1 Accounts that end with Karl’s abdication include Wilfried Fest, Peace or Partition: The Habsburg Monarchy and British Policy, 1914-1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978); Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (1987; New York: Vintage Books, 1989); and many surveys of the empire’s history, including Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); and Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918 (New York: Longman, 1989). Czech-centered accounts include Victor S. Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe 1914-1918: A Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); as well as the view of Czech nationalist leaders themselves; see Tomás G. Masaryk and Henry Wickham Steed, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations, 1914-1918 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1927). On-the-ground accounts include John W. Boyer, “Silent War and Bitter Peace: The Revolution of 1918 in Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003): 1-56; Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Dagmar Perman, The Shaping of the Czechoslovak State: Diplomatic History of the Boundaries of Czechoslovakia, 1914-1920 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962). Treaty-focused accounts include Frederick Dumin, “Self-Determination: The United States and Austria in 1919,” Research Studies 40 (3/1972): 176-94; and Ivo J. Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study in Frontiermaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). My understanding of sovereignty and its complexities is based on Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
2 For Wilson’s personal perspective, see Ray Stannard Baker, ed., Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, 8 vols. (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927-39). For supporters of Wilson, including the staff of the Inquiry, see, among numerous others, Leon Dominian, The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe (New York: Henry Holt and Company for the American Geographical Society of New York, 1917); and Charles Seymour, Geography, Justice, and Politics at the Paris Conference of 1919 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1951). The Inquiry’s relationship with Wilson and the members’ expertise and worldviews are explored in Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917-1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). The idea of fully formed national groups just waiting to be freed from Habsburg rule also found a home in a great deal of subsequent scholarship on the empire; a key text that bridges the divide between participant accounts and subsequent historiography is Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929).
3 On migration between the two countries — including return migration to the empire — see Mark Wyman, Round-trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
4 I elaborate on these problems in my dissertation: Nicole M. Phelps, “Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the New Liberal Order: US-Habsburg Relations and the Transformation of International Politics, 1880-1924,” PhD. diss., University of Minnesota, 2008.
5 On this practice, see David D. Newsom, Diplomacy Under a Foreign Flag: When Nations Break Relations (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 1989).
6 U. S. officials protected the interests of Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Japan, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, San Marino, and Belgium in Austria-Hungary, as well as Habsburg interests in Britain, France, Japan, Russia, and Belgium. See No. 46, “Closing of the Budapest Consulate General,” Coffin to the Secretary of State, Christiania, Norway, 24 July 1917, file no. 125.2432/54; “Conduct of the Consulate General at Budapest, Hungary, since July 4, 1914,” Mallett to the Secretary of State, Budapest, 14 September 1914, file no. 125.2436/32; “Work of the Budapest Consulate General during the war,” Coffin to the Secretary of State, Budapest, 6 January 1916, file no. 125.2436/42; and Penfield’s telegram to the Secretary of State, Vienna via Berne, 29 December 1915, file no. 124.63/4, all in U. S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park MD, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59 (hereafter cited as NARA). On the efficacy of the U. S. Consular Service, see Phelps, “Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the New Liberal Order,” ch. 4; and Charles Stuart Kennedy, The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service, 1776-1914 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
7 Helen Z. Papanikolas, “Immigrants, Minorities, and the Great War,” Utah Historical Quarterly 58 (Fall 1990): 351-70, esp. 361. On other instances of wartime violence, see, among numerous others, Jörg A. Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg: “Feindliche Ausländer” und die amerikanische Heimatfront während des Ersten Weltkriegs (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000); and Christopher Capozzola, “The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America,” Journal of American History 88 (March 2002): 1354-82.
8 J. C. Rider, “Alleged Cruelties and Violence to Austrians and Germans,” 19 November 1918, file no. 311.63/351, in NARA.
9 There is some debate among historians as to when the list-making began. The date 1914 is given in Mitchell Yockelson, “The War Department: Keeper of Our Nation’s Enemy Aliens during World War I,” Presented to the Society for Military History Annual Meeting, April 1998, available at: < http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/comment/yockel.htm> (8 July 2005); 1916 is listed in Mark Ellis and Panikos Panayi, “German Minorities in World War I: A Comparative Study of Britain and the USA,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (April 1994): 238-59.
10 William B. Glidden, “Internment Camps in America, 1917-1920,” Military Affairs 37 (Dec. 1973): 137-41, esp. 138.
11 See Woodrow Wilson, “Proclamation 1364: Declaring That a State of War Exists Between the United States and Germany,” 6 April 1917; and Wilson, “Proclamation 1408: Additional Regulations Prescribing the Conduct of Alien Enemies,” 16 November 1917; both available through The American Presidency Project, ed. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, available at: < http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/>; and Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg, 14.
12 Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg, 250-60; and E. E. Werber to the Swedish Legation, Fort Douglas UT, August 1918, file no. 311.63/230, in NARA.
13 Charles Warner to the Secretary of State, Washington, 14 September 1917, file no. 311.63/49, in NARA.
14 O’Brien to the Secretary of State, Washington, 26 January 1918, file no. 311.63/75, in NARA.
15 Gerald H. Davis, “‘Orgelsdorf’: A World War I Internment Camp in America,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 26 (1991): 249-65, esp. 257.
16 On internees and camp conditions, see Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg; Ellis and Panayi, “German Minorities in World War I,” 238-59; Nagler, “Enemy Aliens and Internment during World War I: Alvo von Alvensleben in Fort Douglas, Utah. A Case Study,” Utah Historical Quarterly 58 (Fall 1990): 388-405; Davis, “‘ Orgelsdorf’”; Glidden, “Internment Camps in America”; Richard B. Goldschmidt, In and Out of the Ivory Tower: The Autobiography of Richard B. Goldschmidt (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960); Yockelson, “The War Department”; and Howard Levy, “The American Symphony at War: German-American Musicians and Federal Authorities during World War I,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 71 (Jan. 1989): 5-13.
17 There were 150 Austrian and Hungarian citizens held at Fort Ogelthorpe, Georgia; the number held in other camps has not been separated from the statistics on Germans; see Davis, “‘Orgelsdorf.’”
18 See Erich Pohl to the Swedish Ambassador, Fort Douglas, 10 February 1918, file no. 311.63/95; Werber to the Swedish Legation, August 1918; Dr. Ernst Kunwald to the Royal Swedish Legation, Fort Oglethorpe, 11 February 1918, file no. 311.63/94; and Margarethe Weiss-Wikins to the Swedish Legation, Fort Oglethorpe, 2 March 1919, file no. 311.63/435, all in NARA. It is likely that the anarchists mentioned in these records had been interned, but it is also possible that they had merely been arrested; the Department of State records do not clarify this point. See the files in group 311.6324, in NARA.
19 On internment in other countries, see especially Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914-1920 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989); and Bill Waiser, Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western Canada’s National Parks, 1915-1946 (Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1995). See also Mary Stenning, Austrian Slavs: Internment Camps of Australia, 1914-1918 (Australia: Fast Books, 1995); Rudolf Rocker, An Insight into Civilian Internment in Britain during WWI, new ed. (Maidenhead: Anglo-German Family History Society, 1998); and Desmond Morton, “Sir William Otter and Internment Operations in Canada during the First World War,” Canadian Historical Review 55 (March 1974): 32-58.
20 See, for example, Giuseppe Webber and the Lega Tirolese Trentina di Greater New York to Lansing, New York City, 16 June 1919, file no. 311.63/519, in NARA: “Not one of [Cirio Lucki’s] people knew just why he was arrested and up to the present are in the dark on this subject.” O’Brien to the Secretary of State (re: Julius Preleuthner), Washington, 26 January 1918, file no. 311/63/75, in NARA; Nagler, “Enemy Aliens and Internment.”
21 See, for example, O’Brien to the Secretary of State, 26 January 1918; and Valentin Reibel to the Swedish Ambassador, Fort Douglas, 15 March 1918, file no. 311.63/134; and file no. 311.63/140, all in NARA.
22 Reibel to the Swedish Ambassador, 15 March 1918.
23 O’Brien to the Secretary of State, 26 January 1918.
24 Goldschmidt, In and Out of the Ivory Tower, 178.
25 O’Brien to the Secretary of State, Washington, 12 February 1916, file no. 311.63/89, in NARA.
26 Levy, “The American Symphony at War,” 9.
27 O’Brien to the Secretary of State, Washington, 1 May 1918, file no. 311.63/134, in NARA.
28 Alvo von Alvensleben to the Attorney General, 2 May 1919, quoted in Nagler, “Enemy Aliens and Internment,” 402.
29 On this phenomenon, see Mark Sonntag, “Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917-1919,” The Historian 56 (Winter 1994). There is also evidence of this type of opportunism in Australia and Canada. There is a discussion of local businessmen pressing to have their competitors interned in Fischer, Enemy Aliens. Localities in Canada sent the destitute to internment camps to avoid having them become local public charges; see Waiser, Park Prisoners; and Morton, “Sir William Otter and Internment Operations.”
30 Pohl to the Swedish Ambassador, 10 February 1918.
31 On wartime civil liberties and efforts to protect them, see Thomas C. Lawrence, “Eclipse of Liberty: Civil Liberties in the United States during the First World War,” Wayne Law Review 21 (Nov. 1974): 33-112; Donald Oscar Johnson, The Challenge to American Freedoms: World War I and the Rise of the American Civil Liberties Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: Norton, 1979); and Harry N. Scheiber, The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties, 1917-1921 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960).
32 See E. E. Werber to the Swedish Legation, Fort Douglas, August 1918, enclosing William F. Beer (surgeon) to the Commandant, War Prison Barracks, Fort Douglas, 12 August 1918, file number 311.63/230, in NARA.
33 Acting Secretary of State to Ekengren, Washington, 12 June 1919, file no. 311.63/516, in NARA.
34 John Hanna to the Secretary of State, Washington, 24 March 1920, file no. 311.63/596, in NARA.
35 See, for example, No. 5255/21, Ekengren to Lansing, Washington, 28 October 1918, file no. 311.63/294; and O’Brien to the Secretary of State, 2 November 1918, file no. 311.63/324, both in NARA; as well as the other cases listed below.
36 O’Brien to Secretary of State, 31 October 1918, file no. 311.63/321, in NARA.
37 No. 3875/21, Ekengren to Lansing, Washington, 9 August 1918, file no. 311.63/219; and O’Brien to Lansing, 14 October 1918, file no. 311.63/238, both in NARA.
38 Werber to the Swedish Legation, August 1918.
39 O’Brien to Secretary of State, 16 October 1918, file no. 311.63/285, in NARA.
40 Daniš et al. to the Department of State, Fort Oglethorpe, 9 March 1919, file no. 311.63/436, in NARA.
41 “Britain’s Interned Aliens,” New York Times, 16 March 1919, quoted in Daniš et al. to the Department of State, Fort Oglethorpe, 21 Mach 1919, file no. 311.63/449, in NARA.
42 Daniš et al. to the Department of State, 21 Mach 1919.
43 O’Brien to Lansing, Washington, 27 March 1919, file no. 311.63/450; see also O’Brien to Lansing, Washington, 3 April 1919, file no. 311.63/457, both in NARA. In a similar case, an ethnic Romanian from Transylvania was denied release because Transylvania was still considered enemy territory, despite the fact that it had passed into the possession of Allied Romania. See O’Brien to Lansing, Washington, 24 February 1919, file no. 311.63/430, in NARA.
44 Department of State Solicitor to Coffin, “Memorandum,” Washington, 7 January 1919, file no. 311.636/6, in NARA.
45 Daniš et al. to the Department of State, Fort Oglethorpe, ca. 9 April 1919, file no. 311.63/458, in NARA.
46 Posselt to Department of State, Ft. Oglethorpe, 4 June 1919, file no. 311.63/515; see also Posselt to Department of State, Ft. Oglethorpe, 23 May 1919, file no. 311.63/504, both in NARA.
47 It is not clear from the available records what became of the others represented in this correspondence.
48 Posselt to the Swedish Legation, Ft. Oglethorpe, 2 August 1919 [forwarded to the Department of State on 14 August 1919], file no. 311.63/534, in NARA.
49 Creighton to the Secretary of State, Washington, 10 September 1919, file no. 311.63/543, in NARA.
50 Posselt’s letter, enclosed in No. 4500/21, Ekengren to the Department of State, Washington, 8 November 1919, file no. 311.63/559, in NARA.
51 Posselt’s letter, enclosed in No. 4581/21, Ekengren to the Department of State, Washington, 11 November 1919, file no. 311.63/560, in NARA.
52 Posselt to the Department of State, Ft. Oglethorpe, 7 December 1919, file no. 311.63/567, in NARA.
53 Hanna to the Secretary of State, Washington, 9 January 1919, file no. 311.63/574, in NARA.
54 Zweig to Adee, Ft. Oglethorpe, 9 May 1919, file no. 311.63/495, in NARA. Note that his letter is filed under Austria-Hungary, not Czechoslovakia. A search of the Czechoslovak protection of interest files yielded no documents relating to internment.
55 Wachtell to the Department of State, New York City, 31 May 1919, file no. 311.63/509, in NARA.
56 No. 1011/21, Swedish Legation to the Secretary of State, Washington, 19 March 1919, file no. 311.63/447, in NARA.
57 O’Brien to the Secretary of State, Washington, 9 April 1919, file no. 311.63/455, in NARA.
58 See file 311.6324, in NARA.
59 All anarchist deportations are filed under 311.6324, in NARA. The classic historical work on anarchist and communist deportations is Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955).
60 Post to the Department of State, Washington, 30 July 1920, file no. 311.6324P26/2, in NARA; see similar statements from Post: Post to the Department of State, Washington, 21 May 1920, file no. 311.6324B49/4; and Post to the Department of State, Washington 9 July 1920, file no. 311.6324R96/2, both in NARA.
61 No. 1986/21, Ekengren to the Department of State, Washington, 1 May 1920, file no. 311.6324B86/2, in NARA.