Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
Pétain spent the summer months driving from division to division, talking to officers and men, making promises, which he promptly carried out, of better conditions, more frequent leave. There would be no more random butcheries. The Americans were coming. Tanks were the instruments of victory. He reassured everybody: “We must wait for the Americans and the tanks.”
When Greek Meets Greek
News of the coming declaration of war found Theodore Roosevelt fishing for “devilfish” in the Gulf of Mexico, in the company of a congenial Virginia tobacco trader named Russell Coles, whose hobby was sharks and rays. Coles had a houseboat anchored among the keys that fringe Charlotte Harbor as a base for fishingtrips after shark and manta. The giant rays occasionally seen off the Florida coast were known as mantas to the watermen, but T.R. found it more exciting to astonish the reporters by calling the ugly monsters “devilfish.” Boarding the launch that was to take him out to the fishing grounds from Punta Gorda he delivered himself of a tirade against pacifists.
The outing was a success. T.R. managed to thrust his harpoon a full two feet through the hard cartilage of one monster’s slippery back. The barbed iron held. After the launch had been towed a half a mile the four “twohanded” men of Cole’s crew hauled the thrashing batlike creature in to the point where it could be dispatched, amid great splashing and lunging and outpouring of greasy blood into the brine, by hacking and poking with a sharp steel lance specially designed for the purpose. When thoroughly dead the giant ray was found to measure sixteen feet eight inches from fin to fin. “Good sport but not the sort of thing to recommend to a weakling,” T.R. told his newspaper cronies.
After a few days of such relaxations, the politician in T.R. mastered the fisherman, and he decided it was time to head back into the theatre of action.
On the train that carried him north he had two pieces of news to ponder. Woodrow Wilson was asking Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. That was all to the good.
The second piece of news boded ill for T.R.’s fondest hopes. Wilson’s Secretary of War was depriving his dear friend Leonard Wood of command of the Eastern Department where he’d done yeoman’s work organizing the Plattsburg camps, and getting the units under his command as ready for war as he could with the skimpy equipment at his disposal. He’d gone so far as to set some companies drilling with broomsticks when the War Department could not furnish rifles for them.
Wood, although publicly muzzled, had been second only to T.R. in private denunciations of the “peace at any price” policies of the President. Now the Administration was striking back by dividing General Wood’s command into three and suggesting that Manila, notorious as the repository for superfluous officers, might be a suitable field for his talents. Wood, as the ranking major general in the army, insisted on being given command of the new South-Eastern Department, with headquarters at Charleston, South Carolina, where he could at least go on training troops.
The meaning of this move was obvious. Wood was not to be considered for the command of an expeditionary force in Europe.
This shelving of the most popular military leader in the country threatened the scheme to raise a volunteer division, to which T.R. had been devoting his energies ever since the German announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare. Men from all walks of life including crowds of retired army officers had answered his call. One division wouldn’t hold them all. Now he was planning four.
The old dream of military glory had become an obsession. San Juan Hill wasn’t enough. Although not quite fiftynine T.R. had to admit that the fevers he contracted in the Amazon Basin and the bullet near his lung had damaged his old robust health. If he wasn’t well enough for field service he could at least infect others with his enthusiasm. He couldn’t help seeing himself, in spite of everything, leading one last charge, as a fitting climax to the strenuous life, and ending in a burst of glory with the flag planted on one last shelltorn hill.
On the train north T.R. determined on a personal interview with the President. He stopped off in Washington and called unannounced at the White House. The President was in a cabinet meeting. T.R. chatted for a while with his old friend the chief usher and then, before catching his New York train, drove up to the Hill to drop in on Henry Cabot Lodge.
The occasion of the call was to congratulate the other “scholar in politics” upon a successful bout of fisticuffs which the newspapers had reported as taking place in a Senate corridor, with a young pacifist who, in the course of an altercation about war policies, called the Massachusetts senator a coward. Lodge, though a far older man than T.R., hauled off and knocked the pacifist down. New England cheered. The pro-Allied press blew up the incident to heroic size.
Lodge himself was keeping mum about the affair. He did mutter something to a friend about how after a lifetime of public service “the public suddenly discovers I’m a great man when I commit a breach of the peace.”
“The dear old Brahmin,” T.R. exclaimed to one of his “newspaper cabinet,” “that’s just like him. The scholar in politics simply couldn’t bring himself to say he had indulged in a fist fight.”
The President and his advisers put their heads together as to what should be done about T.R. After exhaustive consultations with Baker and the Chiefs of Staff, Wilson had already decided to pass over Wood, and appoint John J. Pershing as commander of any American expedition that needed to be sent to Europe. Though Pershing stood in a poor light in the public press as a result of the failure of his efforts to catch Villa, it was well understood in the War Department that he had risked his military reputation through punctilious obedience to orders from Washington. To Wilson, Pershing looked like his man.
So long as Wood remained in the army he was subject to discipline, but T.R. was not only an ex-President and the most popular leader of the war party, but a possibility for the Republican nomination in 1920. He must be shelved, but gently. Wilson had to think of the support he needed in Congress to get his war measures through, particularly conscription, sure to be unpopular in many quarters. An interview was arranged.
A few days later T.R. reappeared in Washingtoa He put up at his daughter Alice Longworth’s house. As wife of a prominent member of Congress, and as a woman of sharp wit and spirit, her home constituted a last redoubt of the old Washington society of the days of John Hay and Henry Adams. Immediately the Longworth house became the center of political conjecture.
On April 10 at twelve o’clock Theodore Roosevelt appeared at the front door of the White House. He was in his usual gusty spirits. Tumulty met him in the Blue Room. He slapped Tumulty on the back and congratulated him on being the father of six. He was immediately ushered into the President’s office. Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt talked alone for fortyfive minutes. As he left T.R. was heard kidding Tumulty about having a staff job for him at his divisional headquarters in France, though it wouldn’t be a dangerous job; he could assure Mrs. Tumulty and the six children of that. Tumulty jokingly answered he had half a mind to accept.
On the White House steps T.R. found thirty waiting reporters surrounded by a crowd of some three hundred people. He flashed his teeth and his glasses and puffed out his chest for the photographers. He declared the interview was bully. The President was most courteous and attentive.
T.R. had assured Woodrow Wilson that the past was buried and that in this emergency he was giving him his complete support. He plead to be allowed to raise his division. He tried to be disarmingly jocose. If the President would let him go he’d promise not to come back. In any case, he declared he was in favor of the administration conscription bill, and would go right to work to see it was put through Congress.
He stopped himself, and turned to Tumulty, who was listening attentively to every word. “If I say anything I shouldn’t be sure and censor it,” he said waving his arms. Then addressing the reporters he added, “I’m already under orders.”
“I congratulated him upon his war message,” he continued later, in an off the re
“If any other man than he talked to me as he did I would feel assured,” he told the friends gathered to meet him at his daughter’s house, “but I was talking to Mr. Wilson … He has however left the door open.” Interested parties lost no time in reporting these remarks to the White House.
That afternoon and all next day T.R. kept open house at the Longworths’. Newton D. Baker was the first to call. He listened politely to everything T.R. had to say. “I had a good time with Baker,” T.R. told his newspaper friends. “I could twist him around my finger if I could have him about for a while … He will do exactly what Wilson tells him to do, he will think exactly as Wilson wants him to think … He has the blindest faith in the General Staff and the graduates of West Point. He doesn’t realize that a muttonhead, after an education at West Point, or Harvard, is a muttonhead still.”
It was like the old days. The ambassadors called, with Jusserand and his dear Spring Rice, old members of the “tennis cabinet,” in the lead; and Senator Lodge; and people from the Council of National Defense; and congressmen from the military affairs committees of the Senate and House. He lectured them all on the need for conscription and for four divisions of volunteers for immediate action, to be raised by himself and trained and led by General Wood.
Roosevelt’s Lost Division
When Congress passed the conscription act T.R.’s four divisions of volunteers were, in spite of vigorous pressure from the White House, incorporated in it. The provision was added that these divisions should be activated at the President’s discretion. Wilson lost no time in announcing that this was a war for professionals and not for amateurs.
General Wood, who had been acclaimed as a hero throughout the South as he travelled about inspecting campsites, couldn’t help confiding to his friends that the War Department was playing politics with him. T.R. stormed at Sagamore Hill, but issued a statement that he was bowing to superior authority, and releasing the men who had volunteered to serve under him.
Pershing, as soon as he was notified that he was chosen to lead the first troops to France, intimated privately to the Secretary of War that neither Wood nor Roosevelt would be acceptable to him overseas. Troublemakers. Physically unfit. Baker’s underlings in the War Department began spreading tales about how T.R.’s bronchitis would never support the French climate and how Leonard Wood had a hole in his head.
Tumulty, who feared a voters’ revulsion against the shelving of the two most popular military figures, argued long and valiantly on the other side. He begged his boss to let some sort of ornamental posts at least be found for them.
Joffre, when he arrived on his mission to Washington, gave out that he wanted volunteers at once. Pétain, from France, begged for volunteers. Clemenceau wrote specially to the President pointing out the morale value of a Roosevelt mission. Bryce added his plea.
Wilson had made up his mind. Once he had made up his mind there was no altering him.
“The real truth,” wrote T.R. to an Arizona friend, in the bitterness of his disappointment, “is that Wilson is bent on making this merely a war to advance his own personal fortunes from a political standpoint. He has always been more interested in preventing Wood and myself from being of service to the nation than he has of rendering himself such service.”
A great many people from both parties agreed with T.R. One of the more prominent Roosevelt volunteers, John M. Parker, a New Orleans cotton factor and a progressive Democrat who had performed as a mighty man of valor during Wilson’s campaigns in the South, made it his business to tell the President so.
“Mr. President,” said Parker, who pulled too much political weight to be denied an interview, “you preach against autocracy and today in the civilized world there is no greater autocrat than Woodrow Wilson.”
Wilson’s treatment of General Wood and Colonel Roosevelt was destroying confidence in his conduct of the war, Parker went on. “You should realize that you are simply an American citizen, exalted for the time being by the votes of your people to the President’s chair. As a man who gladly gave his own time and money touring the country to support you, I feel I have the right to criticize, because you are my hired man, just as you are the hired man of the people … remember it is their money, their sons who are making this fight … I beg you not to play politics.”
According to Tumulty the President kept his temper:
“Sir,” he replied, “I am not playing politics. Nothing could be more advantageous to me than to follow the course you suggest.”
He pointed out that the British had used Kitchener, their most famous general, for training troops. “General Wood is needed here. Colonel Roosevelt is an admirable man and a patriotic citizen but he is not a military leader.”
After fifteen stormy minutes Parker took his hat and went back to the Shoreham Hotel to write down every word that had been said. Meanwhile Roosevelt, smouldering with frustration at Sagamore Hill, was including in almost every letter of his enormous correspondence a phrase that tickled him: “Fighting this war under Wilson is like fighting the Civil War under Buchanan.”
Selective Service
Congress passed the conscription bill on May 18. The next day President Wilson issued a proclamation based on a draft Newton D. Baker had sent over from the War Department early in the month.
The proclamation quoted section five of the act which the President’s signature had just made law: “That all male persons between the ages of 21 and 30 inclusive shall be subject to registration in accordance with regulations established by the President: And upon proclamation by the President and other public notice given by him or by his direction stating the time and place of such registration it shall be the duty of all persons of the designated ages, except officers and enlisted men of the army, the navy and the National Guard and Naval Militia while in the service of the United States, to present themselves for and submit to registration under the provisions of this act.”
Failure to register was a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail followed by compulsory registration.
Woodrow Wilson went on to develop some characteristic variations upon the theme of “selective service,” the euphemism for conscription which had been hit upon as being most palatable to the American public:
“The whole nation must be a team in which each man must play the part for which he is best fitted … To this end Congress has provided that the nation shall be organized for war by selection: that each man shall be classified for service in the place to which it shall best serve the general good to call him.”
He was preparing the public for the exemption of farmers and railroadmen and seamen and essential workers in war industries.
“The day here named is the day upon which all shall present themselves for assignment to their tasks. It is for that reason destined to be remembered as one of the most conspicuous moments in our history.”
This was the historian Wilson speaking. He clearly understood that the Selective Service law, supplemented by the espionage bill Congress had in the works, would give him more power than any President had enjoyed before him.
The lag in recruiting during the past year of war prosperity and high wages had combined with what they read of the failure of recruiting in Britain to convince Wilson and his War Department that the only way an army large enough to make its weight felt in the present war could be raised was by some sort of compulsory military service. A large body of moderate Republican opinion led by William Howard Taft, whose pulpit was the League to Enforce Peace, had for some time been calling for universal military training on the Swiss model. Long before the declaration of war, the Judge Advocate General, a skinny little Missourian nam
Conscription was a bitter dose for Wilson’s Democrats to swallow. A draft army had long been as anathema as alcohol to Bryan and his supporters. Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House, declared as the debate opened that in his opinion a conscript was the next thing to a convict.
While, with the help of the Republicans, Crowder’s bill was being rammed down the throats of reluctant congressmen, the Judge Advocate General’s office was in a fever of activity. The most original feature of the bill, by which registration and selection for the draft would be in the hands of the same civilian boards that handled registration for voting, was largely the contribution of Crowder’s assistant, Major Johnson, an irrepressible young cavalry officer who, like his boss, had studied law in leisure moments of his military career. Hugh Johnson was making it his business quietly to alert the state governors, and the sheriffs of about ten thousand counties, as to what would be expected of them when the moment came. He found them almost universally cooperative. At the same time he attended to the printing, in secret and before the money to pay for them had been appropriated, of some ten million registration cards at the government printing office.
Secretary Baker had convinced the President that, so that there should be no opportunity for opposition to organize, as little time as possible should be allowed to elapse between the passage of the law and registration day. They both spent sleepless nights remembering the bloody riots against Lincoln’s draft in the Civil War. They dreaded the reaction of the large enemy alien population enrolled in German vereins and foreign language societies. The Irish were unpredictable. The Socialists, though their votes had diminished in the last election and their leadership was split on the war issue, were still to be reckoned with. Trouble was expected from women’s peace leagues and from the pacifist fringe of the labor movement, from the I.W.W. and from foreignborn anarchists stirred to frenzy against capitalist war by such agitators as Emma Goldman.