1917
Page 22
Roosevelt went further. All the animosity of the past, he said, “would be dust in a windy street, if we can make your message good . . . If we can translate it into fact, then it will rank as a great state paper, with the very great state papers of Washington and Lincoln.” High praise, indeed—and Wilson was not immune to flattery, especially from a charismatic personality such as Theodore Roosevelt. “There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling,” Wilson told his aide Joe Tumulty afterward. “You can’t resist the man.”8
Soon, the two men were laughing and talking like old friends, and after twenty-five minutes, Roosevelt left. But if he thought the thawing of relations would bring him closer to his goal of raising and commanding a division of volunteer troops as he had done with the Rough Riders, he was to be bitterly disappointed. On April 13, a formal letter came from Secretary of War Newton Baker turning Roosevelt’s offer down flat. Baker said command in this war would go to men who had “devoted their lives exclusively” to military service—a slighting dismissal of Roosevelt’s own experience leading men in combat in Cuba less than twenty years earlier.9
For Roosevelt, it was a disappointment and a gratuitous put-down—and for Wilson, a missed opportunity. The visit had been Roosevelt’s offer to bury the political hatchet, to throw aside personal and ideological bitterness now that he and Wilson had found themselves on the same side. But Wilson could not bring himself to agree or to respond in any way except, unforgivably, through a letter from a third party. The good reasons for turning Roosevelt down were few, and the good reasons for accepting his offer many. Even giving TR a token military command, or redirecting his offer of combat duty by making him a special military adviser, if only in an honorific role, would have given Wilson regular access to a former president and commander in chief who understood the vagaries of modern warfare far better than he himself did, both from the viewpoint of geopolitics and from having served on the battlefield.
But such an idea, or such a generous gesture, was beyond Wilson. As historian Richard Striner has said, “Wilson missed a priceless opportunity to turn an enemy into a friend”—and instead, he turned a possible friend into a dedicated enemy.10
Roosevelt never forgot the slight, and to the end of his life he believed it had been made out of personal spite. He communicated that feeling to his friends, including Henry Cabot Lodge. Acceding to Roosevelt’s request would have cemented Wilson’s standing with pro-war Republicans; turning him down alienated them permanently. If people sometimes wonder why the Massachusetts senator’s opposition to Wilson and the League of Nations was so bitter and personal, it wasn’t just because Lodge thought Wilson’s utopian global vision dangerous and his version of the League a direct threat to the United States. He also remembered Wilson’s humiliation of his friend Roosevelt, whose only wish had been to serve his country alongside his three sons, who would go on to fight in France—one of them, the eldest, Quentin, would die there in the last months of the war—and to command men under fire one last time.
It was still up to Wilson to choose a general to command American troops going to France. There were two possible choices for commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force: Gen. Leonard Wood, hero of the war in the Philippines; and Gen. John J. Pershing, whom Wilson had sent on the punitive expedition against Mexican bandit Pancho Villa in 1916. Wood, however, was close to Republicans and had been a vocal critic of Wilson’s failure to prepare the country for war. So, even though Pershing and the president rarely saw eye to eye on anything, Wilson opted for him, the man known as “Black Jack.”
Fifty-six years old, strong-minded, and at the peak of physical fitness, Pershing had seen his army career take him from president and first captain of his West Point class of 1886 to three tours of duty in the Philippines and then to commander of the American expedition to Mexico. When he returned to West Point in 1897 as a tactical officer, cadets nicknamed him “Nigger Jack” (or, more politely, “Black Jack”) because he had commanded the African American Tenth Cavalry, or Buffalo Soldiers, on the frontier, and he liked and respected his black soldiers. In 1898 he had led them up San Juan Hill, where the Buffalo Soldiers fought with desperate bravery and 50 percent of the regiment’s officers were killed or wounded.
Pershing’s racial views were bound to clash with Wilson’s. The Progressive president was also a keen white supremacist and insisted on segregating the U.S. Army in the same way he had most of the federal government. Even though the army was desperate for men, the number of blacks being drafted was kept artificially low. By the war’s end, more than 350,000 African Americans were serving in the American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. Pershing made sure they earned pay equal to that of white soldiers, but Wilson had approved the policy that assigned them only to segregated units commanded by white officers. Most units were also supply or logistical units, which meant that the vast majority of black soldiers saw no combat and were left out of any chance for medals or promotion.
Wilson’s support for segregation led to trouble and violence. When the all-black Twenty-Fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment was transferred from Columbus, New Mexico, to Houston, the soldiers were confronted with segregated streetcars and white workers at their camp who demanded separate water fountains. This led to clashes with local authorities, and the beating of a black soldier by a white policeman. On August 23, 1917, that set off a full-scale riot, which ended with the shooting deaths of two soldiers, four police officers, and nine civilians (a fifth police officer and another soldier died later from wounds sustained in the riot, while a fourth soldier died from injuries he received during his capture the next day). The army deemed the riot a mutiny, and nineteen black soldiers were executed, while another forty-one received life sentences.
Wilson had told a group of black soldiers who came to protest his policy that “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” His commitment to white supremacy left a stain on America’s armed forces, especially the army, that would remain long after they were desegregated after World War II.
If Wilson lacked the gift of handling the human factor in leading the country to war, he was more than eager to deal with the bureaucratic, institutional side. From his Progressive perspective, however undesirable war was, it did offer a sterling opportunity to extend into the arena of military and industrial relations, and into the larger economy, the principles of the strong administrative state he had developed in his writings and deployed in domestic reforms in his first term as president.
Starting that April, he seized on this opportunity like a man possessed. When he told Sen. Carter Glass on April 9 that his goal was to mobilize a nation as well as create an army, he foresaw that “we must keep every instrumentality in it [i.e., the nation] at its highest pitch of efficiency and guided by thoughtful intelligence”—and the way to do this was by flexing the fullest powers of the federal government.11
At the start of 1917, there wasn’t much bureaucratic machinery to accomplish all this. But Wilson did have something to build on, thanks to Thomas Alva Edison.
After the Lusitania’s sinking, it wasn’t surprising that, as America’s most famous inventor and robust media personality, Edison was asked what he thought America should do to protect itself. “If any foreign power should seriously consider an attack upon this country, a hundred men of [scientific] training quickly would be at work here upon new means of repelling the invaders,” Edison told reporters. “I would be at it myself.”
In the summer of 1915, navy secretary Josephus Daniels met with Edison, and together they set up the Naval Consulting Board, or NCB, which would solicit suggestions from scientists and other private citizens on how to help the U.S. Navy better defend America in case of war.12
The NCB included members of the country’s leading technical and engineering associations. One of them, Howard Coffin, president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, declared, “Twentieth-century war demands that the blood of the sold
ier must be mingled with three to five parts of the sweat of the men in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms”—a sentiment David Lloyd George or even Erich Ludendorff could have endorsed.
Coffin also opined that the war was “the greatest business proposition since time began”—an opening for American entrepreneurial instincts if ever there was one.13
The idea of American business joining, even taking the lead, in making the country well armed as well as prosperous would be realized during the making of FDR’s “Arsenal of Democracy” in World War II.14 For Woodrow Wilson in 1917, however, it was enough to encourage direct Washington intervention into which businesses were producing which military resources, and which economic resources could be deployed to make war matériel. By an act of Congress in June 1916, the NCB spawned the Council of National Defense, or CND, which was charged with building a detailed inventory of the scientific and industrial resources that could be put to use for the military in case of war.
Remarkably, the army was largely uninterested in getting a handle on how it would obtain the guns, artillery, uniforms, and bullets it would need if pushed into the kind of modern warfare under way on the battlefields of Europe—let alone how it was going to feed the hundreds of thousands of draftees it would be taking on in a matter of weeks. “If we really have a great war,” one high-ranking officer remarked sourly in June 1917, after the army had been officially committed to hostilities for two months, “our War Department will quickly break down.”15 The Navy Department did somewhat better, but it, too, was largely unprepared for the demands in terms of the industrial and technological base it would need to fight a modern war at sea, particularly a war against the world’s biggest and most modern submarine fleet.
In the end, it was up to civilian Washington and private industry to figure out how to arm, clothe, and feed a nation at war. After several false starts and hesitations, in July 1917 the CND gave way to the War Industries Board, or WIB, under the chairmanship of Wall Street wizard and Wilsonite Progressive Bernard Baruch. The choice was significant: Baruch’s experience as a financier provided him with an overview of American business and industry that no one else in the country could match at the time. Even then, the WIB struggled to achieve the kind of meshing of government, business, and military resources needed for a smooth-running industrial machine.
Yet, in the growing alphabet soup that was Wilson’s Washington at war, the WIB represented a turning point. The one great continuity of the American economy since its founding, the transformation of resources into wealth through private initiative and capital, was now superseded by a new transformative force, that of the federal government. America’s “empire of wealth,” as historian John Steele Gordon has dubbed it, would now be matched by an empire of government.
Legislative as well as executive action emanating from Wilson’s desk made this a reality. At Wilson’s request, the Food and Fuel Control Act—called the Lever Act after its chief congressional sponsor, Rep. Asbury Lever of South Carolina—passed in Congress in August 1917. It authorized the government to set prices for wheat, cotton, pork, coal, and petroleum (the last two were now vital to both the army and the navy and to the nation’s railroads that supplied them) and to license all large-scale food producers and distributors. One newspaper pronounced the Lever Act “the most revolutionary measure ever enacted by an American Congress”; another branded it state socialism. Both were right.16
Nonetheless, since it seemed justified by wartime necessity, the measure stuck. Out of it would sprout two new federal agencies. Wilson would appoint to head the Federal Fuel Administration Harry Garfield, president of Williams College and son of former president James Garfield. Garfield and his colleagues were now empowered to set the prices and supply of coal and oil for the entire country, using local boards at the state and county level to enforce their regulations and rules. Out of the effort to cut back on civilian use of fuel, it was the Federal Fuel Administration that first introduced daylight saving time a year later, in 1918. Anyone who gets confused today about how to set his clock when the official time change rolls around, or who has to recite “Spring forward, fall back” before he does, can thank Harry Garfield and Wilson’s Fuel Administration.
The head of the Federal Food Administration had even more sweeping powers. The man Wilson selected to head it up was an Iowa-born engineer named Herbert Clark Hoover. Hoover had led the administration’s one major intervention in the war in Europe before 1917, albeit a humanitarian instead of a military one: the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which fed millions of starving refugees with American wheat and corn. (In a few years, Hoover would have the opportunity to do so again, this time in Russia.)
Hoover’s spectacular success with the war relief program made him an obvious pick to lead the Federal Food Administration. He never had occasion to issue the kind of sweeping directives his counterpart Garfield did when, for example, Garfield mandated “gasless Sundays” and at one point ordered the closing of thousands of factories across the country to end a coal shortage. “Although Americans can be led to make great sacrifices,” Hoover said at one point, “they do not like to be driven.”17 Yet Hoover did regulate prices for nearly every agricultural commodity and controlled an elaborate licensing system that prevented the export of foodstuffs by private businesses. He forced wheat farmers to sell their product at a set price to a government-controlled corporation and worked with farm organizations and financial institutions to rein in speculation on food-related futures in America’s commodity markets.
Hoover liked to think of his efforts and initiatives as “voluntary,” but in fact, as historian Robert Zieger points out, each relied on compulsory requirements and sanctions: “The de facto suspension of market forces placed the government in every wheat field, grain silo, and kitchen.”18 That suspension generally benefited the biggest and most established agricultural interests and distributors, and shoved smaller businesses into the background—and marked the emergence of an American version of corporatism, of big business and big government forming a permanent alliance. Progressive writers such as Herbert Croly and Charles Van Hise had argued for something along these lines; it underpinned aspects of Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.”19 Now it became a tool for President Wilson, not only to get America prepared for war and then to fight it, but also to realize his Progressive dream of a nation that responded to the agenda and needs of government—as opposed to the other way around.
As 1917 rolled along, the arms of the federal octopus would extend into other areas of American life. American shipbuilding had long fallen into the purview of the Shipping Board; the need to pay for the war meant a sharp increase in corporate and personal taxes (although not as much as some Progressives, such as Sen. Bob La Follette, wanted). The big breakthrough, however, came when the federal government became the nation’s biggest bond salesman, with the first “Liberty Loans,” or Liberty Bonds, authorized by Congress on April 27.
Treasury secretary McAdoo saw the issue of Liberty Bonds as a way not only to help pay for the war but also to reduce unnecessary consumption (and therefore fend off inflation) by encouraging people to invest in these government-issued war bonds instead. McAdoo used every trick in the book to get Americans to buy the bonds. Boy Scouts fanned out across the country to urge people to devote some of their paychecks to the Liberty Loan drive; actors such as Charlie Chaplin and singers such as Enrico Caruso lent their prestige to the drives. McAdoo also didn’t hesitate to use more coercive ways of persuading people that they had to buy, or else.
“A man who can’t lend his government $1 per week at the rate of four percent interest is not entitled to be an American citizen,” he declared. In fact, the five successive Liberty Loan drives during the war were outstanding successes. All together, they raised some $20 billion—almost a third of that from people who earned less than $2,000 a year.20 But the Liberty Loans were only the tip of the financial iceberg.
Of the initial a
uthorization of $5 billion, more than $3 billion was set aside for the Entente powers. “Unlike American troops,” writes historian Adam Tooze, “American money flowed quickly.” By July, McAdoo had advanced $485 million to Britain alone. Most of that money, in turn, was used to purchase goods in the United States: Congress had imposed the condition on the loans that they be used to buy American. “After April 1917, the US Federal government was operating a gigantic, publicly funded export scheme.” To keep the scheme going, the Inter-Allied Supply Council, set up to speed the placing and filling of orders for the matériel the Allies needed, was overseen by a U.S. assistant treasury secretary. The council also worked directly with the War Industries Board—just to complete the corporatist circle.21
How much of this transatlantic arrangement driven by American financial/industrial synergy led from Washington would survive the war was anyone’s guess. Most observers, including McAdoo, probably assumed very little. And it was very little—but it would shape the postwar world decisively. One result, for example, was that the dollar came to replace the pound sterling as the world’s reserve currency (one of McAdoo’s declared goals in the spring of 1917).22 The U.S. loans were made on the condition that they could not be used to support either the pound or the franc, or to repay the loans that J.P. Morgan had made before America entered the war. The consequence was that while Britain’s debt (and France’s) only continued to mount out of sight, so did America’s financial leverage over its Allies once the war ended. They would be reduced to junior partners, even if they won the war—as now they must, with America on their side.
In this way Wilson’s desire to see America emerge as the world’s leading power was now ensured. The hegemony he desired on the moral plane would be undergirded and reinforced by the fact that the world’s Great Powers owed America more than they could ever repay—while only the United States would come out of the war with a currency still founded on gold.