Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  After Lansing went home to bed Wilson and House sat up till one in the morning reworking the President’s reply to the German note. Their final version demanded, as preliminary to an armistice, the clearcut acceptance by the Germans of Wilson’s Fourteen Points; the immediate evacuation of invaded territory without any dillydallying over a mixed commission; assurances that the government in Berlin spoke for the German people and not for the military clique.

  The President’s note of October 8 constituted the final wedge driven in between the Kaiser and his subjects. At the same time it was considered by neutrals and belligerents alike as a pledge by Woodrow Wilson that, if the Germans laid down their arms, they would be treated “with impartial justice” according to the principles of the Fourteen Points.

  Comment in the American press was respectful but unenthusiastic.

  On Columbus Day, renamed Liberty Day for the occasion, Woodrow Wilson marched at the head of a parade up Fifth Avenue and received, according to the New York Times, “an ovation such as no President has ever before encountered in this city … The Wilson smile was in evidence from start to finish, and his arm worked with the regularity of a piston doffing his tall hat to the cheering throngs.”

  That evening, while President and Mrs. Wilson were dining at the Waldorf before attending a benefit for Italian soldiers blinded in the war, again at the Metropolitan Opera House, Tumulty brought the news that the German Government had accepted the President’s terms.

  “There was an enormous crowd which cheered the President with much enthusiasm,” noted House. “I was so stirred by the news that had come from Berlin I could not listen to the programme.”

  The President returned to Washington determined to lose no time. Every hour’s delay meant an unnecessary sacrifice of human lives. House went with him on the train.

  “Yesterday,” noted House on October 15, “was one of the stirring days of my life. The President and I got together immediately after breakfast. I never saw him more disturbed … He wanted to make his reply final so that there would be no exchange of notes …”

  Wilson’s first demand, before an armistice could be considered, was the cessation of such atrocities as the sinking of the Leinster …

  “Neither the President nor I desired to make a vengeful peace. Neither did he desire to have the Allied armies ravage Germany as Germany has ravaged the countries she has invaded … He is very fine in this feeling and I am sorry he is hampered in any way by the Allies and the vociferous outcry in this country. It is difficult to do the right thing in the right way with people like Roosevelt, Lodge, Poindexter and others clamoring for the undesirable and the impossible.”

  At this point it was essential that the President be personally represented on the Supreme War Council at Versailles, where the American representative, sturdy old General Bliss, had never been given any power to assume the initiative. Even before Wilson concluded his exchange of notes with Berlin, which cleared the way for an armistice, Colonel House was on the high seas headed for France.

  Accompanied by Mrs. House, and by Miss Denton, who had furnished herself with a small pearlhandled pistol to protect the colonel’s life if need be; and by Miss Denton’s assistant, Miss Tomlinson; and by his soninlaw Gordon Auchincloss, on loan from the State Department, the confidential colonel boarded the U.S.S. North Pacific off Staten Island. On board he found Rear Admiral William S. Benson and his staff; Joseph C. Grew, onetime counsellor at the Berlin Embassy; a number of clerks and stenographers; and Frank Cobb of the New York World. That made up the party. They had a stormy crossing. They left in the fog and arrived in the fog. On October 26 the ship dropped anchor in the harbor at Brest.

  In his pocket Colonel House carried a personal letter from the President which amounted to a power of attorney, and an impressively sealed document concocted at the State Department: “… Reposing special trust and confidence in the integrity and ability of William M. House of Texas, I do appoint him a special representative of the Government of the United States of America … and do authorize and empower him to execute and fulfill the duties of his mission with all the powers and privileges thereunto of right appertaining …”

  To all concerned the moment seemed heavy with destiny. The President’s farewells, and indeed those of Mrs. Wilson, were unusually affectionate. “As I was leaving,” House noted in his diary, “he said ‘I have not given you any instructions because I feel you will know what to do’ … He knows that our minds are generally parallel and he also knows that where they diverge, I will follow his bent rather than my own.”

  The Republicans Take Congress

  As the congressional-elections approached, in spite of the vigor of the wellfinanced campaign led by Will Hays, newly appointed chairman of the Republican National Committee, administration leaders remained confident. The morning of election day the New York Times predicted a Democratic victory. When the results were tallied, Woodrow Wilson was confronted, not with a Republican landslide to be sure, but with a clear indication that the Republican trend, which had come near defeating him in 1916, was continuing.

  Both campaigns were hampered by the calling off of public meetings in many parts of the country on account of the influenza epidemic. The Republicans claimed that more of their rallies were cancelled than of their opponents’. In spite of this, and of a certain wariness that the fear of the Department of Justice’s interpretation of the Espionage Act instilled in antiadministration orators, the Republicans carried the House of Representatives by thirtythree seats and had a thin edge in the Senate. The cornbelt returned to the Republican fold.

  In Illinois popular and pinkwhiskered J. Hamilton Lewis, who had tried to introduce a Senate resolution authorizing the President to conduct peace negotiations without senatorial consultation, lost to a Republican.

  In Michigan, Lieutenant Commander Truman H. Newberry, industrialist and big navy enthusiast, had shown such zeal in his successful campaign against Henry Ford, who was induced to run for the Senate on a Wilson platform, that he had already become embroiled with a grand jury for the alleged misuse of campaign funds. If Newberry’s election could be made to stick, the Republican regulars would organize the Senate and Henry Cabot Lodge would have the chair of the committee, all-important at this juncture, on foreign affairs.

  Political postmortems were almost unanimous in laying a large share of the blame for the administration’s defeat on the President’s appeal to the voters to show their support of his policies by electing a Democratic Congress.

  “I have no thought of suggesting that any political party is paramount in matters of patriotism,” Wilson wrote in a statement issued a few days before election. “I mean only that the difficulties and delicacies of our present task are of a sort that makes it imperatively necessary that the nation should give its undivided support to the government under a unified leadership, and that a Republican Congress would divide the leadership … I am asking your support not for my own sake, or the sake of a political party, but for the sake of the Nation itself.”

  In spite of its disarming phraseology, the President’s appeal was greeted by an outpouring of righteous indignation from Republican orators. “An insult,” shouted Will Hays, “to every loyal Republican in the land.” In vain George Creel and Tumulty pointed out that similar appeals had been issued at electiontime by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and that McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and Taft had been far more partisan in their election day pronouncements.

  The Democratic defense was lukewarm. Such administration leaders as had been consulted had advised against this sort of statement. Washington newspapermen claimed that McAdoo was “mad as a hornet” because the President hadn’t asked his advice. Newton D. Baker was quoted as having pointed out wryly to a friend that of course it was wrong for a Democrat to ask people to vote for him; that was the prerogative of Republicans.

  In the Senate lobby Henry Cabot Lodge, in behalf of his opposition group, handed the newspapermen an abusive rebutta
l. “This is not the President’s personal war” was its burden. Theodore Roosevelt made Wilson’s appeal the theme of the final speech of his career.

  Colonel Roosevelt’s Last Charge

  Ever since Wilson made him give up his scheme to lead troops in the European war, T.R. had been beating himself to pieces against a wall of frustration. He was fighting illhealth. His explorations in the Amazon basin had left him with an intermittent fever. The bullet lodged next his lung caused chronic bronchitis. “When I went to South America I had one captain’s job left in me,” he confided to Owen Wister. “Now I’m good only for a major’s … It doesn’t matter what the rest is,” he added hastily, “I’ve had fun the whole time.”

  He showed occasional bursts of the old energy; like a fighting bull bemused by the capes of the toreros, he was still good for an occasional deadly charge. He’d see red in a Wilsonian phrase and show his old fire and dash for a while, but he would soon tire and trot back weakly to his wife, Edith, and to Sagamore Hill for a rest.

  He was subject to fits of rage, as in his runin with Samuel Gompers in the summer of 1917, when they appeared on the same platform in Carnegie Hall to greet the democratic revolution in Petrograd.

  The newspapers had been filled for three days with accounts of a murderous race riot in East St. Louis. Mobs, instigated, it was claimed, by union leaders, had attacked Negro families who had moved up from the south in search of work. Houses were set afire, men and women slaughtered as they ran out from the burning buildings; children died in the burning houses. The toll was twentynine dead, about ninety people badly hurt; three hundred shacks and houses and a large part of the business district burned to the ground.

  T.R. could not shake off the horror of this attack on helpless people. When he was introduced, amid a storm of cheers, by Mayor Mitchel, he departed from his prepared speech to express his shame and grief that such a thing could happen in America.

  Gompers asked for the floor and tried to explain that those really to blame for the race riots were the manufacturers, greedy for war profits, who had lured cheap Negro labor up to St. Louis to break down union wage scales.

  T.R.’s face flamed red. He shook his fist under Gompers’ nose. “Justice with me,” he shouted, “isn’t just a phrase or a form of words. How can we praise the people of Russia for doing justice to the men within their boundaries if we in any way apologize for a murder committed on the helpless?”

  Gompers was ashy pale. He murmured something about an investigation being carried out by the A.F. of L.

  “I’d put down the murders first and investigate afterwards,” roared T.R., flailing with his arms.

  Boos, hoots and occasional cheers rose from the audience. It was with difficulty that order was restored in Carnegie Hall.

  The following winter T.R. spent several weeks in hospital with an abscessed leg. When the weather turned warm he was out again charging about the country, assailing the Administration’s conduct of the war and lashing up patriotic fervor with his talks on Americanism. Wherever he went he shook men’s faith in the Wilsonian rhetoric. His plain speaking on Negro rights helped alienate Negro voters in the northern cities from the Democrats.

  The Colonel couldn’t go to war himself but he gloried in being represented by his four sons. Archie and Theodore Jr. were officers in the A.E.F. Kermit had enlisted with the British and came down with malaria in the Mespot. Quentin, the youngest, was training for aviation. “I putter around with the other old frumps,” T.R. wrote Quentin after getting out of hospital in the spring, “trying to help with the liberty loan and the Red Cross and such like.”

  As the summer of 1918 advanced, news from the fighting front warmed his heart. Theodore Jr. distinguished himself at Cantigny and was now a lieutenant colonel in his own right. Archie was badly smashed up by a burst of shrapnel. He came home on leave long enough to appear with his arm in a cast on the platform beside his father when T.R. addressed the erstwhile German-American Liederkranz Society in New York.

  T.R. conducted two successful speaking tours through the middlewest. He staged a public reconciliation with Taft at a political dinner in Chicago. His re-entry into national politics seemed assured. Many elements in the Republican Party looked to his leadership to dislodge the Democrats from Washington in 1920. He was only sixtyone. If his health would mend he might be President once more.

  Late in July news came that Quentin, the youngest, in some ways his father’s favorite, had been shot down fighting a formation of German planes. At first he was listed as missing. Then the Germans reported his death and burial with full honors behind their lines near Cambrai.

  It hurt more than T.R. had expected. He threw all his energies into keeping his wife’s courage up. Unbowed he went to Saratoga, two days after the news came, to deliver the keynote address at the Republican state convention. All factions, even Boss Barnes whom he had lambasted in a libel suit, urged him to accept the Republican nomination for governor. Smiling he turned them down. He was out for bigger game.

  On October 26, before a packed and cheering audience, he hauled the President over the coals for his call for a Democratic Congress. He denounced the arrogance of Wilson’s conduct of the war. With his customary combination of wild inflammatory statements and commonsense reasoning he tore the Fourteen Points to pieces, crying out that they were shams and would not bring the peace with justice the American people wanted.

  (T.R. hadn’t been able to get Wilson’s war away from him: maybe he could carry off the peace.)

  That night in Carnegie Hall, flashing his eyeglasses and clacking his great teeth and waving his arms with the legendary zest, T.R. seemed to his listeners his old riproaring self. He admitted to no one that he felt feverish and sick. The abscess in his leg was acting up. When he got home to Sagamore Hill he confessed to Edith that he was really not well. The day of the armistice they took him to Roosevelt Hospital in New York. He was weak and running a temperature and in great pain, suffering from what he described as sciatica.

  Roosevelt’s old friend Henry White, a survivor from John Hay’s diplomatic corps, who had represented Roosevelt at the Algeciras Conference during the great days of his presidency, came, along with Elihu Root, to call on him at the hospital. White had just been appointed, as a sop to the Republicans, one of Wilson’s delegates to the Paris Peace Conference. White and Root wanted to consult T.R. on a program, but they found him too weak to talk.

  He did pull himself together long enough to compose a few days later a careful denunciation of the President’s peace plans: “Our Allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people at this time. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated by them … Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.”

  By Christmas T.R. was thought sufficiently recovered to go home. Two weeks later he died, without a murmur, in his sleep in his own bed at Sagamore Hill.

  The Cause of Righteousness

  Theodore Roosevelt intended his last blast as a warning to the world that Woodrow Wilson’s peace terms, even before they had been fully elaborated, were likely to be repudiated by the voters back home. Though blinded by personal bitterness the old campaigner had not lost his political intuition. Somehow, while so skillfully driving a wedge between the populations of the central empires and their governments, the President had allowed himself to become alienated from large and essential segments of the American people. The cleavage was not yet completely apparent.

  In six years a change had come over the political landscape. The reform movements which had smoothed the way for Wilson’s leadership were losing their power or developing new aspects. During the years of the century’s youth the American people hungered and thirsted for righteousness. T.R. and Bryan and Woodrow Wilson bu
ilt their political careers on popular faith in selfgoverning institutions, and on belief in the eventual triumph of Christian ethics. Now many of the reforms had come to pass. Senators were elected by popular vote. Woman’s suffrage was a fact. With many of the great aims attained the generous passion for civic virtue was degenerating into a series of smallminded manias.

  Backed by an effective and bigoted organization prohibition was sweeping the country. Long before the war a good deal of reforming zeal had spent itself in efforts to suppress gambling and prostitution. Now the evils of drink became such an obsession that a man could hardly attain the office of notary public without being endorsed by the Anti-Saloon League.

  In lashing the people up to a maximum war effort the Wilson administration unleashed blind hatreds and suspicions against foreigners and foreign ideas, and in fact against any ideas at all, that could hardly be controlled once their imagined usefulness, as a part of the psychology of total war, was at an end.

  Such enthusiasts for political reform as remained were estranged by the prosecution of dissenting voices. As the suppressive measures weakened, movements like La Follette’s Progressive Party and the Nonpartisan League in Minnesota and the Dakotas, which were in many ways the heirs of Bull Moose, would come back into the open, but as agrarian or farmer-labor groupings. Somehow they had lost their national character.

  When their leaders would speak of the war it would be no longer in terms of the Wilsonian slogans. They would not find the world made safe for democracy. The recollection would be too fresh in their minds that while Wilson’s Department of Justice conducted something like two thousand prosecutions of socialists, pacifists, syndicalists or alleged pro-Germans, hardly an effort was made to check the brutal profiteering that grew out of the cost-plus system. “Merchants of death” would be the reformers’ theme.