100 Years Since The Great War
Revisiting The Impact: Coloradans Must Have Marveled At Speed From Peace To War
By Stephen J. Leonard, Special to the GPHN
In early April 1917, the United States entered World War I, a conflict that had ravaged many parts of the world since the summer of 1914.
The Great War, as it was called before it was eclipsed by World War II, pitted Germany and Austria and their partners against France and Great Britain and their allies. President Woodrow Wilson told the American people that by supporting the British and the French the U.S. would fight a war to end war and secure a victory that would make the world safe for democracy.
A hundred years later, as we celebrate Independence Day, let’s revisit three bygone Julys to catch a glimpse of the Great War’s impact on Colorado.
July 4, 1917 — Picnickers at Denver’s Washington Park enjoyed a subdued Fourth without fireworks and with patriotic songs. Part of the holiday crowd at City Park listened to a band concert. At Berkeley Lake in North Denver swimmers competed in a 440-yard race. Auto daredevils sped from Denver to Laramie, Wyoming, with the winner completing the dash in three hours, nine minutes and thirty seconds.
Reflecting on their first few months in the war, Coloradans must have marveled at the speed at which they had raced from peace to war. In November 1916, many of them had voted to re-elect President Wilson, who, as part of his “America First” policy, pledged to keep the nation out of war.
During 1917 and 1918 anti-German phobia swept Colorado, prompting smart Germans to alter their family and business names. Denver’s German American Bank and Trust Company became the American Bank and Trust Company and the Kaiserhof Hotel was rebaptized as the Kenmark. Patriots, some of them school children, made bonfires of German books in Alamosa, Boulder, Fairplay, Fort Morgan, and Salida.
Denver’s East High School stopped teaching German and the University of Denver fired an allegedly pro-German professor.
Despite the patriotic fervor, Uncle Sam realized that he could not count on volunteers; he needed to draft millions of men into his army. The vast majority of Colorado men over 20 and under 32 dutifully registered for the draft on June 5, 1917. In July and August inductees assembled at Overland Park in Denver, Fort Logan south of Denver, the State Fair Grounds in Pueblo and other places in Colorado where they waited to be sent to training camps such as Camp Funston in Kansas, Camp Kearney in California, and Camp Mills in New York.
On July 10, 1917, Colorado Gov. Julius Gunther called a special session of the General Assembly, which convened in Denver on July 18. It appropriated funds to protect the state, including a $10 bonus to members of the Colorado National Guard. That, no doubt, pleased militiamen, some of whom were guarding reservoirs from potential German saboteurs. The state also established women and men’s Councils of Defense to promote Homefront war work.
July 4, 1918—Twenty thousand people gathered in City Park. Denver’s new mayor, William F. R. Mills, who had succeeded Robert W. Speer after Speer’s May 14, 1918 death, read the Declaration of Independence and the Denver Municipal Band played France’s Marseilles, Great Britain’s Rule Britannia, and The Star Spangled Banner. By then thousands of Coloradans were among the hundreds of thousands of Americans who were either in France or on their way to “over there.”
Wallace Simpson, an African American serving as a cabin steward, may have been the first Colorado serviceman to die in the conflict when the U.S.S. Jacob Jones, a destroyer, was torpedoed by a German U-Boat on Dec. 6, 1917. Simpson was an outlier. Most American troops did not arrive in Europe until the late spring and summer of 1918 and they suffered most of their casualties on the Western Front in France between early June and Nov. 11, 1918, when the armistice put an end to the shooting. Then most of them waited for months until they could be transported back to the U.S. They left many of their dead behind in French, Belgian, and British cemeteries. Later some bodies were exhumed and shipped home.
Homefront sacrifices hardly matched those made by soldiers and sailors. Still, Coloradans did much. Thousands grew gardens to prevent food shortages. Women knitted socks for soldiers, provided meals and snacks for troops passing through the state, and did some of the work normally done by drafted men.
Conscientious housewives heeded President Wilson’s call to conserve food by limiting their use of sugar, forgoing meat on Tuesday, and wheat on Wednesday. Socialites refashioned old gowns into new ones to save fabric. Men mined molybdenum at Bartlett Mountain north of Leadville and tungsten near Nederland, west of Boulder—elements used to make high-grade steel for arms. Across the state residents responded to Liberty Loan campaigns by lending Uncle Sam more than $150 million to help finance the war.
July 4, 1919 — Between 35,000 and 40,000 Denverites (approximately 15 percent of the city’s population) thronged City Park where some of them watched soldiers from Fort Logan play push ball. A few days later, troops from the 115th Engineers, a unit with many Colorado members, arrived in Denver where they got a royal welcome. The Rocky Mountain News proclaimed their heroic deeds including building a bridge across the Meuse River despite intense German bombardment. Happily, the 115th suffered no fatalities.
Others were not as fortunate. Of around 43,000 Colorado military personnel, more than 1,000 died during the war — more from disease and accident than from German shells, bullets, and gas. Two Army nurses, Stella Raithel and Clara Orgren, sacrificed their lives. Two of the dead, Lt. Marcellus Chiles and Captain John Hunter Wickersham, were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their valor.
The two other Colorado Medal of Honor winners—Jesse N. Funk and Frank Upton—survived the conflict as did Captain Jerry Vasconcells, Colorado’s only flying ace, famed for downing six German aircraft. Besides mourning the war dead, Coloradans in 1919 also grieved for the more than 7,700 people killed in the state by Spanish influenza mainly between September, 1918, and early 1919.
Colorado benefitted from rising commodity prices between 1914 and 1918 and it plucked other economic plums during the war. By taking over and subsidizing the Denver and Salt Lake and the Denver and Rio Grande railroads, the Federal Government kept those lines alive, thereby preserving rail service to much of western Colorado.
In 1917, Denver had lobbied for an army base, but got nothing. In 1918, the federal government agreed to fund an army hospital in Aurora. Originally named U.S. Army Hospital Number 21, it was made a permanent facility and renamed Fitzsimons in 1920. First a haven for tuberculosis and poison gas victims, it later became a multi-purpose hospital and a contributor to the area’s economy until it closed in the 1990s.
The negative side of the ledger included fatalities and casualties, severe inflation which led to labor strikes, and the trashing of civil liberties. Xenophobia fostered by the war sparked a witch-hunt aimed at Communists in 1919 and fueled the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s. And, as the events of the ensuing century proved, the Great War, in which more than 100,000 Americans died, neither made the world safe for democracy, nor ended war.
Park Hill resident Stephen J. Leonard, who has written extensively on Colorado history, is a professor of history at Metropolitan State University of Denver. His most recent book, co-authored with Thomas J. Noel, is A Short History of Denver (2016).