Common Cause Read online

  “Samuel Hopkins Adams was the embodiment of the perplexing and confounding American nature careening between patriotism and bigotry, idealism and war mania. His book Common Cause: A Novel of the War in America is a pertinent lesson for our times when values clash with each other and good men do things that they may regret. There is much here to ponder.”

  —Alex S. Jones, Pulitzer Prize winner and former director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School

  “Common Cause, in this superbly annotated edition, is an unexpected and timely reminder of the distorted emotions that spike in moments of heightened patriotism. Samuel Hopkins Adams was a first-rate polemicist, and the target of his novel, while set a century ago during World War I, is a familiar bogeyman: the hyphenated American whose country of origin is at war with the United States. Back then it was German-Americans; later, it would be Japanese-Americans and Arab-Americans. Reading this wartime novel one hundred years after its first publication is a disturbing reminder of the enduring characteristics of xenophobia.”

  —Peter Finn, coauthor of The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book

  Common Cause

  A Novel of the War in America

  Samuel Hopkins Adams

  Annotated and with an introduction by John Maxwell Hamilton and Amy Solomon Whitehead

  Potomac Books

  An imprint of the University of Nebraska Press

  Introduction © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © iStockphoto / KenDrysdale.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 1871–1958, author. | Hamilton, John Maxwell, writer of supplementary textual content, writer of introduction. | Whitehead, Amy Solomon, writer of supplementary textual content, writer of introduction.

  Title: Common cause: a novel of the war in America / Samuel Hopkins Adams; annotated and with an introduction by John Maxwell Hamilton and Amy Solomon Whitehead.

  Description: [Lincoln, Nebraska]: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018053132

  ISBN 9781640120020 (paperback: alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781640122178 (epub)

  ISBN 9781640122185 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781640122192 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918—United States—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3501.D317 C66 2019 | DDC 813/.52—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053132.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 2

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part 3

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Notes

  Introduction

  “Distinctly a War Story”

  John Maxwell Hamilton and Amy Solomon Whitehead

  “Has this cruel war killed off our book sales entirely?” Samuel Hopkins Adams asked Ferris Greenslet, a director of the Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin, in an August 1914 letter.1

  Earlier that summer orders for Adams’s forthcoming novel, The Clarion, had been brisk. There was no reason to think foreign affairs would edge out his tale of a newspaper editor’s crusade against patent medicine manufacturers who hoodwinked the public with bogus elixirs. Americans were focused on their country. Progressive writers such as Adams thought in terms of domestic social and political reforms. Europeans themselves were slow to foresee the horrific World War looming even after the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on a sunny Sunday morning in late June. The first British journalist did not leave London for Vienna until the end of July, a week before Germany marched into Belgium to invade France.

  By the time Adams wrote his worried letter to Greenslet, Europe had been transformed into a battleground, with France, Britain, and Russia arrayed against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.2 Greenslet, who was ill with whooping cough and mumps, struggled to figure out what the war meant for his publishing house. He could not be reassuring about the impact it would have on Adams’s strictly American novel. Some of the country’s best journalists were headed to Europe to focus the nation on the Great War. With the understatement publishers employ to soften bad news for authors, Greenslet wrote Adams in return, “You will be somewhat hit by it, I am afraid.”3

  Sales for The Clarion reached thirty thousand copies, which was a respectable amount attributable to Adams’s skill as a popular writer. Nevertheless that was a third of what Greenslet hoped the book would achieve. In 1915, as the conflict raged in Europe and on the pages of American newspapers, the publisher continued to blame poor sales on “the untimely outbreak of the European War.”4

  The United States remained neutral, and so did Adams. Vast numbers of Americans, including progressives like Adams, considered the war a strictly foreign affair. Untroubled by the conflict in Europe, Adams continued to produce light novels and used his newspaper columns to fight false advertising. When Woodrow Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916 with the slogan “He Has Kept Us Out of War,” Adams joined fifty other writers in signing a letter designed to put Wilson’s Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, on the spot for his waffling on the possibility of the United States joining the war. It was a brilliant stroke of propaganda by the Democratic National Committee Publicity Bureau, which played a large role in keeping Wilson in the White House.

  All the while Greenslet pressed Adams for another “opus.” When the writer finally agreed, he was no longer a passive spectator. In April 1917 the United States had entered the conflict, and so presently did Adams. Like many war-reluctant progressives, his enthusiasm was vivified by Wilson’s high-minded goal of making the world “safe for democracy.” Adams helped sell Liberty Loans, government bonds issued to fund the war, and, at the end of 1917, again joined a number of prominent writers aiming to sway public opinion on Wilson’s behalf, this time in service to the Committee on Public Information, the first United States government agency dedicated to propagandizing the public. The committee used every medium available, from newspapers and posters, to speakers and pamphlets, to rally patriotic support for the U.S. war effort.

  “From now on,” Adams somewhat misleadingly told his publisher in September 1917,
“it looks as if I should be putting in most of my time still-hunting pro-German and peace propaganda.”5 Still-hunters stalked their prey noiselessly, and Adams’s pursuit of German-American treachery was anything but silent. All the while, he kept up his commercial writing, including the opus for Greenslet. The novel combined his familiar theme of newspaper crusading with his new cause: combating German-American subversion of the war effort. The book, Adams told another executive at Houghton Mifflin, “is more of a story of loyalty vs. German propaganda than anything else, and while the scene will be largely in a newspaper environment, it is distinctly a war story.”6

  *

  Samuel Hopkins Adams was to writing what Macy’s was to selling dry goods. His output encompassed nearly every literary product that existed at the time. It was consumed by the masses.

  Born in 1871 in the small town of Dunkirk along Lake Erie in western New York, Adams began his journalism career at the New York Sun immediately after graduating from Hamilton College in 1891. While he continued to write for newspapers after the turn of the century, his byline became a staple in McClure’s, Collier’s Weekly, and other leading periodicals. Magazine publishing boomed at the time with reporting and fiction—both of which Adams produced at an astonishing rate.

  And Adams wrote books. When he died in 1958, he had written more than fifty. As a sign of his writing vigor, an additional volume was published posthumously. These books ranged from The Clarion and other serious novels to romance and light-hearted fiction, history, biography, children’s books, science fiction, mysteries, a game book, and a Western. He even penned racy books under the pen name Warner Fabian. These latter novels he did not mention to Greenslet at the staid Houghton Mifflin publishing house.7

  While on the staff of McClure’s, Adams wrote advertising copy and edited stories. He scribbled a smattering of poetry, ghostwrote for others, and tried his hand at movie scripts. Many of his works were adapted for the stage and cinema. A short story for Cosmopolitan became Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. It was the first film to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay). Two of his stories were adapted for phonograph records. One served as the basis for a Broadway musical.

  Adams wrote for the market, had a natural talent for popularizing, and possessed enormous energy and discipline. He was an avid sportsman, with a hard-driving tennis serve and a passion for fishing that he shared with Greenslet. Adams and his wife, a former actress, were enthusiastic socializers. Nevertheless, he was up each day to work before the sun rose and pushed himself to write a thousand words before lunch.8 Once, when his home caught on fire, he went next door to finish “his stint,” as his wife put it.9

  These characteristics are common to market writers of all eras. Another Adams trait, though, was rooted in the progressive era in which he thrived. For progressive journalists focused on exposing corruption and injustice, publicity did not automatically carry the whiff of “spin” or manipulation that it does today. These muckrakers, as they were called, used the word in the sense of eighteenth-century political thinker Jeremy Bentham, who argued for making government deliberations transparent to ordinary citizens. Progressives broadened the concept to cover all aspects of society, especially those dark recesses most in need of scrutiny.10 Adams shed the purifying sunlight of publicity on mining companies’ treatment of labor, the monopolistic practices of the “Beef Trust” to control the meat packing industry, and government corruption. A pioneer in consumer reporting, he rooted out deceptive advertising in everything from straw hats to “cure-all” drugs.

  Adams’s journalistic crusades reemerged as themes in his fiction. In a short story published in McClure’s, “B. Jones, Butcher,” the protagonist takes on the Beef Trust.11 The Health Master, a novel for Houghton Mifflin, was based on his medical reporting. The Clarion picked up one of his favorite themes: newspapers that kowtow to special interests. In this story, a young journalist buys a failing newspaper with the help of his father, who has prospered selling fraudulent medicine. When the editor decides he has to clean up the community, businesses around town withhold advertising to crush The Clarion. In the happy ending the paper prevails, and the father repudiates his trade. The editor’s girlfriend, who owns a tenement that fosters a typhoid outbreak, also comes around to see the evil of her ways. After The Clarion was published, a flattering profile of Adams noted, “There is not one page of his book that is inactive or freed from the necessity to drive home the evils of journalism.”12

  Adams wanted to affect change as well as earn money. He did not limit himself to exposing bogus advertising exclusively through his books, newspaper articles, and magazine stories. He traveled to Washington to lobby for Pure Food and Drug Laws and served on the executive committee of the National Consumers League.13 And as a result of his mounting fame as a medical writer, the American Medical Association made him an associate member. It was, thus, an easy leap to volunteer as a government propagandist for a war President Wilson promised would spread democracy around the world. It was an idealistic call to arms that many progressives like Adams could embrace.

  *

  Every segment of the nation—farmer and factory worker, Boy Scout and homemaker—was conscripted into the war machine. The writing industries were not exempted.

  The war placed restrictions on publishers of newspapers, magazines, and books. Enlistments depleted their staffs. Shortages of paper and other material impeded production. When an author of war poetry insisted her book have a red cover, Greenslet struggled to find the dye, which usually came from Germany. “The Germans, among their other atrocities,” he said, “have prevented its exportation.”14 On top of this, Congress passed laws to restrict speech, which the administration aggressively implemented and the courts upheld.

  Despite these hardships, complaints among journalists and publishers were remarkably muted. A strong feeling of patriotism prevailed generally. And where that sentiment was not so strong, say, among some German-American newspapers, the instinct for self-preservation was a moderating force. Apart from pacifists and Socialists, who were jailed for speaking against the war, objections to free speech were not chiefly about the principle of suppression—editors and reporters enthusiastically offered suggestions for censorship and propaganda. Their frustrations lay with inefficient, clumsy censorship. Few reporters within establishment news organizations wanted to erode support for the war with stories that called its purposes into question.

  The word Hun, a derogatory reference to Central Asian barbarians who invaded Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries, became a pejorative shorthand in newspaper headlines for Germans, whose supposed secret plots to subvert the war were rampant throughout America. This was a stark turnaround from only a few years before when German-Americans were esteemed for their hard work and good citizenship. Back then, Americans embraced the Germans’ sobriquet for themselves, das Land der Dichter und Denker, “the land of poets and thinkers.”15

  When he joined Houghton Mifflin in 1910, Greenslet was sent abroad to obtain an “international point of view.”16 In 1913, he published Pan Germanism, by Roland G. Usher, a rare volume that foresaw the Great War. Once war did erupt, Greenslet persuaded his fellow directors at the company that the public’s interest in the European conflict would soar and that Houghton Mifflin should prepare to meet this demand. In 1915 Greenslet sailed to England to scout authors and book ideas. He “read up on the German case and felt the force of their need for living room” and, prior to 1917, published books that presented the German point of view. But, as he later admitted, his overriding aim was “to educate America to a full knowledge of the evil ambitions that were loose in the world, even if in the end it would lead us to join in fighting them.”17

  Publishing war books was Greenslet’s chief occupation during the conflict. He brought out Ian Hay Beith’s best-selling novel, The First Hundred Thousand, a comic account of a British military unit’s tra
vails, and Mildred Aldrich’s A Hilltop on the Marne, which recounted the first days of the war and enjoyed sixteen printings.18 Houghton Mifflin also published manuals for army training camps, patriotic textbooks for colleges, The Patriotic Reader for middle school students, and the food-conservation-minded How to Make the Garden Pay.19 Like other publishers, Houghton Mifflin collaborated with the National Board of Historical Service, an organization created by university professors to help promote the war. Greenslet reckoned Houghton Mifflin published more than one hundred war books with sales of nearly 1.5 million.

  During this time, literary propaganda flourished in every belligerent country. Writers, journalists, and educators were mobilized to sell their country’s side of the war to its own citizens as well as to those in other countries. Efforts in the United States tracked closely with those undertaken in Great Britain, a country which had inspired many American political institutions and with whom Americans shared a common language. Wellington House, the site of the National Insurance Commission in London, served as the British government’s propaganda center at the start of the war. Its existence was not officially acknowledged until well after the war ended, whereas the Committee on Public Information in Washington was highly visible from its start. The emphasis on writers, however, was similar.

  Publishers in the United States benefited financially by cooperating with the Wilson Administration’s censorship apparatus. Concerned that postal censors were holding up export of books for sale in Europe, publishers struck a deal with the Censorship Board, vowing to “go to any lengths provided the flow of books abroad could be restored.”20 These concessions included agreeing to export only “pro-American” books and submitting publication lists and the books themselves for approval to export.

  That’s not to say the book businesses’ patriotism was insincere. George Putnam, of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, was a founder and major funder of the National Security League, a super-patriotic organization created in December 1914 to promote military preparedness. It continued its strident pro-war propaganda after April 1917.21 George’s brother, Herbert Putnam, was the Librarian of Congress. As part of his war work, Herbert Putnam provided space to the Committee on Public Information to screen books, and he informed the CPI of individuals who checked out volumes deemed suspicious.22