Immigrants played a major role in winning World War I

By Gordon C. Morse
via The Virginian-Pilot newspaper pilotonline.com web site

Courtemont-Varennes, France — It may have happened 100 years ago, but the more time you spend with the first world war, the more it closes in on the present.

You want to kick around immigration? You want to witness an argument? Then wade into the thicket of American politics in the early years of the 20th century and see the discussion then, in the aftermath of one of the greatest spans of immigration in the nation’s history.

Gordon C. MorseHow were we going to make this work as a nation? No one really knew. With people arriving from here, there and everywhere, flooding the cities, entering the rural interior, it became a source of social bewilderment and sharp political division.

Then America looked up in 1917 and said, Oh, we might have to join a raging, ongoing war on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean — from whence many of us came. It was a previously unimaginable choice that rapidly became compelling.

In the third year of the Great War, when America decided to participate, we had the regular army — what there was of it. “With 108,000 officers and men,” writes Patricia O’Toole, in her new biography of Woodrow Wilson, “The Moralist,” the U.S. Army “was on par with the army of Montenegro.”

National Guard divisions would help, but we needed millions of Americans in uniform, not tens of thousands. A draft would have to make up the difference.

That’s how the “National Army” emerged, an induction-based collection of divisions topped with professional military leadership. Among the first to get ready and enter the fighting was the 77th Division, based in New York, and that involved an amalgam of ethnic backgrounds.

Pulling people together and training them became a business of Americans meeting Americans, from sea to shining sea — and it started with being able to talk to each other, says historian Ed Lengel.

Read the entire article on the pilotonline.com web site.

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