By Ross Eric Gibson

In 1913, Santa Cruz High School burned to the ground. In the rebuilding, they decided to double the size of the school, and include an auditorium. Watsonville architect Wm. Weeks had become popular statewide for his library and scientific schoolhouse designs. He not only designed the high school, but the Model School House exhibit at San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The fair’s president was Santa Cruzan Charles C. Moore, with Midway exhibits coordinated by the Boardwalk’s Fred Swanton.

The exposition was San Francisco’s chance to showcase its recovery from the utter devastation of the 1906 earthquake and fire. The fair’s Tower of Jewels glittered in the daylight, or by rainbow spotlights at night. And 31 nations provided hundreds of exhibits showcasing the progress of civilization in technology, art, science and culture. Yet military exhibits showed advances in warfare, things like machine guns, flamethrowers, poison gas, tanks, howitzer canons and aerial bombing. And in the Palace of Education was the Eugenics exhibit titled “Race Betterment,” promoted as a form of healthy living. But Eugenics were scientific racism, targeting “inferior races” that supposedly had poisoned the blood of the “Aryan master race.” So within this fair of great world unity, lay the corrupting seeds of world destruction.

Roots of war

In 1908 The Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, subjugating Slavs who wanted their own nation, with Russia aiding the Slavs. As Watsonville was the largest settlement of Croatians in the U.S., their personal experience with Austro-Hungarian oppression put Watsonville’s sympathies with Slavic independence. On June 28, 1914, Austro-Hungarian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. So Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia July 28, while Germany joined Austria, declaring war on Russia on Aug. 1, and on France Aug. 3. Germany sought to invade neutral Belgium, bringing Britain to Belgium’s aid by declaring war on Germany Aug. 4.

The 1916 novel by Spanish author Vicente Ibanez saw the Kaiser’s war in apocalyptic terms, in his novel “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” The Book of Revelations wrote of four plagues unleashed upon the earth as Four Horsemen. The first was a charismatic horseman on a white steed, carrying the bow of Invasion, and the crown of Conquest. Many at first believed him a righteous figure, but it became clear he was the False Messiah or Anti-Christ. Germans were already indoctrinated with Freidrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, widely read by German soldiers at the time.

Nietzche proclaimed that God is dead. Some felt he meant God had always been a fiction, but what was pronounced dead were His universal principles of love, justice and truth. Nietzsche denounced Christianity as “herd morality,” teaching the “unnatural ethic” that it’s bad for the strong to dominate the weak. Civilization had made modern man weak through courtesy and comfort. Nietzsche promoted the “Ubermensch” or Dominator Man, someone above morality who expressed his self-willed strength over the herd. Kaiser Wilhelm had encouraged his soldiers in 1900 to fight the foe (China) like “Huns under Attila.” (A. Musolff, 2017). Encouraging German soldiers to be unashamed barbarians, revived the term “Huns” for Germans during World War I.

The Ubermensch/Eugenics philosophy replaced Christian values of sympathy, tolerance and mercy, with brutality, greed and vanity. In the Kaiser’s Christianity, Jesus became a Barrabas-style warlord, taking revenge on the Jews. It was Paganism reborn. The German military found they could recruit uneducated peasants by no longer proclaiming them low-born inferiors, but as victims of unscrupulous men who kept them poor, subservient and abused.

They were told they descended from Ubermensch ancestors who dominated “degenerate races” and took what they wanted for the glory of the fatherland.

Americans were sick of European conflicts, singing “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier,” as part of the anti-war movement. Germany wanted an alliance with Mexico to keep America from foiling German plans for world domination. In January 1916, Mexico’s revolutionary leader Pancho Villa kidnapped 18 Americans from a Mexican train and slaughtered them. Then on March 9, Villa invaded America with 1,500 guerillas, to raid the small American border town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing 19 citizens and burning most of the town. These acts were not authorized by the Mexican government, and the next day General Pershing gained Mexican permission to take 6,000 troops into Mexico to search for Villa and his men.

In May, Company L of the 2nd California Infantry was formed in Watsonville with 84 men, who joined Pershing’s expedition. Woodrow Wilson narrowly won reelection Nov. 7, 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Nine days later, Company L returned to Watsonville. On Jan. 17, 1917, America intercepted a coded telegram from German diplomat Arthur Zimmermann, which secretly offered, in exchange for a German/Mexican alliance, that Germany would conquer America, and Mexico would receive Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada. Mexico did not take the bait. And yet the second horseman appeared carrying the sword of Bloodshed, riding a red Warhorse. San Francisco built its 1917 war barracks on the ruins of the 1915 fair.

Germany had been the center of the arts, sciences and technology, things claimed by the brutish populists as proof of their personal greatness. Yet they also condemned the authors of this culture because they were Jewish, Bohemian, scholarly or insisted that truth not be replaced with populist delusions. This would demonstrate the sad lesson that no civilization can be so advanced, that it can’t be quickly destroyed by its most fanatic admirers. Many Germans had moved to the U.S. to escape the aggressively militaristic German politics that no longer made them feel at home. Yet in America, anger at Germany was turned against German Americans, who did what they could to show their loyalty to America. The Santa Cruz German Methodist Church feared their German language services could be perceived by non-German speakers as plotting treason, so they switched to English-only worship.

Veterans

As we learn in Robert L. Nelson’s Santa Cruz County book “Remembering Our Own,” dying in service is not always the glorious battlefield death of legend. Some died in basic training, through tragic accidents or contagious diseases, with pneumonia the most common.

Aviation was used for the first time in combat, a technology so new and untested, Santa Cruzans Paul Herriott and Thomas Evans were killed in two nose-dive crashes during aviation training. Santa Cruzan Edward Williams Jr. was a lieutenant in the US Army Air Service, one of six officers to receive instruction in the Italian aircraft “Caprini.” Before his first solo flight, Williams witnessed his captain crash and burn in a similar aircraft. Promoted to captain, Williams became the expert in flying Caprini planes and training aviators for Uncle Sam. He relocated to the Panama Canal, then died of spinal meningitis March 28, 1919. The Italian government gave Williams the posthumous title of Chavalier, and awarded him their highest military medal, “Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy.”

The modern war technology produced unprecedented suffering, replacing cavalry charges with trench warfare, which Ibanez called open graves for the living. Standing water made them Petri dishes for disease. The violence drove off birds and critters, now only seen as a food-source. This third horseman rode a black horse and carried scales, representing Famine, Scarcity and Rising Prices. Famine overwhelmed civilian populations of all combatant nations. War turned farms into no man’s land, with bare soil and barbed wire, and what crops grew were subject to an actual Plague of Locusts. Blockades and military requisitions made famine worse. Britain came close to starvation, with only six weeks of food left at one point, long lines for scarce items, and mandatory rationing imposed December 1917. Germany assumed its Aryan superiority meant a short war, and Mary Elizabeth Cox documented severe German hunger among women and children between 1914 and 1924.

The caregivers

Then came the fourth horseman named Death, riding an emaciated pale horse of Epidemic.

Santa Cruzan Joel Gaba worked for the Canadian Army Hospital in Victoria, British Columbia, which became quarantined for measles in 1917. Gaba relocated to England where he died of pneumonia Feb. 13, 1918. A month later, the first Spanish Influenza appeared, at first mild, then more deadly. Carroll Wyckoff of Watsonville was at Camp Colt in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, under command of Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. By Sept. 25, the disease was rampant, and first Eisenhower converted the base auditorium into a hospital, but it soon exceeded its 70-bed capacity, so they expanded to the entire ground floor, where Wyckoff died of influenza Oct. 4, 1918. On Oct. 5, Seabright resident Mary Pearl Turner of the Naval Nurse Corps, helped opened an emergency hospital at Mare Island near Vallejo. It treated 1,536 men in October. When Pearl became infected, her mother came to Vallejo and cared for her daughter until Pearl’s death Oct. 21.

In the Meuse-Argonne Offensive from Sept. 26 to Nov. 11, 1918, over a million American soldiers joined allied forces, in the deadliest campaign in American military history. It yielded 26,000 America casualties (compared with 4,427 for D-Day in 1944). Among the dead were Santa Cruz County men Antone Porta Jr. native of Aptos, Christ Ciges, Clyde Clausen, Walter F. Brostrom native of Eccles, Edward Lorenson, Wm. Felix Devitt, Clyde Clausen, James A. Brown, John Mickelotti of Bonny Doon, Charles Garretty, Manuel S. Christodoulon, Joseph R. Pasha, Fay M. Wyman, Reuben M. Wilkinson, Joseph S. Rebeiro (“Big Red 1”). It was the final major battle of the war, significantly contributing to the German defeat and signing of the cease-fire. The 1918 Armistice was put into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 106 years ago today. Who thought the Four Horsemen would be summoned a second time 22 years later, for another party in hell.