Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  As the fine seaside afternoon wore on Joe Tumulty’s voice grew boyishly confident over the phone. Maybe the east was doubtful but the middlewest looked increasingly good. Colorado and Kansas were sure.

  The shock came at dinnertime. Tumulty’s voice lost its resonance. Hughes would carry Illinois and New York.

  Around nine that night the reporters broke into Tumulty’s office in Asbury Park to find him sitting with his son staring glumly out of the window. They brought in a bulletin for him to comment on. The New York World had conceded defeat. The World, edited by a personal friend, Frank Cobb, was Wilson’s most fervent supporter among eastern newspapers. Tumulty kept his dukes up with an optimistic pronouncement. “Wilson will win. The west has not yet been heard from.”

  Tumulty’s heart was in his boots. As soon as he could get rid of the reporters he called Shadow Lawn.

  The President had already heard the bad news from Grayson. “Well Tumulty, I guess we’ve been badly licked,” was all he would say.

  Grayson had been trying to console him by prophesying a comeback like Grover Cleveland’s. Wilson replied with a favorite story about a Confederate veteran who reached home after Appomattox. He walked with a limp. He had his arm in a sling. His house and barns had been burned, his fences were down, his stock driven off, his family scattered. “I’m glad I fought,” he said, after surveying the ruins, “but I’m damned if I’ll ever love another country.”

  In New York at the Hotel Astor Mr. Hughes was awakened from his afternoon nap with the news that he would be the next President. The Times searchlight was flashing a Republican victory. A skysign on the roof of the hotel spelled out HUGHES in electric bulbs. Marchers from the Union League Club appeared with a band in Times Square calling on Mr. Hughes to claim election. At Oyster Bay, Theodore Roosevelt was already declaring that the Republican victory was “a vindication of our national honor.”

  Charles Evans Hughes was a careful man and a decorous man. There was a lot of rural upstate New York in his makeup. Against his own better judgement, he had allowed himself to be cajoled into resigning from the Supreme Court to run against Wilson. He wasn’t going any further out on that limb. He insisted that he would make no claims until the count was completed in California.

  Meanwhile, over at the Biltmore, a victory banquet which had been arranged for the Democrats, with Henry Morgenthau at the head of the table, was falling flat. Colonel House refused to attend. “While I did not expect defeat”—House’s promise to Wilson of 230 electoral votes for sure left him needing only 35 more to be picked up in the heat of battle—“I did not wish to be at such a gathering without knowing whether the President was successful.” Morgenthau told House afterwards that “there never was such a morguelike entertainment in the annals of time.”

  Instead of going to the Democratic banquet Colonel House walked around with Attorney General Gregory to the Bar Association Library to look up the federal statutes on the subject of the President’s resignation.

  The outcome of the war in Europe seemed to teeter on a knife edge. The moment was too dangerous for an interregnum in Washington. Wilson had decided to resign at once if he failed in re-election.

  The idea appealed to him as a political theorist as well as a practical politician. He was convinced that the American government must be made more responsive to the popular mandate, more like the English party government by a responsible ministry. He had talked it over many times with House. Resigning would turn defeat into a constitutionally constructive gesture.

  So that nobody could say he was acting in a fit of pique, two days before the election he outlined his plan in a letter to Secretary of State Lansing.

  “Again and again the question has arisen in my mind, What would it be my duty to do were Mr. Hughes to be elected? Four months would elapse before he could take charge of the affairs of the government, and during these four months I would be without such moral backing from the nation as would be necessary to steady and control our relations with other governments … Such a situation would be fraught with the gravest dangers … The course I have in mind is dependent upon the consent and cooperation of the Vice President; but if I could gain his consent to the plan I would ask your permission to invite Mr. Hughes to become Secretary of State and would then join the Vice President in resigning.”

  As the law then ran, the Secretary of State would be next in succession to the presidency.

  It was a gesture planned in the grand style. “It seems,” House wrote in his diary, “that during the uncertain hours of Tuesday night … both the President and Mrs. Wilson were cheered, as I was, by the thought of the dramatic dénouement we had in mind in the event of defeat.”

  The letter, sealed with sealingwax and addressed in Woodrow Wilson’s own hand, with “most confidential” underlined on the envelope, was entrusted to Frank Polk, a crony of House’s who was counsellor at the State Department. He handed it to Secretary Lansing when they met at Democratic headquarters, where Lansing arrived on his way from voting at his home in Watertown, to the Balthasar’s feast, as Henry Morgenthau was calling it, at the Biltmore.

  Wilson supporters went disconsolately to bed. SWEEPING VICTORY FOR HUGHES, read the headlines in their own New York World. Conservatives who distrusted theorists and innovators and pro-Ally fanatics in the eastern cities, turned in contentedly: the country was in good hands.

  Colonel House was between the sheets by eleven. “I believe I can truthfully say I have not worried a moment,” he confided in his diary. “If I had I could not have stood the strain. It was not that I was altogether certain of the result, but I never permit myself to worry over matters about which I have no control.”

  The colonel admitted that he woke at five. By daybreak he was hanging onto his bedside phone. The far west was going Democratic. He immediately called the despairing watchers at party headquarters and urged that they telephone the county chairmen of every doubtful state telling them to pay no attention to press reports that Hughes was elected. As soon as he decently could he had Attorney General Gregory up and worrying about federal measures to protect the ballotboxes wherever the vote was in doubt.

  California was the crucial state; in southern California the vote was expected to be particularly close.

  “I did not close my eyes all night,” Meredith Snyder, the reform Democrat who was mayor of Los Angeles told Josephus Daniels in reminiscent vein some years later, “until the result of the election was declared. Shortly after the polls closed I ordered that every ballotbox be sealed and stationed policemen in every booth with orders to shoot any man who should lay the weight of his hands on the ballotbox. With associates I went from booth to booth all night. We kept vigilant watch and a staunch Democrat was assigned as watcher in every booth. Nothing was left undone to see that there was no tampering. I knew that the fate of the Presidency in the next four years would be settled in those boxes, and I staked my life that the votes should be counted as cast.”

  All over the country Democratic watchers and wardheelers were frightening each other out of a year’s growth with the tale of a mammoth Wall Street plot, financed by millionaires, to steal the election for the Republicans.

  “We lost no State I had placed in the certainties,” Colonel House boasted to his diary. “I regard this with some degree of pride. The President was skeptical regarding the value of organization. I wonder whether he is now …”

  On the morning of November 8, while Woodrow Wilson was shaving, his daughter Margaret knocked on the bathroom door with the news that the New York Times was about to run off an extra announcing that the election was in doubt. Wilson thought she was pulling his leg. “You tell that to the marines,” he called back through the door.

  At Asbury Park, Tumulty had been comforted in his unhappy vigil by telephone calls from an unknown supporter who claimed to be calling from Republican headquarters. The Republicans were worried, the strange voice kept saying. “Don’t concede.”

  To get some fresh air
the President went out with Grayson for a few holes of golf. “How is your game today, Mr. President?” asked an acquaintance on the links. Wilson is quoted as having answered, with a wave of the hand, that Grayson had him three down, but he didn’t care, he was four states up over yesterday’s returns.

  The Democratic column kept building on the tallysheets. Everything depended on the outcome of the close race in California. It wasn’t until November 10 that Vance McCormick dared wire his county chairmen to buy red fire and celebrate.

  A telegram came into Shadow Lawn from Wilson’s runningmate. Vice President Thomas R. Marshall was a professional Hoosier, fond of classical quotations and pokerfaced statements in the crackerbarrel style: “T’is not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door,” he wired, “but t’is enough. T’will serve.”

  A story went through the corridors of the Pulitzer Building that a reporter who tried to get into the Hughes suite early that morning for a statement was told, “The President can’t be disturbed.”

  “Well when he wakes up tell him he’s no longer President,” replied the reporter. “Wilson’s re-elected.”

  PART THREE

  The Birth of Leviathan

  In the sense in which we have been wont to think of armies, these are no armies in this struggle. There are entire nations armed … It is not an army that we must shape and train for war; it is a nation.

  —Woodrow Wilson’s statement

  accompanying his draft proclamation,

  May 18, 1917

  Chapter 11

  THE END OF MEDIATION

  As the immediate consequence of Villa’s raid Congress ordered an increase in the regular army to some five thousand officers and a hundred and twentythree thousand enlisted men. The states were instructed to raise their militia units to full strength and the President was authorized to take them into the federal service at his discretion as the need arose. The entire National Guard was estimated at sixtyseven thousand men in March 1916 but many regiments mustered barely half their theoretical numbers. Although the navy was fast catching up with Germany’s, the American military establishment on land was proportionately smaller than Holland’s. Recruits were needed and fast.

  Little Newton D. Baker, just beginning his David and Goliath contest with the gigantic lethargy of the War Department, hired a publicityman to produce leaflets and posters extolling the military life. One of those groups of enthusiasts for improving the behavior of their fellow citizens which abounded on the American scene was sponsoring the national tour of a trainful of exhibits to warn people against the reckless driving of automobiles and industrial accidents generally. A recruiting sergeant was placed on the Safety First Train.

  The National Guard

  Enlistments in the regular army lagged. Seven years looked like a long time in the land of opportunity. Munitions plants were offering good wages. Farmers were looking forward to high prices. American young men showed every sign of preferring safety to soldiering.

  On the other hand Leonard Wood’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign for preparedness stimulated enthusiasm for enlistment in the militia. The Plattsburgtype camps and the R.O.T.C. were proving attractive to college men. The war spirit was rising among them. Citizen soldiers were not entirely unprepared for the shock when, on June 18, a few days before the humiliating ambush at Carrizal, President Wilson started calling out the state militias for service on the Mexican border.

  The colleges and highschools had closed down for the season. American youngsters were curious about war. As they turned to the sports page in the newspapers it was hard quite to ignore the daily headlines. Young men dropped their search for summer jobs and hurried to enlist. Armories filled up with confused youths called in some cases all of a sudden from their beds. Many guardsmen with wives and young families gave up positions they had staked their future on.

  The officers knew no more of soldiering than the enlisted men. Probably the outfit best prepared was an Illinois regiment which had been acting out wargames for the benefit of a motion picture company.

  Equipment was lacking or thoroughly out of date. Most of the militia regiments were issued woolen o.d. uniforms impossible in the arid heat of the border country. Rifles and ammunition were in short supply. Machineguns were rare and mostly of unworkable types. For the purposes of logistics most units depended on the old Civil War wagon train. The army mule was still considered the proper means of military transport. The Quartermaster General in Washington was supposed to fill in deficiencies in the equipment of the state militias, but the War Department was ensnarled in requisition systems which had proved faulty in the campaign against Geronimo and almost fatal in the Spanish War.

  The feeding and equipping of the national guard regiments was left largely to the good will of state officials and to the ingenuity of officers and noncoms yanked suddenly out of civilian life. Camps were improvised out of fairgrounds and on back lots, cook shacks and bath houses built, latrines dug. By guess and by God trainloads of excited young men found their way to the border.

  Accustomed to think of themselves as volunteers, the militiamen were unexpectedly faced with the federal oath. Regular army officers supervised the grim ceremony. Their orders read: “If any man refuses to step forward and answer to his name when it is called, or refuses to raise his hand and take the oath, he is to be jerked out of line and placed under arrest pending courtmartial.”

  Henceforward the militiamen were subject to the Articles of War. Overnight they found themselves in the straightjacket of a military caste system which ran counter to all the habits of democracy. Officers were superior beings, enlisted men coolies who must learn to obey orders with automatic alacrity.

  The manual of arms. Close order drill. Atten’shun. Eyes front. Left dress. Wipe that smile off your face. Forward ’arch.

  By midsummer a hundred thousand men sweltered under tents from Brownsville to San Diego. Boys who dreamed of marching on Mexico City found themselves standing guard among the dusty mesquite and the pricklypears. The sun beat down with the weight of a sledgehammer. Duststorms or “sand devils” blinded sentries on watch or snatched up hats or loose bits of clothing to whirl them out of sight into the air. Most of the time the country was dry as an oven but as summer advanced cloudbursts would wash out campsites and leave the desert a sea of slippery mud. There were continual latrine rumors of greasers sniping across the border and now and then a fulldress alarm when companies would throw themselves on their bellies and open fire into the dark. Like as not the alarm would turn out to have been caused, not by raiding bandits but by some sulky old Indian on a burro trying to sneak across the border to sell his watermelons.

  The one universal gripe was the attitude of civilians towards enlisted men. Girls turned up their noses at anything less than a second loot’s gold bars. The first fruits of twenty years of fanatical agitation for prohibition was that the canteens only sold 2½% beer. Thirsty privates had to buy rotgut at fancy prices in blind tigers. On leave they were persecuted by military police and sheriff’s deputies. At Ysleta near El Paso the owner of a dance hall put up a sign:

  DANCING FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

  SOLDIERS AND DOGS NOT ALLOWED

  Building the canal in Panama and fighting yellow jack in Cuba and campaigning against the insurrectos in the Philippines, the Medical Corps had learned to cope, as no other army service in history, with the problems of military health in torrid regions. Sanitation was excellent. Outside of sunburn, heat prostration, cracked lips from the dry air and occasional outbreaks of venereal disease, the health of the troops was good, better, the public health men said, than it would have been at home.

  Reports of the military aptitude of the militia were less favorable.

  After the national guard units were mustered out in the late fall of 1916 the Militia Bureau of the War Department published the results of an inquest on efficiency:

  “As to the present degree of readiness and fitness for field service of organizations
of infantry, the answer in 89% of the reports was either ‘fair,’ ‘poor,’ ‘unfitted,’ ‘not ready,’ ‘wholly unprepared,’ or the like; 46 reports out of 102 said that under the most favorable conditions it would require 6 months in the field to have the regiment meet an inferior enemy, and 2 years to meet trained troops; 10 reports stated that it was doubtful if organizations inspected would ever become efficient under their present officers.

  “Of the cavalry, one third of the reports indicated that it would require from 6 to 9 months to make the organizations fit for service against an inferior enemy, and approximately from 2 to 3 years against trained troops. In 6 other reports 4 to 6 months was considered the time needed to make them ready for active service.

  “In the field artillery there were 30 inspections—6 of regiments, 8 of battalions and 16 of separate batteries. In 17 the organizations were reported as ‘unfit for field service’ … None of the engineer organizations was reported as fit for field service …”

  The regular army, though superior in the manual of arms, was not much better off in equipment than the militia. Testifying before a congressional committee during the following winter, the ranking U. S. Major General, Leonard A. Wood, pointed out that the regular army totally lacked hand grenades or instruction in their use, or the trench mortars which were proving so important in the fighting in Europe. There were virtually no machineguns or signal apparatus; no searchlights or antiaircraft weapons or usable airplanes for that matter. Field artillery was inadequate, small arm ammunition was in short supply. Nothing had been done to expand production of muchneeded automatic rifles. Coast defense guns lacked fire control systems. The few modern light guns the army had had been bought from a firm supplying the British, and American ammunition didn’t fit them.