by Smith, Gene;
In 1912 he was nominated for the Presidency. His election was a certainty, for the Republicans were split, with the incumbent President, Taft, running on the regular party ticket, and the former holder of the office, Roosevelt, campaigning as a Progressive on the “Bull Moose” ticket. The returns in, the President-elect went vacationing to Bermuda. He went bicycle riding with his daughters and turned his head sideways to look at the ocean because someone told him the view was best from that angle. The cable system to the United States was out of order for five days, and he said that made him happy, for he needed peace to think. But he was a public figure now, and reporters dogged his footsteps. He came back from a ride with Jessie and asked the photographers not to take her picture while she was wind-blown from the exertion; when a camera popped he rushed at the man who ignored him and raised his fists as he threatened to chastise him physically.
Back at Trenton, he received a steady stream of visitors seeking appointment to high posts, but he kept his own counsel and refused to be hastened into making known his selections for the Cabinet. (Those who came, however, were generally ignored when the time came for him to announce his choices. He did not think it seemly that men should so nakedly seek power.) In the end his Cabinet was generally marked down as a weak one.
As President he did not consult with the Senators and Representatives. When he wanted to tell them something, he sent for them. There was little give-and-take when they appeared. He explained what was desired, and dismissed callers. When men offered information he already possessed, he cut them off by saying, “I know that.” He could not abide callers who meandered about without coming to the point; they wearied him with their palaver and proffered good-fellowship. With his Cabinet he was pleasant and even affable, but he did not care for long extended discussions, preferring written memorandums. At the Cabinet meetings he offered cigars—although he did not smoke himself—and told jokes, but did not get involved in the minor problems of the various departments. When something important came up, he digested the memorandums on the subject with remarkable speed, sent for the Secretary in question, analyzed the problem in a few sentences, and recommended a solution. No one ever had trouble understanding him, and no one had to wait long for a written reply to a written question. (It rarely took more than a day for a Secretary to get an answer to a query.) No one ever dictated to a stenographer faster and more surely than the President. Few of these dictated replies ever needed doing over, for everything he said was right the first time. He was like that in his verbal habits also. Each sentence was gotten out correctly; there was never any stumbling or beginning again. He could not conceal his impatience with men who began to say something, stopped, and took off in a new direction.
At table there was never any business discussed, and never any guests who would talk of public matters. All the conversation was erudite and cheerful. In the Congress they criticized him for this and said that what he wanted was a few tough-minded sons instead of the gay and easygoing daughters. The sons would throw things back in his teeth, Senators told each other, and make the President less inclined to ignore the advice of other people. On the golf course, also, there was no business talk. No Senators or Representatives went along on the auto rides, for the rides were for relaxation. The President said he had a certain amount of energy and was not going to squander it by taking up business matters when he was not in his office during working hours.
In his first year he did more than most of his predecessors had done in complete terms. Tariffs were lowered, the Federal Reserve System was born, and the Federal Trade Commission and a strong anti-trust law. Personal income taxes were levied to make up for the losses in tariff revenue. The rights of laboring men were strengthened, and vocational schools were given federal assistance. At his inauguration he had motioned to an empty space in front of the Capitol and, indicating the men and women held back by police, said, “Let the people come forward.” That was the theme of his administration; that was the meaning of the New Freedom.
In 1916 he was renominated. In order to receive his formal notification on a spot not the property of the government, he rented a New Jersey estate and was there through Election Day, when it seemed that Charles Evans Hughes was the winner. The apparent loss did not ruffle the President; he went to bed early after remarking that it seemed his programs had not been completely understood by the voters. The morning after (legend has it) a reporter calling at the Hughes home was told that President Hughes could not be disturbed. The tally was that close. It came down in the end to how California would go, and when the last returns from the mountain polling places were in, the state was in the Democratic column.
By then, by 1916, the domestic program was in the background, for the talk was all of whether the United States would go to the war. A Democratic slogan, “He Kept Us out of War,” was credited with the President’s victory, but he knew best of all that a German lieutenant looking through a submarine periscope could make nonsense of the slogan.
The Americans did not want to fight, not in the main. Nor did their President, who remembered from his youth what Sherman had done to the South. From the White House went unending notes to the contesting British and Germans as the President twisted one way and then another in his attempts to avoid the war. During the first half of his first term there had been a skirmish between American marines and some Mexicans at Vera Cruz, and when the handful of American deaths was reported to the President he whitened and staggered. To go to France in force would mean dead men in their tens of thousands. In the President’s eyes the soldiers he would have to send to face machine guns and artillery shells were akin to his boys back at Princeton. That is what he usually called them—“boys,” not “soldiers” or “men.”
But the war, it seemed, could not be avoided. He sat before dawn one day in April on the South Portico, and the First Lady awakened and came to him with an overcoat, some biscuits, a glass of milk. In the rain of an April evening he went with the words he had written to the House Chamber of the Capitol. His fingers trembled as he turned the pages, and in the silences between his sentences the sound of drops could be heard hitting upon the roof. He said, “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace …”
On the plaza outside, cavalry Regulars from Fort Myer sat their horses to keep the crowds back and guard against disturbances of the kind which earlier in the day saw an anti-war pacifist strike Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in the face. (Lodge hit back before the pacifist was dragged away.) Soon the Regulars would be indistinguishable from the farmers and clerks, the college boys and mechanics, and in the Oval Room of the White House the President would give off singing the nonsense songs of Princeton in favor of “Over There” and “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.”
“… and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”
(Something would have to come of it. America would bring the justice and peace of a just and peaceful nation to the world.)
“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged …”
(Else what would it all be for, the dying boys and the sunken ships?)
“… to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.
“God helping her, she can do no other.”
There was a moment of silence. Then a great roar of applause rolled up to him. Mixed in it were the high rebel yells of
Southerners. The troops of cavalry formed up, and with Cary Grayson, Joe Tumulty and the First Lady he drove in silence back to the White House past the crowds of cheering people. “My message today was a message of death for our young men,” he said. “How strange it seems to applaud that.”
The Americans went to France and Pershing and his staff to a grave where an officer said, “Lafayette, we are here!” The way it got back was that the handsome and soldier-like head of the American Expeditionary Force said it himself, and that was right, because it was what he should have said. There was something different about the soldiers the Americans sent abroad under him in that AEF. Such soldiers, perhaps, were never seen before. They sang. They laughed a great deal. They believed in themselves, their country, their way. They were young, confident and open; to the Europeans it seemed that they were indeed godlike, untouched, sure of the sacredness of their mission, which was to give the world a new order and make the world clean and right.
And the war was fought and won. The New World had come to redeem the Old, and when it came time to ask for peace the enemy applied to the leader of that New World. And the guns stopped. That the night ended meant there must be a dawn, and that the dawn must compensate for the dead in their millions, for the girls who would get old and older and who would die as old maids whose lovers-that-should-have-been lay, forever young, in Flanders or Mesopotamia or Gallipoli. In parts of France the poison gas would cling to the roofs of caves for twenty years; the trench-system outlines under the fields could be seen from airplanes forty years later. The Sacred Way up to Verdun, the Lost Battalion, the Chemin des Dames, the Australians coming off their transports past the sunken River Clyde, the British boys in their 174 cemeteries crammed into the Ypres Salient, the Italian artillerists dueling with the Austrians in the snow; the English staff general going up forward for the first time and crying, “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?”, the Yank non-com with “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”, the mules drowning in the shell holes, “Madelon”—it all had to be paid for, something must come out of it, it could not have all been done for nothing. The world was crying out for the price to be paid.
Three weeks after the Armistice was signed, on December 4, 1918, the President of the United States, the man who with his soldiers had brought the dawn, sailed for Europe to work on a final peace treaty and to form a League of Nations which would give the world justice and security and prevent war forever.
“You carry overseas with you,” Ellen’s brother wrote him, “the hearts and hopes and dreams and desires of millions of your fellow Americans. Your vision of the new world that should spring from the ashes of the old is all that has made the war tolerable to many of us. That vision has removed the sting, has filled our imaginations, and has made the war not a tragedy but a sacrament. Nothing but a new world is worth the purchase price of the war, and the comfort of millions of us is that you have the vision to glimpse it and the power to realize it in action.”
Off Brest before dawn of December 13, at four-twenty in the morning, lights were sighted on the horizon and a welcoming fleet of American warships steamed up. By seven twenty-five, nine battleships were standing alongside the warship and five destroyers that had escorted the George Washington across the ocean. Each fired a 21-gun salute as it came by. Twelve destroyers followed the battleships. A little after ten Brest could be seen by the President and the First Lady standing on the bridge with Cary Grayson and the First Lady’s secretary, Edith Ben-ham. As they headed in, two French cruisers and nine French destroyers came up from the south firing salutes, the black puffs of smoke visible in the air moments before the roll of the guns could be heard. By eleven-thirty they were fifteen miles off shore, with the George Washington leading and the Wyoming, the Pennsylvania, the Arkansas, the Florida, the Utah, the Nevada, the Oklahoma, the New York, the Texas and the Arizona ranging behind in double column. The French squadron and the American destroyers followed through a calm sea and under a sky brightening after a dark morning. At one o’clock they entered the narrow strait into the harbor, and the shore batteries in the ten forts on both sides of the cliffs began firing salutes one after the other. The fleet below returned the honor gun for gun, and the booming from the heights and from the water mingled with the clouds of black smoke pouring forth. As the George Washington went in, military bands on top of the cliffs crashed into The Star-Spangled Banner and The Marseillaise. The pounding of the guns was deafening, but when they reached the harbor the noise grew even greater as the sound of the continual firing mixed with the whistles and sirens of the shore craft, ships dressed and yards manned.
A little after one-thirty the George Washington dropped anchor a mile off shore, and the escorting and welcoming fleets took up stations around it. As far as the eye could see across the mile-long harbor, ships were standing to, and weaving through them came boats carrying welcomers. Margaret, who had been abroad singing for the troops, came on board with Pershing and a contingent of French officers and dignitaries who bore bouquets and clicked their heels as they bent to kiss the First Lady’s hand. Admiral Sims walked up to Pershing, whom he had not seen in some months, and made them all laugh: “Hello, Jack, how the hell did you do it? I didn’t know you had it in you.” Two hours later, after lunch, they went ashore in a tender, the President standing by the French Ambassador to the United States, Jules Jusserand, who pointed out the sights. All along the terraced shore they could see fishermen in wooden shoes, velvet coats and flat hats, and women in colorful Breton headdresses and peasant bodices. They reached the quay, where a specially constructed platform was waiting. It was covered with masses of greens and flowers, and as the tender came to it a French marine band burst into the National Anthems of first America and then France. The tender was made fast and the party went ashore, the First Lady escorted by Pershing and the President coming last, walking up the gangplank alone with his silk hat held in his hand in response to the cheers rolling toward him. The French troops and the Americans presented arms, hands slapping smartly on the rifles, and the Mayor of Brest stepped forward to present the President with a large parchment roll made fast with a ribbon of red, white and blue and containing the greetings of the Brest City Council. The Mayor’s seven-year-old daughter handed a bouquet to the First Lady and received a kiss in return.
The visitors got into open automobiles and began to ascend the steep road up the cliff to the railroad station, where the private train of President Poincaré of France waited to carry them to Paris. All along the route American soldiers stood at attention, and Ike Hoover, the White House usher, thought he could see their chests swell with pride to be so near their President. Above the road, over the troops and the shouting Bretons and cheering children waving American flags, hung printed signs: HAIL THE CHAMPION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN. HONOR TO THE APOSTLE OF INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE. HONOR AND WELCOME TO THE FOUNDER OF THE SOCIETY OF NATIONS. The President held his hat in his hand and smiled even though he took note that the sign about the founder of the society of nations was a little premature. At the railroad station there was a pavilion decorated in red silk and the Mayor made a speech, saying destiny brought the American leader to release the people of Europe from their tortures. The train had huge armchairs and picture windows, and at four o’clock they pulled out of the station. Just before they left, the Mayor’s little girl came in again with a bouquet which she shyly pushed forward. The President made as if to take the flowers and hand them to the First Lady, but the child hung on and finally got out, “Pour Mademoiselle Veelson,” and Margaret bent laughing to kiss her.
All along the line to Paris people stood waiting to shout greetings. And in the capital itself the next day there waited the largest throng in the history of France. The weather ever since Armistice Day had been rainy and muddy, but on the day they arrived there was a soft and clear autumn-like sky and a brisk west wind. It seemed the whole of France stood in the streets. From the Madeleine to the Bois de Boulogne not a sq
uare foot of space was clear. Stools and tables were put out by the concierges of houses along the parade route, with places on them selling for ten, twenty or fifty francs, depending upon the affluence of the customer. Carpenter horses and boards were arranged into improvised grandstands, and men and boys clung to the very tops of the chestnut trees. The housetops were covered with people. Captured German cannons were ranged along the line of march and the cannons were covered. Lines formed of thirty-six thousand French soldiers, the cream of the Army, stood fast to hold back the crowds; they parted only to allow wounded comrades in wheel chairs to gain places inside the lines so as to see the visitor. The people had gathered hours before the train was due in Paris and stood waiting and looking down toward the station, a tiny bandbox on the edge of the Bois reserved for official arrivals of visiting royalty.