Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  The dangers of the work took a toll. Holmes contracted tuberculosis during an arduous survey in Alaska, and the illness forced him to step away from his duties in 1914. Manning ran the bureau in Holmes’s absence—by some accounts, more efficiently than Holmes did. “Many of the things that Dr. Holmes could not find time to do, Mr. Manning has done. Many of the papers and reports which Dr. Holmes did not have time to write or edit, Mr. Manning has ‘whipped into shape,’” reported one mining newsletter.

  After a long decline, Holmes died in July of 1915. Manning wrote Holmes’s obituary for the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. “In the death of Dr. Holmes, the people of the United States lose one of their most remarkable and efficient public servants,” he wrote. With a vacancy at the top of the organization, President Wilson appointed Manning to the position. Well-wishers from around the country, from state geologists to the United Mine Workers, wrote to congratulate him. The bureau held a banquet at Rauscher’s to welcome Manning on November 20, 1915. More than two hundred people attended, and after the guests found their seats in the banquet room, the toastmaster asked everyone to stand for a moment of silence to remember Holmes. After everyone took their seats again, George Otis Smith, the head of the Geological Survey, remained on his feet. Manning’s success, he said, was due to his work as a topographer. “He has had more hard knocks than his looks show,” Smith said.

  The speeches were long, and the night grew late. Finally, Interior Secretary Franklin K. Lane rose from his seat. He thanked the other speakers and spoke a few words in homage to Holmes. Then a political note crept into Lane’s speech. He equated the Bureau of Mines slogan “Safety First” to President Wilson’s slogan “America First.” The two slogans were one and the same, Lane said—“safety for ourselves and safety for our country.” The Bureau of Mines was at the nexus of both. The agency’s men delved into the secrets of nature and placed them in the service of the nation, he said, “because we have passed now into an industrial world, and war seems to be the chief industry.” Where war was once a clash of men with swords, those days were past. Now military might meant extracting and developing immense mineral reserves. It meant smelting ore into barbed wire, railroads, cannons, and automobiles— “everything that a great industrial nation has constitutes the army now when comes the war, and we are an army pre-eminently great in leading any onslaught, because we have mineral resources greater than those of any other country,” he said.

  In a world where industrial might and military might were inextricably linked, the Bureau of Mines, an agency created to save lives, was now more critical than ever, resting squarely at the axis of progress, military strength, and economic power. Lane said:

  We can build a battleship out of the mines of the United States, and no other country can make that boast. And it is the plan to make the Bureau of Mines a great conservation institution, saving from waste, putting to use, and I have no doubt that the president was wise, as wise as usual, when he selected to direct the work of that bureau Mr. Manning.

  As Manning rose to his feet, the guests in the hall began to sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” He spoke only a few minutes, mostly in self-effacing praise of others, and he sprinkled his comments with modest adages and wry jokes. He thanked President Wilson and Secretary Lane, then the audience. “When the day is done, I will be satisfied if it is said of me: ‘Living he did gain men’s good opinions, and now dead leaves his work to the care of noble friends,’” he said. The room broke into applause. The speeches were done. The band struck up. The guests rose and began to dance.

  By winter of 1917, Secretary Lane’s bellicose words proved true, and the shadow of war grew with each passing day. Still adamant in his desire to keep America out of the war, Wilson tried to broker a peaceful solution. On January 22, 1917, he proposed a league of peace that would require the Central powers and the Allies to lay down arms and abandon the old dynastic alliances that had begun the war. It would be a global Monroe Doctrine, founded upon the notion that no nation should try to influence another. At its heart was a principle that he called “peace without victory,” a puzzling concept that earned opprobrium and ridicule from critics.

  For days after the speech, there was silence from Germany and Austria. Soon their views became clear. A German newspaper in Essen that served as a government mouthpiece scoffed that Wilson did not understand Europe and dismissed the plan as “beyond the bounds of practicality.” Vienna expressed disappointment in the speech, dismissing Wilson’s words as shiny pearls that would lose luster.

  The true response came on January 31, when Wilson’s secretary stepped into the president’s office and laid a wire-service bulletin on the desk without a word. Wilson set down his pen. Amazement crept over his face as he read, his lips pressed together. Germany had abandoned its pledge not to attack neutral ships, including American vessels. His long face ashen and his jaw clenched, Wilson handed the paper back. “This means war. The break that we have tried so hard to prevent now seems inevitable,” he said. Neutrality was no longer an option. “Peace without victory” was dead.

  On February 3, Wilson returned to Capitol Hill, this time to announce that he had severed diplomatic relations with Germany and recalled the American ambassador in Berlin. In the following days, the toll of lives lost at sea rose in a grim tally. A German submarine sank the U.S. steamship Housatonic on its way to London. On February 6, U-boats sank fourteen ships on a single day, twelve the next day, and ten more the day after that. As Wilson went to Congress to ask for the arming of merchant ships, a new outrage inflamed the public further: the Associated Press published a secret German telegram proposing an alliance with Japan and America’s adversary to the south, Mexico, if Wilson declared war.

  Germany’s machinations finally tipped the scale. There seemed to be no way back from the brink. With war increasingly inevitable, Secretary Lane ordered each of his bureaus to confer over how best to aid in preparedness. Manning summoned his chiefs and his top technical men to his office on February 7. Manning’s chief mining engineer, George S. Rice, came from Pittsburgh. Rice was fifty, with a thatch of gray hair and piercing blue-gray eyes set back beneath a heavy brow. His specialty was mine explosions, and he had been at the bureau since its earliest days, first as senior engineer and then as chief mining engineer. He had even temporarily stepped in as director when Manning was traveling on bureau business. During Rice’s frequent trips to Washington, he stayed at the Cosmos Club, one of the city’s elite private dining clubs that invited only the most accomplished scholars and scientists to join.

  The bureau headquarters were in the Busch Building, a brick claptrap of creaking elevators and battered wainscoting on E Street NW. About ten blocks to the west, carpenters and electricians were completing a new building for the Department of the Interior that the Bureau of Mines would move to in April. The vast stone structure would be one of the biggest office buildings in Washington. Each bureau within the department would have its own rectangular tower, rising five levels above common floors of the building. Just a few blocks from the White House, the new building sat close to the epicenter of federal power, reflecting the department’s prominence.

  Manning maintained a tidy office, almost prim in its organization. He worked at a double-sized desk, polished to a gleam. When he bent over his work, pen in hand, he resembled a diminutive pianist hunched over his instrument. He protected the desktop with a wide blotter, a double inkwell centered at the top. He aligned his books in perfect rows on the shelves. A photograph of Joseph Holmes hung on one wall, his baleful eyes peering out over his walrus mustache. On another wall, Manning hung a very different print: a wilderness vista of a waterfall crashing from a rugged peak. Full of turbulence and motion, the picture showed a place that was the opposite of Washington, with its cautious order and arcane rules of conduct.

  After the men settled into their seats, Manning asked each for his views on how the bureau could aid in the war effort. Rice said the bureau cou
ld almost certainly help investigate war gases, especially in finding ways to protect the soldiers with masks. After all, one of the bureau’s men, an engineer named William Gibbs, had designed a breathing apparatus that allowed miners to breathe freely amid clouds of poison gas underground.

  Charles L. Parsons, the bureau’s chief chemist, had just returned from an expedition to Europe to study chemical processes in England, France, Italy, Norway, and Sweden. He was among the most prominent chemists in the country, and his words had clout. When it was his turn to speak, he dismissed Rice’s suggestion that a gas mask was needed on the battlefield. The problem of protecting against gas had been solved with “a simple cloth mask, which dipped in certain chemicals neutralized the gases,” he said.

  The comment astonished Rice, and probably all the other men in the room, too. In fact, the earliest German and British masks were not far from what Parsons described, which perhaps was the reason Parsons was so convinced that more effective protection was unneeded. But those were emergency measures abandoned years ago, and all sides had long ago developed much-more-advanced gas masks. The idea that a cloth over the nose and mouth could provide a suitable defense against poison gases was preposterous, particularly coming from the bureau’s chief chemist. The comment illustrated the naïveté of the Americans with respect to the gas threat, even two years after the introduction of chlorine at Ypres.

  Manning, though, firmly agreed with Rice that real masks were needed and saw his bureau as the logical agency to spearhead the work. In fact, he believed it to be the only government organization with the collective scientific ability to handle the problems of war gases.

  While Parson’s skepticism about gas masks was wildly off the mark, some of his other observations were not. Throughout Europe, a shortage of chemists hobbled the Allies’ ability to respond to Germany’s weapons. Everywhere, Parsons said, anguished scientists reported that their ranks had been dangerously thinned as result of chemists being sent to the front as soldiers, their expertise and training dying in the trenches with them. Germany, by contrast, had shielded its scientists from such a fate by keeping them at home and out of combat. Realizing their mistake, generals in France, England, Italy, and Canada had all ordered their chemists back from the front. It was not a mistake that Manning intended to let the American military repeat.

  The next day, he wrote to the National Research Council offering to lead war gas investigations, pointing out that the bureau could use its expertise to design gas masks for soldiers. The bureau already had testing chambers at the Pittsburgh station, and experienced scientists. The chairman of the council wrote back a few days later, saying he would bring the matter to the attention of the council’s committee.

  While Manning awaited further word, the bureau’s work continued. There were deadly mine explosions and fires to investigate. Technical papers and reports needed review, requests from Congress demanded attention. But preparedness was never far from Manning’s thoughts. At the end of March, President Wilson told his cabinet that he would seek a war declaration from Congress. The next day, the War College nudged Manning still closer to the war effort. Because explosives were mostly used in mining and related industries, the War College president, Brigadier General Joseph E. Kuhn, requested that the Bureau of Mines regulate explosives everywhere in the country. The need to control explosives was obvious to anyone who read the newspapers. Many states had no such regulations, and those that did often conflicted with other states’, making for a confused patchwork of rules. Determined saboteurs could easily get their hands on dynamite. An example was right under the government’s nose: the bombing of the U.S. Capitol in 1915, in which the perpetrator ordered dynamite, blasting caps, and fuses and had them delivered under an alias to a railroad freight office, where the helpful station agent had locked the dynamite in his office and held it overnight as a courtesy.

  As the march toward war continued, Manning undertook an ambitious task: a nationwide census of scientists in fields that might be of use to the war effort. Like all of Manning’s undertakings, the census was meticulous: twenty-five thousand letters mailed to chemists, engineers, metal-mining and coal-mining companies. The letter asked for information about the type of work and materials the scientists worked with. It asked them to name colleges they attended, military connections, citizenship status, along with marital status, number of children, and country where they were born. Manning made no secret of his desire to enlist the country’s chemists and scientists into the war effort. Trade groups such as the American Institute of Mining Engineers and the American Chemical Society supported the effort. Charles Herty, the influential editor of the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, was an enthusiastic booster and featured the census in the journal’s pages. Completing the questionnaire, Manning said, was “a matter of patriotism.”

  Shipyards would have to assemble destroyers and submarines as quickly as possible, he said. Factories would have to retool to build tanks and artillery. There would be a race to counter ever-evolving weapons with more lethal ones. American expertise and skills had already produced armored battleships, submarines, machine guns, and airships. Whatever new weapons and devices were needed when war arrived, the country’s technical men would find a way to make them. This was an engineers’ war, Manning said. A chemists’ war.

  Wilson’s second term had begun on March 4 with barely a whisper, a hurried recitation of the oath of office, stripped of ritual, in the President’s Room of the Capitol, while antiwar senators thundered against his maritime defense bill in the chamber a few feet away. The next day, he was sworn in again in an austere, bare-bones public inauguration. His war address to Congress was set for Monday, April 2. Wilson spent Palm Sunday laboring over his speech, then went to church to pray. That night, opponents of U.S. intervention protested the president’s reversal, and war supporters mounted patriotic demonstrations. A riot broke out at an antiwar speech in Baltimore.

  On the day of the speech, protesters from throughout the country disembarked at Union Station. White antiwar sashes slung over shoulders and bands cinched around their arms, they marched under the station’s flag-draped archway and past a recruiting station with a sign reading MEN WANTED FOR THE ARMY. When demonstrators tried to assemble on the Capitol steps, police herded them down to the plaza in front of jeering onlookers. War supporters turned out in huge numbers as well, trailing the pacifists’ lobbying circuit through Congress. Inside the building, a heated argument between Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge and an antiwar demonstrator escalated into a fistfight. After the senator leveled the man with a punch to the jaw, a Western Union messenger beat the protester, spattering blood on the marble floor. In the hours before the speech, Secret Service and police swarmed the building, clearing out demonstrators, and mounted police guarded the entrances.

  Wilson waited all day for the summons from Congress. It came just after 8:00 p.m. Thousands of people massed in the rain outside the White House, singing raucous renditions of “Dixie” and “America” that could be heard for blocks. Cavalry flanked Wilson’s car as it drove slowly past the cheering crowds toward the Capitol. The car arrived at 8:30 p.m., and Edith Wilson left her husband in the President’s Room to take her seat in the gallery. With only a Secret Service man and a magazine editor looking on, the president sagged against the ornate fireplace and stared into the mirror over the mantel. His face was so contorted and flushed that the alarmed editor thought Wilson might be having a stroke. Then he straightened, composed himself, and walked to the House chamber.

  Onlookers jostled in the galleries, and the diplomatic corps faced the rostrum. Supreme Court justices were in the front, with Chief Justice Edward Douglass White at their center. When the president reached the dais, cheers prevented him from speaking for two minutes. The chamber finally fell silent, the lawmakers and dignitaries still. He gripped his typewritten notes in both hands and read without looking up.

  “I have called the Congress into extraordinary s
ession because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making,” he read. The president went on, now looking up from time to time. The new German submarine policy had swept aside all restriction on the seas, he said. “Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board.” Hospital ships and relief vessels had been sunk. Men, women, and children had died on the seas. Armed neutrality, the position he had pledged, “is ineffectual enough at best.

  In such circumstances and in the face of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual; it is likely only to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is practically certain to draw us into the war without either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents. There is one choice we can not make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission—

  In the front row, Chief Justice White leaped to his feet, dropping his hat to the floor and raising his arms with a joyous expression on his face. Lips pressed together as if holding back tears, White clapped his hands above his head. As if on cue, Democrats followed suit, and the entire chamber thundered with applause. The words that followed were lost in the roar of approval from the chamber.