New York played a vital role in the Great War.

Because New York was a destination for many immigrants, the state embodied the doubts — as America stayed out of the war at first — that allegiances to home countries would be stronger than to the United States Army.

After the end of the war, as fears of communism rose, New York’s Ellis Island became a deportation center.

In between, the state gave an enormous amount — with finances, manufacturing, and soldiers — to the war effort. This, and much more, is detailed in a book and New York State Museum exhibit that share a name: “A Spirit of Sacrifice: New York State in the First World War.”

“In a conflict — a war of global proportions — that was the first world war, it would be easy to say that looking at the contributions of a single state doesn’t really matter. That it can’t add anything to the narrative that has already been established,” Aaron Noble, co-author of the forthcoming book, told The Enterprise this week.

“But when you look at New York State, approximately 10 percent of military forces raised during the war came from here — one of out every 10 soldiers was a New Yorker; 14,000 of the 100,000 soldiers killed in combat were New Yorkers; New York State accounted for 18 of the 121 Medal of Honor recipients; by the end of the war, there were 38,000 New York State companies manufacturing under war-time contracts, which is far-and-away above any other state,” says Noble, a senior historian and curator at the State Museum.

On Sunday, Nov. 5, he spoke to the New Scotland Historical Association — which has its own exhibit on local soldiers in World War I — about his book.

New York was unique because it was a final destination for immigrants from all over the world, which would be a major factor for determining American strategy on entering the war. There was still a lot of division and debate over the role that the United State should play — if any.

Because of New York’s very large immigrant population, there was a keen interest in the war. Many immigrants still had family ties to Europe. In fact, thousands of immigrants who came to New York returned to their home countries to fight in the war, says Noble. Germans comprised the third-largest ethnic-immigrant population in the United States when it entered the war in 1917.

President Woodrow Wilson tried to keep the United States on the sidelines for as long as he could.

“One of the motivations for the Wilson Administration to push for the policy of neutrality was because the United States was such a multi-ethnic and multicultural country.  There was a lot of concern among leaders in the American government about whether or not this country could fight in a global conflict; or, if competing loyalties of native land and adopted country would be so much that we wouldn’t be able to successfully field an army in our own name,” Noble said.

The divisions began on Aug. 8, 1914, when the Socialist Party held a massive anti-war rally at Union Square in Manhattan. Socialists argued that this was a war that pitted the working-class against one another.

American banks, mostly located in New York City, made $2.5 billion ($60 billion today) in loans to belligerents, nearly all to the Allied side, though some smaller loans were made to the Central Powers.  

“J.P. Morgan was named the official purchasing agent for all three Allied Powers — Great Britain, France, and Russia. So, Morgan, a New Yorker, had the authority to sign contracts on behalf of all three governments for munitions and other equipment,” Noble said.

This is one of the reasons Socialists argued that it was a capitalist war. All these companies were making lots of money, while the working-class people were being massacred in the trenches, he says.

But the Wilson administration was aware that the economy was on the brink of a recession, and the influx of capital from Europe for war material helped stave off a worse recession.

Selling the war

“World War I is really the first war in which the American government makes a very concerted effort to ‘sell’ the war to its population,” said Noble. “It’s also — kind of — the first war in the nation’s history that we enter voluntarily. There was no firing on Fort Sumter, like in the Civil War; or the explosion of the USS Maine that sparked the Spanish-American War; or later on, the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

“World War I is fought over ideals: Freedom of the sea; freedom of trade; defense of democracy — things that are a little less tangible for most people,” he says.

To sell the war to the country, the government went Hollywood — sort of.

Four-minute men were citizen-volunteers who were trained to give speeches on various topics, such as liberty loans, recruitment or enlistment, or joining the war effort by conserving food.

It took a theater operator four minutes to change a movie reel on a projector, so the four-minute men would go into the theaters and give their speeches to captive audiences.

Cracking down

Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia, democracies across Europe as well as in the United States feared communists would foment revolution on the homefront.

This fear and paranoia coincided with a recession at the end of war as factories laid off employees, two-million soldiers returned home, and the truce between labor and management that existed during the war broke down, Noble says.

Across the country, and in New York, there are waves of strikes.

National and New York politicians saw this labor unrest as the first salvo in the feared-communist revolution.

Veterans of the 369 Infantry — nicknamed the “Hellfighters” by the Germans because of their toughness — consisted mainly of African Americans, many of whom resided in Harlem after the war. They became adherents to the New Negro Movement, which meant they were not willing to accept the pre-war racial status quo and would push for better treatment and rights.

The Red Summer of 1919 saw hundreds of black men hanged across the country — more than a few while in their military uniforms.

The government responded by cracking down on various groups.

In New York, the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities was set up, headed by Senator Clayton Lusk of Cortland. This committee was given broad authority to investigate individuals and organizations in the state who were suspected of promoting the overthrow of the American government.

Also included in the list of subversives were “the NAACP, women’s suffrage groups, and other immigrant-minority groups — really, when you look at the list they were investigating, they were already groups being left out of participating in the American Dream,” said Noble.

In 1921, the first restrictive-immigration laws were enacted by the federal government, which established a quota system that disproportionately targeted eastern and southern Europeans as well as Asians and Africans.  

Ellis Island, closed as an immigration center, was re-opened as a deportation center.

“Because of its role as the progressive epicenter of the nation, New York found itself at the center of the debate over why the war was being fought, how it was being fought,” and what the resulting expansion of government power and authority meant for individuals, Noble says.