The Illusion of Victory (16 page)

These dissenters amounted to no more than ripples in the immense stream of 9.5 million unprotesting registrants. Baker and Creel had pulled off a feat of national persuasion that was little less than awesome. One explanation may be the words of a Texas father, who was asked why he was ready to let his son fight in a foreign war: “I’d rather have my son go to heaven in France than to hell in America!” Another explanation may be glimpsed in a comment in the
New York Times
:“The Selective Service Draft gives a long and sorely needed means of disciplining a certain rather insolent foreign element in the nation.”
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Hyphenates, beware!

In Congress, while the Four Minute Men were preaching acceptance of the draft in the American heartland, another brawl raged over an “omnibus bill” that gave the president wide powers to deal with spies, saboteurs and other forms of subversion; to control exports of materials that might be needed for the war effort; and to bar “treasonous” materials from the mail. The quarrel erupted when senators spotted in the middle of the bureaucratese the president’s demand for the power to censor the nation’s newspapers. Almost as infuriating was an appropriation of $100 million to fund the Committee on Public Information—with no accounting to Congress on how this large sum would be spent. Republicans—and many newspapers—were already viewing Creel’s committee as a Wilson publicity machine.

Woodrow Wilson’s low opinion of the press and fears of its supposed distortions had not been assuaged by George Creel’s arguments in favor of government expression. The president’s demand for censorship powers had Democratic support, but Republican progressives such as Senator Hiram Johnson of California went berserk over this attempt to repeal the First Amendment. Predictably, the
New York Times
and other papers agreed, calling the “spy” bill a tyrannous measure.
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Another political disaster began taking shape before the White House staff ’s appalled eyes. Tumulty and other Wilson advisers begged the president to consult with leading figures in the press to create a censorship board composed of (presumably) patriotic newsmen. Instead, Wilson wrote a letter to the
New York Times
, declaring that press censorship was “absolutely necessary to the public safety.” He was backed by Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory, Postmaster General Albert Burleson, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who added to the uproar by forbidding State Department employees to speak to reporters under any circumstances. Gregory topped this indiscretion by circulating a memorandum to the Justice Department, warning that many newspapers had been infiltrated by German sympathizers. The outrage of the major papers, most of which had led the cry for war, was spectacular.
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After weeks of wrangling, in which the president was repeatedly described as a would-be tyrant by the Republicans, Congress finally voted down the sweeping censorship powers Wilson demanded. But the lawmakers left in the hands of the postmaster general the authority to decide which newspapers were seditious and liable to prosecution. The Committee on Public Information also emerged with its power to control official war news largely intact. Even more worrisome—and largely ignored by the bill’s opponents—was a passage stating that anyone who made “false reports or false statements with the intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces” or interfered with the recruiting of these forces would be subject to a $10,000 fine and twenty years in jail.

These words would soon inflict misery on thousands of Americans. The sponsors of the bill brushed aside worries about free speech expressed by some members of Congress. They were told that “policies of the government and [the] acts of its officers” would always be open to criticism. Only makers of “willfully false” statements would be prosecuted.
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On June 15, 1917, Wilson signed the Espionage Bill, as it was now called, in spite of its lack of censorship powers. He and Congress might have continued wrangling over this explosive issue and the powers of Creel’s committee for the rest of the summer. But a new sense of urgency was injected into the national mood by the arrival of missions from France and England to discuss their nations’ military and financial needs. England’s was led by former prime minister Arthur Balfour, now foreign secretary in the war cabinet of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Smooth-tongued and exuding charm, Balfour made a favorable impression on everybody except the Irish independence men, who hated him for his savage repression when he was chief secretary for Ireland.

France’s group was headed by former premier René Viviani, who was known as the William Jennings Bryan of France for his fervid oratory. His behavior did not win friends or influence people. When a manicurist failed to keep a 6 A.M. appointment, Viviani flew into such a rage, people wondered if the alliance were about to collapse. The orator announced he would address the Senate—but only if President Wilson was in the audience. Whereupon he spoke in French. The newspapers and the administration gave up on him and made portly Marshal Joseph “Papa” Joffre the star attraction. This affable soldier had been puffed to mythic proportions for stopping the German drive on Paris in 1914. Since then, Joffre had killed even more men than Field Marshal Haig in futile offenses. In early 1917, Papa had been promoted to field marshal and retired to dining out on his past glory.
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An alert observer might have spotted a symptom of trouble in the peculiar way the French and British missions operated. They barely spoke to each other. They preferred to talk separately to the Americans. Eventually, however, both the king’s men and the heirs of Napoleon Bonaparte informed the astonished Americans that they were on the brink of collapse. The U-boats were sinking 900,000 tons of shipping a month, threatening England with starvation. The French army was in a funk after another failed offensive in April 1917, under a new commander, General Robert Nivelle, who had the Haig-Joffre genius for mass slaughter. Behind the murk of censorship and Wellington House’s miasma of hate and bunk, the Germans were winning the war.

What was the answer? Besides massive infusions of American cash into their depleted exchequers, both the French and the British wanted men—the quicker the better. There was no need to train the raw American youths who would soon peacefully register for selective service. British General G.T. M. “Tommy” Bridges urged U.S. Chief of Staff Scott to send “five hundred thousand untrained men at once to our depots in England to be trained there, and drafted into our armies in France.”
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An appalled General Tasker H. Bliss, the army’s assistant chief of staff, told Secretary of War Baker:“When the war is over it may be a literal fact that the American flag may not have appeared anywhere on the line because our organizations will simply be parts of battalions and regiments of their Entente Allies. . . . I have received the impression from English and French officers that such is their deliberate desire.”

When Bliss and Chief of Staff Scott expressed doubts about this approach, the British suggested letting them recruit volunteers in the United States, with the help of their propaganda machine. (By this time, Wellington House had been replaced by a bigger and more aggressive government department devoted to official lies.) Backing up the British negotiators was a cable from Prime Minister David Lloyd George: “It is vital that American troops of all arms be poured into France as soon as possible.” The April 2 antiwar protester whose placard read,“Is this the United States of Great Britain?” would seem to have been onto something.
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The Allied panic was profoundly embarrassing to President Wilson and his advisers—so embarrassing that it was never revealed to the American people. Aside from casting further doubt on Wilson’s prophetic conversation with Frank Cobb of the
New York World
, it forces us to ask what impact this revelation had on Woodrow Wilson. Almost certainly, it inflicted a terrible wound in Wilson’s self-image as a president. It also shook his confidence in Colonel House, his supposedly all-knowing, roving diplomatic representative. Wilson struggled to deny this wound, to reassert his confidence in his presidential judgment. But the realization that American soldiers would have to die in possibly huge numbers to gain him a place at the peace table soon flowered in Wilson’s subconscious as gnawing guilt.

This guilt was intensified by another revelation that Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour made to the president in the privacy of the White House. He told Wilson about a number of secret treaties that the Allies had signed. Russia had been promised Constantinople, a prize for which it had hungered for centuries. France was to regain its lost province of Alsace-Lorraine and a chunk of Germany’s mineral-rich Saar basin. The French would also divide Turkey’s Mediterranean empire and Germany’s African colonies with England.

Japan was promised Berlin’s Far East colonies, including control of China’s Shantung peninsula, hitherto a German preserve. The crudest and most blatant payoff went to Italy for deciding to enter the war in 1915. Rome was to get the Austrian South Tyrol and Trieste regions in the north as well as control of the Dalmatian coast on the east side of the Adriatic Sea and some colonies in Africa. For Wilson, it must have been profoundly disturbing to discover behind the facade of his noble war for democracy the hoary tradition of who gets what.
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At first, Wilson was inclined to insist on a revocation of these testaments to imperial greed before the Allies got another dollar of U.S. aid or before a single American soldier headed for Europe. But Colonel House, his Anglophilia never more nakedly exposed, persuaded the president that such a blunt approach would disrupt the war effort—and victory had become the only thing that mattered. Wilson reluctantly assented; from a practical point of view, House was right. But the decision added another dimension to the guilt that began to fester in Woodrow Wilson’s psyche.
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Meanwhile, on the practical side, the frantic demand for American soldiers suggested that Theodore Roosevelt was right. There was an urgent need to get some Yanks into the front lines in France to lift the morale, if not fill the ranks, of the reeling British and French armies. This discomfiting truth was underscored by a telegram from Georges Clemenceau, soon to become premier of France, urging Wilson to reconsider and give Roosevelt his volunteer force. The president and the general staff remained united in their opposition to Teddy. But they realized if some sort of American expeditionary force were to go overseas, they had better find a commander for it, fast.

By far the best-known soldier on the horizon was Major General Leonard Wood. Chief of Staff Hugh Scott admired him so extravagantly that, when war was declared, he offered to resign so Wood could take his job. Wood’s chief liability was his tendency to play politics. He had joined Theodore Roosevelt to campaign for preparedness while Wilson had been talking neutrality. In January the president told Baker he had “no confidence in General Wood’s discretion or his loyalty to his superiors.” George Creel voiced a typically over-the-top opinion:“Wood ought to be shot for treason!”
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Down in Texas was another major general, who had led Wilson’s Punitive Expedition into Mexico in pursuit of the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa for shooting up a New Mexico border town and murdering many other Americans elsewhere. Ramrod straight at fifty-seven, with a brush mustache and a hawkish countenance, John Pershing had not a few things to recommend him. He had led a company of African-American soldiers up San Juan Hill in 1898 alongside Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. In the Philippines, he had pacified the island of Mindinao in a deft campaign against fierce Moro tribesmen with the loss of only a handful of men. In 1905, he had married Helen Frances Warren, daughter of Republican Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming, who at that time was chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee.

Pershing had some liabilities. He was a friend if not a political ally of Theodore Roosevelt, who had promoted him to brigadier general over 862 senior officers. Some of these infuriated gentlemen had spread a whispering campaign that Pershing had fathered several illegitimate children in the Philippines; the story had gotten into the newspapers and Pershing had been forced to obtain affidavits from loyal friends to support his denials. When he was proposed for superintendent of West Point a few years later, an angry newspaper campaign based on these Philippine accusations had killed the appointment.

Pershing’s largest liability, however, was an act of fate. On the night of August 27, 1915, a smoky fire had broken out in his family’s quarters in the Presidio, outside San Francisco. He had been in El Paso, Texas, trying to keep the Mexican border quiet. Helen Warren Pershing and her three daughters were asphyxiated. A son, Warren, was rescued by an orderly. A man with such a tragedy in his immediate past might seem a dubious candidate for high command. But Pershing had endured the loss with public stoicism; only a handful of close friends and family knew the depths of his grief.
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Pershing had performed well in Mexico, except for a tendency to say unkind things about Wilson’s refusal to let him pursue Pancho Villa all the way to Mexico City if necessary. He had ceased these after-dinner diatribes when warned by Hugh Scott. There was no doubt that Pershing wanted the new command. In February, after Wilson had recalled the Punitive Expedition without catching Villa, Pershing summoned to his tent some reporters who had been on the campaign and said: “We have broken diplomatic relations with Germany. That means we will send an expedition abroad. I’d like to command it. Each of you must know some way you can help me. Now tell me how I can help you so you can help me.”
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