by Theo Emery
The Mannings filed into Rauscher’s after the president’s rousing speech, but the buffet was hardly a political affair, the stuff of neither patriotism nor politics. Rather, it was a genteel reception honoring a famous ornithologist and photographer, William Finley, who had traveled to Washington from his home in Oregon. The Mannings were among a hundred people invited for the late supper, many of them fresh from the chaos at the Capitol, President Wilson’s words and the thunderous ovations from Congress still ringing in their ears.
The elegant banquet hall was a picture of Washington decorum, a gentle occasion that would be noted in the society pages of the morning papers, a bubble of civility amid the city’s tumult. Members of Wilson’s cabinet, society ladies, and naturalists looked admiringly at the photographs of baby birds and animals that Finley displayed. The momentous events of the day, the roar of the crowds, the president’s speech, the protest and debate—all of that remained outside in the city’s rainy streets.
As the guests filled the reception hall, the starchy secretary of war Newton D. Baker, still considered an upstart in the cabinet, entered with his wife, Elizabeth. Senator Miles Poindexter from Washington State, a Progressive and Republican who detested those opposing the war, came late as well. There was Senator John Beckham of Kentucky and Congressman Charles Carlin from Virginia. There was the evening’s host, E. Lester Jones, the tall, lean chief of the U.S. coastal survey. There was Secretary of Commerce William Redfield, with his bristling red muttonchops. The ruddy face of Postmaster General Albert Burleson bobbed among the guests, next to his wife, Adele—both southerners, like the Mannings.
Next to the dashing men in the room, Manning cut a diminutive figure, perhaps a bit dowdy. Not even five and a half feet tall, he was slightly plump and unimposing at age fifty-five, with a boyish, padded face and a prominent chin. A fastidious dresser, he had a taste for expensive waistcoats and cutaway suits. Known as Van, he was firm and charming, and modest above all else. “I was born in a depot,” he would joke about his early years in tiny Horn Lake Depot, Mississippi.
While not a top official in President Wilson’s administration, Manning directed the Bureau of Mines. It was a young agency, not yet seven years old, created because of growing alarm over the thousands of deaths each year in U.S. coal mines. The bureau’s mandate was to prevent accidents and improve mine safety, but also to research the poisonous gases that seeped from the rock and overwhelmed miners deep underground. Manning saw his bureau as a fulcrum of progress, an axis of science, industry, and technology. Soon, it would be at the center of the war effort as well.
Inside the elegant reception hall, the war seemed far away. Yet even here in Rauscher’s, with its glowing wall sconces and linen tablecloths, the upcoming war vote loomed over the gathering. Stirring as the president’s speech had been, it marked the start of what would be an acrimonious, bitter fight. In the morning, the senators and congressmen peering at Finley’s wildlife photographs would begin to debate whether to declare war.
For Manning, there was little to debate. Over the winter, he had been meeting with his department heads and planning for this moment. War was coming, and the country was ill prepared.
The War College, the War Department brain trust that charted the nation’s military policy in peacetime and war, had already asked for Manning’s assistance, requesting that his bureau regulate explosives nationwide. Bombs and dynamite menaced the whole country—every bridge, every ship, every munitions depot, was a potential target. But explosives were not the weapons that most concerned Manning. The armies of Kaiser Wilhelm had unleashed something new and dreadful on the fields of France and Belgium, weapons concocted in Germany’s industrial dye works and laboratories. Weapons that gagged and blinded and choked all those unlucky enough to stand in their path. For months, Manning had been preoccupied with the poison gases that the Germans unleashed on the battlefields, the clouds of noxious chemicals that immobilized Allied troops with fear and felled hundreds of soldiers at a time. The director contemplated a wartime role for his bureau, one that would put its scientific expertise fully at the service of the military.
For Manning, the battle had already begun.
Since an assassin’s bullets struck down Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand and his pregnant wife in June of 1914, sending Europe tumbling into war, the United States had been deeply divided over the distant conflict that had turned the Continent into a slaughterhouse. The Battles of Verdun and the Somme had revealed the war’s horrors: a front riddled with stinking trenches, a sodden, denuded wasteland rank with the stench of corpses rotting in the deep mud, trench lines that barely budged, and savage hand-to-hand combat. The British saw more than fifty-seven thousand casualties, with almost twenty thousand dead on the first day of the Battle of the Somme; by the battle’s end there were more than four hundred thousand casualties and over one hundred thousand dead. French casualties totaled more than two hundred thousand, while the Germans suffered as many as six hundred thousand. Death arrived in new and terrifying ways. Tanks made their debut, iron alligators growling across the battlefield, mashing fences, trenches, and bodies beneath their treads. In spasms of ferocious violence, faceless soldiers in masks unleashed liquid fire into the trenches. High explosives—shells packed with incendiary material that exploded on contact—tore men’s bodies to pieces. The mortar shells loaded with chemicals punctuated battles, coughing up toxic blends of phosgene, chloropicrin, and other poisons. All the rules that governed the battlefield, the codes of chivalry and honor intended to keep warfare civilized, had been abandoned.
From its earliest days, the war created sharply conflicting loyalties among Americans, some sympathizing with Germany and the other Central powers, others with the alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia, which became the Quadruple Entente with Italy’s addition in 1915. Socialists saw allies in Germany’s working class and viewed the war as little more than the death throes of inbred, imperial dynasties fueled by greed of speculators and industrialists. Isolationists viewed the war as an overseas quagmire of no concern to Americans. Deep seams of pacifism and antiwar sentiment ran through the country as well, with their own bellowing champions in Congress.
It was a barbarous, grinding war, a throwback to a time before laws of warfare. Yet at the same time it was a thoroughly modern conflict, a war of science and technology. Lithe German submarines had become fearsome predators in the ocean, and a new fleet of massive dreadnoughts—swift battleships larger than any vessel at sea—brought unheard-of firepower to the British navy. An era of aviation had unfolded in the skies, with aerial warfare and bombing. Long-distance observation from the air and signaling abilities on the ground had leaped forward. While mules and horses still brought equipment to the front, so did trucks and trains. Where cavalry once charged, now tanks rumbled across the battlefield. Machine guns, though not new to the war, were mass-produced in far-greater numbers to cut apart infantry assaults, and high explosives killed more soldiers on all sides than any other weapon. Massive howitzers like the fabled Big Bertha slung shells from miles away, and later, the Germans’ Paris guns bombarded France’s capital city from some sixty miles away.
If there was any military weapon that epitomized this new era of lethal science, it was gas warfare. Germany was at the vanguard of industrial chemistry, its engineering and industrial dye works the envy of scientists throughout Europe and the United States. For American chemists at elite universities, it was a privilege and rite of passage to travel across the Atlantic to study with Germany’s giants of the field, such as Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Walther Hermann Nernst at the University of Berlin.
Gas represented a fundamental change in warfare, and the 1915 chlorine attack and others that followed shocked American scientists. Not only was gas warfare a blatant violation of international pacts signed in 1899 and again in 1907, but scientists that American chemists revered, such as Haber and Nernst, were central to the German gas war
fare program. The prominent role of Haber, who had personally overseen the attack at Ypres at the front, was particularly odious for scientists because of another spectacular achievement, Haber’s discovery of a process for turning nitrogen gas into a crop fertilizer. Nitrogen fixation, as it was called, was a breakthrough, one of history’s greatest advances in agriculture. His enthusiastic embrace of chemical warfare earned him scorn and brought tragedy to his home. Just days after the attack at Ypres and Haber’s return from Belgium, Haber’s wife, Clara—an accomplished chemist herself—shot herself in the heart with his army pistol, despondent over her husband’s role in this new chapter of warfare. Haber left the next morning for the eastern front and did not attend her funeral.
Chlorine was only the beginning. Once the breach had opened, France and Britain responded in kind with their own gas programs. In September of 1915, the British attempted to retaliate with chlorine in Loos, Belgium. The attack was delayed and poorly planned. When the day arrived, the winds blew toward the British lines, and their soldiers advanced through their own gas cloud. The offensive was a failure, with over 2,600 British gas casualties and more than 50,000 overall, more than twice that of their adversaries.
The Germans, always a step ahead, introduced a new war gas in December 1915: the industrial chemical phosgene. A green cross marked the shells that carried it, and when the gas burst from exploded munitions, it gave off an odor of musty hay or apples. Far deadlier than chlorine, phosgene caused uncontrollable coughing and edema of the lungs even in tiny doses. Eventually, the victims’ lungs filled up with fluid, drowning the soldiers as they choked and gasped for breath. In July 1916, chloropicrin appeared in German shells. Called vomiting gas, it was rarely deadly, but it had the advantage of passing straight through the filters of the Allies’ rudimentary gas masks. When the retching soldiers tore off their masks, they inhaled other deadly chemicals mixed with the chloropicrin. Terrible as these weapons were, worse was still to come.
When war finally came to America, it arrived from under the sea. On May 7, 1915, the German submarine U-20 sank the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. Of all the war’s grotesque novelties, the advent of submarine warfare and the blockade that Germany announced in February of that year most inflamed American outrage. Britain’s dreadnoughts had virtually eliminated German surface ships from shipping routes. Germany’s response was to deploy its submarine fleet in stealthy attacks against merchant ships running the blockade. The Lusitania, though, was a passenger ship, and when the German submarine torpedoed the ship, more than one hundred American civilians were among the nearly twelve hundred passengers sent to their deaths, fanning fury toward Germany.
New outrages followed. Two months after the Lusitania sank, a former Harvard professor named Erich Muenter planted dynamite in the U.S. Capitol, shattering windows and blasting the frescoes from the ceiling, then attempted to murder the Wall Street financier J. P. Morgan Jr. Later that year, after Germany recalled its military attaché, Franz von Papen, and his naval attaché, Karl Boy-Ed, in December of 1915, Americans learned that the two of them had bankrolled a network of spies and saboteurs within the country. In July 1916, German agents set fires that detonated explosives and ammunition warehoused on Black Tom Island in Jersey City with powerful blasts felt as far away as Maryland and Connecticut, shattering windows for miles around. A secret cabal of conspirators led by a German chemist smuggled ingenious incendiary devices onto dozens of merchant ships, delayed-action chemical bombs that set the vessels afire at sea. With each new report of sunken ships and sabotage, the anger grew.
American scientists who understood the link between Germany’s scientific and industrial capacity and its success in developing new weapons began to quietly discuss the possibility that their own chemists and other scientists could be called upon if the United States entered the conflict. Soon after the attacks at Ypres and the sinking of the Lusitania, the astrophysicist George E. Hale wrote to William H. Welch, president of the National Academy of Sciences, about what the war meant for men of science.
However remote the possibility of war, he wrote, America needed to muster its own scientific prowess to the same ends for “development of new appliances of warfare,” including chemical weapons. Hale’s letter contained a prescient note of dread over the prospect of gas warfare. “I hope we should avoid the use of poisonous gases, but we must enlist the aid of our chemists in protecting our soldiers against them,” he wrote. He urged Welch to keep the entire matter confidential until it became clear whether scientific mobilization was necessary.
President Wilson, a puritanical Presbyterian and pacifist at heart, maintained that armed neutrality was the best course and believed the United States should be a mediator of the warring nations. When he was renominated in 1916, Democratic delegates cheered his slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” and he rode support for neutrality back into the White House for a second term. He kept the country on a high level of alert nonetheless, adopting the slogan “America First,” supporting “preparedness” campaigns, and pushing for an expanded military and navy.
Part of that preparedness for war included heeding Hale’s warning. In 1916, Hale, Welch, and other scientists met with President Wilson to offer the services of scientists to the war effort. The result was the National Research Council, a think tank of leading scientists across disciplines, government agencies, and the Smithsonian Institution, to encourage government, private industry, and academia to collaborate on industry, defense, and national security issues, with Hale at its head. On August 5 of that year, President Wilson sent the names of government appointees to Hale. One of those names was Manning’s.
Van Manning was an unlikely warrior. He spoke with warm, self-deprecating humor and seemed to always want to credit others for achievements. Despite his affable personality, he could appear preoccupied and dour, his mouth drawn into a thin, humorless line. In a bureau publicity photo, he looked distinctly uncomfortable, his jacket a bit too snug, his outfit a bit too formal, as he observed a lab-bench experiment of one of his chemists. He was a government man above all, a bureaucrat with an exacting nature who paid fussy attention to detail.
Yet there was more to Manning than his buttoned-up appearance revealed. Though Manning had never fought on a battlefield, he was a child of war nonetheless and had soldierly instincts. His father, also named Vannoy Hartog Manning, was a Confederate colonel. A brash Southern partisan from North Carolina, he studied law in Nashville before moving with his wife to Horn Lake Depot, Mississippi. Not long after the Civil War broke out in 1861, he helped organize an infantry regiment and marched to Vicksburg with eleven companies, leaving behind his pregnant wife. Captured at the Battle of the Wilderness, he spent the rest of the war in prison.
After the South’s surrender, Manning returned to his family, his face scarred by battle wounds. His wife had moved to Holly Springs, Mississippi, with their young son, who was now four years old. The boy had been born in December of 1861, and his mother had given him his father’s name without a “junior” at the end, perhaps reflecting doubt about his father’s return. For more than a decade, the elder Manning practiced law and his son went to school. In 1877, Manning was elected to Congress and moved to Washington. The younger Manning studied at the University of Mississippi and worked as a schoolteacher in Holly Springs for a time before the whole family joined his father in Washington, settling in a neighborhood southeast of the Capitol.
The younger Van Manning did not become a creature of Washington right away. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hired him for a job that would lead him to the world of chemical warfare more than thirty years later. He spent two years as a topographic aide surveying land in Massachusetts before he took charge of mapping parties in Wisconsin and North Dakota and then assisted the survey of Indian Territory. Year by year, his responsibilities grew. He became section chief of surveys in Missouri and Arkansas, then was put in charge of surveys for the entire southeastern United Stat
es. Over a quarter century, Manning surveyed federal land in almost every state. Mapping was dangerous, rugged work—one slip could result in a deadly tumble or injury. Foul weather and cold brought on sickness. Wild animals prowled the territories, along with two-legged denizens potentially hostile to surveyor teams. Under his bespoke trousers, Manning had a bullet wound on his right shin.
At their core, the geological surveys were technical expeditions linked with the nation’s growth, charting the nation’s interior and cataloging the resources that would fuel future engines of industrial progress. Manning’s mentor and predecessor at the helm of the Bureau of Mines, Joseph A. Holmes, saw science as a critical ingredient for industrial progress and believed the government should have a central role in making mineral and resource extraction safer and more efficient. His advocacy moved Congress to authorize a new technological branch of the Geological Survey.
Holmes’s ultimate goal was to create a bureau dedicated solely to mines and mining. Thousands of men were dying every year in mines across the country. Holmes used his reach at the helm of the new scientific branch to deepen investigations into accidents. Private companies and trade groups like the American Mining Congress supported his efforts, and a series of disastrous explosions in December of 1907 highlighted the urgency of his work. The Technologic Branch began investigating safety lamps and mine-rescue equipment, and studied explosives and the perils of running electricity underground. Given the divergence of the scientific work from USGS surveys, as well as pressure from mining interests, Congress created the Bureau of Mines in 1910. President Taft put Holmes in charge. Holmes adopted the slogan “Safety First” for the bureau, a credo to guide its lifesaving research. He named Manning as assistant director in January 1911, and Manning remained at Holmes’s side throughout the rest of his tenure.