World War I – Historical Miscellany

Cuba-You-Quit Way in Pittsburgh

This article appeared originally in Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.

The earliest appearance of Cuba-You-Quit Alley on a map, in 1882.

On the subject of Cuba You Quit Way, von Hindenberg asks, “What is the large building thrown diagonally across Cuba’s line of retreat?”

Dr. Boli and Father Pitt have not been able to find out. The question is complicated. The alley was on a steep hill (it ran along the border between Uptown and the Hill District), and the map shows small frame houses (yellow) and two brick houses (red) that no longer exist. In the 1910 map by the same company, the same building is shown as red, indicating that it was made of brick or stone. Possibly the change of color indicates that it was demolished or dilapidated. It appears to belong to “V. Brusco et ux.” on the 1923 map, but it is adjacent to the Booth & Flinn brickyard, and might be one of their buildings. Since there was no zoning in the neighborhood, the whole area was a cluttered mix of modest rowhouses, businesses, small factories, and institutions. The western half of Cuba You Quit Way may not have been cut through: many streets appear on these maps that are only paper streets, or pathways through the weeds. We should add that the automobile or wagon was not welcome here: Wyandotte Street (the diagonal street at lower right) is a stairway. Probably the only way to get to those little houses on Cuba You Quit Way was on foot (which is still true of a surprising number of houses in Pittsburgh). It is easier for a pedestrian than for a car to step around the projecting corners of a building.

Of course the name of the alley is the most surprising thing about it, and it tended to attract remark when it was current. During the First World War, the Pittsburgh correspondent for The Union Postal Employee took inspiration from the name to suggest some improvements in the city’s street-naming system, which still frustrates mail carriers.

Our city scheme is not simple. The “namers” of the streets appear to favor words of topographical significance, and as a result one-half of the names refer to some degree of elevation peculiar to the section in which the street happens to be. There are dozens of “Hill Top,” “Highview,” “Hillside,“ ”Hilldales,” etc., to say nothing of a few pages of “Maples,” “Elms,” and “Ferns.” One street, however, stands forth prominently as the only one of its name in the world. I refer, of course, to “Cuba-You-Quit Alley.” At the present time, with a war in progress that makes the Spanish-American War look like a backyard scrap, the only move to commemorate the event was the changing of the name of “Kaiser Wilhelm Street” to “Marne Way.” Surely the “namer” of “Cuba-You-Quit Alley” would not hesitate to accept the suggestion that we rename some of the “Maples,“ ”Elms” and “Hills,” etc., with more appropriate titles. I suggest a few, but the inventor of the name of “Cuba-You-Quit Way” will undoubtedly be able to improve on my list: “Berlin-or-Bust Alley,” “Buy-a-Bond Terrace,” “War-Savings-Stamp Street,” “Food-Will-Win-the-War,” “Don’t-Waste-It Alley,” “Over-the-Top Avenue,” or “Carry-On Boulevard.” (The Union Postal Employee, January, 1918.)

In at least one way the postal employee’s suggestion was implemented. Shortly after the Great War, a new automobile highway was opened clinging to the cliff above the Monongahela, and it was given one of the most audaciously grandiose names ever applied to an American street: “The Boulevard of the Allies.” Unlike New York’s Avenue of the Americas, the Boulevard of the Allies is so called by ordinary Pittsburghers; and furthermore Second Avenue downtown was renamed as an extension of it, so that to navigate the avenues downtown you have to learn to count in Picksburgh dialect: one, Allies, three, four, Forbes, five, Oliver, six, seven.

But did Cuba-You-Quit Way get its name from the Spanish-American War? No; it first appears on maps in 1882. The name appears to be a folk etymology: that is, a popular but incorrect explanation of the derivation of a term. The Post-Gazette told the story of Cuba-You-Quit Way a few years ago. It seems the alley was named for a Chippewa woman named Cub-bayou-quit (there was no settled spelling of her name), who married a well-to-do Pittsburgher. She married him in a Chippewa ceremony; but when, as a widow, she tried to claim property worth millions of dollars in 1874 money, the current owners claimed that Chippewa marriage did not count in Pennsylvania law. Apparently the case was such a sensation that it was in everyone’s minds for months, and some city planner attached her name to a new alley, which does not appear on an 1872 map but does on an 1882 map as “Cuba-You-Quit Alley.” The rule that there are no “alleys” in Pittsburgh was not in force until the early twentieth century; we still find some ancient street signs marking alleys that are “ways” on modern maps.

Street sign for Larkins Alley (now Larkins Way) on the back of St. Casimir’s Church, South Side.

The Post-Gazette says that the name of Cuba-You-Quit Way was changed to Cuba Way in 1926, and adds that “it no longer exists.” That is not quite correct. The eastern section of Diaz Way, a narrow and nearly but not quite abandoned alley, is the old Cuba-You-Quit Alley.

Diaz Way probably has an interesting history, too. It appears as “Davis Alley” in 1872, the earliest map on which we have been able to find it (it does not appear in 1862 or before). It is still Davis Alley in 1882, but the name has changed to Diana Alley in 1890. It still appears as Diana Alley in 1910, but as Diaz Way in 1923.

Dr. Boli often wanders into back alleys of history, but seldom so literally as he has done today.

Van Wert Prepares to Face the Huns

History may be lurking in a desk drawer in your own house. An old family photo album, unopened for decades, turned out to be full of pictures of Van Wert, Ohio, as the United States entered the First World War. The photographer, Harry A. Bailey, was a young man who had enlisted the day the war was declared; as he waited to do his bit (which he ultimately did with some distinction), he took pictures of the big parade and the various war preparations around town. These pictures are a priceless record of a small city’s response to the war effort in 1917. Some of them are also unique records of the state of certain buildings in Van Wert more than a century ago.

As I scan the pictures, I’m donating them to Wikimedia Commons in their own category. They are in the public domain: anyone can use them for any purpose.

Here our photographer has climbed on the roof of a building at Main and Washington Streets. The distinctive Second Empire courthouse marks the spot as the central block of Main Street.

The parade passes Crooks Bros. Hardware at Main and Washington.

The scene on the ground.

Why we fight: never forget the rape of Belgium. Were these really Belgian refugees, or were they just Ohioans dressed up to look like the magazine pictures of Belgian refugees? No matter; the point is made.

As a general rule, your patriotism can be measured by the size of the flag you carry.

We hope this profuse growth of bunting will not get wadded up in the machinery.

A billboard company helpfully provides a War Map of the Western Battle Front. You can also read Van Wert County’s war record so far if you enlarge the picture:

Enlisted Men, 482
Made Supreme Sacrifice, 3
Nurses, 15
Doctors, 15
Liberty Bonds, $1,650,000
Thrift Stamps, $600,000
Red Cross, $35,000
YMCA, 22,375 (?)
Salvation Army, 1457
Knights of Columbus, [no visible figure].

The War Campaign hard at work. With Van Wert mobilized this way, the Germans don’t stand a chance.

G. K. Chesterton on America’s Entering the First World War

From “Our Note Book,” Illustrated London News, April 14, 1917.

The American declaration of war was practically the verdict of history. It is no flattery to say that this great and democratic yet distant population stands somewhat in the position of posterity. It is only upon the largest and plainest matters that it is even a compliment. Posterity may make mistakes; and probably will make many mistakes in matters of detail. We had better be Chinamen and worship our ancestors than be like some modern evolutionists and worship our descendants. Our descendants (if they preserve the family likeness) will muddle a great many things and misunderstand us in a great many ways, but they will see certain historic facts simply as facts, as we see the Norman Conquest or the discovery of America. One of the broad facts they will thus see in bulk is the fact that the Prussian appeared in history as an enemy, exactly as we see that the Hun appeared in history as an enemy. We know very little about the followers of Attila; and that little, like so much that modern learning has deduced from the Dark Ages, is very probably wrong. But that the glory of Attila was a calamity to society, that the power of Attila was the impotence of society, is the verdict; and it will not be reversed.

The first fact which makes the American decision conclusive is plain enough. Yet it needs careful statement in order to avoid, as I have always tried to avoid, the tone of cheap superiority about the long neutrality of a vigorous and valiant nation. Anybody who ever supposed that Americans as such were “too proud to fight,” in the ironical sense of being too timid to fight, was a fool whose impudence was simply ignorance, and especially ignorance of history. Within living memory, America was full of fighting, in a literal sense even yet unknown to England, although England is full of fighters. It was even less likely that they had changed in military quality since Bull Run and Gettysburg than that we had changed in military quality since Plassy or Waterloo. Moreover, much that strikes an Englishman in America, like much that strikes him in Ireland, as being mere anarchy is only a different manifestation of mere courage. But when we have guarded against this irritating error, we can safely propound the purely intellectual truth. And the truth is that America had been largely converted, in the manner of a relatively mild religious conversion, to the modern ideal of peace, both in its sane and its insane formulae. The difference might be stated thus: Pacifism really was in America something which it never is anywhere else, though it always pretends to be. It was democratic. The people, or great tracts of the people, really wanted peace; and were not (as in Europe) merely told by horribly unpopular Socialists that they really wanted peace. It was the poor, plain man of the Middle West who could truly be described as disliking all war. It was not merely the International Proletarian, who can safely be described as disliking or liking anything, since he does not even exist to answer. The most startling proof of this is the fact that there could be in America such a thing as a pacifist popular song—a music-hall ditty that is not patriotic; and is almost anti-patriotic. Try to imagine that “Keep the Home Fires Burning” could be sung enthusiastically with the intention of keeping all males of military age at home by the fireside. Imagine a song about the British Conscientious Objectors in the style of the British Grenadiers. That will suggest the position in which it was possible for a very virile people to applaud the mother’s song which ran “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” That mother has already discovered that you always run the risk of doing so, if you raise him to be a man. Now, to have stung all this solid and sincere neutralism into war is a fact which history will count as final. No arguments about whether the pacifist had cause to be exasperated can count for an instant against the fact that he was a pacifist and that he was exasperated. If the Germans did something which made Mr. Bertrand Russell plunge into a suit of khaki and rush out of Cambridge breathing fire and slaughter, it would be quite useless to say that what they did was not provocative. If some German action awoke M. Romain Rolland in his Swiss mountains and made him rush down the slope and die in the carnage of Lorraine, it would be quite clear that his comment on the act was an answer to all possible defence of it. Americans had a right to be neutral, which in the case of Mr. Russell and M. Rolland is perhaps more difficult to expound; but they certainly desired to be neutral, and it is the final criticism on Germany that they could not be neutral, even when they desired it. The question is yet further clarified by the last provocation actually offered to America—the proposal to treat the self-defence of merchantmen as piracy. This theory is so plainly an insanity that it is not even a sophistry. It has nothing to do with any international understandings, but with the elementary ethics of cause and effect, of responsibility and reason. It is precisely as if a magistrate were to pay a band of official highwaymen to stab and rob all pedestrians, and then hang the pedestrians for rioting if they resisted. With this enormous idiocy modern Germany loses her last link not merely with civilisation, but with the human mind itself, and merely barricades herself in a mad-house. And the moment of that loss is the moment of the entry of America, which may truly be described as the entry of mankind. It is even, as I say, like the entry of unborn mankind. We have talked too much of America as “a daughter nation”; and have tried too often to patronise a daughter when we ought rather to have respected a very distant and very independent cousin. But in this sense there is truth in the tag—the Western democracy speaks for our daughters and our sons even more than for ourselves. The youth of the world has found Pacifism impossible because it has found Prussianism intolerable; it is the rising generation that is knocking at the door of Potsdam, and knocking with a battle-axe; it is the babe unborn that stirs and cries against the Herod who has slain so many babes.

President Wilson, in his great speech, was truly and worthily what somebody was once called fancifully—the orator of the human race. There was a powerful impersonality in his very eloquence which was all the more human because it was not individual, but rather like the mighty voice of a distant but approaching multitude. The simple words with which he ended were among the sort of historic sayings that can be graven on stone. There is a moment when man’s moral nature, apparently so wayward, finds its path with a fatality like that of doom. “God helping her, she can no other.” That is the answer of humanity to all possible preaching about the inhumanity of war, to libraries of loathsome realism, to furnaces of ghastly experience, to the worst that can be said, to the worst that can be endured. There comes a moment in which self-defence is so certainly the only course that it is almost superfluous to say it is the right one. There is nothing else, except to commit suicide; and even to commit suicide is to connive at murder. Unless a man becomes the enemy of such an evil, he will not even become its slave, but rather its champion, In such an extremity there enters at last an awful simplicity; and we share something of that profound spiritual peace which always possesses the armies fighting in the field. God helping us, we can no other; for God Himself will not help us to ignore evil, but only to defy and to defeat it.

——Included in The Miscellaneous Chesterton. Serif Press, 2019.