Hicksville's 1917
Multiple things conspired to make people in Hicksville edgy that December. There were two major factors, both of which had first arisen eight months earlier. One was the United States' participation in World War I; the other was New York State's new mounted police force. These two phenomena set the stage for the riot - but there also was something else at work: two of the key characters in the developing drama had a personal history.
Being German
By now, over-zealous excitement about America's entry into the war had faded, and people were worrying. Family members were in uniform, and soon they would be in harm's way. Troop trains rolled through Hicksville, each carrying a thousand men - draftees to, or brand-new soldiers from, Camp Upton. The war's continuing carnage made the future of young men like these less certain every day.
According to the White House, America's entry into the war had been reluctant. Regardless of whether or not that was true, the country's sympathies had been clear for a long time. During its three years of official neutrality, America had openly paraded - sometimes literally, as illustrated by the flags in this 1916 painting of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue - its feelings, which lay not with Austria-Hungary and Germany, but instead with France and the British Empire.
Childe Hassam, Preparedness Day Parade, 1916
http://vexillophilia.blogspot.com/2010/05/childe-hassams-flag-paintings.html
One of the explanations that historians give for the earlier neutrality is the Wilson administration's concerns about the reactions of American citizens of German descent. On that score, Hicksville ranked higher than most places; during the 19th century, its Quaker roots had receded before an influx of German farmers and businessmen. In 1917, the notable residents mentioned most often in the local press had names like Huettner, Herzog, Kroemer, Puvogel, Steinert, Wetterauer, or Braun. Many of the clerics in the village were German, and not just the Lutheran ones; Fathers Goetz and Fuchs were early priests at St. Ignatius. Most of the owners of the village's hotels, where people socialized each evening and exchanged news, were German-Americans, like Messrs. Reinhardt, Wolgast, Fleischbein, and Vogel. The hotels' décor was often German-themed, as were the menus; hasenpfeffer was a specialty. Despite the preponderance of German ancestry, Hicksville rallied behind the nation's decision to join in the war.
It must have been hard, however, for many of its citizens to stomach the propaganda campaign that soon flooded the country. Some of the village's German immigrants, like the venerable Herman Menge, had served with the Union Army during the Civil War. Now, the descendants of their fellow soldiers were doing their best to vilify and insult all things German - sometimes, all things "foreign" - making life painful for anyone who was German-American.
U.S. Army Recruiting Poster
Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010652057/
For example, this poster (pre King Kong, incidentally) depicts Germany as a gorilla, standing on the word America as he wades ashore, having already found a young American woman to molest. Note that his bloodied club bears the word Kultur. This probably is a reference to Prussia's one-time (but by 1917 long abandoned) Kulturkampf policy, devised to drive people of "undesirable" ethnicities from the then-Prussian lands in which their ancestors had lived.
Note that when the story of the Hicksville rioters appeared in the New York Tribune, these news items could be found on the same page:
The American Defense Society was lobbying New York City to cease teaching German to its language students, because doing so posed "a serious threat to the city."
- The New York branch of the National German-American Alliance resolved to fight the attempts to end public school instruction in all foreign languages, saying that German-Americans were stronger than all the "narrow minded people who are behind the obnoxious propaganda...."
- An aeronautical engineer at Wright Aircraft with a German name had been arrested on suspicions of draft-dodging and espionage.
- Germany was suspected of having "ordered" the International Workers of the World to sabotage American grain silos in order to weaken America- even though the IWW tended to be socialist or communist, and was not a likely ally of Germany.
The country was polarized. German-Americans felt persecuted, and too many other Americans seemed willing to persecute them.
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