Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Bryce had retired with his aim still unachieved, and T.R.’s old friend Cecil Spring Rice was slated to replace him. Meanwhile Colonel House brought Foreign Minister Grey’s private secretary Sir William Tyrrell to call on the President at the White House.

  “We all spoke with the utmost candor and without diplomatic gloss,” House noted in his diary. “If some of the veteran diplomats could have heard us they would have fallen in a faint,” the Britisher confided to House after they left the executive office.

  The British washed their hands of Huerta. From that moment on the Mexican problem was in Uncle Sam’s lap.

  Mr. Bryan’s Thirty Treaties

  Bryan was only too glad to leave the day to day administration of foreign affairs to the President. As Secretary of State he felt that his historic function was to negotiate arbitration treaties. He was convinced he had found an infallible remedy for war.

  Back in 1905 in an article in The Commoner he had suggested that all the differences between nations should be submitted to a court of arbitration. If nations could agree to a year’s cooling off period while some sort of neutral factfinding commission investigated their causes of friction, declarations of war would be postponed long enough to let hot tempers cool.

  He explained his plan more in detail in an address to the Interparliamentary Union in London in the summer of 1906. James Bryce called it “certainly splendid.” The English press reported the project with enthusiasm. Arbitration was officially endorsed by the Interparliamentary Union and by the Liberal government. Bryan’s evangel appealed to the nonconformist conscience then in the ascendant in Britain. Great hopes were raised.

  After Roosevelt failed to induce the Senate to ratify his arbitration treaties, Bryan, who was drumming up his plan before Chautauquas and at peace conferences all over the country, urged Taft to try again. At a meeting with Taft and Elihu Root he convinced them that his plan was practical and that it would find popular backing in Great Britain and at least in the smaller European countries. Taft’s arbitration treaties met the same fate as T.R.’s.

  As soon as Bryan was installed as Secretary of State he went to work. He used all his skill in political manoeuvering and all his powers of persuasion. Before he accepted the office he showed a sample treaty to Woodrow Wilson for his approval. One of his first acts was to call together the entire diplomatic corps and ask them to submit his proposals to their governments.

  The warmth of his dedication to the cause of peace melted the icy scepticism of the professional diplomats. Using the arts of compromise and cajolement he had acquired working with platform committees at many a party convention he allowed the treaties to be worded to suit the individual prejudices of the various governments. While trying to save the spirit he conceded the letter. Starting with San Salvador and the Netherlands he negotiated a first batch of eighteen arbitration treaties, and took them in person to the Senate. Germany was one of the few countries that refused.

  Bryan had a knack with politicians, and especially with senators. “I remained in the office of the Clerk of the Senate two days while the treaties were being discussed, answering questions as they arose,” he wrote. While the treaties were being drafted he had taken the precaution of consulting the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs in advance on every provision. Where the two previous Republican administrations had failed, Bryan, by his conciliatory manner and his personal prestige with Democratic politicians, blarneyed the Senate into ratification.

  Bryan’s chest swelled with pride under his piqué vest. For years he had been throwing all the organ notes of his voice into his favorite oration, which he called “the Prince of Peace.”

  At the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, his optimism rose to the point where he dared exclaim: “We know of no cause today that cannot better be settled by reason than by war. I believe there will be no war while I am Secretary of State … I hope we have seen the last great war.”

  At the formal signing of a large batch of the treaties, amid the whir of motion picture cameras and the jostling of journalists, a lifesized oil painting was unveiled of Mr. Bryan with an arbitration treaty in his hand.

  The Secretary had induced his friend Secretary of the Navy Daniels to have a set of paperweights made for him from some old steel swords at the Navy Yard. They were cast in the form of a plowshare and engraved with two quotations: one the soothing words Mr. Bryan himself used when the Japanese ambassador complained about the treatment of his nationals in California: “Nothing is final between friends”; and the other the more familiar phrase from Isaiah about beating swords into plowshares. These he distributed to the signatory diplomats as mementos of the occasion.

  Chapter 5

  THE RED MAN

  WHILE Bryan was happily signing arbitration treaties and assuring Chautauquas and summer conferences that the triumph of peace was at hand, more wary observers of the international scene were expressing misgivings. A few months after the inauguration of Wilson’s administration, T.R.’s friend Spring Rice—then representing the British in Stockholm—wrote Henry Adams asking for his impressions of “the professor’s victory.” He went on to describe the mounting tension in Europe.

  In a sort of code used by the intimates of Henry Adams’ and John Hay’s twin houses on Lafayette Square the spirit of militarism was in those days called “The Red Man.” “Isn’t it curious,” Spring Rice wrote Uncle Henry, as he called him, “that we are all supposing ourselves to be standing on the edge of the most terrific disaster (for Europe) which has ever taken place. Even the hardened dip. looks a little solemn when the subject is alluded to at dinner. The appearance of the Red Man in a particularly realistic manner, in the middle of the cocked hats and laced coats, had had rather a calming effect”—he was talking about the latest outbreak of war in the Balkans, which he feared might be the beginning of something worse—“We shall have some red spots on our white kid gloves. But this isn’t yet the real thing. Austria may have given the order which may lead Europe to a several-years’ war”—he was referring to Austrian efforts to keep the southern Slavic nations from getting a port on the Adriatic—“but it is singular to think how tremendous are the calamities that may be brought about at any moment by one slight act, based on what look to you the meanest motives. As a matter of fact it is a peoples’ question, the struggle for existence between races; and this struggle has been going on for ages and perhaps the moment for the decisive struggle has come.”

  The Dragon’s Teeth

  The Red Man was indeed at large. In Mexico and in the Balkans armed bands fought and murdered and raped and burned. While the armies of civilized Europe marched and countermarched in more and more realistic manoeuvers, the “hardened dips” of the foreign chancelleries cooperated with Bryan and his aides in the State Department as they would humor some child’s game. Perhaps it eased their consciences a little to mutter little prayers for peace at a time when every move they made on the chessboard of power politics brought war nearer.

  Woodrow Wilson, sitting long hours at his solitary typewriter upstairs in the White House, was conducting the relations of the United States with the Mexican revolutionists in such a way as to keep the diplomats thoroughly puzzled.

  At the end of January 1914 Spring Rice, who was just settling down at the British Embassy in Washington, described the situation in a letter to Sir Edward Grey’s secretary:

  “The President has maintained and rather increased his influence in Congress and in the country, but he is as mysterious as ever. When he summons the newspaper men he talks to them at length and in excellent language, but when they leave his presence they say to each other, What on earth did he say? When he sees the members of Congress he reads them a lecture and tells them what he thinks is good for them to know, which appears to them to be very little. He asks the advice of no one.”

  In Mexico armed men kept springing up from the blood of the dead Madero. His mystique of dem
ocracy spread in strange forms to even the remotest hamlets where Spanish was hardly spoken, much as the reforming zeal of the Theodore Roosevelt era infected the North American backlands with a yearning for righteousness. In the United States the reforms took legal shape according to the ancient traditions of Anglo-Saxon comity; but in Mexico the young men who trooped out of the mountain cornfields and the dry maguey plantations and the irrigated sugarcane to make a revolution, found themselves slaves of the only social formation they knew outside of the communal village and the hacienda: the robber band under a chieftain who enforced his will with the gun.

  The Mexicans remained puzzling to Woodrow Wilson to the last.

  A Constant and Intolerable Annoyance

  He had family perplexities too. Right along he had hated the idea of his daughters having beaux. At Princeton his sarcasms tore to pieces the young men the girls occasionally ventured to bring home to meals. Jessie managed to win her father’s approval of a college professor and married him. “The pang of it is still deep in my heart,” the President wrote Mrs. Peck after the wedding.

  Now Eleanor, after an effort to keep her engagement secret for fear of her father’s wrath, was about to marry his Secretary of the Treasury. The press, inevitably nosy about the doings of nubile young women in the White House, was filling the society pages with rumors of Eleanor’s and Margaret’s engagement to this man and that. One day the President betrayed his underlying tension by lashing out at the newspapermen Tumulty worked so hard to keep in a cosy frame of mind.

  “I am a public character for the time being,” he announced at a press conference, his sharp jaw jutting and his eyes flashing behind his nose-glasses, “but the ladies of my household are not servants of the government and they are not public characters. I deeply resent the treatment they are receiving at the hands of the newspapers … It is a constant and intolerable annoyance … If this continues,” he glowered into the embarrassed faces assembled in front of his desk, “I shall deal with you, not as President, but as man to man.”

  The men trudged out of the oval office like schoolboys who had been tonguelashed by the headmaster.

  It was hard for Wilson to keep his serenity amid so many worries. His greatest anxiety was about his wife. Ellen Wilson’s health was worse. She had a fall in her room one day, but she wouldn’t stay in bed. She laughed off her symptoms, appealing from their father to her daughters. “This goose keeps worrying about me for no reason at all.”

  She was busy with a private project. While her husband worried about the Colorado mine strike, and the need to send troops to the Mexican border to keep the bandits from spilling over into United States territory, and busied himself piloting antitrust legislation through Congress, Ellen Wilson was lobbying for a bill of her own. As a southerner she had been raised to look out for the wellbeing of Negroes. Now in Washington she found families living in back alleys under conditions she felt were a disgrace to the national capital. She joined the group of social workers to get through a bill to clean up these conditions. All her ebbing strength, all her quiet charm and winsome ways, went into backing her housing bill.

  In April the President stole a few days off to take his wife to White Sulphur Springs. He was trying to believe that the change of air would do her good. A nurse went along.

  The Dignity of the United States

  The presidential party had hardly settled at the Greenbrier before a dispatch from Secretary Bryan appeared on Wilson’s breakfast table. Huerta’s commander at Tampico had arrested a navy paymaster and the crew of a ship’s boat flying the American flag. The detention was short but Admiral Mayo, in command of the American fleet hovering off the Mexican coast, was demanding the punishment of the guilty Mexicans and a twentyone gun salute in apology for the insult to the flag.

  The President hurried back to Washington. For a week the cables back and forth to the chargé d’affaires, who replaced the recalled ambassador in Mexico City, resounded with that twentyone gun salute.

  Huerta was sorry. His officers were sorry. It had all been a mistake. Huerta offered to arbitrate the dispute at The Hague.

  The President refused. Arbitration would mean recognizing the bloodstained old drunkard. Instead he delivered himself of an ultimatum, giving Huerta until April 19 to salute the American flag. “People seem to want a war with Mexico,” he told his daughters when they brought their mother back from the springs, “but they shan’t have it if I can prevent it.”

  To Wilson this seemed the chance he’d been looking for to put the Mexican dictator out of office. To Huerta it looked like a chance to rally the Mexican people behind him. Already his prestige was rising so that wealthy Mexicans were subscribing to a loan to be used to buy munitions for his army.

  When the news reached Washington that a shipment of arms was about to be landed at Vera Cruz from the Hamburg-America steamer Ypiranga, Wilson went before the two houses of Congress and obtained a joint resolution empowering him to use the army and navy to enforce his demands. The yellow press was all for cleaning up “the mess in Mexico.” Western senators even talked of taking over Central America clear to the Panama Canal.

  Meanwhile Bryan and Wilson decided that, since no state of war existed and they didn’t intend it should exist, it would be most incorrect to seize the cargo off a friendly ship on the high seas. They must wait until the shipment was unloaded and seize the arms on Mexican soil.

  At eleven in the morning on April 21, 1914, a thousand marines landed from the American fleet off Vera Cruz and occupied the customhouse. The Mexicans fought back. Another three thousand men had to be landed next day. Before quiet was restored in Vera Cruz a hundred and twenty-six Mexicans were dead and the American forces had lost nineteen dead and seventyone wounded.

  President Wilson was very profoundly shocked.

  Some good came of the affair. The sanitary methods which had proved successful in Cuba and in Panama were applied to the area occupied by American troops to the lasting benefit of the veracruzanos, and the dreadful old fortress prison of San Juan de Ullúa was opened to the light of day and its miserable victims turned loose.

  The violation of Mexican soil, if it didn’t unite the warring factions in support of Huerta, at least gave unanimity to their hatred of the gringos. American consulates were burned, American property was looted, Americans were murdered. The cry of indignation resounded throughout Latin America and found a selfrighteous echo in the London press.

  Sober opinion in the United States, particularly among the reforming element the President depended on for support, was almost wholly against him. In one of his moments of selfdeception he had told the reporters the day before the landing that the purpose of the naval demonstration was not to eliminate Huerta but “to compell the recognition of the dignity of the United States … I have no enthusiasm for war but I have enthusiasm for the dignity of the United States.”

  The President became entangled in his own contradictions. There was a general outcry against going to war over a mere matter of prestige. Andrew Carnegie’s was one of thousands of messages of protest. He reminded Wilson of Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput: this was like “the fabled war of two kings to decide which end of the egg should first be broken.”

  The incident ended with the flight of Americans from Mexico, and a cordon of troops spread along the Mexican border. The Administration renewed the embargo on arms to the constitutionalists. Except for Villa, who tried to curry favor in Washington by pretending to be delighted, the constitutionalists were protesting even more vigorously than their enemy Huerta against the Yankee invasion.

  An initiative, which had the bland encouragement of Colonel House, from three Latin-American ambassadors, Naon of Argentina, de Gama of Brazil and Suarez Mújica of Chile, gave the Administration a chance to retire from an impossible position. The three ambassadors offered to mediate between the various Mexican factions and between the Mexicans and Washington.

  The Mexican problem was taken behind closed doors at on
e of the resort hotels at Niagara Falls. The mediation of the “A.B.C.” powers, if it did not do much to alleviate the anarchic situation in Mexico, at least did something to convince the rest of Latin America that the United States was not planning an invasion. United States citizens could once more venture out on the streets in Latin-American towns without having stones thrown at them.

  To Die in a War of Service

  On May 11, 1914, three days after his daughter Eleanor’s marriage to Secretary McAdoo, President Wilson rode in the New York funeral procession of seventeen of the navy men killed at Vera Cruz. Enormous crowds packed Broadway under the halfmast flags. In front of the Marine Barracks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard the President delivered an address to serve as their funeral oration.

  It would have been disgraceful to die in a war of aggression, he said, but “to die in a war of service is glorious.” In landing at Vera Cruz Americans had been performing a service for the Mexican people. “I never was under fire but I fancy it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you … The cheers of the moment are not what a man ought to think about but the verdict of his conscience and the conscience of mankind.”

  It was a very hot day. The sun beat down on the ranks of bluejackets and marines at parade rest. A crowd of ten thousand people broke through the police lines and milled around on the Navy Yard. Nineteen women fainted and several small children narrowly escaped being trampled. Members of the official party noticed that the President’s face showed deep emotion when he looked down on the seventeen guncarriages and the flagcovered coffins: it was by his orders that these young men had gone to their deaths.