A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  Ultimately, Baruch had more success getting business to work with the bureaucracy than he did getting the bureaucracy to work with the military. Subject to McAdoo and Baruch, American innovators proved far less productive than they had in the Civil War, when they were generally left to their own devices. Aside from a few inventions—the Browning automatic weapon, the Lewis machine gun, or the Holt caterpillar, which became the basis for the British-designed tank—the U.S. military found itself outclassed by both Allied and enemy gear. (Ironically, J. Walter Christie, unable to sell his designs to the U.S. Army, sold them to the Russians, where one became the basis for the famed T-34 tank.) By the end of the war, the United States was still relying substantially on French-made 75 mm guns, although this was partly by design. Both the British and French feared the United States might not be able to gear up in time for war, leading the French especially to promise to make available all necessary hardware (except rifles and ammunition) if the Americans just transported their soldiers “over there.” A more important factor, however, was the ulterior motive on the part of both the French and British to use American soldiers as mere replacements in their own divisions, so all the Yankee troops needed were their rifles and ammunition.

  In fact, American factories had been filling orders for the Allies for some time, especially for such items as artillery shells, but often on European specifications. Consequently, instead of the 1903 Springfield—the official service rifle, which could not be produced fast enough—the U.S. Army adopted the British Enfield, which already was being produced by the American companies Remington and Winchester. Although a bolt-action rifle, the Enfield was easy to use, reliable, and had a slick mechanism allowing for a high rate of fire. Moreover, it fit perfectly with the American tradition of sharpshooters. As one military historian noted, while doughboys (as the Americans were called) never attained British-level fire discipline, “at least they were well armed.”114 That is, they were “well armed” when they set foot on French soil. Until that time, many of the men had never trained with the Enfield; virtually none had ever fired a machine gun or thrown a grenade, and were put off when the British tried to teach them the “cricket” style of hurling grenades. Doughboys rebelled at what they considered “sissy” styles, and threw grenades like baseballs.

  While Baruch tried to streamline the production of war goods, McAdoo centralized control over finances. The son of a Georgia attorney, McAdoo moved with his family to Knoxville at fourteen, when his father became a professor at the University of Tennessee. Practicing law in Tennessee, he nearly went bankrupt investing in the Knoxville streetcar system before moving to New York City. Forming a new law firm with Francis Pemberton—the son of Confederate general John C. Pemberton and cousin of the inventor of Coca-Cola, John S. Pemberton—McAdoo returned to railway projects, seeking to build a tunnel under the Hudson River and running the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company. An active Democrat, he had caught Wilson’s eye in the 1912 campaign before marrying Eleanor Wilson, the president’s daughter. Wilson had already tapped him to head the Treasury Department, and it was McAdoo’s order to close down the New York Stock Exchange when the Europeans started to withdraw gold from the United States in 1914 that prevented them from draining American gold supplies. A “dry” when it came to alcohol, a pragmatist when it came to stacking the Treasury with talented businessmen, McAdoo is remembered for his quip, “It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument.” As treasury secretary during the war, McAdoo knew the conflict would be phenomenally expensive—ten times the cost of the Civil War in real dollars, or about $112 billion, in addition to $10 billion in loans to the Entente. Both the machinery of the income tax and the Federal Reserve System permitted the government to raise revenues at unprecedented levels. New war bond campaigns, led by movie stars (including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin), brought in billions. To administer the finances, McAdoo oversaw creation of the War Finance Corporation in 1918, whose chief function was to provide financial support to war-critical industries. Since railroads were also within his expertise, McAdoo was charged by Wilson to take control of the railroads in December 1917, running them through yet another board, the U.S. Railroad Commission, called by one liberal historian the “most drastic mobilization of the war.”115

  Socialist Criticisms, Progressive Responses

  While the Wilson administration’s departure from the tradition of relying on the private sector to supply weapons was noteworthy, it paled next to the domestic centralization the Progressives instituted, beginning with the Espionage Act of June 1917. Under this act, use of the mail to oppose the war was punishable by large fines and/or imprisonment. Under the heavy hand of Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson, the Post Office targeted the Socialist Party, which had passed a resolution for “vigorous resistance” to the war, and which in the summer saw mailing privileges withdrawn for a dozen Socialist newspapers. All foreign-language editorials referring to the U.S. government, any of the belligerents, or the conduct of the war itself had to be translated into English and submitted in advance to the Post Office.

  Prominent Socialists, such as Upton Sinclair, quickly broke with the national convention to declare their support for the war. George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, described by author Jonah Goldberg as “the West’s first modern ministry for propaganda,” enlisted the support of such former civil libertarians as Clarence Darrow, who said, “When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace…I know he is working for Germany.”116 Creel’s CPI and the Post Office pressured any group or individual who resisted the censorship of the Sedition Act (banning the “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing of any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military”). The most notable case involved Max Eastman’s radical journal The Masses, which was charged with attempting to hamper recruitment by urging men to resist the draft and by opposing the war. Although six editors won hung juries in a New York trial, it hardly constituted a blow for freedom of speech. When three espionage cases came before the United States Supreme Court in 1919, the convictions in each were upheld, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., declaring that “when a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured.”117

  During the war, dozens of journals, newspapers, and magazines were censored or banned from the mails for perceived antiwar messages, stories, or even cartoons. Some of the cases were egregious violations of civil rights, such as the state official in Wisconsin who was sentenced to more than two years in jail for criticizing the Red Cross, and the movie producer who received a ten-year jail sentence for making a film about British troops committing atrocities in the American Revolution.118 After new sedition amendments were added in May 1918, federal prosecutors were given wide latitude to round up offenders, and prosecutions tended to be highest in the western states, where the socialist International Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”) were active. Lest anyone think Wilson was prepared to return to “normalcy” and suffer criticism, in December 1919 he sought a peacetime version of the Sedition Act to replace the wartime law, but Congress ignored it. After the war, of course, many Progressives would stage a post-hoc criticism of the “excesses,” claiming, as Walter Lippmann did, that society had gotten “too big, too complex” for men to understand, hence the rabid racism, Germanophobia, and xenophobia. What was Lippmann’s solution? Another agency, an intelligence bureau under the direction of a “special class” of Progressive intellectuals.

  While the Progressives tinkered with social engineering and intellectuals attempted to decide which of the two values, pacifism or Progressivism, was more important, there was still a war to be won. American troops arrived in France in large numbers in 1917, where they constituted the first completely unified American draftee army ever put into the field (as Union and Confederate conscripts had fought ag
ainst each other). As evidenced in previous wars, the volunteer nature of most U.S. military forces led friend and foe alike to underestimate them as fighters. Certainly there was nothing imposing about the draftees and volunteers who showed up in 1917. The 79th Division of the U.S. Army, for example, “included in its roster a murderer, several moonshiners, and bootleggers, a newspaper reporter, a professional baseball player, several lumber-jacks, a couple of ‘ham’ actors, a couple of high school professors and at least one lunatic.”119 Famous gangsters, such as “Wild Bill” Lovett and “Monk” Eastman, were decorated heroes—Lovett won the Distinguished Service Cross, and Eastman was so chewed up by knife and bullet wounds that he nearly flunked the physical. They arrived with similar tales: “I can hardly remember a single instance of serious discussion of…war issues. We men, most of us young, were simply fascinated by the prospect of adventure and heroism,” said one. Another noted, “War had been declared and I thought my country needed me,” and a recent Italian immigrant was even more succinct: “Ma name Tony Monaco. In dees country seex months. Gimme da gun.”120 A third-generation Frenchman, Jean Pierre Godet, enlisted in November 1917, a day his father marked with a “mixed sense of joy and pain.” “I feel,” the elder Godet wrote, “a strange contradiction between my love for [my son] and my love for America.”121

  The Yanks, and Black Jack, Arrive

  By October 1917, British and French commanders, their armies already bled white, sought to have Americans fight alongside and within their own units before assuming an independent command. Privately, the British didn’t trust the American soldiers to perform, while the French simply needed bodies to plug into the ever-growing number of holes in their ranks. British representatives even argued for doughboys to “be arranged immediately into provisional battalions, and shipped to Europe with little more than the uniforms on their backs,” whereupon they would be trained and used as replacements for British divisions.122 Of course, this meant being trained by British trainers in all things British, but after all, in the British view England had paid to bring American bodies over in British ships, had fed and clothed them, and now deserved to use them in battle.

  But the French knew better than to advance this proposal, choosing a more diplomatic approach. In a secret memo to high command, the head of the French military mission, in a moment of perspicacity worthy of de Tocqueville, sized up the Americans as having “a highly developed national pride and a strong spirit of independence.” Anticipating the changes afoot in the world, he perceived, “they are all convinced that their country is now predominant [and the United States thinks it is] holding the balance of power, by virtue of its enormous resources in men, money, and supplies.” They had decided, he added, “not to submit to any subordination whatsoever,” but to demand equal footing,” to which “we must resign ourselves.” He concluded that the French had to trust the Americans, who were “gifted, in general, with a sound common sense, and a spirit of fairness…. Our real and only danger lies in failure to make allowances for the spirit of the American people, and for the idiosyncrasies of the American mentality.”123 Nonetheless, the French also sought to train and use American soldiers for their own purposes, a move strongly and successfully resisted by General Pershing. To put matters to rest, Pershing finally abolished the use of French and British trainers for American soldiers, calling British training “a detriment” and French instructors “useless.”124

  The critical need for American troops in the spring of 1918 was due to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and to Lenin’s having signed a peace treaty with Germany. Not only had Germany accomplished all of its war aims in the East (and perhaps more), the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 freed hundreds of thousands of German POWs and troops for service on the Western Front. Fortunately for the Allies, the Germans had occupied so much territory that it required hundreds of thousands of troops to guard and control the new acquisitions. Those forces could have been more effectively employed in the West. Nevertheless, enjoying a numerical superiority not seen since August 1914, the Germans mounted a series of offensives against the British and French using their new “Hutier tactics” of bypassing strong points to achieve breakthroughs in depth, bringing the Allies to the brink of destruction. Pershing allowed a quarter million American troops to assist in the defense, but only in American formations and commanded by American officers. By July, the Germans had suffered one million casualties and the Allies could go on the offensive with the American doughboys.

  Pershing had been tasked by Wilson with keeping the American Expeditionary Force a “separate and distinct component” of the Allied forces. This was necessary not only because of the need to preserve American autonomy, but also because Pershing worried that the low morale of the battle-weary British and French would rub off on his untested units. Given little other direction by Wilson, Pershing shaped the American war effort in Europe more than any other single U.S. commander in military history. Pershing’s unsuccessful expedition into northern Mexico to track down Pancho Villa had presented him with a lesson in the value and limitations of the new technologies. Airplanes under his command had scouted the vast desert, while automobiles commanded by Patton had pressed Villa. The Mexican campaign had instructed the United States in a much different type of guerrilla warfare from the one the more successful Philippine campaign had offered—indeed, many of the units had just come from the Philippines—and contributed to a larger body of knowledge of what worked, and didn’t work, in battling guerrilla forces over large, open areas.

  Pershing took a great deal more with him than knowledge and experience from his days in Mexico and Texas. While stationed at Fort Bliss in August 1915, he had received a crushing call from an AP correspondent who thought he was speaking to Pershing’s lieutenant: “Lieutenant Collins, I have some more on the Presidio fire.” Earlier that morning, a fire had engulfed Pershing’s home in San Francisco, killing his wife and three daughters by smoke inhalation—only his son Warren survived. The general sobbed on a friend’s shoulder the entire two-day train journey back for the funeral. Among the letters of condolence was one from Pancho Villa.125

  Like many famous American commanders who were educators or involved in education—William Tecumseh Sherman, Joshua Chamberlain, Robert E. Lee (after the Civil War), and both Stonewall and Andrew Jackson (briefly)—John Pershing had been a schoolteacher for a short time after graduating from high school and before attending West Point.126 His service in education continued with a posting to West Point as a tactical officer, and to the University of Nebraska as an instructor in military science, where he established the first of the “Pershing Rifles” drill teams. As an officer with the 10th Cavalry “Buffalo Soldiers,” Pershing fought as a brevet major at San Juan and Kettle hills alongside Teddy Roosevelt and won what later became the Silver Star. With his unprecedented promotion to brigadier general, solid service in the Philippines, and notoriety from the Villa expedition, Pershing was one of only six people qualified to command the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. Two were due to retire in a year, and two were in ill health, making his only serious rival for the command General Leonard Wood. It turned out to be no contest as Wilson believed Wood harbored ambitions to become president, and while both Wood and Pershing were Republicans, Pershing’s presidential aspirations did not come into focus until after the war. Both Pershing and Wood actively campaigned for the command, but Secretary of War Newton D. Baker chose Pershing and Wilson approved. Pershing met with President Wilson only once, and received no instructions as to the course he should pursue. “In the actual conduct of operations I was given entire freedom and in this respect was to enjoy an experience unique in our history,” Pershing said later.127 It is also worth noting that while virtually all national reporters knew of Pershing’s departure date and on what ship he sailed, there were no “leaks” of the information, so patriotic were the journalists of the day. No one wanted to give the enemy a chance to sink Pershing’s ship.

  Ironically,
Pershing’s training concepts and tactics were decidedly “retro,” greatly resembling the failed French notions of élan. He emphasized rifle fire accuracy, the use of the bayonet, and above all, the soldier’s spirit. Instead of massed formations bedecked in brightly colored uniforms, however, doughboys would fight from a tactical background outlined in the Infantry Drill Regulations, which emphasized fast-moving infantry operating in smaller units with khaki or camouflage uniforms. Pershing appreciated the firepower of machine guns, but did not want his men dependent on them, fearing they would slow the advance. But he remained wedded to the frontal assault—to be sure, using broken-field “combined arms” tactics—in which the key was to identify the vulnerable strong points and overcome them using bayonets. The problem in the Meuse-Argonne offensive (September–November 1918), where the United States played a major role, was that lacking their own artillery or tanks, and demonstrably weak in coordinating with what air power there was, the Americans were reliant on the French. Time and again, artillery proved poorly directed; tanks broke down or French crews abandoned them under heavy fire; and Colonel Billy Mitchell’s airplanes bombed and strafed behind the lines, not in support of advancing American infantry. The saving grace was that, whenever possible, subordinates were allowed to redefine tactics in light of battlefield circumstances—an American tradition.