History in the Raw: Dispatches From Stars and Stripes, c. 1918

Insight on the News, Sept 30, 2003 by John Elvin

Byline: John Elvin, INSIGHT

History in the Raw: Dispatches From Stars and Stripes, c. 1918

Reading between the lines of a newspaper account from Sept. 20, 1918, it appears that a certain Private Ross may have had a secret laugh on the U.S. Army.

According to the enthusiastic correspondent's account, Private Ross was a Ute Indian from Arizona dubbed "Chief" by his doughboy companions on the front in France during World War I. "Chief Ross is not what you would call a model soldier. He has been known to salute an officer only once, and that was when he had gone to his captain for the third time to request a pass. He says 'Ugh' for 'Yes sir' and shakes his head for 'No sir,'" according to the account.

It also was reported that Chief Ross performed extraordinary services as a battalion scout that might have made his behavior somewhat tolerable, "whether it be a machine-gun nest that needs silencing or only a sniper, he would return to his own lines without even so much as making a report to his unit commander."

Chief Ross also had a habit that may explain why he was left to fight the war his own way: He slept with a liberated Lugar pistol and, when his ammunition ran low, would visit German trenches to replenish his supply.

The tale of Chief Ross is but one small feature in the complete 71-week run of Stars and Stripes for World War I, posted on the Internet by the Serial and Government Publications Division of the Library of Congress. Stars and Stripes, the soldiers' newspaper, was first published in 1918 on orders from Gen. John J. Pershing to provide a newspaper for servicemen written by servicemen. An eight-page weekly with a mission to be a "morale booster," the newspaper contained news from the front and from home, plus sports reports, poetry and cartoons.

After a year of publishing, the newspaper had a circulation of more than a half-million copies. Its success owed much to a rapid delivery system involving rail, truck, auto and motorcycle, reaching out to U.S. troops scattered at unit level among British, French and Italian forces. Among journalists who worked on the project were legends such as Alexander Woolcott, Harold Ross and Grantland Rice. The Stars and Stripes collection can be found on the Internet at the following address: http://memory.loc.gov./ ammem/sgphtml/sashtml/ sashome.html.

Readers Want Assateague 'Forever Wild'

The mail continues to come in regarding the controversy over possible development of Assateague Island, a barrier island located on the Atlantic Ocean, partly in Maryland and partly in Virginia. The item that sparked a flood of comment concerned crusader Jay Cherrix and his group, Citizens for the Preservation of Assateague. While not opposed to public access, the group believes that even structures such as the new visitors center violate the intent of early preservationists who wanted the island kept forever wild.

A very lengthy and eloquent note arrived from Diana N., a disabled grandmother who believes that when even government-funded projects are allowed to be built, "It doesn't end with just a few improvements for tourists." At Assateague, she writes, she felt a part of "another place and time. I was able to point out to my grandchildren a bit of history and a bit of advice about what we choose to do with this beautiful land. ... The native people were right and, because we didn't listen, we lost so much. Let's keep what little of it we have left and leave it alone."

Expanding on Six Degrees Of Separation

It has become popular to guess how far we are removed from anyone else in the world, thanks to psychologist Stanley Milgram's book Six Degrees of Separation. His theory demonstrated that an average of six exchanges among a sequence of friends would get a letter from a random sender to a selected target. The only qualification was that the sender address the forwarded note to someone actually known to them, such as a friend or family member. (Researchers since have found that the most successful chains utilize professional contacts rather than friends or family). Milgram's work, which inspired a play, a movie, a TV show and the Internet parlor game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," was published in 1967. Several researchers studying Milgram's notes since have questioned the validity of his results, though. Of 96 messages Milgram's volunteers sent, 18 actually reached their targets.

More recently, Columbia University in New York City tried the project again on a grander scale. Of 24,163 tries to reach a target person somewhere in the world, 384 successfully were delivered within five to seven tries. Each try actually was a chain of letters, so in fact some 61,000 people participated in the whole project. Now, Columbia is trying the project again within stricter parameters.

Participants will include volunteers from the estimated 100 million e-mail users in the world. Though seemingly a rather frivolous exercise, researchers expect the results will help them better understand how diseases spread, how people find jobs and, perhaps, even how criminals can be caught.