Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Behind the scenes both sides were busy. The German generals were using the respite to consolidate their military positions and to sort out the units which could be spared for service at the western front. Nor were the Bolsheviks idle. Russian troops were fraternizing with the Germans along the whole length of the lines. Propaganda leaflets calling on the German workingclass to end the imperialist war were being hurried to the front from the printing shops of Petrograd and distributed by the hundreds of thousands.

  The first talks ended with a ten day truce during which both sets of negotiators were to consult their governments. The German generals left dismayed. Somehow these despised Bolsheviks had managed to turn Brest-Litovsk into a sounding board for the preaching of their revolutionary apocalypse.

  Von Hindenburg described the situation in his memoirs: “On December 15 an armistice had been concluded on the Russian front … Of course it would entirely have corresponded with our desires if the peace bells could have rung. The place of those bells was taken by the inflammatory wild speeches of revolutionary doctrinaires with which the conference room at Brest-Litovsk resounded … Peace on earth was to be assured by the wholesale massacre of the bourgeoisie … It seemed to me that Lenin and Trotzky behaved more like the victors than the vanquished, trying to sow the seeds of political dissolution in the rear as well as in the ranks of the army … I need hardly give any assurance,” ruefully added the Prussian commander in chief, “that to negotiate with a Russian terrorist government was extremely disagreeable to a man of my political views.”

  Thawing Out the Railroads

  With the coming of the holidays domestic problems piled up on the President’s desk. The country was locked in one of the harshest cold spells on record. Blizzards in the west and zero weather on the eastern seaboard were disrupting railroad traffic, already disorganized by conflicting priorities issued by the commissions, purchasing bureaus and quartermaster’s agencies which proliferated in Washington and around the thirtytwo camps where the draftees were in training. Every army paymaster was putting blue priority tags on the shipments he wanted with the result that priorities lost all meaning.

  The railroads had come into the war in bad shape. Management was plagued by the results of past piratical financing, and held in a vice between the demands of skilled labor for wage increases, generally admitted to be long overdue, and the Interstate Commerce Commission’s refusal to allow rates to be raised. The railroads were undermanned. High wages in munitions plants and shipyards were draining off their best employees. The draft boards depleted the rest. The growth of war exports, without compensating imports, tended to fill the railroad yards in the east with empty freightcars waiting for a westerly load. On top of that the prolonged cold spell froze up locomotives, trapped barges on rivers and canals and increased the nationwide demand for coal and petroleum products. The railroad war board appointed by the Council of National Defense tried to unsnarl the tangle through voluntary cooperation but to no avail.

  As Christmas approached, news came to Washington daily of plants shutting down for lack of fuel, of finished goods essential to the war effort jammed into warehouses or deteriorating on open docks, of ships tied up in frozen harbors. New York City was facing a coal famine. A hundred and fifty ships were anchored in the bay waiting for coal. In two weeks no mails had left for Europe. Newspapers were claiming that within seven days there would be no coal at all on Manhattan. Criticism of the conduct of war production was mounting in Congress. Somebody had to be put in charge to keep transportation moving.

  For the past month whenever the President and his Secretary of the Treasury had a moment together they had talked railroads. Where was the man who could organize the whole network and run it as a continental unit? Wilson’s soninlaw already had the Treasury and four other fulltime jobs. “Mac I wonder if you would do it?” the President asked him one day. No man to underestimate his own powers, McAdoo answered that since he was already deep in railroad finance maybe he had better take the job himself rather than give it to someone he would have trouble cooperating with. Under the authority of a provision of the Army Appropriations Act, the President issued a proclamation taking possession of every railroad in the country and appointing William Gibbs McAdoo, with supreme powers over wages, rates, routing and financing, as director.

  A Baneful Seething

  In his address to the railroad executives gathered in at the White House the summer before when the President was trying to induce them to meet the railroad workers halfway and stave off a railroad strike, he spoke with emotion of the “baneful seething” he found beneath the surface of America. This baneful seething, if proper action were not taken, might express itself in radical action “the consequences of which no man can foresee.”

  Now he saw the possibilities of the sort of radical action he dreaded much enhanced by the flood of propaganda the Russian Bolsheviks were letting loose on the world. He saw Socialists, I.W.W.s, pacifists, anarchists of the Emma Goldman stripe all contributing in their separate ways to help enemy aliens and German agents impede the war effort. While he was a stickler for the forms of the constitutional process, he intended to use his powers under the espionage law and draft laws to the full.

  His Attorney General was House’s old Texas friend T. W. Gregory, a devout adherent since the days of the Texas delegation at the Baltimore convention. Gregory made his name as a lawyer by conducting the government case against the New York New Haven & Hartford in an antitrust prosecution. House described him as loyal as Caesar’s legion. Now Gregory was zealously backing up the President by sending his assistants far and wide over the country to root out sedition.

  Gregory’s fellow Texan, Postmaster General Burleson, was already making life difficult for the hyphenated press. He banned the chief Irish newspapers The Freeman’s Journal, The Irish World and The Gaelic American from the mails for statements disrespectful of the English ally. German and slavic language papers were continuously scrutinized for sedition. The Socialist Leader, published in Milwaukee, a city under suspicion as both a German-American and a Socialist center, was denied mailing privileges. Even the liberal Metropolitan Magazine, among whose contributors and editors were staunch adherents of the New Freedom, had an issue declared unmailable on account of an article by William Hard questioning the Administration’s policy in the Caribbean. Organs of the angry young radicals, such as Max Eastman’s Masses, were put out of business.

  The Department of Justice even took action against a motion picture entitled The Spirit of 1776 which was forbidden the screen on account of a scene showing redcoats committing atrocities against revolutionary civilians. The Attorney General was so pleased with the judge’s decision in this case, tried in a federal court in California, that he had it published as a pamphlet.

  Gregory’s agents meanwhile were seeking indictments against the seditious and the disloyal. The notorious anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were already in the toils of the law for their opposition to conscription. Enemy aliens were being weeded out of training camps and interned as fast as they could be apprehended. The disaffected were marked for deportation. Indictments were in the works against a college professor named Scott Nearing, who had been dismissed by the University of Pennsylvania for pacifist utterances; and against Rose Pastor Stokes, a Socialist from East Side New York, an old Wilson admirer, who was unable to stomach the Allied war aims as revealed by the secret treaties, and was saying so in public. Warrants were out for leaders of the Non-Partisan League who were too outspoken in their admiration for Senator La Follette. In Akely, Minnesota, a young Socialist let his fear of the Department of Justice so prey on his mind that he blew his head off by biting into a dynamite cap. In Chicago the federal District Attorneys were carefully laying the groundwork for the fulldress state trial of one-eyed William D. Haywood and a hundred and one members of the Industrial Workers of the World.

  These “Wobblies” were easier game than the Socialists. The Socialists were respectable
people. Their convictions about the sanctity of the democratic process were very near Woodrow Wilson’s own. The Wobblies came from the bottom of the heap.

  Their fundamental tenet, like that of the Russian Bolsheviks, was that the exploiting class, as they called the employers of the world, and the working class had nothing in common. Unlike the Russian Bolsheviks who were all for seizing government power, they would have nothing to do with the state, either theoretically or practically. They boasted of their belief in sabotage and direct action. They dreamed of the general strike which, by some mystical process they never got very far towards describing, would peacefully transform society so that the men who did the work would own the tools of production and retain the profits now being siphoned off into the money bags of parasite capitalists. It was a doctrine which appealed to the wild frontier fringe of American labor. It was a doctrine for tramps and freelivers. It smacked of talk around the campfire in hobo jungles and of the independence of the homesteader invading the wilderness with his axe and his gun. As Americans, they claimed, they were born with the right of free speech.

  The Wobblies may well at that time have had a million and a half adherents. They encouraged draftdodging and denounced the war as a capitalist device to squeeze profits out of the blood of conscript workers. Their doctrines were prevalent among the lumbermen of the Northwest who were producing timbers for the shipyards and spruce for the airplanes which were so slow in coming into production. They were stirring up strikes and freespeech fights which, it was claimed, impeded the war effort. The trial and eventual conviction of the entire leadership and the brutally long terms imposed by Judge Landis virtually removed the Wobblies’ frontier syndicalism from the lexicon of American Labor.

  While Gregory’s federal agents, using what they called presidential warrants when they could not get warrants duly issued by grand juries, and even more zealous state officials, labored mightily to place critics of the presidential policies behind bars, the general public joined in the hue and cry.

  Forty authors of standing petitioned the Senate for the expulsion of that wilful man, La Follette. German courses were dropped from schools and colleges. German dishes disappeared from bills of fare. Sauerkraut became known as liberty cabbage, German measles was renamed. German clover appeared in the seed catalogues as crimson or liberty clover. All manifestations of foreign culture became suspect. German operas were dropped from the repertory. The drive against German music culminated in the arrest of Dr. Carl Muck, the elderly and muchadmired conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

  The Opinions of Leviathan

  “It is not an army that we must shape and train for war. It is a nation,” Wilson wrote in his draft proclamation. “The whole nation must be a team.” To turn the whole nation into a team it was not enough to punish the expression of the wrong opinions. It was necessary to disseminate the right opinions.

  During the first weeks after the declaration of war, at a time when Wilson was distracted by Congress’s refusal to give him, along with his other wartime powers, the censorship of the press, there appeared on the White House desk the sort of document he most liked to peruse when he was trying to make up his mind on some issue. The epistle summed up the arguments for and against official wartime censorship and suggested that what was needed was not suppression, but expression; in other words a publicity campaign to sell the war to the nation.

  This brief was the work of a Colorado journalist who had supported the President with such vim, through a set of slashing editorials and a book on the issues, during the 1916 campaign, that Tumulty had him down for a post in one of the departments. The journalist’s name was George Creel.

  Creel was a little shrimp of a man with burning dark eyes set in an ugly face under a shock of curly black hair. He came from an impoverished family of Virginians who had moved to Missouri after the Civil War. He had made his way up through Kansas City newspapers and muckraking New York magazines by energy and brass to the position of Police Commissioner in Denver. He was a leader of the reform element among Colorado Democrats. He had graduated from the tubthumping Denver Post to his own Rocky Mountain News. He was married to Blanche Bates, one of the reigning stars of the American stage.

  A hardworking man with an inexhaustible selfconfidence, his failing was snap judgements. He was famous for his wise cracks. His remark that Senator Lodge, like the soil of New England, was carefully cultivated but naturally sterile, undoubtedly endeared him to the President.

  “To Creel,” wrote Mark Sullivan, the journalistic chronicler of the period, “there are only two classes of men. There are skunks and the greatest man that ever lived. The greatest man that ever lived is plural and includes everyone who is on Creel’s side in whatever public issue he happens at the moment to be concerned with.” “It must be admitted,” Creel wrote of himself, “that an open mind is no part of my inheritance. I took in prejudices with mother’s milk and was weaned on partisanship.”

  For years Creel, working his noisy way through single tax, socialism, muckraking, progressivism and reform to the New Freedom, had been proclaiming that Woodrow Wilson was the greatest man that ever lived. He certainly did not keep that opinion to himself when he appeared at the White House for consultation about the Committee on Public Information the President had decided to set up with Daniels, Baker and Secretary of State Lansing on the letterhead. The result of a single interview was that Creel was appointed chairman with full executive powers. It was understood that his instructions would come direct from the President.

  As the wartime tensions increased around the President’s desk, Creel, along with Baruch, Newton D. Baker and Colonel House were about the only men Tumulty was instructed to pass into the upstairs study. Creel was Wilson’s link with the Censorship Board, with the Post Office and the Department of Justice. He cooperated with Military and Naval Intelligence. Through these he exercised the President’s power to suppress. As head of the Committee for Public Information his function, so he liked to put it, was expression. He became the President’s mouthpiece in the war of slogans.

  Creel set up his office across the street from the White House in an old brick residence on Jackson Place. There he collected about him a staff of Wilson-minded journalists who, through subsidiary offices in the large cities, spread the doctrine from coast to coast.

  The C.P.I. became the fountainhead of war news for the Washington press corps. The existence of an official press censorship was consistently denied but editors were safer if their material had passed through Creel’s hands.

  He developed a news bureau and a set of syndicated services giving the administration slant to events and explaining away false and damaging rumors. Special matter was prepared for the foreignlanguage press. A picture division was set up and a film division. A foreign division channelled propaganda into Germany and Russia. There was a speakers’ bureau through which speakers for the various Liberty Loan drives were furnished with material. The seventyfive thousand volunteer orators groomed for four minute talks at street corners, in movie theatres and churches and at civic events, on topics prepared for them by Creel’s bureaus, became known as “the stentorian guard.”

  C.P.I. posters were in every postoffice. C.P.I. information bulletins were on every bulletin board. Country weeklies and trade journals were nourished on Creel’s boilerplate. In an astonishingly short time George Creel had the entire nation—except of course for the disreputable minority who insisted on forming their own opinions—repeating every slogan which emanated from the President’s desk in the wordy war to “make the world safe for democracy.”

  Remaking the Map

  Woodrow Wilson’s birthday was on December 28. The group of White House intimates, that the President and Mrs. Wilson kept carefully insulated from any mention of the strains and anxieties of high office, conducted their jollifications in the small dining room because the larger White House rooms were closed off to conserve fuel. Mrs. Josephus Daniels baked the cake.

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��The cake was perfectly beautiful and as palatable as it was good to look at,” the President wrote her in his note of thanks. “The sixty one candles on the cake did not make so forbidding a multitude as I should have feared they would and our little family circle had a very jolly time blowing them out and celebrating.” He allowed himself a professorial pun: “It was a regular blow-out.”

  Colonel House returned to the White House before Christmas bringing the documents his Inquiry had prepared on European populations and boundaries and on the pretensions of the various national leaderships. After New Years he came back with another mass of material including maps prepared by Dr. Bowman’s assistants at the American Geographical Society. Wilson decided to give his statement the form of a message to be delivered soon after the opening of Congress. He had to answer the Bolshevik challenge that the Allies state their war aims. He hoped to stir the German socialists to the sort of pacifist demands he decried among the unruly at home, and to reassert his position as leader of liberal and idealist trends of thought in France and Great Britain.

  House’s train was late. McAdoo was giving coal shipments right of way even over crack passenger expresses. It was nine o’clock on January 4 before the colonel reached the White House. “They had saved dinner for me,” he wrote in his diary, “but I touched it lightly and went into immediate conference with the President.” Wilson who loved the number thirteen was trying to organize the points he wanted to make under thirteen headings.

  Next morning they met again in the President’s study. “Saturday was a remarkable day,” wrote House. “I went over to the State Department just after breakfast to see Polk and the others, and returned to the White House at a quarter past ten in order to get to work with the President … We actually got down to work at half past ten and finished remaking the map of the world as we would have it, at half past twelve o’clock.