Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  The Judge Advocate General’s office worked fast. Before the ink was dry on the President’s proclamation the machinery for registration was well on the way to completion. Crowder was appointed Provost Marshal General to administer it.

  The Power to Curb

  At the same time the Department of Justice, without waiting for the additional powers to curb free speech which administration lawyers were incorporating in the espionage bill Congress was hotly debating, mobilized a force of special agents to nip anticonscription agitation in the bud. Attorney General Gregory made the announcement from Washington that, “Any spoken or written word, uttered or written for the purpose of interfering with the purpose of the Selective Service Act, will result in prompt arrest of the person or persons responsible.”

  In New York two Columbia students and a Barnard girl were taken into custody for getting up a protest against conscription. In Columbus, Ohio, some more students and a printer were arrested for preparing an antiwar poster and charged with treason. A Socialist meeting was raided in Topeka, Kansas. In Kansas City the three Browder brothers were arrested, along with several other persons, for declaring in public that they would refuse to register. In Wichita Falls, Texas, the members of a Socialist group, calling themselves the Farmers and Laborers Protective Union, were hauled off to jail. Eight prospective draftdodgers were picked up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and several in small towns in Wisconsin.

  In New York the police overawed the disloyal and the foreignborn, and the youthful radicals who packed to overflowing mass meetings held by an Anti-Conscription League in Madison Square Garden, and at Hunts Point Casino in the Bronx. The President found it necessary to issue a fresh proclamation warning draftdodgers who were trying to leave the country, and agitators against registration, that they would run afoul of the Selective Service Act.

  Enthusiastic citizens began to take the law into their own hands. Soldiers and sailors attended pacifist meetings to howl down the orators. Many a man lost his job because he spoke English with an accent. In Racine, Wisconsin, the employees of a tin plant made a machinist, heard to mutter against conscription, crawl across the floor on his knees to kiss an American flag. In Omaha a young man suspected of being a socialist was chased by a mob, and only escaped by outrunning them.

  On Capitol Hill a battle raged over censorship of the press. Wilson was insisting that a clause be inserted in the espionage bill giving him power to censor the newspapers. This was too much even for his most faithful adherents among the nation’s journalists. Letters and telegrams against censorship piled up on Tumulty’s desk. He was reminded of the bad odor the Alien and Sedition Laws had left in the history books. Even the warmongering New York Times published editorials against censorship. Tumulty, who as usual had his ear among the grass roots, formulated his opinion in writing. “I know how strongly you feel on the matter of a strict censorship, but I would not be doing my full duty to you … if I did not say … that there is gradually growing a feeling of bitter resentment against the whole business.”

  When the House voted censorship down Wilson, hoping it might be restored to the bill in the Senate, invited some of his most energetic opponents among the Republican old guard to the White House. Henry Cabot Lodge, after spending two hours talking to the President, along with Senator Gallinger and Senator Knox, made an entry in his diary: “The President has at last discovered that without the Republicans he would not and could not get his legislation … He was most polite and talked well, as he always does so far as expression goes. We discussed revenue, food control and censorship chiefly. The two latter were his objects.” … Lodge added selfrighteously: “We told him perfectly pleasantly some truths which he ought to have heard from those who surround him.”

  In spite of the agreeable way the President conducted the interview, Lodge still hated the man. “I watched and studied his face tonight as I have often done before—a curious mixture of acuteness, intelligence, and extreme underlying timidity—a shifty, furtive, sinister expression can always be detected by a good observer … The man is just what he has been all along, thinking of the country only in terms of Wilson.”

  In the end the President had to content himself with an Espionage Act shorn of specific powers of press censorship. As it turned out the powers conferred on the presidency by the mass of wartime legislation were so extensive that censorship was hardly needed. So long as the war lasted most of the news that appeared in the newspapers was piped to them through the administration’s Bureau of Public Information.

  Section three of the Espionage Act contained a clause which could be interpreted by the courts to prove an effective curb on free speech in wartime: “… and whosoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting of enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service of the United States, shall be punished with a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.”

  Once Lead This People into War

  Registration Day passed off quietly. Throughout the nation men lined up at precinct polling places with no more concern than if they were voting in an election. The Census Bureau had estimated that there were something more than ten million men of draft age in the country. When all returns were in it turned out that more than nine million six hundred thousand had registered. The slackers, announced the Department of Justice, would be rounded up in due course.

  The administration press hailed the turnout as a plebiscite in favor of the Wilsonian policies. The Republican papers joined in the flagwaving.

  The editions that came out on the morning of June 6 had few exceptions to note to the general calm. In Butte, Montana, a small riot was caused by the parade of an Irish society. A radical Finn made a speech which nobody could understand. The mayor, addressing the troublemakers from the roof of a house, induced the crowds to disperse before shooting began. A report from Flagstaff, Arizona, alleged that the Navahos had chased the officer who appeared to register them off their reservation. In New Mexico the governor of the Santo Domingo pueblo was arrested for refusing to produce a list of his people’s names. In Ignacio, Colorado, the Utes took to the hills at the first rumor of a draft and were reported to have furnished themselves with liquor and to be performing war dances and bear dances. At Phoenix three hundred Russian Doukhobor settlers politely but firmly explained to the sheriff that their religion would never allow them to register for war.

  With these few exceptions the young men of America stood up to be counted. With registration the war spirit spread. “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance,” Woodrow Wilson had told Frank Cobb. His words proved prophetic.

  The Secret Government

  From being one of the drowsiest of capitals, Washington, as the summer of 1917 advanced, took on an air of bustle. Fresh faces daily filled the great waiting room of the newly constructed Union Station. As the government departments proved incapable of coping with enormous wartime demands new agencies had to be created. Each new agency imported clerical workers. The government kept taking over apartment houses for offices without providing living accommodations for the people who were going to work in them. A housing shortage developed. Hotel rooms were all taken. Industrialists come to help had to live in their private cars lined up in the railroad yards. Every boarding house was full. Editorials in the newspapers implored respectable residents to do their bit by renting spare rooms to young women secretaries.

  TEN THOUSAND NEW CLERICAL WORKERS EXPECTED THIS SUMMER, ran a headline in the Evening Star. According to the Census Bureau the population of the District increased by forty thousand in a year.

  The dilatory habits of the federal government died hard. The War Department proved especially incapable of coping with its problems, Civilians had to be called in. Pushing business executives
invaded leisurely bureaus where, in high old rooms shuttered against the heat, ailing colonels, often relics of the Indian wars, had for years shuffled yellowed foolscap under slowmoving ceiling fans, with the secretarial assistance provided, as often as not, by needy gentlewomen of Confederate families, who spoke of themselves with some pride as being “in office,” and were loath to be hurried; and offices closed for the day at four in the afternoon. One man, on loan from a busy New York corporation, called in to explain to the Chief of Staff how some problem of procurement could be solved, after having worked his whole office force through several nights to get up the facts and figures, went back to his associates appalled: the elderly general, halfway through the explanation, fell asleep in his chair.

  One of the chief wonders of the European war, as seen by American men of affairs, was the effectiveness of German industrial mobilization. For years advocates of preparedness had been calling for the creation of some sort of skeleton agency which might, if the need came, establish contact between the War Department and the industries capable of producing war materials. The navy already had a civilian consulting board, figureheaded by Thomas A. Edison and engaged in a survey of all possible sources of munitions.

  So strong was the feeling against military measures of any kind in the Wilson administration and on Capitol Hill that the first moves to create a Council of National Defense had to be almost surreptitious.

  Dr. Hollis Godfrey, a Massachusetts engineer and writer of books for boys, who was president of the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, had been propounding a plan for industrial mobilization under such a council ever since, on a trip to England in 1906, he found Campbell-Bannerman and young Winston Churchill in the throes of organizing a war council for the empire.

  With the worsening of relations with Germany, Dr. Godfrey’s plan began to assume more than hypothetical importance. He went to work with fresh zest and managed to interest Secretary of War Garrison, who was wearing himself out trying to move the Wilson administration towards preparedness. The chairmen of the Senate and House committees on military affairs approved the project and Elihu Root, who as McKinley’s Secretary of War tried to centralize the administration of the army under a General Staff, drafted a bill. Secretary Baker took time off from the confusions and frustrations of the campaign against Villa to revise the plan and gave it his endorsement. General Wood and T.R. were loud in its favor.

  Bringing the projected Council of National Defense to the attention of the President was a ticklish matter. Anything endorsed by Leonard Wood smelt of Wilson’s tormentors in the Republican press. It was deemed advisable that Dr. Godfrey should call on Colonel House at his New York apartment. House approved the plan, revised it again, and, when he judged the time was ripe, presented it to the President. He used such discretion that Woodrow Wilson is reported to have exclaimed, “This is extraordinary, this composite work … It is exactly the putting of this theory of education into government. I am heartily for it.”

  The Council of National Defense had to be handled even more gingerly by its sponsors in Congress, for fear of touching off pacifist oratory. A clause was quietly inserted in the National Defense Act giving the President powers towards the mobilization of industry and transportation in case of war. The same act assuaged the suspicions of the antimilitarists by throwing a spoke into the wheels of central military planning. The General Staff was reduced in numbers and more than half its members were forbidden to be stationed in Washington at any one time.

  The subsequent Military Appropriations Act set up a Council of National Defense to consist of the Secretaries of War, Navy, the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor. Provision was made for unpaid advisory commissions of businessmen, manufacturers and technicians. A small appropriation was made for hiring a permanent staff.

  McAdoo, who had a good deal to do with the scheme at this point, kept the Treasury off, claiming with some justice that he already had more work than he could handle. It was McAdoo who suggested the appointment of Walter S. Gifford, an inconspicuous young Harvard man from Salem, Massachusetts, who had risen by quiet brains to the post of chief statistician of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company by the time he was thirty, as director, and of Grosvenor B. Clarkson as secretary. The setting up of this novel federal agency met with little comment in Congress or in the press.

  The President described the council as maintaining “subordinate bodies of specially qualified persons … capable of organizing to the utmost the resources of the country.” He added that these commissions would be nonpartisan. Secretary Baker, who contributed his mouselike presence to the first meetings as permanent chairman, seems to have seen to it that they remained so.

  When Clarkson, who was a Republican, wrote up his history of the vast organizations that developed out of these vague beginnings, he went out of his way to state with some solemnity that he was unable to “recall a single instance in which Mr. Baker or the council requested him to make an appointment or take an administrative action on a personal or partisan basis … a demonstration of nonpartisanship in a crisis that the writer would not have deemed possible before going to Washington … The credit,” he added, “is no less due to Mr. Baker by reason of the fact that this attitude reflected the policy of the President … politics simply did not enter into the makeup of the American war machine.”

  The Council of National Defense, in itself formal and inert, proved, under the continually increasing demands of the war machine, to be the fertile parent of a series of commissions that, acting by rule of thumb, without theory or legal basis, organized American industry, as the President put it “to the utmost,” for the war effort.

  First came the Advisory Commission. On December 7, 1916, a group of somewhat bewildered tycoons was brought together in a Washington hotel room. In their derby hats and overcoats, they were photographed with the appropriate cabinet officers on the steps of the War Department. Besides Dr. Godfrey who fathered the scheme, there was Daniel Willard of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; Howard E. Coffin of the Hudson Motor Company, a champion of preparedness so energetic that his colleagues described him as giving the impression of a gale of wind when he came into the room; shy Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who as much as Henry Ford was an energumen of mass distribution; Dr. Franklin Martin of the American College of Surgeons; the canny old cigarmaker Samuel Gompers who had created the American Federation of Labor in his own image, and Bernard Baruch. When a reporter asked Baruch what his business was he answered tersely: “Speculator.”

  When the journalists began to catch on to the scope of the activities of the chairmen of the various commissions spawned by the Council of National Defense they tagged the commissioners “dollar a year men,” taking a hint from the President’s words: “They serve the government without remuneration, efficiency being their sole object and Americanism their only motive.”

  The War Department’s separate procurement agencies, following time-honored procedures in the name of the Signal Corps, or the Engineers, or the Medical Corps, were proving incapable of serving even the needs of the force of around a hundred and thirty thousand men that existed before the passage of the National Defense Act. The Quartermaster Corps had a staff of about sixty. Many of their methods dated from the Civil War.

  With the taking over of the National Guard, and the prospect of a greater army to come, agencies had to be improvised if the troops were to have shoes and uniforms and guns. The Advisory Commission kept bringing fresh groups of businessmen to Washington to create them.

  As a disgruntled Republican congressman, George Scott Graham of Pennsylvania, investigating in 1919 what he called “the secret government of the United States” reported after reading the records of the Advisory Commission: “An examination of these minutes discloses the fact that a commission of seven men chosen by the President seem to have devised the entire system of purchasing war supplies, planned a press censorship, designed a system of food control and selected Herbert Hoover as
its director, determined on a daylight saving scheme, and in a word, designed practically every war measure which Congress subsequently enacted; and did all this behind closed doors, weeks and even months before the Congress of the United States declared war on Germany.”

  Grosvenor Clarkson considered these words such a handsome tribute to his organization that he quoted them in his Industrial America in the World War.

  The Dollar a Year Men

  “Reference and deference are the curse of bureaucracy” wrote this same Mr. Clarkson when he became their historian after acting as secretary of both the formal Council, which functioned merely to endorse with the majesty of the presidential mandate the acts of the subsidiary commissions, and of the allimportant Advisory Commission. The administrators who crowded into Washington hotels and hall bedrooms to man the subcommissions that kept separating off from the parent body had one thing in common: a fear and hatred of bureaucratic methods.

  They were raised in the school of getting things done. Their system was to find a man who could do a job and let him do it no matter how and no questions asked. “My notion of organization,” Herbert Hoover told the President, when he was called to Washington from his Belgian Relief to head the Food Administration which grew out of one of the projects of the Advisory Commission, “is to size up the problem, then send for the best man or woman in the country who has the ‘know how,’ give him a room, table, chair, pencil, paper and wastebasket—and the injunction to get other people to help, and then solve it.”