The Illusion of Victory (17 page)

In his memoirs, Pershing would later claim: “I had scarcely given a thought to being chosen as commander in chief of our forces abroad.” In 1917, he thought of little else. He wrote to Chief of Staff Scott, saying he was eager to go overseas. The day after Wilson’s war message, Pershing wrote Secretary of War Baker, fulsomely praising the president’s speech and adding that he was “prepared for the duties of this hour.” On May 2, 1917, Pershing’s pulses must have leaped when he received a telegram from his father-in-law, Senator Warren, asking if he could speak French. Pershing immediately wired that he had spent several months in France in 1908 and had learned to speak the language well. He was sure he could quickly “reacquire [a] satisfactory working knowledge.”
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The next day, May 3, Pershing got a telegram from Hugh Scott, informing him that the War Department had decided to send four infantry regiments and one artillery regiment to France from Pershing’s department. The Wilson administration was still hoping that a token expeditionary force would mollify the French and British and raise their morale. By May 10, Pershing was in Washington to discuss matters with Scott.
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The conversation left Pershing dismayed at the army’s almost total lack of preparation for a major war. The United States had only 285,000 Springfield rifles, 450 light field guns and 150 heavy guns in its armories. “It had been apparent to everybody for months that we were likely to be forced into the war,” Pershing later wrote,“and a state of war had existed for several weeks, yet scarcely a start had made for our participation. . . . The War Department seemed to be suffering from a kind of inertia.”

Pershing’s chief competitor for his job, General Leonard Wood, emphatically agreed. After a visit the previous week, Wood confided to his diary: “War Dept. Dead Sea lively in comparison. . . . Scott helpless.”
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Another glimpse of what was wrong with the War Department comes from a recollection of Secretary of War Baker. Arriving at the State, War and Navy Building one morning in April 1917, he learned from a puzzled aide that the basement was filled with typewriters—no less than 12,000 of them. The adjutant general, Brigadier General Henry P. McCain, had proclaimed them his property.

Baker asked General McCain why typewriters were overflowing the basement. Were they going to fight the war with typewriters?

“No, Mr. Secretary,” McCain chortled. But the declaration of war had alerted him to the certainty that there would be fierce competition for typewriters in Washington, and he had laid his hands on “every free typewriter in the United States.”

Baker had to explain to McCain that in wartime it might be a good idea to share some of his typewriters with the navy, the Quartermaster Department, and maybe even with the army’s bête noire, the Marine Corps. McCain went away disgruntled. He was typical of the army’s bureau chiefs, who regarded their departments as semi-independent fiefdoms over which the general staff had little authority. To make matters worse, most of these men were pushing seventy, having risen to power in the army’s rigid seniority system. In the words of a young captain named George C. Marshall, who would rise to fame in another war with Germany, they had all “ceased mental development years before.”
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Pershing was more encouraged by his meeting with Secretary of War Baker. His first glimpse did not enthuse the general. Baker looked “diminutive” in a large office chair, sitting with one leg curled up beneath him, the other dangling several inches from the floor. But Pershing soon found himself liking the little man’s decisive manner and crisp style. Baker said his reading in the history of the Civil War had convinced him that civilian superiors should give generals the authority to fight the war their way and back them up when they needed political support. Pershing left the meeting feeling he had found an important friend.

Pershing did his best to participate in decisions that would affect his mission. He cast an emphatic vote against the amalgamation of the American army into the French and British armies. Baker was convinced and persuaded an uncertain Wilson to back the general. After some hesitation, Pershing also cast a more covert vote against giving his old friend Theodore Roosevelt any role overseas—something that no doubt pleased Wilson.

By this time, Roosevelt was resigned to his rejection and on May 20 wrote Pershing a warm letter, congratulating him on his appointment to command the expeditionary force. The former president asked Pershing if his two sons, Theodore, Jr., twenty-seven, and Archibald, twenty-three, could serve under the general. They had spent two previous summers training at a preparedness camp set up by Roosevelt and General Wood at Plattsburgh, New York. The president had announced that only regular officers would go with Pershing’s division. If this rule remained in force, TR said both young men were prepared to serve in the enlisted ranks.

Roosevelt added a touching postscript, saying that if he were not “old and heavy and stiff,” he would volunteer as a sergeant. Pershing replied with a promise that he would send for Ted and Archie as soon as possible.
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On May 24, two weeks after Pershing arrived in Washington, Secretary Baker took the general to meet Woodrow Wilson for the first time. Although the president was cordial, his conversation was surprisingly superficial. He did not say a word about what was happening in France, nor did he give even a hint of how he thought Pershing should deal with the panicky Allies and their demand for amalgamation.
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Four days later, on an afternoon so rainy and foggy that the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline were invisible, Pershing and a staff of 191 officers and men sailed for Europe on the SS
Baltic.
Although the departure was supposedly top secret, a battery on Governors Island fired a salute—another example of the U.S. Army’s reluctance to admit it was fighting a serious war.
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Elsewhere in the United States, the reality of the war was being brought home to people in less heroic ways. At Columbia University in New York, President Nicholas Murray Butler fired two professors, one for working with antiwar groups, the other for petitioning Congress not to send draftees overseas. The
New York Times
praised Butler for “doing his duty” by striking this blow against “disloyalty.” Historian Charles A. Beard resigned in protest. Many other colleges soon followed Butler’s lead, firing professors who declined to support the war.
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This attitude was only a portent of a war within the war, which would soon be waged by Woodrow Wilson’s Department of Justice, under the leadership of Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory. Earlier, the liberal Gregory had pushed antitrust prosecutions and persuaded Wilson to appoint fellow liberal Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, like most Americans, including the president, Gregory was convinced that the country swarmed with German secret agents and homegrown admirers of Kaiser Wilhelm. How to track them down was the big problem. The Justice Department had only three hundred men in its Bureau of Investigation (BI). Since the government did not provide these agents with automobiles or expenses for taxis, they had to pursue spies on foot or on streetcars.
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The answer to Gregory’s predicament emerged in Chicago, where a middle-aged businessman named Alfred M. Briggs offered to recruit twenty or thirty affluent men of his vintage who would hunt spies and other hidden enemies of the war effort gratis. They would even provide their own automobiles. Soon Briggs was in Washington, D.C., conferring with A. Bruce Bielaski, head of the BI. Bielaski had used civilian volunteers in the past in one of the first progressive reform campaigns, against the white slave trade. The BI head listened attentively while Briggs proposed a nationwide organization, the American Protective League (APL), which would operate under cover as “Secret Service Divisions” in cities and towns throughout the United States.
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Bielaski swiftly persuaded Attorney General Gregory to approve this bad idea. By June the APL had 250,000 activists in its ranks and was rooting out dissent in six hundred cities and towns. It was ridiculously easy to join. A dollar bought a man membership and entitled him to call himself part of the “Secret Service.”

Local APL leaders were usually prominent men in their communities—bankers, lawyers, clergymen. Unfortunately, their presumably good education did not include a course on the Bill of Rights. Their methods frequently involved opening suspects’ mail, burglarizing their homes and offices, tapping their telephones and planting listening devices in their parlors and bedrooms. Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, under whom the nation’s professional Secret Service agents served, warned Wilson that these amateurs were getting out of hand. Wilson wrote to Attorney General Gregory, opining that it was dangerous to have such an organization operating in the United States:“I wonder if there is any way in which we could stop it.” After the APL turned out in massive force to make sure there were no disruptions on draft registration day, Gregory told the president he thought they were a wonderful group of 100 percent Americans, and Wilson dropped the subject.
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The president also had nothing to say about the American Defense Society, which turned from preaching preparedness to hunting for spies, saboteurs and dissidents. Nor did he criticize the state Councils of Defense organized by many governors. Like the APL, the councils operated with scant attention to the Bill of Rights.

The government also played a direct role in suppressing dissent. New York police raided meetings of the Friends of Irish Freedom, where harsh things were being said against conscription and demands for immediate peace brought “prolonged cheers.” In Boston, labor union members staged a protest parade down Tremont Street, near the Common. They carried banners such as: “If Is This a Popular War Why Conscription? We Demand Peace!” The paraders were attacked by well-organized squads of soldiers and sailors commanded by uniformed officers. For three hours the military pursued, clubbed, kicked and battered the paraders, often forcing them to kiss the American flag on their knees. Afterward, the police, who watched the fracas in bemusement, arrested five of the marchers on charges of assault and battery. The
Boston Journal
called the riot a disgrace that would “harden the hearts of our already numerous skeptics of our war for democracy.”
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In West Virginia, the state secretary of the Socialist Party wrote a pamphlet attacking the draft as a foreshadowing of a “militarized America.” he got six months in jail. In Philadelphia, another socialist was sentenced to six months in jail for possession of an antiwar pamphlet,
Long Live the Constitution of the United States.
The U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld the sentence; liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes affirmed the legality of the Espionage Act under the doctrine that in time of war, antigovernment critics can be “a clear and present danger” to victory.
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At first, some judges dismissed charges against men and women who distributed literature or spoke out against the draft. Popular among the protesters was the pamphlet
The Price We Pay
, which described the war in France in horrific terms. In Albany, a man named Pierce gave a copy to one John Scully, who was holding forth against the draft in a saloon. Scully was working undercover for the American Protective League, and Pierce was soon in jail. His indictment declared that the statements in the pamphlet, which included a diatribe against fighting for J.P. Morgan, were “wholly false and untrue.” therefore Pierce was obstructing the war effort. When Pierce was convicted, this interpretation of the little-noticed clause in the Espionage Act swiftly became gospel in courts across the country.
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The government soon broadened this mandate for total patriotism from printed words to speech. John White, an Ohio farmer, received twenty-one months in the penitentiary for declaring that the murder of women and children by German soldiers was no worse than the crimes that American soldiers committed in the Philippines during the 1900–1902 insurrection there. An elderly South Dakota farmer got five years for urging a young man not to enlist in a war that was “all foolishness.”
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Also in the mix was some old-fashioned revenge. A prime target was strident Wilson critic Jeremiah O’Leary. His magazine,
Bull
, was suppressed by Postmaster General Burleson, and O’Leary was arrested for obstructing the draft, which he had attacked in numerous speeches. Convinced that he had no hope of getting a fair trial, O’Leary jumped bail and fled to the state of Washington, where he changed his name and became a farmer.
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Wilson did not seem interested in or even aware of this ruthless repression of dissent. On July 27, 1917, when Lucius W. Niemann, the editor of the Milwaukee
Journal
, urged him to take a strong stand against draft resisters in Wisconsin, the president told Joe Tumulty that “anybody is entitled to make a campaign against the draft law provided they don’t stand in the way of the administration of it by any overt acts or improper influences.” But the president showed the other side of his contradictory nature when he told the cabinet that a man who had publicly hoped Secretary of War Baker would become an early casualty should be arrested “and given the 33rd degree and then the story of his comment given to the public so he would be forever damned by the people.”
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Another large administration worry was unrest among African-Americans. The newspaper stories of German plots to foster a black revolution in the South that surfaced during the first week of the war were only a symptom of this concern. White fears were not assuaged when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) held a convention in Washington, D.C., in May 1917. Behind the scenes, W. E.B. Du Bois, the association’s brightest intellect, wrote most of the resolutions, which declared: “The real cause of this World War is the despising of the darker races by the dominant groups of men.” the convention called for the extension of the principle of the consent of the governed “not only to the smaller nations of Europe but among the natives of Asia and Africa, the Western Indies and the Negroes of the United States.” the NAACP insisted that American blacks were loyal to the United States and pledged their support of the war, but “absolute loyalty in arms and civil duties need not for a moment lead us to abate our just complaints and just demands.”