Comment on this story Men Who Don’t Fit In Not all Knoxvillians who died in World War I lost their lives in the trenches or influenza infirmaries of France. Some of the earliest, and latest, to die during the war period had enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Their fates were often significantly different from those of the footsoldiers. One of Knoxville’s first official casualties of the war was Ernest Ely, one of those career guys who was deployed early. A former railroad-car repairman who had worked for the Southern yards here, he’d joined the navy way back in 1907, and liked it so much he kept re-enlisting. He was at Vera Cruz when Wilson ordered troops there during instability in Mexico. He may have been happy when the big war came that he was stationed in Manila Bay in the relatively peaceful Philippines, on the other side of the planet from the poison-gas trenches of Europe. A month after Congress declared war, Petty Officer Ely was swimming in Manila Bay when he was attacked by a shark. Ely was nonetheless listed as a casualty of World War I. More mysterious is the fate of Archie Pope. A Fountain City boy, he had worked briefly at huge Brookside Mills. The month war broke out, Pope found escape from the life of a Knoxville millworker as a fireman, third class, in the Navy aboard a ship called the U.S.S. Cyclops. He was aboard when the Cyclops sailed from Rio de Janeiro in February; after touching ground at Barbados, it steamed north toward Chesapeake Bay on March 4, and was never seen or heard from again. The huge ship vanished with its crew of 309 men. No radio signal, no debris, no record of torpedoes or mines, little evidence of bad weather. Its loss remains one of the great sea mysteries, one the chief tales in Bermuda Triangle mythology. Two of its sister ships vanished in the mid-Atlantic several years later. President Wilson remarked, “Only God and the sea know what happened to that great ship.” Another former Knoxvillian, Ensign James Johnston, had been paymaster at the Brooklyn Navy Yard until March 1918, when he was assigned to the transport ship President Lincoln. A German U-boat torpedoed and sank the President Lincoln at the end of May 1918. Though some crewmen survived the attack, Johnston did not. Arthur McClinton, who grew up in his parents’ home on Dameron Avenue in North Knoxville, was a seaman who had enlisted long before the war, apparently when he was only about 17. He was aboard the U.S.S. Wilmore when German U-boats torpedoed the ship in September 1917. He survived that, and capture by the Germans. He also survived the actual war. Just after the armistice, he was transferred to duty in New Orleans, a post few seamen would have objected to. But weeks after he arrived, he disappeared—to be found drowned in a New Orleans canal a week later. –J.N.

Remembering Knoxville’s past in a half-forgotten but tragically influential conflict

by Jack Neely

It was right about 85 years ago that some of them came home.

They looked a good deal different than they did when they left, clean-cut boys marching down Gay Street toward the train station, singing songs. And it wasn’t just that they were two years older when they got off the train at the same station. Some of them couldn’t walk anymore. Some of them couldn’t see. And there were fewer of them, too. Of those who were from Knoxville alone, there were about 160 fewer of them. They were the soldiers of World War I.

Of course, they didn’t call it World War I in 1919. They called it the Great War. Or, the War To End All Wars. It was hard to imagine there could be another one. Or that diplomatic sloppiness in the aftermath of war would lose the victories they’d earned and set the stage for many more wars, even into the 21st century.

They felt they had done their job. They had fought the war that would end war. The idealists among them believed themselves to be the last combat veterans in American history.

Despite its horrible significance, World War I has not lingered in the American imagination as other wars have. More than four million Americans served in World War I; more than 116,000 young Americans died in the effort. More Americans died in World War I than in all wars since 1945, combined.

But each century is allowed only one focal, legendary war, and World War I didn’t make the cut. Another, inevitable, second war eclipsed it. If we use the phrases postwar or prewar in 2004, it’s understood we’re talking about only one conflict, the Second World War. The library’s file of newspaper clippings about World War I is a small fraction as thick as that of World War II.

Nationally, thousands of books have been published about World War II—and the Civil War: together, they’re sometimes described as the two chief subjects of non-fiction in American publishing. There aren’t nearly as many books about World War I. Americans haven’t made many movies about World War I, either. One current video guide indicates that Hollywood has made about nine times more movies about World War II than World War I.

Its lack of emphasis is surprising because World War I shaped much of the world as we know it today, from Bosnia to Iraq. Many of today’s conflicts are issues left unresolved at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. We are still trying to undo the mistakes and omissions of diplomats and politicians in the postwar years.

Few kids in the last 60 years have ever played World War I. It offered little opportunity for individual adventure. The war’s images weren’t as likely to inspire. The soldiers wore high starched collars and round helmets that looked something like metal bonnets; they were called Doughboys. They spent their time not storming beaches or parachuting behind enemy lines, but sitting in trenches, dying of pneumonia and the flu.

No one has ever called it “The Good War.” The people who fought World War I have never been hailed as “The Greatest Generation.”

The war had started back in the summer of ‘14, of course, when a Serb nationalist assassinated the archduke of Austria. The dominoes started falling on both sides, as allies lined up against each other. By 1916, it was already the deadliest war in human history. More than one million French soldiers would die—a death toll greater than that of all American soldiers in all wars in the 20th century.

Americans first regarded it as one of those stubborn, creaky old European conflicts that flared up in the Old World every now and then like the shingles, in which old men with peculiar hats and baroque motives would order slavish troops onto the field to whale away at each other for the old routine of glory and slaughter.

America was grateful to stay clear of it. We’d not been in a war of any sort since the ‘90s, the short and puzzling Spanish-American War—unless you count Wilson’s persistent attempts to intervene in revolution-torn Mexico. At Vera Cruz, when Marines expected to be greeted as liberators, but were shot at as invaders; at the border, when General Pershing chased one elusive terrorist—Pancho Villa, a popular hero who had killed innocent Americans.

America had not been in a major war, the sort where nearly everybody knew someone involved, the sort that requires whole new graveyards, in half a century. By 1914, the people who remembered the horrors of the Civil War were fading away.

When Wilson ran for re-election on a He Kept Us Out of War platform, Knoxville supported it. One prominent member of Wilson’s cabinet was a former Knoxvillian: Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, a UT grad who had lived here during his youth and young adulthood. Almost 30 years earlier he had pioneered electric streetcar lines in Knoxville. Since he married Eleanor Wilson, he was also the president’s son-in-law. McAdoo attempted to maintain America’s official “neutrality” though devising loans and other material help that might have assured an Allied victory without U.S. military help. If Russia had stayed intact, it might have worked.

Though Britain and its allies were making headway on some of the farther fronts—Britain captured Baghdad from the German-allied Ottoman Turks in March—progress in Europe itself was slow. Erstwhile ally Russia was in the throes of revolution, men at the front were still dying by the thousands, and no resolution was in sight.

A few weeks after Wilson’s election, Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare on Britain, threatening American shipping, inflaming the memory of American dead on the Lusitania a couple of years earlier. Then the Zimmerman telegraph surfaced, revealing Germany’s secret plot to involve Mexico against the United States by promising to return territory lost to the U.S. 70 years earlier, from California to Texas.

In early April 1917, barely a month after his inauguration, Wilson declared war on Germany. Former Knoxvillian McAdoo became the chief architect of the war effort from the financial side, as founder of the Inter-Allied Purchasing Commission and Chairman of the War Finance Corp., and federal director of the nation’s railways. By some accounts, he was more instrumental in the war effort than any civilian in the nation.

America had been content with a peacetime standing army of 190,000. In a year, that army had multiplied in size by a factor of almost 20, to three and a half million. More than 4,000 of them were from Knox County. Most of those, about 2,700 in all, were drafted.

Peacetime Knoxville was big on itself in early 1917, preparing for the biggest annexations in the city’s history: South Knoxville, Lincoln Park, Lonsdale, Park City: before 1917, they’d all been suburbs. Also in the land grab was mostly rural Looney’s Bend, not yet known as Sequoyah Hills. The city nearly doubled in size, from a compact urban population of about 40,000 to a more dispersed sub-urbanity advertised to be about 85,000. The real population was probably less than that, but the annexation had created what was, and remains, the biggest one-year growth spurt in the city’s history. The place was booming: it was still known to some as The Marble City, due to its role as marble supplier to the nation. Other sorts of factories, especially textile mills, were going up all over. Both electric streetcars and newer automobiles, then owned mostly by the affluent, made it easier than ever to get around. Knoxville had 53 miles of streetcar track in 1917, much of it originally laid by Mr. McAdoo’s company; more mileage in rail than it had in paved roads.

More highways were getting paved, though, and Knoxville appeared to be on the way to being part of the Dixie Highway, a major tourist route from the upper Midwest to Florida.

It was a substantial city with two daily papers, two train stations, a huge market house, dozens of factories, and a growing university. UT was tearing down the antebellum main building long known as Old College, and planning a new one in its place, though no one was yet anticipating it would be named for President Brown Ayres. Down the hill on Cumberland Avenue, on the gravelly, irregular gridiron known as Wait Field, the Tennessee Vols practiced. They were strictly a regional collegiate football phenomenon. In 1917 Knoxville, baseball was still much more popular. That year, the city received a lovely gift, a new and permanent park for the playing of baseball, from Col. Caswell, the Civil War veteran who had been one of the first ball players in town. Farther out, near Chilhowee Park, was Cal Johnson’s Racetrack; betting on the horses was still popular, even legal, in Knoxville.

Knoxville was debating solutions to the dangerously steep roller-coaster valley known as the “Death Dip” on Gay Street near the Southern rail yards; the chief proposal on the table was a new, flat concrete viaduct.

In early 1917, the city opened a free public library in a handsome new marble building on Commerce. It’s a sign of those times that at the same time of Lawson McGhee Library’s opening, plans were underway for a separate library for “negroes.”

Radio hardly existed except as a hobbyist’s toy, but the movie theaters and vaudeville houses—the Bijou, Staub’s, plus nearly a dozen silent-movie houses of various sizes, kept people entertained. Booze was illegal, and had been for a decade, but was easy to find.

It wasn’t hard to find recruits, either, in the Home of the Volunteers. Most of those who signed on were too young to remember even the Spanish-American War. More than a thousand signed up without waiting for the draft. They needed a good deal of training. Though things seemed desperate “over there,” most Knoxvillians who signed up in 1917 didn’t see combat for a year or more.

They marched down Gay Street to the Southern terminal; some photos show soldiers marching down the street’s steep “Death Dip.”

Most went first to Camp Sevier. Though named for longtime Knox Countian John Sevier, the army training camp was located in South Carolina. They were there for a few months on average, sometimes shifting to another camp or two, before boarding a troop ship for France.

Knoxvillians were strewn to the winds of the army and navy’s demand for them. By 1918, Knoxvillians in uniform were scattered around the world.

At home, the effects on local society were profound. Prices went up, on food and other basic commodities. Gasoline was rationed. Most Knoxvillians didn’t have cars in 1918, but enough of them did to feel the pinch of “Gasless Sunday,” the day of the week on which unnecessary driving was prohibited, one of several local resolutions against “the useless consumption of gasoline.”

Women led war-bond drives, and volunteers met in the old James Park House downtown to make bandages for the soldiers.

Patriotic optimism was overt; negative newspaper stories about the war effort were rare. But in some cases the war’s effects were disheartening. For more than half a century, Knoxville had been proud of its German population. Over the years, several German-born men were elected to City Council. A downtown Lutheran church conducted services in German. In the 1890s, the city had elected a German mayor, Peter Kern, of Heidelberg. The German society, Turn Verein, hosted popular dances and festivals.

But now the Germans were no longer the Germans; in newspaper headlines and in common conversation, they were the Huns. During the war, some East Tennesseans of German heritage changed their names to make them sound English. Knoxville’s German community has rarely gotten together to publicly celebrate itself since.

Prince Street was the original name for one of Knoxville’s chief commercial streets, the important avenue that ran from the city’s busiest loading dock, the Prince Street Wharf, past the courthouse and the main post office to Market Square. During World War I, its name seemed to Knoxvillians too imperial, perhaps too German. We were, after all, fighting for democracy. The Huns had princes; we didn’t. The name was changed to Market Street.

Our closest approximation to a military celebrity in 1917 was Lawrence Davis Tyson. A former colonel in the army who’d fought against Geronimo’s Apaches out west, he’d also commanded troops in the Spanish-American War, and served as military governor of Puerto Rico. He married into an old Knoxville family, the McGhees, and had become better known here as a successful mill owner for almost 20 years. At age 56, he signed up again, this time as a brigadier-general, leader of the 59th Brigade of the 30th “Old Hickory” Division. In his police-style military cap, the mustachioed Gen. Tyson bore a remarkable resemblance to his superior, the U.S. commander John “Black Jack” Pershing.

Tyson’s son, McGhee, followed his father into the service; the handsome young bachelor golfer, best known on the links of Cherokee Country Club, had something of a reputation as a playboy. He joined the navy’s flying program.

Those who did enlist seemed to be all right, at first. For months, we didn’t hear much about local casualties. For a full year, in fact, no one from Knoxville died in combat. It’s not surprising that the first who did were career military men who didn’t have to deal with the training curve.

Lillard Earle Ailor had briefly worked for the Fulton Co. before enlisting in the regular army back in 1913. Assigned to an artillery unit, he was stationed for a time in the occupied Philippines, then went to Mexico to help Pershing during the Pancho Villa era. In December 1917, he shipped to France. On April 8, 1918, he was there, at Verdun, the French town already famous for the slaughter that had happened there two years earlier, when two-thirds of a million people died. Ailor was there with the 15th Field Artillery at the most haunted spot in the world when he fell and became the first Knoxvillian to die in actual combat.

It was on April 17 that the famous 30th Division, loaded with Tennesseans, including Gen. Tyson, relieved a British division in France and saw combat. In the four months that followed, only 14 more Knoxvillians were killed in the slow march to the east, at Soissons, on the Ypres, on the Marne, at Belleau Wood and Chateau Thierry.

On May 24, 1918, an optimistic crowd of 280 enlistees for the 2nd Corps Artillery posed in front of the old post office at Clinch and Union. One carries a cocky slogan painted in large white letters on his suitcase: “SURE! WATCH US.”

By late summer, with predictions of an Allied victory and optimistic newsreels showing on Gay Street, Knoxville mothers looked forward to the day their sons would return on the train.

It was just the beginning of the worst. The Allies, Americans now thick among them, slammed into what they called the Hindenburg Line. Germans, harking to Wagnerian mythology, called it the Siegfried Line: a series of formidable bulwarks and obstacles that the Germans considered impregnable. Until then, the Germans had been fighting for conquest; now they were fighting for survival. It was then that the invading Americans began to die in the largest numbers.

The ruined Argonne Forest was one of the deadliest destinations for American soldiers; one in 10 who were involved in that battle died, including more than a dozen local boys.

One leader of the U.S. assault against the German wall of defense was Col. James A. Gleason. In civilian life, he worked in real estate and insurance from his office on Market Street, but he had recently served with Pershing in the Mexican border campaigns pursuing the elusive terrorist Pancho Villa. Knoxville businessman Cary Spence, president of Spence Trunk & Leather and also one of the early developers of Island Home, led in the 117th Infantry.

Fresh troops moved closer to the front in motorized troop carriers, many of them driven by some French colonials from Asia. It was the first glimpse most American soldiers had of Vietnamese. Their boldly rapid driving reportedly alarmed some doughboys.

Approaching the Hindenburg Line, the bullets, shells, and grenades were thicker than falling leaves. Some days were especially bad: on Sept. 29, 13 Knox County boys died at the Somme. On Oct. 6, 15 died.

On a single day, Oct. 8, 1918, about 20 Knox Countians died in combat. In local fatalities, it was the war’s worst day. As it happened, it was the very same day that a farmboy from Fentress County became the war’s one immortal hero: With one rifle, Cpl. Alvin York of Fentress County killed or captured more than 150 German soldiers. York, a fundamentalist Christian, had been a conscientious objector to the war, on Biblical grounds—back in the days when fundamentalists were often pacifists.

And on that day (though some sources say it was the 6th), Knoxville’s own Sgt. Ernest Karnes and a private named John Ward, also from East Tennessee, overwhelmed a machine-gun nest of more than 20 Germans.

There was a lot of dying on both sides. In the whole six-week Meuse-Argonne offensive, more than 26,000 Americans died—a figure the War Department discreetly kept to itself for eight years afterward. About 70 Knoxvillians died in less than three weeks.

At home, Knoxvillians were dying, too, as if in sympathy. Precisely at the moment that casualties to the men hurling themselves at the Hindenburg line were peaking, an impertinent microbe arrived in town. It had caused a worldwide epidemic, exacerbated by the massive wartime movements of human beings in close quarters. The Spanish flu killed an estimated 20 million globally. At the beginning of October, only a handful, maybe 60 Knoxvillians, had come down with the flu. By Oct. 9, the city had 850 cases of it, with hundreds more every day. Dr. W.R. Cochrane, the secretary of the Knoxville Board of Health, levied draconian measures. “No one need think that they can hold any public meetings in Knoxville,” declared Dr. Cochrane, “because any gatherings for a non-essential purpose will not be tolerated.” At Chilhowee Park, the fair closed early. Movie houses were shut down. UT was quarantined; students weren’t allowed to leave the Hill; their friends weren’t allowed to visit. By the end of the month, about 10,000 Knoxvillians, nearly 15 percent of the population, had come down with the flu; nearly 150 had died of it. The deaths from the flu in Knoxville that month approximated the city’s loss of soldiers in the war. The epidemic appeared to end promptly with the end of the war.

In the end, more than 160 Knoxvillians died in World War I, about four percent of the total who had enlisted. Among the Knoxvillians who died in the war were several with German surnames: Eckel; Kline; Koontz; Overholser; Yeager. That fatality rate was, for whatever reason, higher than that of American soldiers as a whole, which was about 2.5 percent.

Of those who died in combat, about two-thirds died in the war’s last six weeks. One Knoxvillian died in combat on the morning of the Armistice.

In his prewar photograph, Oscar Rider wears a bow tie and, caught in shadow as if surprised, looks like the young Pablo Picasso. He waited until late April 1918 to enlist. He had lived in Knoxville for several years before, and seems to have been in demand as a specialized industrial laborer, first as a blacksmith, then as a skilled machinist for the burgeoning Ty-Sa-Man company. On Nov. 11, 1918, word had already gotten around that the German emperor was abdicating and that Armistice was at hand. Rider was stationed in the Argonne Forest, where it seemed as if the worst was over. At about 10 that morning, an hour before the papers were signed, Rider was hit and killed.

The Armistice came, as a generation remembered, at “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”: Nov. 11, 1918, 11 a.m. Local time, that was 5 a.m. Though there were already enough people on Gay Street to send up a simultaneous cheer, as local newspapers received word by telegraph, there were a good many more six hours later, when the 11th hour reached Knoxville’s time zone. A downtown crowd ticked down that time by watching the old Hope Clock, its cast-iron pedestal planted in a Gay Street sidewalk. The Hope Clock was already older than many of the soldiers who fought and died in the war; later known as the Kimball’s clock, it has survived the closing of a couple of jewelry stores and a move to a different location; it still keeps good time on Gay Street in 2004.

It was a wild day. Most businesses were closed, and even the stoic farmers on Market Square shut down early. Max Finkelstein put up a sign on the front door of his clothing store: “Closed For Joy.” The newspapers published Extras, hawked in the crowded streets, where horns, gunfire, cowbells, and firecrackers made things noisier than some battles, and multiple effigies of Kaiser Bill and Crown Prince What’s-His-Name sustained all manner of insults. Reporters found it remarkable that even middle-aged women were openly cussing, shouting “Damn the Kaiser!” right on streetcorners. All over town, Wilhelm was wishfully dragged, burned, beheaded. Some 10,000 gathered at Wait Field to burn phony kaisers. The only live European known to be in Knoxville that day was one unaccountably errant French officer wearing the blue uniform of the 171st French Regiment. Local women mobbed him with kisses, as if he were liberating Knoxville itself.

Ironically, on the original day that would later be better known as Veterans Day, the French captain was one of very few veterans in Knoxville.

The terror of the deadly flu, which was killing Knoxvillians by the score just two weeks earlier, was apparently past. Moonshine, usually sold under the table on Market Square, flowed freely.

“Dignity was one of the lost arts in Knoxville Monday,” assessed the Journal. “Age joined with youth, aristocrat joined with plebe, the precise and nice threw all their starch to the winds and did their bit to make the most rollicky day in the city’s history.”

You get the impression that the celebrations might not have been so ecstatic if mothers, fathers, chums, and girlfriends knew what they would learn over the next few weeks. Some of the war’s longest casualty lists hadn’t been published yet.

In Washington, the former Knoxvillian Secretary of the Treasury, perhaps Wilson’s hardest-working cabinet member, resigned shortly after the Armistice. Said to be exhausted, William Gibbs McAdoo moved to California.

A few months later, a French officer, Captain Henri Negre, visited the Strand Theater on Gay Street, to introduce a film called Remember. “My mission to you is to urge you to remember, in order that those who died have not died in vain.”

Wave after wave of returning soldiers were greeted with gala receptions. For almost a century, it had been the custom to have military parades down Gay Street. But on March 29, the first fighting group to return to Tennessee, the 114th Artillery, left the train station and marched north, to a quiet suburban area; they broke ranks at the tree-shaded residential corner of 5th and Randolph, a homelike setting where they met with family and friends. Only after that did they march down Gay Street.

Leading one column of returning soldiers that day, alongside Col. Gleason, was Col. Luke Lea, a flamboyant Nashville businessman-politician. In January, he had earned international attention for what Pershing described as an “amazingly indiscreet” attempt to kidnap ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II from exile in Holland. Speaking German, he and six other American soldiers bluffed their way into Wilhelm’s library before being rebuffed. (Lea, who would later own the Knoxville Journal, would later still get in serious trouble with authorities over suspicious banking practices; Lea eventually did time in a North Carolina jail.)

Returning soldiers were feted with gigantic holiday feasts; soldiers were seated at a table laid out on Walnut Street from Main to Church, followed by a huge dance on Cumberland Avenue; officers attended a parallel dance at Cherokee Country Club. “No less heroes than the other returning troops from overseas, the returning negroes were given a cordial reception.” It may have seemed a charitable thing to say of a race whose accomplishments were rarely regarded as equivalent to whites in 1919. And it probably didn’t strike anyone as odd that there wasn’t a dance or a feast waiting for them. They were met at the station with fresh fruits, candies, and cigarettes.

On Memorial Day, 1919, some folks in New York and Washington declared that this day, originally founded to honor the Union dead of the Civil War, should honor the dead of three wars: the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and this just-concluded Great War. In graveyards all over France and at Arlington in Virginia, small American flags were planted on the graves of modern soldiers. It was a new interpretation of a ritual that had been the brainchild of one Union widow in Knoxville more than half a century earlier.

Knoxville, however, honored the day strictly as the city always had, as a Union memorial day. Flowers were strewn from the Gay Street Bridge for Union sailors lost at sea during the Civil War alone; the National Cemetery was crowded with elderly Union veterans and widows as dignitaries solemnly read the Gettysburg Address. If there was any mention of scores of Knoxvillians who had died the previous year, it didn’t make the papers. Maybe their deaths were too fresh to require deliberate remembering.

However, those who wished to remember the war came up with a swell keepsake: a 448-page book called Knox County In the World War. Published in Knoxville in 1919 under the auspices of a committee headed by Tyson, Gleason, and Spence, it’s a remarkable document, including local street scenes, combat scenes, photos and brief stories of hundreds of servicemen. Given special attention and prominence, like the senior class in a high-school annual, were the 162 Knox Countians who didn’t come home in 1919.

Bessie Shugart, organist at Second Presbyterian, wrote a song for them, expressing the confidence, and perhaps naiveté, of a victorious nation:

Now once again the world is safe
Autocracy has lost
Democracy will reign fore’er
Because her rule is just.

An ungrammatical but intuitive headline of an otherwise mundane story in the March 30 issue of the Journal sounded different: German Spirits Broken; Is Now Economic And Moral Peril To Civilized World.

Today, the unquestionably momentous Second World War is often regarded as a consequence of the less-heralded First World War. And though the long and costly Cold War is sometimes regarded a postwar flub of WW2, it really started during WW1; wartime instability bred the first Communist state, and the first conflicts with the free world.

The Serb nationalist question that started World War I was unsolved, practically unaddressed, at Versailles. It would provoke further wars. Arab nationalism, once a dream of idealistic British leaders like T.E. Lawrence, was utterly botched as France and Britain tried to outmaneuver each other at diplomacy. One of several half-baked solutions formulated at Versailles was an artificial division of one eastern region of the defeated Ottoman Empire, a new, artificial nation called Iraq. The nation, partitioned carelessly as a British protectorate without regard to its ethnic and religious divisions, might have seemed doomed to be trouble forever.

President Woodrow Wilson was able to convince European leaders of the importance of his famous 14 points. The last of them, the key one, was the organization of a first-time-ever global League of Nations which would solve disputes before they became wars. He was not as successful convincing the U.S. Congress of its importance. Among the Senate opponents who doomed the League of Nations with a No vote in 1920 were both Tennessee Democratic senators, Kenneth McKellar and Knoxville’s own John K. Shields, who waffled before tilting decidedly against the permanent international organization. Without U.S. involvement, the League of Nations floundered, and Wilson’s other points about promoting democracy and liberty in the world had little hope for realization.

Ironically, 25 years later it was another politician from the Tennessee hills, Cordell Hull, who led the establishment of another international council, the United Nations.

One of the biggest and most enduring consequences of World War I in this region, however, may have been a single idea. The federal government built one dam on the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Ala., to power a wartime munitions project. Subsequent attempts to convert Wilson Dam and its government installations to peacetime use—among them an ambitious plan by Henry Ford, and another by U.S. Sen. George Norris—seeded the later development of an unusual organization called the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Not all of the war’s effects on the Knoxville area were benevolent. Months after the Armistice, there remained a strong anti-occupation insurgency in Germany, and 1919 bred rumors of German saboteurs making their way to America. The year 1919 also brought the first Red Scare, an anxiety about Communist infiltration in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. Anarchism, also connected to Europeans, was still a phobia, as well. What had been anti-German sentiment metastasized into all-around anti-immigrant sentiment.

A generation or two earlier, Knoxville’s leadership had sometimes been dominated by European immigrants and their children. In the late 19th century, City Council meetings were sometimes conducted in French and German accents. By 1922, though, the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce was boasting of the city’s low percentage of immigrants. “We are free of the undesirable foreign element,” boasted the Chamber. “Knoxville has the purest native-born population in America. Only 1.3 percent are foreign born.” They didn’t cite a source for that figure, and scanning City Directories may give a student cause to question it. But the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce kept quoting that boast, and that precise percentage, for the next 40 years. It apparently came in handy during the nation’s second Red Scare.

Knoxville’s postwar months also brought unexpected anti-black sentiment. For half a century, Knoxville had regarded itself a model city with regard to race relations.

The summer of 1919 would become known as Red Summer due to a rash of race riots, some of them provoked by the image of black veterans returning from war. Though the military was strictly segregated, and returning black troops were not feted nearly as extravagantly as returning whites, some were offended to see them wearing the same uniforms as whites, and to see them being hailed as heroes. Also, the Red Scare manifested itself in the South chiefly through rumors that the Bolsheviks were stirring up blacks into revolution.

Knoxville’s own crisis came late that summer, when a frustrated lynch mob and a confused detachment of guardsmen laid siege to a largely black downtown neighborhood. Several were killed, some of them by machine-gun fire with a new weapon developed for combat in Europe. The military enforcement of a post-riot curfew was disproportionately harsh on the black community.

Black historians cite World War I as the end of the years of prosperity and trust between blacks and whites in Knoxville. There followed a black exodus. The city had once been almost one-third black, but the minority percentage of the city’s population slipped below 20 percent.

Knoxville’s most conspicuous military leader had also suffered a horrific personal loss in the war’s final days. His son McGhee Tyson, recently married, was flying in the North Sea with some fellow Navy men scouting for mines when their plane went down. Though initial reports suggested it had been shot down, it was later called an accident. Searchers found most of the plane’s crewmen, dead and alive, but McGhee Tyson was missing. For days afterward, they searched the shoreline of Scotland for the body of the general’s son. Gen. Tyson himself left the front to search in a rowboat, and the story goes that it was he who found what was left of McGhee Tyson floating near the shore.

At the bidding of McGhee’s mother, Betty Tyson, the wealthy family donated a piece of Third Creek bottomland—part of which had been used as the city’s first golf course some 25 years earlier—as a city park. There was, however, a condition. When the city established an airfield, it would have to be named into perpetuity for the airman who was lost in the North Sea. Knoxville’s first public airport was established within city limits on Sutherland Avenue in 1927 within walking distance of Tyson Park. It was named McGhee Tyson, a name that would necessarily stick when the city established a new and much-larger airport in Blount County in 1935.

The elder Tyson presided over one postwar ceremony after another before he had an opportunity to run against U.S. Sen. John Shields, well known for his effective opposition to Wilson’s League of Nations proposal. Gen. Tyson was elected in 1924. He co-authored the Tyson-Fitzgerald Act, which guaranteed payment to disabled officers; it carried despite President Coolidge’s veto. He died in office in 1929 and was buried beside his son, beneath a tall marble obelisk at Old Gray.

In the weeks after Armistice, there was talk of constructing a war memorial auditorium in Knoxville. A committee was formed, plans were proposed. Though a classically impressive one was built in Nashville near the Capitol, it never coalesced here.

The doughboy statue in front of old Knoxville High on Fifth Avenue was erected to the memory of former KHS students who had died in Europe, a large portion of Knoxville’s war dead. It has been subject to manifold indignities over the years. No generation was ever more cynical about World War I than the generation of people who were young in the 1920s. In 1926, a cocky young former KHS student named James Agee, a few years too young to have worried about the draft, ridiculed the doughboy statue in one of his first stories, alleging it was a product of the “Doughboy Mfg. Co.” Agee would later go on to write the screenplay for one of the best-known World War I movies, The African Queen. In 1948, vandals damaged the doughboy statue with paint. In 1966, a couple of years before antiwar sentiment had coalesced at UT, someone pulled it all the way down, probably with a chain and a heavy truck.

Ironically, in years when few remember the war dead the monument commemorates, it seems to have been treated with greater reverence.

And there’s the J.E. “Buck” Karnes bridge. (His friends may well have called him “Buck,” but most contemporary references to Mr. Karnes, including when we first heard of his exploits in the Great War, call him “Ernest.”) Karnes, Knoxville’s own Sergeant York, came home to live modestly; the city’s only Congressional Medal of Honor winner worked as a painter for another contracting firm in the 1920s. In 1929, he got the second gun-carrying job of his career when he got work as a Knoxville policeman. The state built this bridge here around 1935, just in time to build a road to lead to the new McGhee Tyson Airport; it was named for Karnes by act of the state Legislature. At the time, Karnes was the only active Knoxville cop who had a massive steel bridge named for him. By 1940, Karnes had retired, suffering a disability; he died in Sacramento in 1966. The bridge was completely rebuilt without its famous narrow superstructure in 1990, but kept Karnes’ name.

Armistice may have been a fiction. In several ways, we’re still fighting the Great War. Several wars of the 20th and early 21st centuries could be considered mopping up its aftermath.

When we commenced researching this story, we were hoping to get to chat with one of the more than 4,000 soldiers from Knoxville who fought in the Great War. A representative of one of the city’s veterans’ groups told us last month she was pretty sure there were several still around. They would have to be somewhere past the age of 100 years old, of course, but we hear more and more about people that age who are still lively and conversant.

According to the local office of Veterans Affairs, the last surviving Knoxville veterans of World War I died recently. Local Veterans Affairs administrator Chuck Jones says one was named Scott Weaver, a private involved in the combat at Verdun, Chateau Thierry; he died in the summer of 2001. Another, Orlando Morley, who was interviewed for local television news programs in his later years, had moved away for medical care before he also died.

There are believed to be only a few remaining survivors nationally.

May 27, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 22 © 2004 Metro Pulse