by Theo Emery
For Wilson and Secretary of War Baker, the fight over the draft was a distasteful one. Both men disdained the idea of compulsory military service, and Baker owed his appointment to antidraft views that he shared with the president. But the shifting tides of the war had changed their positions as a draft looked increasingly necessary, further infuriating pacifists and other war opponents who already felt betrayed by Wilson’s reversal on neutrality.
Foremost in Wilson’s and Baker’s minds were lessons learned in Great Britain, where fervor to volunteer had sent vast numbers of potential leaders to perish in the trenches. To Wilson, raising an army demanded a methodical, organized conscription system that would avoid sending into battle American boys whose skills could be used in some critical capacity and would ensure that the country’s economic and industrial foundations remained sound. An orderly approach to raising an army also served the interests of the Bureau of Mines scientists, who feared that capable technical men would be swept up in a stampede to volunteer for service. The only way to create such a system was compulsory registration that would require every eligible man to step up and make himself known to the government—a huge undertaking that had never been attempted before.
Complicating the draft’s delicate politics even further, Theodore Roosevelt—one of Wilson’s most ferocious critics for vacillating on whether to fight—had been agitating with his usual bombast for an all-volunteer force to go to the trenches. Huge prowar rallies thundered for a full-throttle military engagement in France, and Roosevelt’s supporters advocated for the aging former president himself to be at their vanguard. When the War Department announced in May that it would send an expeditionary force to France led by General Pershing, the force did not include Roosevelt’s volunteer force. Wilson complimented Roosevelt’s gallantry but bluntly rejected his volunteer regiment. “The business now in hand is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definitiveness and precision,” he said in his public comment.
Congress battled over the draft details for weeks, and the bill that eventually passed required all men ages twenty-one to thirty to register for selective service into the new National Army, with harsh penalties for those who shirked their duty. Registration day was set for June 5, which Wilson declared a holiday. The Council of National Defense ordered churches and fire stations to ring their bells at 7:00 a.m., when registration booths opened. Bands would play patriotic songs, fire bells would ring, and the government recommended that men of registration age should be escorted to the doors of the station by their kinfolk, neighbors, and friends.
“Registration Day should be celebrated as a consecration of the American people to service and to sacrifice. It should be a welcome to those registering. It should be a public expression by each community of willingness to surrender its sons to the country,” the council director, Walter Gifford, proclaimed in his directive.
The hullabaloo wasn’t for patriotism’s sake alone. Recalling the draft riots during the Civil War, Baker worried about anticonscription demonstrations and even bloodshed. To Baker’s great relief, the day went smoothly, with only scattered unrest and protest. With brass bands blaring and flags waving, almost 10 million men lined up at registration stations throughout the country.
The first draft drawing was on July 20, and Secretary of War Baker himself drew the first number. Standing in a packed hearing room in the Senate office building, Baker rapped on the tabletop in front of him, and the room fell silent. Dozens of reporters seated around long tables turned to look at Baker, along with members of the House and Senate Military Affairs Committees in silk summer suits and long-tailed jimswingers. On the table, a fishbowl held tiny capsules. He stood in front of a long chalkboard filled with numbers from 1 to 500.
“Gentlemen, this is a solemn and historic moment,” Baker said. “We come here to determine which of ten million of our young men who have registered for national service will be selected to answer the president’s call for an army of 687,000.”
After Brigadier General Enoch H. Crowder explained how the drawing would work, another general broke the paper seal on the fishbowl and stirred the capsules inside with a long wooden spoon. Baker took his glasses off, and an aide tied a white blindfold over his eyes and guided him to the table. Baker stirred the jar again with the spoon, then reached in.
“I have drawn the first number,” he said, and held the capsule up. A War Department clerk took it from Baker’s hand, broke it open, and read the number. “The number is two hundred and fifty-eight,” he said. “Two hundred and fifty-eight,” the tally chief repeated, and the number went onto the chalkboard opposite the number 1. The draft had begun.
By the time of the drawing, almost 184,000 recruits had already volunteered to go to France in their state National Guard units or in the Regular Army. The troop convoys had departed Hoboken in secrecy, as had General Pershing himself—one day he was in his tiny War Department office that was barely big enough to contain him and his staff, and then one day he was gone—his desk empty, and his aides’, too—only to reappear in England shortly after.
The arrival of the American soldiers was unexpected to the French. When the first convoy glided into Saint-Nazaire, France, a strange stillness discomfited some of the American soldiers leaning over the railings of the ships as crowds watched in eerie silence from the quay. By the time the second contingent arrived on June 27, the mood had changed, or at least the press accounts of it had. American flags had been hastily erected around the port, and throngs of French admirers cheered wildly as the transports brought the troops ashore.
Sibert, General Pershing’s second-in-command of the American Expeditionary Forces, had no battlefield experience or training in organizing field troops. What he did have, however, was political capital, which made him a darling of Congress and helped propel him to France and, eventually, to the head of the Chemical Warfare Service.
A son of the South, Sibert was born on October 12, 1860, and grew up on his family farm in Gadsden, Alabama. He came from a long military tradition. His great-grandfather arrived in America as a regular in the British army, and his father, a Confederate infantryman, had been wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run. The schoolhouse in Gadsden was a primitive, one-room school, but young Sibert excelled, particularly in math. In the lean years after the Civil War, Sibert left school to work on the family farm. His years of backbreaking farmwork provided him a personal benchmark for the toil an able-bodied man could do in a day. Instead of returning to school, he crammed for an entire year to prepare for college applications and was accepted at the University of Alabama at age eighteen. His high marks earned him free room and board and, eventually, a spot at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy for the Corps of Engineers, where he transferred in 1880.
One of the first challenges for new cadets was a grueling, often-humiliating period in the “Beast Barracks,” where first years known as plebes were segregated from the rest of the students and subjected to near-constant hazing. The Beast Barracks were a ritual that cadets whispered about with fear and awe, a trial intended to toughen the young soldiers, instill discipline, and build camaraderie. When an upperclassman burst into the tent that Sibert shared with his bunkmate, a spindly South Carolinian named David DuBose Gaillard, and asked the smaller boy’s name, he replied, “David, sir.” The older cadet saw Sibert standing at attention, towering over his bunkmate. “Oh yes,” the older cadet gloated, “you are David and this is Goliath.”
Not only was Sibert big for his age, but the farm boy could thrash bigger upperclassman in the boxing matches and fistfights that settled grudges among the cadets. Long after he graduated, the name “Goliath” stuck. More than twenty years later, David and Goliath would be thrown together again in a new backbreaking test of strength and stamina, one with far-higher stakes: construction of the Panama Canal.
Top students at West Point received appointments to the Corps of Engineers, ushering them into the ranks of the army elite. Sibert graduated seventh in his clas
s of thirty-seven, just below Gaillard. During training at the Engineer School at Willets Point, New York, Sibert met his first wife, a Texas belle named Mary Margaret Cummings, whom he called Mamie. When they were apart, he addressed his tender letters to “My dear old darling,” writing in one that “there is a charm about you that makes you surpass all other women in my eyes… .I wish I could kiss you good night and tell you how dearly I love you and how hard it is to get along without you.” They would have a daughter and seven sons, two of whom died in infancy. Sibert studied lock-and-dam engineering, working on the Green and Barren Rivers near Bowling Green, Kentucky, and then the Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, locks system between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes. His work there earned him a command in Little Rock, Arkansas, and then an assignment in 1899 as chief engineer of the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines, one of the fronts in the Spanish-American War. While serving on the staff of an early-rising general, Sibert adopted the habit of arriving at his office each day before dawn. When the war ended, another stint in the States followed, before President Roosevelt appointed him to the Isthmian Canal Commission, the body charged with building a canal across Panama, in March 1907.
The Panama Canal was an engineering marvel, an undertaking so vast and ambitious that it was compared to wonders like the Pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China. Every European explorer since Hernán Cortés had dreamed of a maritime shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans to avoid the arduous journey around South America. Several routes had been charted, but the French were the first to buy the rights and property from the Colombian government to build the canal. Hacking through disease-infested jungle and carving a trough through the Culebra Mountains proved too costly and complicated for the French; after twenty years, they threw up their hands and sold the canal rights to the United States. A series of short-lived appointments convinced President Roosevelt that permanent oversight was needed, leading to the seven-member Isthmian Canal Commission, which included Sibert.
The Canal Zone was an otherworldly place, an eruption of man and machinery amid primordial tropical forests teeming with perils. Tapirs thundered through the brush, and tiger cats prowled the undergrowth at night. The fer-de-lance, an irritable pit viper that could spit venom six feet, slithered underfoot. Mosquitoes carrying yellow fever, malaria, and other maladies swarmed the humid forests. The vast scale of the construction zone was staggering, with denuded hillsides sloping into a Stygian moonscape of soil and rock stitched together with rail lines. An army of steam shovels huffed clouds of smoke as they clawed through soil and substrate, and the ground trembled underfoot with the roar of dynamite blasting apart the Culebra Mountains. Showers less like rain than cataracts of water triggered flash floods and landslides that sometimes buried steam shovels and trains under hundreds of tons of soil and clay. Boneyards of abandoned French excavators and rusty train cars enveloped by jungle creepers peppered the Canal Zone, reminders of the folly that came before.
Unlike the rotating crew of civilian engineers who came and went, the new commissioners were not allowed to resign and were required to live in the Canal Zone. Sibert was one of the top engineers who together were the driving force behind the canal; the others were Colonel George W. Goethals and Lieutenant Colonel David Gaillard, his old friend from West Point. On the Atlantic side of the canal, Sibert was responsible for construction of the Gatun Locks, the system of concrete basins and watertight gates that raise southbound ships to the elevation of Gatun Lake and lower northbound ships from the lake to the Atlantic Ocean. On the Pacific side, he was also in charge of the West Breakwater in Colón, the Gatun Dam, and the channel between Gatun Lake and the Pacific. Gaillard was in charge of another stupendously difficult part of the project: the Culebra Cut, the vast trench bisecting the spine of the isthmus to link the locks on the north and south ends of the canal. Another engineer, Colonel William C. Gorgas, also had a seemingly impossible task: to rid the zone of diseases that killed laborers by the thousands.
Sibert spent six years in Panama, bringing his family to live in a house that he built for them. Acrimonious battles raged over the design of the canal. At one point, when Sibert returned to Washington for congressional hearings on the canal, a candid response to a congressman’s hypothetical question about lock failure nearly resulted in his dismissal. The secretary of war was coaxed into allowing Sibert to stay. It was a wise decision. Sibert’s efficiency and meticulous organization significantly cut the construction time for the Gatun Locks. The locks were expected to take two years longer than other parts of the canal; instead, Sibert completed the locks first.
After Sibert returned from Panama in 1914, the army sent him to China to work on flood mitigation. When he returned, the army put him in command of the Pacific artillery in San Francisco. Tragedy struck the family in spring of 1915 when his beloved wife, Mamie, died of malaria.
Congress was still giddy with patriotic fervor over the canal’s completion and eager to reward the men who turned the dream of a canal into reality. A special act of Congress made Sibert a brigadier general, pushing him into the ranks of the general officers of the line. Trained in warfare, officers of the line resented the exalted status of the Corps of Engineers; one major general confided to Sibert that Congress might as well start promoting medical doctors as generals if it was doing the same with engineers.
When war finally came in 1917, the petrified hierarchies of the U.S. Army limited General Pershing’s options for his line generals. He selected Sibert as his second-in-command, a man who knew about hydrodynamic pressure and the calculus of Pascal’s law but had no battlefield experience. Sibert knew Pershing from their West Point days, although they were in different classes.
Goliath was summoned for active duty on April 26, the announcement drowned in the flood of news over the slaughter at Arras. His promotion to major general in June was similarly overshadowed by Pershing’s arrival in London. Sibert was sent quietly across the Atlantic, and it was only after he had landed that the army announced his command of the First Division. In one photo that ran out on the wires, Sibert wore tweedy civilian clothes and appeared gaunt, looking more like a harried professor in his tie and vest than a general taking command of the trenches. When the ship reached Saint-Nazaire, Pershing himself had greeted the troops, standing stock-still on the wharf, intently studying the men as they walked down the gangplank. Sibert didn’t know Pershing as well as the other officers who disembarked with him, but he would soon learn that Pershing’s harsh scrutiny wouldn’t abate, and that after the general made a judgment about someone, he rarely changed his mind.
Sibert was not the only engineer that Pershing plucked from obscurity. In the early morning of July 20, Amos A. Fries strode into the lobby of the Astor Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, uniform rumpled from a long night on the train from Washington, D.C., and set down his suitcase containing his pistol belt and riding gloves. A forty-four-year-old cattleman’s son with a mustache like a Fuller brush, Fries had dark, piercing eyes that burned with a fierce intensity and a head of unruly curls that erupted on either side of a severe part down the middle of his head. He always had an indomitable confidence no matter where he found himself, and it showed in the imperial angle of his chin, in the hard glare from under his brow.
He had traveled more than two thousand miles across America, but the lavish hotel was only the midpoint of his journey, a gilded resting point before he continued on to Europe. The hotel’s baroque interior, with its elegant Oriental carpets and gleaming marble columns reaching up to intricate ceiling frescoes, was hardly the kind of accommodations to which Fries was accustomed. He had gone from an austere frontier childhood to the spartan existence of the army, where he served in malarial swamps of the Philippines and then the volcanic ferment of Yellowstone Park, where he had been director of roads until just a few weeks earlier. Now he found himself in luxurious surroundings with a few days of relaxation and high-society amusement.
Before Fries retired to hi
s room, he took care of a vital piece of business: letting his beloved wife, Bessie, know that he had arrived safely. His brisk efficiency and adherence to the army’s clockwork predictability masked a sentimental streak. Every morning, he put tiny photos of all his children and his wife in his pocket and carried them with him everywhere he went, and he wrote home almost every day, addressing his letters to “My darling wifey and babies,” and ending them with “With love and kisses, Amos, Daddy.” Sometimes he scrawled his letters home on stationery, sometimes pecked them out on a typewriter, sometimes dictated them through the window of a telegraph office. On the night he arrived in New York, the telegram to his wife went out at 3:30 a.m. “Am stopping Hotel Astor now,” he wrote. He suffered chronic indigestion, but even after his long voyage, his stomach felt fine. “Am feeling well weather warm but not so hot as June,” he wrote. Finally, Fries retreated to his room to unpack his suitcase, where he had tucked some of his purchases in Washington, which included three pairs of pajamas.