Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Baker thanked Wilson for his support but offered to resign. The president brushed the suggestion aside and encouraged the secretary to fight back. The former mayor had a quick mind and ready tongue, which he had recently displayed when he deftly parried attacks by Chamberlain, Weeks, and others at a Military Affairs Committee hearing earlier in January. Baker bettered that feat when he appeared again before the committee on January 28. He spoke for five hours, dominating the meeting and demolishing charges of mismanagement. He did so well that during the noon recess Senator Ollie James of Kentucky, an administration stalwart, hailed a cab and hurried to the White House. Admitted to the president’s office, James forgot himself in his excitement and uttered a sacrilegious expression that Wilson disliked: “Jesus, you ought to see that little Baker. He’s eating them up!”3 Several Republican senators were already having second thoughts about the war cabinet bill, and Baker’s performance permanently derailed the drive to hobble his and Wilson’s management of the war. But that did not signal any surcease in harsh criticism and scathing attacks from Republicans on and off Capitol Hill, particularly Roosevelt.

  The incident in January did prompt Wilson to beef up industrial mobilization. McAdoo was lobbying for Baruch to head the War Industries Board. Secretary of Agriculture Houston and Secretary of Commerce Redfield objected, saying that the financier lacked executive experience; Secretary of the Navy Daniels strongly supported the appointment, while Baker was unsure. Despite his affection for Baruch, Wilson briefly leaned toward appointing Edward R. Stettinius, a partner with J. P. Morgan and Company who was serving in the War Department. Tumulty argued that Stettinius’s appointment would send the wrong message to Democrats and labor. Whether that argument was what swayed the president is not clear, but he did decide to go with Baruch, who accepted promptly. The letter of offer spelled out what appeared to be broad authority over production and procurement for both the American armed forces and the Allies, describing the post as “the general eye of all supply departments in the field of industry.”4

  With his genius for self-promotion, Baruch soon made himself one of the most visible and popular figures in the civilian war effort, rivaling Hoover. He publicized himself relentlessly, cultivating not only newspapermen but also movie cameramen. Newsreels now reached big audiences, and the tall, handsome WIB chairman appeared in them regularly, to great applause. Baruch burnished an image of omnicompetence, earning the possibly self-coined nicknames Wizard and Doctor Facts, and he encouraged people to view him as the benevolent czar of American industry. In fact, he possessed neither the authority nor the staff to crack the whip over businesses, and he relied instead mainly on voluntary cooperation. The WIB divided the country into twenty-one production zones, in each of which business leaders were assigned to advisory committees. The approach worked well in promoting conservation of material and standardization of production processes. Baruch got around his lack of authority to set prices through the allocation of priorities. The army’s refusal to relinquish control of military procurement complicated matters, but the officer assigned to be the liaison to the WIB, Colonel Hugh S. Johnson, quickly came to see the merits of cooperation and helped get the two bodies to work together.5

  For all Baruch’s public relations success, his agency’s substantive record was less than stellar. Small-arms production for the army and the British did improve; even before Baruch took over, factories were turning out more than 5,000 rifles a day. Machine-gun production took hold as well, with Browning automatic rifles and heavy machine guns starting to come out in large numbers early in 1918. Still, most of the doughboys’ automatic weapons came from Britain and France until the final weeks of the war. The AEF also had to rely on artillery supplied by the Allies in Europe because of production failures at home. Tanks likewise languished because of Pershing’s coolness toward these new combat vehicles and delays in building them. Aircraft production failed dismally, though not for lack of interest and money. Instead, indecision by military commanders and turf wars between the government and private industry stalemated production efforts. Only one American-designed plane even reached the testing stage. Of the nearly 6,400 planes flown by the U.S. Army Air Service, nearly 4,900 were French and the rest mostly British. As with the shipping program, it remains a matter of speculation whether Baruch’s leadership of the WIB might have produced better results if the war had lasted longer.

  Wilson took so long to name Baruch chairman of the WIB because he had other matters on his mind. He especially wanted to maintain the momentum of his drive for a liberal, nonpunitive peace by keeping up his rhetorical offensive. Germany and Austria-Hungary, against which Congress had now also declared war, replied to the Fourteen Points in polite but unsatisfactory terms, and Wilson believed he needed to answer them with another speech to Congress. The speech that he delivered, on February 11, came to be known as the Four Points Address because in it Wilson laid down four additional elements of his program:

  First, that each part of the final settlement must be based upon the essential justice of that particular case … Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game … Third, every territorial settlement … must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned. … Fourth, that all well defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism.

  He condemned the “military and annexationist party in Germany” for standing in the way of achieving a peace based on these principles, and he pledged to throw the whole strength of America into “this war of emancipation.”6

  This was another artful performance. He was enlarging upon the first of the Fourteen Points—“open covenants … openly arrived at”—by envisioning an entirely new way of conducting diplomacy. He was likewise enlarging upon the last point—“a general association of nations … under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike”—by declaring in this address that such covenants would make the bartering of sovereignty against people’s wishes impossible and would be backed by the united force of all peace-loving nations. That was the closest he had come in more than a year to a renewed endorsement of a league of nations empowered to maintain peace. Perhaps most important, he moved toward embracing “self-determination,” although he still did not utter the word and he eschewed too ready or too broad an application of the idea, maintaining escape hatches for the sake of peace and stability.

  Wilson’s recent silence about a league of nations was deliberate. At the time, he was holding the League to Enforce Peace at arm’s length—for several reasons. The 1916 election campaign had aggravated partisan animosities between him and the LEP’s mostly Republican leaders, particularly Taft. After intervention, the LEP had hitched the league idea to the Allied cause, an approach that did not square with the president’s resolve to keep his distance from his new co-belligerents. Wilson also resented distractions from what he privately called this organization’s “butters-in” and “woolgatherers.” At the beginning of March, he told an LEP activist, “Frankly, I do not feel that it is wise to discuss the formal constitution of a league to enforce peace. The principle is easy to adhere to, but the moment questions of organization are taken up all sorts of jealousies come to the front which ought not to be added to matters of delicacy.”7

  House worried about maintaining outside contacts, and he persuaded Wilson to meet Taft and another LEP leader, President Lowell of Harvard, at the White House on March 28. According to Taft, Wilson began by reiterating his dislike for specific plans for a league: “He said it might embarrass him in dealing with the subject.” He believed that nations might come to guarantee others’ territorial integrity and hold conferences in case of violations. He acknowledged that this process would be slow, but he reminded
his visitors, who were both lawyers, that this was the way the common law had developed. He believed that a series of conferences could ultimately make it possible to create machinery to enforce peace, with precedent and custom dictating the form of such machinery. Wilson also “gave it as his opinion that the Senate of the United States would be unwilling to enter into an agreement by which a majority of other nations could tell the United States when they must go to war.”8

  Taft correctly called this a “minimizing statement.” Although it was consistent with Wilson’s Burkean proclivity, it sounded odd in view of his well-known taste for bold moves. Lowell challenged Wilson’s caution by asking whether at a critical moment such as this more could be accomplished, and he cited the Constitution as an example of going further than anyone except Hamilton had thought possible. Wilson insisted that the circumstances were different, but Lowell persisted in calling for a definite plan. The meeting ended inconclusively, with the parties tacitly agreeing to disagree. The encounter was ironic: in less than a year, Wilson would seize the moment the way Lowell urged him to, and he would push forward the Covenant of the League of Nations against exactly the kind of opposition from the Senate that he was predicting. Despite what he told his visitors, he probably had such a reversal and bold strike in mind in the spring of 1918. Two months earlier, he and House had discussed the possible makeup of the delegation to a peace conference. This discussion, which House called “one of the pleasantest sessions for a long while,” revealed that Wilson was thinking ahead and positioning himself for the possibility of big moves.9

  He was also thinking about how to involve Republicans in the war and the peacemaking. As a student of parliamentary systems, Wilson appreciated the value of coalition governments, and he had the current example of Britain before him. For nearly a year, House had been harping on the need to involve prominent Republicans in the war effort. The appointment of Root to head the mission to Russia had been a gesture in that direction. Wilson made a similar move just a week after his meeting with Taft and Lowell, appointing Taft co-chairman of the newly created National War Labor Board (NWLB). Announced as the “Supreme Court of Labor Relations,” this agency brought together representatives of management and unions to formulate and interpret labor policies. Like the Food Administration and WIB, the NWLB relied on patriotic appeals and voluntary cooperation to enforce its rulings. Taft and his co-chairman, the labor lawyer Frank P. Walsh, worked together surprisingly well, and the NWLB instilled a measure of harmony in wartime labor relations. As an experiment in bipartisanship, however, Taft’s appointment was less successful. It did not involve the ex-president in high-level policy making, and it did not temper his attacks on the administration during the 1918 election campaign.10

  Wilson’s unwillingness to invite Republicans to join in policy making and management of the war did not extend to those already within the administration. Late in February, House passed along a suggestion to form a “War Board,” to consist of the secretaries of war and the navy and the heads of the major support agencies. Wilson liked the idea, and two weeks later he invited Baruch, Harry Garfield, Hoover, and McAdoo, together with Edward Hurley, the head of the Shipping Board, and Vance McCormick, now chairman of the War Trade Board, to come to the White House. This was the first meeting of what came to be called the War Cabinet, which gathered nearly every week for the duration of the war. Although Wilson continued to meet with the full cabinet, this War Cabinet offered him a smaller and more congenial forum for thrashing out supply and transportation problems. In these meetings, Wilson acted much as he did in cabinet meetings: he allowed freewheeling talk, did not dominate discussions, and intimately involved himself in the details of mobilization. He would not have admitted it, but he was probably responding to his Republican critics when he formed his War Cabinet.11

  After giving the Fourteen Points address, the president had also devoted considerable attention to trying to keep the Bolsheviks from leaving the war. He was likewise working to fend off Allied schemes to intervene in Russia, particularly a Japanese move—which the British and French supported—to occupy the port of Vladivostok and a swath of eastern Siberia. By the time Lenin accepted the final terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Germans were beginning to mount their massive offensive on the Western Front. The British and French pleaded for American troops to be inserted into the gaps in their depleted lines. Lloyd George infuriated Wilson by sending a public message that seemed to imply that the administration was dragging its feet about sending men to Europe. Working through Wiseman, House induced the prime minister to issue another statement, written by Wilson, declaring that the administration was doing everything possible to help.12

  Wilson temporarily neutralized his domestic critics with a speech he gave on the first anniversary of the American entry into the war. He still hung back from statements except to Congress, but this anniversary, which coincided with the opening of the third Liberty Loan campaign, was an occasion he could not pass up. Speaking to a crowd of 15,000 in Baltimore on April 6, he denounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for showing the German government’s true face. The German leaders were trying to erect an empire that had no place for “the principle of free self-determination of nations,” and they were seeking “mastery of the World.” He insisted that he was ready to discuss a fair and just peace any time, but there was no mistaking where the Germans stood. “There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”13 Someone who read rather than heard those words might have thought they came from Roosevelt, not Wilson.

  He recognized that he had gone too far and had created the wrong impression—one of militancy and crusading for democracy. Two days later, in off-the-record remarks to a group of reporters from foreign newspapers, he eschewed “the language of braggadocio” and insisted that he had “no desire to march triumphantly into Berlin.” Contrary to his apparent embrace of “self-determination,” he claimed, “There isn’t any one kind of government which we have the right to impose upon any nation. So that I am not fighting for democracy except for the peoples that want democracy.”14 Those remarks lacked the fire of April 6, but they expressed his views far more faithfully.

  If Wilson had spoken on the record for public consumption, what he said might have helped quell some of the madness that he saw around him. In April 1918, a young German-born man was lynched in Illinois, and now that the Bolsheviks appeared to be making common cause with the Germans, radicals suffered further repression. Attorney General Gregory and others around him had complained that the Espionage Act did not sufficiently restrict utterances they deemed dangerous. Congress filled the breach by passing a series of amendments, known as the Sedition Act, that broadly prohibited many kinds of expression in speech and print and conferred censorship powers on the postmaster general. Gregory welcomed the measure’s new powers, although in a letter to Wilson he questioned the constitutionality of the censorship provisions.15

  Even before the new law went into effect, fresh prosecutions under the Espionage Act targeted radicals. In April, 113 IWW leaders, including Haywood, went on trial in Chicago. Despite the flimsy and often ludicrous nature of much of the government’s case, the six-month-long trial resulted in convictions of all the accused. Other high-profile cases involved members of the Socialist Party. The previous July, a federal court in North Dakota had convicted Kate Richards O’Hare, who had spoken against the war at several public meetings. In May 1918, a Kansas City court convicted Rose Pastor Stokes, who had likewise spoken and written against the war. The most publicized case occurred in September, when the perennial Socialist Party presidential nominee, Eugene Debs, was convicted after a trial in Ohio. In his pre-sentencing statement, Debs avowed, “I say now that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I
am not free.”16

  Gregory and Wilson had mixed reactions to these cases. Except for the IWW trial, Gregory left prosecutions to the discretion of federal district attorneys. He later rued that decision because many of those attorneys, as well as the federal district judges, proved prone to hysteria or bowed to local pressures. As earlier with Haywood, the Justice Department leadership tried to avoid making a martyr of Debs—which Debs desperately wished that they would do—and recommended against prosecution, but the U.S. attorney went ahead anyway, probably because he was feeling the heat from patriotic organizations in Ohio. For his part, Wilson did comment to Gregory on “the (very just) conviction of Rose Pastor Stokes” and asked whether the editor of The Kansas City Star might not also be indicted. Yet he shared the concern of western progressives that these prosecutions might alienate supporters of his domestic and foreign policies. In October, he told Gregory it might be wise to put enforcement “upon the basis you and I would put it upon if we were handling it ourselves.”17 Those second thoughts came too late to do anything about the repression of civil liberties.

  The actions against the socialists look doubly strange in light of some of the president’s private thinking. Stockton Axson recalled that in June 1918, Wilson said to him, “Now the world is going to change radically, and I am satisfied that governments will have to do many things which are now left to individuals and corporations. I am satisfied for instance that the government will have to take over all the great natural resources[;] … all the water power; all the coal mines; all the oil fields, etc. They will have to be government-owned.” Axson remembered him adding, “Now if I should say that outside, people would call me a socialist, but I am not a socialist.” He said he was not, but he believed that the next president must take such steps in order to stave off communism. Wilson may have been thinking about himself and a third term. The previous February, he had told House he liked the boldly egalitarian and government-interventionist manifesto just issued by the British Labour Party and talked about forming a new party in America: “He did not believe the Democratic Party could be used as an instrument to go as far as it would be needful to go largely because of the reactionary element in the South.”18 He would soon show that he meant to purge his party of men who were not to his liking.