to rely on the unassimilated scum from the Mediterranean basin and the ghettoes of Poland. Grant warned that these inferior “races” were genetically too weak and defective to fight for America; Roosevelt countered that even if they developed the physical capacity to be soldiers, they would lack the backbone and the stomach to fight like real Americans until they had been purified of all trace of their alien origins. But the two agreed that the vast pool of unassimilated immigrants from the south, east, and center of Europe posed a serious risk to what we would now call national security. In time of peace, these newcomers were a drag on the nation’s vitality; in time of war, they would hobble and corrupt the army, unless they could be magically transformed into “100 percent” Americans.
The bottom line was, America wouldn’t stand a chance in the next big war if it was reduced to fielding an army of “undisguised and unashamed” aliens.
When the test of actual battle comes,” wrote Madison Grant, “it will, of course, be the native American [i.e., the old stock from Northern Europe] who will do the fighting and suffer the losses. With him will stand the immigrants of Nordic blood, but there will be numbers of these foreigners in the large cities who will prove to be physically unfit for military service.” Yet in fact, even before the test of battle came, there were “foreigners” who were serving with perfect physical fitness in the American armed forces. They may not have been “100 percent,” but there they were in uniform, loyal, brave, even reckless soldiers in the nation’s small ill-equipped prewar military.
Two of the bravest and most reckless were Matej Kocak and Sam Dreben—a Slovak marine and a Jewish soldier of fortune. Career soldiers both, they each came into their own the day they signed on to be soldiers in the U.S. Armed Forces. When the test of battle came in the Great War, Kocak and Dreben found themselves by chance on the same battlefield, one of the bloodiest and most fiercely contested in the war; in the heat of that battle, the two of them became heroes and inspired heroism in those they fought beside.
Kocak and Dreben were living proof, if proof were needed, of what poisonous rubbish Madison Grant was spouting. On the eve of war in 1914, they already had more than twenty years of military service between them. Three years later, when the United States entered the fight and a generation of immigrants was called on to serve, Kocak and Dreben led the vanguard into action.
Fair-haired, blue-eyed, strapping, ruddy-complexioned, Matej Kocak was a pretty close match to Madison Grant’s Nordic ideal. The only problem, aside from his middling height of five feet, six and a half inches, was that Kocak was a Slovak and thus, in Grant’s schema, not a Nordic at all but a stubby rude Alpine peasant. Far better than being a Jew, of course, and a decided rung up the racial ladder from the squat coarse Mediterraneans, but still a far cry from the elegant godlike Nordics who carried the true torch of civilization.
Alpine peasant he may have been by birth, but by temperament and preference Kocak was a warrior—and he proved to be a natural fit in the American military. Not that he was especially wrathful or bloodthirsty. Rather, it was the discipline, the conditioning, the camaraderie, the outdoor life, and the opportunity to advance that suited him to the U.S. military. When war came, he displayed the born warrior’s instinct for decisive action—the instinct that wins battles, rouses comrades, and sometimes, when you’re unlucky, gets you killed.
Matej was born on the last day of 1882 to a family of farmers and small landowners outside the town of Gbely (also called Egbell) in the northwest tip of what is now the Slovak Republic but was then an interior region of the vast, fading Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the ethnic stew of Mitteleuropa—Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Carpathian Germans, Gypsies, Vlachs, Jews, and Magyars all simmering together under the same benignly reactionary monarchy—the Slovaks stood out for their vibrant folk culture, pride in their Slavic origins, and resentment at the duration of their subjugation by neighbors. As far back as the twelfth century, Slovaks had been squeezed by Hungarian wars and social upheavals. After 1867, when Hungary became Austria’s coequal in the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slovaks were subjected to an official policy of Magyarization—a campaign to suppress their culture, folk traditions, language, and identity and assimilate them into Hungary’s dominant Magyar culture. Matej’s native town of Gbely was especially hard-hit since it had been a center of Slovak culture, and hundreds of local families fled to North America.
Matej’s own departure was impelled as much by personal passion as by politics. He had grown up with a sister and a brother in a traditional Slovakian Catholic household where the word of the father was akin to the word of God. Schooling ended with the primary grades, and then Matej went to work alongside his father and brother on the family farm. The sister married, evidently with the father’s blessing. Matej, seething under the lash of paternal tyranny, kept his head down, worked on the farm, and drank. It was inevitable that father and son would fight and—given Matej’s personality, slow to anger, but once angry quick to lash out—that the fights would be violent.
When he was twenty-three, Matej fell in love with a girl who lived on a nearby farm. Matej didn’t care that the girl stood a rung lower on the social ladder and had no dowry, but his father did. Father and son exploded—again. This time the rift between them was irreparable. Matej packed a bag and left his family and his girl. He arrived in the United States in 1906, fluent and literate in Slovak, Czech, and Russian but with nothing else to show for himself. Through the immigrant grapevine he heard there was work to be had in the mining towns of western Pennsylvania, so after he ran through the little bit of money he’d brought over from Gbely, Matej drifted out to Lodi. Instead of digging coal underground like so many hardworking, broad-backed Catholics from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he got a job as a cook in a mining camp. That didn’t last long. In 1907 he turned up in the small town of Sturgeon southwest of Pittsburgh and went to work as a laborer—what kind of labor is not specified on his papers, though it was probably in a steel mill or coal mine or digging ditches or laying train track, because those were pretty much the only kinds of labor open to immigrants in western Pennsylvania in 1907. But Matej was not cut out to be a laborer.
On October 15, he showed up at the U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office on 412 Third Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh and in his broken but adequate English informed the guy at the desk that he wanted to enlist. He was escorted to the examining room and presented to E. J. Trader, the surgeon in charge. Trader told Matej to strip and went over him inch by inch. On a form labeled “Marks, Scars, etc.” with a line drawing of a bald stocky naked man, front and back, Trader noted that Kocak had perfect 20/20 vision, a fair complexion, light brown hair, and blue eyes. He weighed in at 157 pounds; he was 24 years old; his chest measured 36 inches around and expanded 2 more inches when he took a deep breath; he had a scar on his knee and another on his backside. Aside from that Matej was a perfect specimen. The Marine Corps signed him up the following day—and that was that. On October 16, 1907, Matej Kocak ceased to be a laborer and became a private in the U.S. Marine Corps.
He was posted to the Marine barracks at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on League Island and assigned to an aging naval sloop named the Lancaster that dated back to before the Civil War. Kocak’s year and a half on the Lancaster passed largely without incident, and in the spring of 1909 he was transferred to the USS Georgia. At the beginning of November 1910, the Georgia was slated to go to France, but for some reason, Matej was dead set against shipping out to Europe, and he hatched a scheme to avoid it that nearly scuttled his military career. On the morning of October 31, Matej went ashore without leave in Norfolk and he and a buddy remained AWOL for a little over forty-eight hours, during which time the Georgia embarked for France without them. The men received a hasty deck court-martial and were convicted of desertion, but the charge was subsequently overturned as “erroneously made,” evidently because of some procedural misstep. In punishment, Matej was docked $10 in pay and given thirty days of extra police duties.
After this one blot on his record, Matej shaped up and settled down. Discharged on October 16, 1911, he spent a couple of months with his brother and sister-in-law in Binghamton, New York, and then, a few days before Christmas, went down to New York City, made his way to the Marine recruiting office at 112 East 23rd Street, and signed up for four more years.
Since his first enlistment, Matej had bulked up to 179 pounds and his complexion had turned from fair to ruddy bronze. He had learned to deal with military discipline and carry himself with a jaunty swagger, and he got on well with his comrades and superiors. In short, he had become a marine—and his second enlistment sealed this fate.
In 1912, Matej requested a three-month leave so that he could return to Europe to visit his mother, Roza, in Gbely. No mention of the father, though he was still alive. Back in the United States in June, Matej was posted to the naval prison at the Boston Navy Yard.
In April 1914, after nearly seven years with the Marines, Matej finally saw some overseas action, though it was not one of the more glorious military episodes in U.S. history. Early that month, a misunderstanding in the Mexican port city of Tampico led to a standoff that ended with the Mexican army taking nine American sailors prisoner. Although Mexico promptly released the American sailors and issued a written apology, the U.S. government insisted that it would not be satisfied until the American flag was raised and a twenty-one-gun salute fired. The fact that this incident took place during the chaotic period of the Mexican Revolution when various factions were vying for power and frequently toppling the government made the situation more combustible. When the Mexicans refused to meet Washington’s demands, President Wilson sent the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet down to Mexico to bolster American forces there. On the morning of April 21, 1914, the Atlantic Fleet began bombarding Veracruz, a city to the south of Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico, and a contingent of nearly eight hundred marines and sailors stormed the city’s customhouse. A short nasty bout of urban street fighting and shelling from U.S. gunships ensued, and then the Americans moved in to occupy the city.
By the time Matej Kocak arrived with a contingent of marines aboard the SS Morro Castle on April 29, the fighting had been over for five days. Nonetheless, the United States saw fit to maintain a sizable garrison at Veracruz, and Kocak remained there on active duty until November, 23, 1914—by which time Europe was mired deep in the mud of war and the U.S. occupation of a sullen Mexican port had receded to the shadowy wings of the world’s stage.
Shoot de woiks” was Sam Dreben’s favorite expression, whether in a crap game or a battle, and in the course of his incredible life he had plenty of opportunity to act on it in both venues. Confronted with injustice, with an enemy, or simply with an opportunity to jump in and blaze away, Dreben did not pause to think. Like Kocak, he was born to be a soldier. And yet, as a comrade in arms pointed out, “He was the last man you would pick out of a crowd to be a soldier. Short, heavyset, with a huge comedy nose, a stomach always straining at the belt, he was a walking vaudeville routine. Always kidding, always cheerful, always carefree and happy, he could make a bunch of men laugh when they were ragged, starving, and facing violent death.” To look at him you’d think he was a store clerk or a peddler, when in fact, even before the Great War made him a hero, Dreben was a crack shot with a machine gun, a fearless infantryman, a gun runner, a crafty spy and raider behind enemy lines—and always a world-class character.
In April 1914, as Matej Kocak was steaming to Veracruz with a company of marines on the SS Morro Castle, Sam Dreben was living in El Paso, waiting for his application for U.S. citizenship to be approved and engaged in the highly dangerous enterprise of supplying arms to Pancho Villa, the most colorful and powerful of the Mexican revolutionary leaders. Had Dreben been caught, he would have been deported and his chance of becoming a U.S. citizen would have been shot to hell. But Dreben’s customary luck was with him.
How a Jew from the Russian Pale ended up, via a string of wars and revolutions, being the only American Pancho Villa really trusted is a tale too strange to be invented. Born in 1878 to devout Jewish parents in the beautiful city of Poltava (in today’s Ukraine) and raised in Kiev, the teeming regional capital, Sam was a short, stocky kid with dark piercing eyes and a prominent nose. As a boy he was shy and “almost painfully polite,” a friend wrote later; though he had a wild streak, he kept it under wraps.
Sam’s parents hoped their son would become a rabbi, but he had other ideas. His first dream was to join the army and become an officer with big shining buttons down his chest. That dream ended when he learned what happened to Jewish boys in the Russian army: no shining buttons, twenty-five years of grueling service, no hope of ever being an officer. While still in his teens Sam ran away from home twice—and then at eighteen he left home for good. He got himself to England by stowing away on a ship; in London he kept himself alive with a job delivering vegetables to markets, but he got fired for eating the merchandise. From London to Liverpool and more odd jobs, as a dock worker and a tailor’s assistant for a penny a day. Sam picked up some English and somehow managed to scrape together the fare for a ticket to the United States. He arrived in New York in steerage—what else?—in January 1899.
Sam had an aunt and uncle in Philadelphia, so he went to Philly in hopes of finding work that paid and suited his temperament. The uncle, a tailor, took on Sam as his apprentice. By day he hunched over trousers and jackets; at night he went to classes to improve his English. It was the life that tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants were living in America’s cities, but Sam hated it. When an opportunity came along to trade tailoring for soldiering, he jumped at it.
Sam’s chance to fight arose because the United States had just declared war on the Philippines—one of those trumped-up late-nineteenth-century wars that gave an imperial power an excuse to flex its muscles and tighten its grip over a client nation. On February 4, 1899, when three armed Filipino men tried to cross a bridge into an American military compound near Manila and ignored (or failed to understand) an order to halt, American soldiers shot them. Since the Philippines was at that time an American territory—purchased from Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War—President McKinley deemed the incident an insurgent attack and demanded that the nation go to war to quell the “insurrection.” And so the brief, inglorious Philippine-American War began and Sam Dreben got his first chance to fight.
With plans to ship eleven thousand American soldiers to Manila by August 1899, the U.S. Army sorely needed recruits. The story goes that Sam encountered a recruiting sergeant in Philadelphia and was incredulous when he learned that if he volunteered to fight in the Philippines he’d get $15 a month and three meals a day. “Do they give the uniform too?” Sam wanted to know. Not only uniforms, the sergeant assured him, but medical care and a free funeral if he died. Sam signed up on the spot.
Whether or not it happened this way—there’s a mythic element to a lot of the stories that have come down about Dreben—Sam was duly enrolled in the army, assigned to Company G, 14th U.S. Infantry (the so-called Golden Dragons), and dispatched to Bacoor outside Manila by way of San Francisco. The first legend of Private Sam Dreben dates from his initial hours of combat. Ordered to go after Filipino rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo (the nation’s future president), Company G was approaching a stone bridge when suddenly the rebels let loose a terrific blast of black powder, nails, rivets, and scrap iron. Eleven American troopers, including the captain, were killed or injured in the explosion. The Company G survivors took cover as best they could and tended their wounded—all except one man.
One of Dreben’s comrades later described what happened: “As I lay watching this slaughter only a few yards away, I suddenly saw one soldier emerge from the smoke, still trotting forward toward the bridge. He was the loneliest figure I have ever seen, jogging along like a boy running an errand. There were several thousand insurrectos in those trenches and the bullets were snapping around him, but he didn’t seem to notice. Down the road he went, over the bridge, and into trenches as if he were taking part in a drill on the parade ground.” Sam’s explanation, when the rest of the company joined him after American reinforcements arrived and put the rebels to flight? “Vell, I heard the captain say ‘Forvards!’ and I don’t hear nobody say ‘Stop.’ ” From then on, Dreben was known in the U.S. Army as the Fighting Jew.
Sam spent the next decade and a half in and out of the army—or rather a series of armies—chasing coups, uprisings, revolutions, and civil wars around the globe. In the course of his first enlistment he was dispatched to China to help quell the Boxer Rebellion and then returned to the Philippines in 1901 to fight Islamic insurgents on the southern island of Mindanao. After his discharge, he went back to the States and bummed around California, picking up money as a tailor in Los Angeles, a streetcar conductor, a fruit picker, a lumberman, a teamster. In the summer of 1904, he reenlisted. Stationed at the cavalry outpost of Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, Dreben mastered the weapon that would transform modern warfare—the machine gun. “Handling a machine gun,” wrote his biographer, “was to be his only real trade.” Honorably discharged as a sergeant three years later, at loose ends again, Dreben ended up bankrupt in Panama as the half owner of a saloon in the canal zone. Eventually, he drifted back to warfare—only this time as a soldier of fortune, first in a revolt in Guatemala, then as a freedom fighter in Nicaragua, then in Honduras (where he freed a general from a prison on the eve of his execution by emptying his rifle into the door of the stucco jailhouse), and finally, inevitably, in the revolution that was raging in Mexico. Dreben teamed up with another colorful American soldier of fortune named Tracy Richardson whom he had gotten to know in Nicaragua, and the two of them taught Mexican revolutionaries how to use machine guns and throw advancing troops into confusion by crisscrossing machine-gun fire in their path. “Those poor Federal soldiers were marched up against us in close formation,” Richardson wrote later. “Rank after rank Sam and I mowed them down till it sickened us.” Dreben and Richardson had many bloody adventures in Mexico and many near disasters after the faction they backed was overthrown in February 1913 and the new president Victoriano Huerta put a price on their heads.
Which was how Dreben ended up in El Paso, supplying arms and information to Pancho Villa, while Kocak was doing his bit in the U.S. occupation of Veracruz in the spring of 1914. On the face of it, the Fighting Jew and the Slovak marine might seem to have been on different sides in a messy border war. But these two immigrant career soldiers had one fundamental thing in common: both were unshakably loyal to their adopted country. When the time came to choose between Pancho Villa and the American force raised to chase him down, Dreben chose without hesitation.
It was a testament to the transforming power of the idea of America at the turn of the last century—the power to remake identity and even instinct—that Sam Dreben and Matej Kocak became American soldiers before they became American citizens. The Jew from the Russian Pale and the Slovak Catholic both submitted to this power at the same time and in the same way. In the war to come, this idea of America would lead an Italian laborer to save his wounded buddies from a hail of German hand grenades and a Jewish barber to deliver the message that rescued a battalion trapped behind enemy lines; it put a Polish farm boy on a wheat field raked by exploding artillery shells, and it won a medal for an Irish kid who had enlisted to escape the mines.
Dreben and Kocak had taken the step from immigrant to soldier as soon as they arrived in the United States; in the coming war, Tony Pierro, Meyer Epstein, Joe Chmielewski, Andrew Christofferson, Epifanio Affatato, and half a million other immigrant soldiers followed them.