The Coming of the Hun! American Fears of a German Invasion, 1918

The best-documented American poster of the First World War was created by Joseph Pennell (1869-1926), one of the most popular American illustrators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Figure I).1 It was designed for the Fourth Liberty Loan drive, which opened on September 28, 1918, and closed on October 19. Pennell wrote, "the idea came into my head on my way back from New York, where I had attended a meeting of the Committee on Public Information at which the loan was announced and the posters asked for.2 I made the sketch on the train, carried it out on transfer paper when I got to Philadelphia, and put it on zinc plates, printed it and went west, and it was not till months after that I heard it had passed both juries in New York and Washington, and was to be used as one of the posters for the fourth liberty loan." The caption reads "THAT LIBERTY SHALL NOT PERISH FROM THE EARTH" and presents a frightful image of New York City destroyed by enemy air attacks (Pennell 9). In the foreground, the headless statue of Liberty is surrounded by flames. Her broken torch lies at her feet, an apt symbol of a vanquished America. In the background, the city is engulfed in flames, and the sketchy pen work creates a moving scene of ruin and destruction. As Pennell himself wrote, "my idea was New York city bombed, shot down, burning, blown up by an enemy" (9). His original idea for the caption was "BUY LIBERTY BONDS OR YOU WILL see THIS" (18). For us today, the idea that German forces could have invaded the United States in 1918 is absurd. It would have been a military undertaking that even today would present almost insurmountable difficulties, and when the First World War began in 1914, most Americans were sure that the United States would not become involved. They felt fully protected by the oceans and would have agreed with Dr. Roland G. Usher, the chair of the Department of History at Washington University and the author of books on American history, who wrote in the New York Times, "needless to say, the European war will not involve the United States in actual hostilities. ... We are too distant from the scene of war; too entirely devoid of interests the combatants might seriously injure ... to cause them to assail us" (Sullivan 86). And in his 1915 book on PanGermanism, he prophesied that "in no event is a German army likely to set foot on the soil of North America to attack the United States, Canada, or Mexico. ... Any notion that Germany would even dream of conquering America is based on a fundamentally incorrect conception of Pan-Germanism" (Usher 136-37). But when the United States entered the conflict on the side of the allies a little less than three years later, this sense of invulnerability had vanished along with our neutrality. Germany had become our enemy-an enemy so powerful that it was a threat to our very existence -and a great many Americans believed that a German invasion of the continental United States was not only possible, but also quite likely and possibly even imminent. This article investigates some of the causes for this radical change in attitude. Books, articles, and especially films will all be considered in an effort to recreate the cultural context in which Pennell's striking poster was seen and understood. Invasion literature was a popular genre of early twentieth-century fiction, both in England and in America. One of the most popular was H. G. Wells's War in the Air, which was written in 1907 and began to appear as a serial in the Pall Matt Magazine in January 1908. In Wells's book, Germany attacks the United States as the opening move in a last vast effort for world conquest. The German navy defeats the American North Atlantic Fleet and a German air armada of zeppelins, huge monsters as large as a battleship, and oneman flying machines called Drachenflieger (dragonflies) bombard New York (Wells). Wells gives a vivid description of the massacre of New York. …