In Washington, Tumulty had been equally valuable in dealing with Congress and the press during Wilson’s first term. He combined abundant charm with shrewd judgment and tact. Nevertheless, after Wilson’s reelection in 1916, the president had fired Tumulty. Why? Because Edith Galt Wilson and Colonel House had advised him against having an Irish Catholic in his White House. Edith considered Tumulty “common.” House foolishly joined the First Lady in this effort to dispose of a rival for Wilson’s attention, never dreaming that he was next on her hit list.
Tumulty had been the target of attacks by anti-Catholics and politicians jealous of his influence—often one and the same. Too many Irish Americans assumed he could get them favored treatment on everything from government jobs to freeing Ireland from Britain’s grip. In dealing with these problems, Tumulty did nothing to impugn his loyalty or impair his usefulness to the president.
Tumulty wrote Wilson a sad letter, in which he said his dismissal “wounds me more deeply than I can tell you.” Although he was “heartsick,” he would depart “grateful for having been associated so closely with so great a man.” Newspaperman David Lawrence, a former student of Wilson’s at Princeton and an admirer of Tumulty, persuaded the president to change his mind. But the old, confident friendship between Tumulty and Wilson was gone beyond recall. The secretary was always aware that Edith Wilson’s critical eye was fixed on him—and her opinion often meant more to the president than his advice.41
XII
Edith Galt Wilson was by no means the first presidential wife to wield political power behind the scenes. Abigail Adams was known as a “compleat politician,” whose counsel her harassed husband, John, frequently sought. Dolley Madison’s political skills were crucial to the survival of James Madison’s troubled presidency. Sarah Polk was James Polk’s constant confidante and adviser on everything from patronage to fighting the Mexican war.
But these First Ladies had been married to their politician husbands for decades before they reached the White House and had acquired graduate degrees in political sophistication over the years. Edith Galt Wilson’s interest in politics was so minimal that she did not even know who was running in the presidential election of 1912, when her future husband won the White House. Even more minimal was her education—only two years of formal schooling. Her adult life had been largely involved with business. Her late husband had owned a jewelry store known as “the Tiffany’s of Washington. ” After his death, she managed the business with the help of a hardworking brother.
Nevertheless, the recently widowed Wilson, in his passionate pursuit of Mrs. Galt, undertook to convert her into a partner in the most confidential aspects of his presidency. He conferred with her about his letters to the German government and his problems with Haiti, Mexico and the Republican opposition. Soon she was telling him,“Much as I love your delicious love-letters . . . I believe I enjoy even more the ones in which you tell me . . . of what you are working on . . . for then I feel I am . . . being taken in to partnership as it were.”42
After their marriage on December 18, 1915, this partnership became even more explicit. Each morning, Edith joined the president in inspecting “the Drawer,” the place in his Oval Office desk where aides placed reports from the State Department or other parts of the government requiring the president’s immediate attention. Edith regularly converted into code Wilson’s letters to ambassadors or to House when the colonel was conferring with political leaders in London and Paris, and decoded letters from them. She frequently remained in the Oval Office while Wilson dictated answers to urgent letters. When Colonel House returned from Europe, he was amazed when Wilson invited Edith to join them to hear about his supersecret negotiations with the British and French.43
This crash course in power politics made Edith Galt Wilson presume a political wisdom she did not possess. The illusion would have a deleterious impact not only on Joe Tumulty and Colonel House, but also on Woodrow Wilson’s presidency and the history of the world.
XIII
Elsewhere in the country, the news that the United States had gone to war landed with a dull thud. No one danced or demonstrated in the streets. In New York, newsboys sold extras to the usual crowds in Times Square. But there was no visible response. About a hundred people read the bulletin boards in Herald Square, where the latest news flashes were posted, without the slightest sign of excitement. The contrast between the way the war had begun in Europe, with tens of thousands of Germans, French, and Russians cheering the news, was stark.44
There was some mild interest in a New York Times story about a hearing before the New York State Senate in Albany to resolve a dispute between Mayor John Purroy Mitchel of New York City and State Senator Robert F. Wagner. The senator had demanded the hearing to clear his name when the mayor accused him of being an agent of the German government. The Times reported that the senate gave Wagner a clean bill of patriotic health.
Another story reported that the pro-war president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, had expelled one Morris Ryskind of the School of Journalism for writing an article in the college magazine, The Jester, calling him a warmonger. Ryskind had also lampooned the pompous president in a poem. The Times claimed that the entire university supported the decision to give Ryskind the boot. The opinionated young man went on to Broadway and Hollywood fame as the writer of Marx Brothers comedies and hit plays in collaboration with George S. Kaufman.45
Only in the Metropolitan Opera House was there any political drama. That was mostly supplied by the former ambassador to Berlin, James W. Gerard, who was violently anti-German. During intermission, he heard the newsboys shouting on the sidewalk outside. Gerard seized the arm of one of the Metropolitan’s directors and urged him to read the news from the stage and have the orchestra play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “No,” the director said,“the opera company is neutral.”
The enraged former ambassador rushed to his box seat and shouted the news to the startled audience. He urged everyone to cheer President Wilson. Very few of these rich people had voted for the president; the response was halfhearted at first. But patriotism soon inspired a louder hurrah, especially when the orchestra undertook the national anthem.
Satisfied, Gerard sat down to enjoy the rest of the opera. But he and the audience were doomed to disappointment. German-born soprano Margaret Ober, deeply distressed by the news, fainted in the middle of the next act. She had to be carried off the stage, leaving an artistic vacuum through which the other singers floundered to the final curtain.46
In Cincinnati, the city’s symphony, one of the nation’s best, played “The Star-Spangled Banner” in magnificent style when the news arrived. Then the conductor, Ernest Kunwald, turned to his mostly German-American audience with tears streaming down his cheeks and said,“But my heart is on the other side!”47
XIV
The next morning, pro-war newspapers and public spokespeople of all stripes made Colonel House’s praise of Wilson’s “communication” seem tame. Frank Cobb’s editorial in the New York World declared that the hope of the whole world rested on Wilson’s words. The New York Tribune, eating Cass Gilbert’s sneers, proclaimed: “No praise is too high for Wilson.” the Times of London, once considered the greatest newspaper on the globe, opined:“We doubt if in all history a great community has ever been summoned to war on grounds so largely ideal.”48
Private letters loaded with equally extravagant praise poured into the White House and the mailboxes of Wilson’s intimates.“The president’s address is magnificent,” wrote twenty-seven-year old Walter Lippmann, already a star liberal spokesperson on the editorial board of the New Republic, in a letter to Colonel House. “It puts the whole thing exactly where it needed to be put and does it with real nobility of feeling.”
Other leading liberal intellectuals, such as Columbia University philosopher John Dewey and Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, were similarly swept away by Wilson’s rhetoric. After years of denouncing Theodore Roosevelt, He
nry Cabot Lodge, and anyone else who urged the United States to get into the war, these men suddenly saw the president as the leader of a “stupendous revolution” that would change the world.49
In Missouri, a thirty-three-year-old farmer named Harry S. Truman was amazed to discover that Wilson’s speech had transformed local attitudes toward the war—including his own—from bored indifference to crusading fervor. Although Truman was the chief support of his mother and sister and beyond draft age, he decided to volunteer. “I felt like Galahad after the Grail,” he said later—an example of Wilson’s ability to tap the latent idealism in the soul of many Americans.50
XV
In Washington, D.C., Congress convened at noon on April 3 and spent the first hour noting the avalanche of letters and telegrams its members had received from individuals, mass meetings, impromptu committees of public safety, and state legislatures, most of them endorsing the president’s stance. While this chore was filling twenty-four pages of tiny type in the Congressional Record, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was discussing a resolution stating that war had been “thrust upon” the United States by the imperial German government and was now formally declared. The document had been drafted the previous night by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The chairman of the Senate committee, William J. Stone of Missouri, startled everyone by casting a negative vote and declining to submit the resolution to the full Senate. At any other time, this defection would have been major news. Stone had played a vital role in winning Wilson the Democratic nomination in 1912 and had worked closely with him in the Senate to pass important domestic reforms. He had wholeheartedly endorsed the president’s attempts to mediate the conflict as a neutral.
Wilson’s switch to a belligerent posture had dismayed Stone. In February, the senator had issued a statement charging that a “cabal of great newspapers” in the United States was “coercing the government into an attitude of hostility” to Germany. Friends had warned Stone that he was risking political extinction. In deep background, a partner in J.P. Morgan’s bank, which had loaned billions to the British, cabled London that he could supply evidence that Stone was “intimate” with the German government.51
In place of Stone, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, once a strenuous opponent of war, undertook the task of presenting the resolution to the Senate. He read the brief document in a matter-of-fact style, obviously assuming that the task was a mere formality. The senator asked his fellow legislators for unanimous consent to consider and approve the resolution. In addition to Wilson’s triumphant speech, this sense of foregone conclusion was bolstered by the morning’s newspapers, which carried a report of the torpedoing of the armed U.S. merchantman Aztec, with the loss of twelve lives. In the press gallery, reporters were poised to scribble news flashes that the United States was practically at war.
A lone voice punctured these assumptions:“I object to the request for unanimous consideration!” Senator La Follette was on his feet, defiance personified. Consternation swept the chamber. Those who understood Senate rules knew this meant that a vote would be postponed for at least a full day. The rule had been created to prevent hasty votes on important topics and to add substance to the claim that the Senate was the world’s greatest deliberative body. La Follette asked a startled Vice President Marshall to rule on his request. In a rage, the pro-war senators could do nothing but adjourn. In the cloakroom, they agitatedly conferred, wondering if La Follette would dare to launch a filibuster against the war resolution.52
A month before, La Follette’s stalling tactics had succeeded when President Wilson had asked Congress for the authority to arm merchant ships as a final attempt to keep the United States out of the war. The Wisconsin liberal and eleven other senators had filibustered until the Sixty-Fourth Congress expired without getting a chance to vote on the proposal.“Fighting Bob” had argued that the proviso would give Wilson the right to declare war—a privilege reserved for Congress—and was a bad idea in the first place. A few guns on a merchant ship were no defense against submarines. The president had denounced the filibusterers as “a little group of willful men” and released the Zimmermann telegram (which he had been sitting on for almost a week) to the press. La Follette and his antiwar colleagues had been roasted in almost every newspaper in the nation. But he stubbornly continued his filibuster, forcing Wilson to arm the merchant ships by executive order.53
XVI
While the Senate fumed impotently, other parts of the U.S. government were preparing for war—sort of. At his desk in the State, War and Navy Building, Army Chief of Staff Major General Hugh L. Scott was confronting a threat he considered far more dangerous than the German army: former president Theodore Roosevelt. The large, slow-moving Scott was deaf and frequently fell asleep in his chair; he had a penchant for answering questions using Native American sign language. But Roosevelt had galvanized him into uncharacteristic action.
After maligning Wilson as everything from a coward to a Byzantine logothete for his refusal to go to war, Roosevelt wanted the president to authorize him to raise a volunteer division that would sail for Europe immediately to show the flag and hearten the Allies. The idea appalled Scott and all the other aging bureaucrats on the general staff. They vividly recalled TR’s performance in the Spanish-American War, in which he not only won fame charging Spanish rifle pits on Kettle and San Juan hills, but also relentlessly criticized the army bureaucracy’s appalling lapses in arming, clothing and feeding the soldiers. The general staff had ordered coldeyed Major Peyton C. March to prepare a paper denouncing the idea of a volunteer division. This document was now in the hands of Secretary of War Baker, making Scott feel that the army was safe from a Roosevelt coup d’état.54
Roosevelt was on his way from Florida to make his request for a volunteer major generalship in person. Further undermining his hopes was a tall, handsome major named Douglas MacArthur, who was serving as Secretary of War Baker’s information officer—the army’s first venture into public relations. MacArthur was ordered to tell reporters that Roosevelt’s volunteerism would mess up the planned draft. The major was already so popular with the fourth estate that a few days later, twenty-nine reporters presented a letter to Baker, praising him as a man who “helped to shape the public mind.” All in all, it looked as if the army would win its first battle without shedding a drop of blood.55
In the same building, another tall, extremely handsome young man was toiling at his desk in the Navy Department. Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt was possibly the happiest civilian in the government. He had been lobbying overtly and covertly for a declaration of war on Germany for well over a year. He even met clandestinely with his wife’s uncle (and his distant cousin), Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson’s most outspoken critic, to discuss how to put pressure on the president.56
The younger Roosevelt hoped that hostilities would oust his lethargic boss, Josephus Daniels, and make the thirty-five-year-old New Yorker secretary of the navy. Through his worshipful right-hand man, gnomelike Louis Howe (who sometimes signed his letters “Your slave and servant”), Roosevelt had sponsored a series of backstairs attacks on Daniels, calling for his replacement by his “virile-minded, hardfisted civilian assistant,” in the words of one complaisant newspaper.57
With war virtually declared, Roosevelt began trying to embarrass Daniels almost openly. When a reporter asked him if the fleet had been mobilized yet, the assistant secretary said he did not know,“but you have a right to know. Come along and we’ll find out.”
He led the reporter into Daniels’s office and said,“Here’s a newsman. He wants to know, and all the rest of us want to know, whether the fleet has been ordered mobilized.”
The portly, mild-mannered Daniels, who maintained an amazing tolerance of Roosevelt’s behavior, replied that an announcement would be made in due course.
Out in the corridor, Roosevelt muttered to the reporter, “You see?” With a shrug and a contemptuous look over his shoulder at Da
niels’s closed door, he added,“It was the best I could do.”58
Roosevelt’s impatience with his slow-moving chief was fueled by the widespread assumption that the major U.S. role in the war would be on the ocean. In the April 4 New York Tribune, Cass W. Gilbert told his readers that the notion of sending a large U.S. army overseas was a “phantasy.” There were simply not enough ships to transport men along with the food that England and France needed to feed their civilians and the munitions that would enable their armies to kill more Germans. Underlying this vision of a more or less bloodless war was the assumption that American infantrymen were not needed. It was evident to everyone who read U.S. newspapers that England, France and Russia were winning the war.59
Elsewhere in the United States, officials and ordinary citizens braced themselves for a wave of German sabotage. In New York, the police commissioner mobilized no less than 12,000 men equipped with machine guns and rifles to deal with an assault by German army reservists who had supposedly been waiting undercover for hostilities to begin. Armed guards patrolled bridges, railroad yards and other likely targets. The National Guard was already protecting the upstate reservoirs, on the apparent assumption that Berlin was not above ecoterrorism.
More worrisome, according to the New York Tribune, were reports of a German plot to trigger a huge uprising among the South’s African Americans, a largely disenfranchised group who might wonder about joining a crusade to make the world safe for democracy. (The Tribune, of course, did not allude to this somewhat glaring fact—or to the way the Southern-born Wilson had permitted his mostly Southern cabinet to extend racial segregation to all parts of the U.S. government.) The shocking goal of the putative plotters was to seize Texas and turn it into a black republic in which “Mexicans and Japanese were to have equal rights with the Negro.” In San Francisco, gentlemen in the lounges of the exclusive Bohemian Club were discussing an even scarier possibility: A German-led army invading from Mexico, with cadres of “armed Negroes” in their ranks.60
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