by G. J. Meyer
The president was wrong to call the submarine campaign a war against all humanity. Many neutral maritime nations had found no reason to protest it. Many of those same nations tried without success to get the United States to join them in objecting to the blockade.
The president was also wrong to call the war a conflict of democracy against autocracy. Was Great Britain a champion of democracy in Ireland? In Egypt? In India? To what extent could Britain herself, with her king and House of Lords and severely limited franchise, claim to be a democracy?
As for the claim that the United States had no quarrel with the German people, it was absurd to say such a thing while accepting a blockade that was “starving to death the old men, the women and children, the sick and the maimed of Germany.”
No less absurd was Wilson’s complaint that the people of Germany had not been consulted about going to war. Were the people of the United States being consulted, really? Had the people of Britain, France, or Russia been consulted? The tenacity with which the Germans continued to fight off an enormous enemy alliance, La Follette said, made it likely that they supported their government more strongly than the American people were prepared to support theirs. He said that his office was being flooded with letters and telegrams from people across the country, and that they supported his position by more than ten to one.
Two honorable courses of action were open to the United States, he said. One was to demand that both sides in the Great War stop interfering with America’s rights, including the right to trade where she wished. The other was to stop trading with both sides altogether.
At the end there were tears on his cheeks. He attempted no grand final peroration, but simply stopped and sat down. In the two hours of speeches that followed, he was denounced again and again, but the denunciations were almost all on the ad hominem level. “Anti-American president, anti-American Congress and anti-American people” was typical of the things he was called, but there was little response to the points he had raised. Seated together in the gallery were progressive leader Amos Pinchot and journalist Gilson Gardner. When La Follette sat down, Gardner had turned to Pinchot and said, “That is the greatest speech either of us will ever hear. It will not be answered because it is unanswerable.”
The last speech was finished shortly before eleven P.M., and the voting began. The resolution was approved eighty-two to six. Of the eight absent senators, seven were quick to make it known that they, too, would have voted yes if able to be present. In happier days Woodrow Wilson had said, “I take my cap off to Bob La Follette….Taunted, laughed at, called back, going steadfastly on…I love these lonely figures.” But now La Follette was an enemy, a threat to unity, never to be trusted, never to be forgiven.
The House took up the resolution on Thursday, April 5, its members eager to go on record about the war. Most wanted to display their patriotism, meaning their support for the president. With more than four hundred representatives to deal with, Speaker Clark was obliged to allow them only ten minutes’ speaking time each. Late in the day, with the list of those requesting the floor seeming to grow no shorter, he cut that to five minutes. On and on it went. When his turn came, the conservative Fred Britten of Illinois used his minutes to tell his colleagues what, in his opinion, all of them knew to be going on.
“Ask your friends around you on the floor of the House,” he said, “ ‘Are you going to vote for this bill?’ ‘Yes, I hate like the devil to vote for it, but I am going to.’ Why do they hate to vote for it? The truth of the matter is that 90 percent of your people and mine do not want this declaration of war and are directly opposed to our going into that bloody mire on the other side.”
Members of the war party took offense and challenged what Britten had said. He replied that “probably seventy-five percent” of the House was secretly opposed and that he could name most of them. But doing so would be an unkindness. Everyone was aware of the torrents of abuse, the threats of expulsion from the Senate, that had come down on La Follette for his speech of the day before. La Follette himself was in the gallery, looking impassively on, when House majority leader Claude Kitchin declared that he was going to vote against the resolution and added that he would so in the knowledge that “the whole yelping pack of defamers and revilers in the nation will at once be set upon my heels.”
While this debate was in process, and virtually unnoticed because the attention of the press was focused on Capitol Hill, the White House issued an executive order. It was directed at the U.S. Civil Service, which was responsible for the administration of thousands of federal jobs, and it gives a remarkably vivid indication of how, even at this early stage, the president intended to manage the government and the nation during wartime.
It read as follows:
The head of a department or independent office may forthwith remove any employee when he has ground for believing that the retention of such employee would be inimical to the public welfare by reason of his conduct, sympathies or utterances or because of any other reasons growing out of the war. Such removal may be made without other formality than the reasons shall be made a matter of confidential record, subject however to inspection by the Civil Service Commission.
The power of this edict lies in the vagueness of its language. Anyone might be fired if someone in authority decided to fire him for almost any reason or no reason at all so long as the firing was said to have something to do with the war. It contained no provision for appeal or even for allowing the discharged employee to know why he had been dismissed. In light of what would soon follow, there need be no doubt that this bore the stamp of Woodrow Wilson personally.
It was almost three hours past midnight on Friday, April 6, when the last speech ended in the House and voting could begin. As in the Senate, the result was a foregone conclusion. What is surprising is that the minority, the members expressing uncertainty and discomfort instead of eagerness for war, had throughout the night received nearly as much applause as the most bellicose patriots. But if Representative Britten had been correct in what he said on the previous day, the vote did not necessarily reflect the thinking of the members. Three hundred and seventy-three of them voted yes, only fifty no.
The president signed the resolution as soon as it was delivered to the White House at midday, interrupting his lunch to do so. It thereby assumed the force of law, and the United States was at war.
The first of millions
July 1917: a division of U.S. doughboys is rushed to France.
The object of this war is to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment, controlled by an irresponsible Government, which, having secretly planned to dominate the world, proceeded to carry out the plan without regard either to sacred obligations of treaty or the long-established practices and long-cherished principles of international action and honor; which chose its own time for the war; delivered its blow fiercely and suddenly; stopped at no barrier, either of law or of mercy; swept a whole continent within the tide of blood—not the blood of soldiers only, but the blood of innocent women and children also and the helpless poor; and now stands balked, but not defeated, the enemy of four-fifths of the world.
—WOODROW WILSON, AUGUST 27, 1917
Chapter 10
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Taking Charge
FOR WOODROW WILSON to expect unity when he led an uncertain nation into war with a faraway country that did not want war and posed at worst a dubious threat to the United States was, to say the least, expecting a great deal.
To demand unity under such circumstances, to equate disagreement with subversion and set out to extinguish it, was worse than an error of judgment. It was to subject the institutions of democracy to strains they were ill equipped to withstand. It damaged those institutions and did injury to untold numbers of the citizens they were intended to serve. It set loose in American society dark currents of mutual distrust that would poison the nation’s politics far into the postwar years.
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br /> Unity was impossible because everything connected with the war effort was controversial, and every question turned into a fight. The fault lines ran in all directions. The ones dividing various pro-war groups from one another were sometimes little less deep than the ones separating proponents and opponents of intervention.
In the days following the declaration of war, there was confusion even about what intervention was going to mean. One veteran senator, Thomas S. Martin of Virginia, declared after voting for the war resolution that “Congress will not permit American soldiers to be sent to Europe.” The White House soon set him straight, but among his colleagues there remained widely divergent assumptions about what role the United States was going to play in the Great War and how much it was prepared to commit.
The most fundamental question, once the president had made clear that he wanted an army of a million men or more, was how to create such a force and how to do it quickly. Three possible approaches were obvious: conscription, the recruitment of volunteers, or some combination of the two. The debate brought to the surface incompatible beliefs about the United States, what kind of nation it was, and what its citizens wanted it to be. It aroused deep and powerful passions. Many Americans, perhaps especially the most recent arrivals, associated conscription with the Old World and the autocratic regimes that they or their forebears had come to the New World to escape. The United States was supposed to be different. When her citizens fought, they did so freely, not because the government compelled them.
Such views reached back to the birth of the republic. They had contributed to making conscription ineffective when various colonies attempted it during the Revolutionary War, and to sparking draft riots when both sides introduced it during the Civil War. But not all Americans were opposed. Universal military service on a European model had been advocated in the United States in the years preceding the Great War, and the number of advocates increased as the war dragged on. One of the toughest congressional struggles of 1916 centered, as we saw earlier, on a National Defense Act put forward by the Wilson War Department. The president abandoned it, and with it the idea of a reserve force of four hundred thousand volunteers, when opposition from southern and western Democrats threatened to split the party. The episode made clear that at that point Wilson would have preferred to expand the military on a volunteer basis but was not prepared to fight to make it happen. It showed, too, that he had limited interest if any in universal (which is to say compulsory) military training.
As the months of neutrality turned to years, support for a system in which every young male would be obliged to spend at least some months in military training drew both increasing support and increasingly outspoken opposition. Cost figured importantly in the debate. Universal military training would have required an enormous increase in an army budget that, though it totaled only about $200 million, already accounted for a fifth of federal government spending. (It takes some effort to grasp just how small the American government and its military were before the Great War. Fewer than twenty officers served on the Army General Staff in Washington. The planning staff was only half that size. And yet the War Department, together with the Post Office, accounted for well over half of the federal payroll.)
President Wilson caused much surprise when, shortly after signing the declaration of war, he reversed his earlier position and asked Congress for authority to raise the new army entirely through conscription. The bill he sent to Capitol Hill would allow only enough men to volunteer to expand the Marine Corps and fill vacancies in the small regular army and the National Guard. Though the guard was not much respected by the regular army’s professionals, the support that its many units enjoyed as a result of functioning as state militias gave it more political clout than the White House could afford to ignore.
The president’s request reignited the anger of southern, western, and rural voters, without whom the Democrats could have no chance of winning national elections. From that perspective it was a courageous move. The reasons for it, in any case, were in no way mysterious. They began with the experience of the Allies in putting their enormous armies into the field and attempting to expand them even while having to replace endless heavy casualties. None of them could have continued the fight if they had tried to rely on volunteers. Even Britain, which had begun the war with a tiny army and taken pride in relying on volunteers to build a force of millions, had in 1916 found it necessary to introduce conscription on a massive scale.
What mattered especially to Wilson and to new secretary of war Newton Baker was what London had learned, to its cost, about how reliance on volunteers disrupted industrial production. Too many of the British who signed up for military service—some of them shamed into doing so by a propaganda machine that encouraged women to give white feathers to apparently healthy young men who appeared in public in civilian clothes—had skills that were indispensable in mines and factories. Shortages of skilled workers eventually became so acute that the government found it necessary to order many soldiers back to their peacetime jobs. This experience caused the Wilson administration not only to insist on conscription but to maintain strict limits on the number of volunteers.
At stake, as the administration sent its bills to Congress, was nothing less than the question of who was going to be in charge of the war effort. Would it be the White House or Congress or both, in some kind of improvised collaboration? The administration’s position was clear: it intended to take command. It found itself challenged as early as April 9, when Republican Senator John W. Weeks of Massachusetts introduced a resolution calling for the establishment of a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. On the face of it the idea was unobjectionable, a vehicle by which members of Congress from both parties would be able to monitor spending and guard against mismanagement. As with the question of conscription, however, the president’s and Secretary Baker’s knowledge of history came into play. They knew that a committee of the same name had been created during the Civil War and had been blamed ever since for putting unnecessary obstructions in Abraham Lincoln’s path. Wilson went personally to Capitol Hill and got key Democrats to promise that they would keep the Weeks resolution from coming to a vote.
The issue was complicated by that most intemperate of Woodrow Wilson’s critics, Theodore Roosevelt. Two decades earlier TR had made himself a national hero by raising his volunteer regiment of Rough Riders for service in the Spanish-American War and leading them to glory in Cuba. Since leaving the White House in 1909, he had itched to get back into uniform and into some war somewhere. He insisted on being called not Mr. President but Colonel Roosevelt, and during the Wilson administration’s troubles in Mexico he had sought unsuccessfully to get permission to once again raise his own fighting force. He was determined not to miss out on the greatest war in history. He called on friends from across the country to help him get permission to recruit an infantry division that he would command as a major general.
Those who hated the very idea of conscription welcomed Roosevelt’s plan for a force of volunteers (a Democratic congressman spoke for millions when he said that “opposition to compulsory military service is characteristic of every government fit to be called a democracy”) and were encouraged to give voice to their objections. It thereby put the administration’s plans in jeopardy. On April 18 the House Military Affairs Committee approved a bill to ban conscription and require reliance on volunteers exclusively. On the same day, as though to ensure maximum confusion, the Senate’s equivalent committee approved the administration’s conscription bill. Meanwhile Roosevelt was expanding his original vision. He now wanted to recruit not a mere division but an army corps of as many as a hundred thousand men. This corps would be commanded not by TR himself but by his friend Major General Leonard Wood, a former army chief of staff still on active duty; Roosevelt would be one of Wood’s division commanders. The corps would be mustered at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and though otherwise privately financed would be equipped by the regular army. It was to be a cross s
ection of the American population, with some units made up of German-Americans (“loyal” ones, of course) and a black regiment led (of course) by white officers. Those officers not cherry-picked from the regular army would be sons of the nation’s “best” families, with places reserved for descendants of the nation’s past military heroes. In recognition of Lafayette’s role in the Revolutionary War, there would also be places for representatives of the French aristocracy.
His corps, TR said, would embark for Europe after sixty to ninety days of training and be ready to engage the enemy by September 1. In this and other ways it was a blatantly harebrained scheme, one that if implemented would have thrown the entire war effort into disarray. TR was fifty-eight years old, in uncertain health (he had less than two years to live), and utterly without qualifications to lead thousands of men in the kind of total war being waged in Europe. His claim that he could have an army corps that did not yet exist in action on the Western Front in about four months exposed the depth of his naïveté. It was also a reflection of the peculiar arrogance that made many Americans contemptuous of the European armies and the soldiers serving in them.
Providing the Roosevelt corps with uniforms, weapons, and other essentials would have stripped the regular army bare. And only a fool could have expected TR, once he was in Europe and in charge of a division, to follow orders or restrain himself from the public airing of his inevitable disagreements with his superiors. Even in the Spanish war, as a mere lieutenant colonel, he had sometimes been nearly unmanageable.
It is astonishing that TR thought he could win White House support for his plan, especially after all the abuse he had been directing at Woodrow Wilson since before the 1912 election. But he did. He even arranged to call at the White House and make his appeal in person. He and Wilson had first met twelve years before, when the Army-Navy football game was played at Princeton: then-president Roosevelt attended, and Wilson served as host. But the campaign of 1912 had turned them into bitter rivals, the bitterness being almost entirely on a frustrated TR’s side. Wilson, for his part, now that he was himself a two-term president, found his visitor charming. He said afterward that TR was “a great big boy.”
