The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  Events soon suggested the blacks were right. On August 22, trouble erupted in Houston when white police officers raided a black crap game. The blacks were all members of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, one of four black regular regiments that had been in the army since the Civil War, serving mostly in the West. The soldiers already resented Houston’s segregation and white hostility. When some of the gamblers fled to the home of a nearby black woman, a Houston policeman abused her verbally and perhaps physically. One of the black soldiers got into a fistfight with the cop and was arrested. Later in the day, a military policeman from the regiment was shot at and arrested by the same policeman.

  In their camp outside Houston, members of the Twenty-Fourth Regiment’s third battalion seized their guns and headed for the city, where they began shooting every white they saw. By the time order was restored by white troops rushed to the scene, fifteen whites and four blacks were dead. Forty-one black regulars were sentenced to long terms in the army prison at Fort Leavenworth, and thirteen were hanged almost as soon as the court martial board handed down the sentences, making an appeal impossible.

  Secretary of War Baker informed Wilson that “some feeling was aroused” by the speedy executions. He suggested henceforth that military death sentences ought to be reviewed in Washington. During the Civil War, this policy had been routine. It was hard for most people to believe that Baker and Wilson did not know this.64

  In a black newspaper in San Antonio, an article praised the executed men for trying “to protect a Negro woman from the insult of a southern brute in the form of a policeman.” the editor of the paper was arrested and given two years in Leavenworth under the Espionage Act.65

  IX

  On June 8, General Pershing and his staff arrived in England to be greeted by a few dignitaries and an honor guard of the Royal Welch Fusileers. While his baggage was being unloaded, Pershing was embarrassed into a press conference by waiting reporters. He said he and his men were glad to participate “in this great war for civilization.” Ashore, he sent a cable to the War Department, asking for absolute power to censor anything and everything reporters wrote about him. This was ingratitude, at the very least. The journalists had lavished extravagant phrases on the general. Heywood Broun said: “No man ever looked more the ordained leader of fighting men.” Floyd Gibbons called him “lean, clean, keen.”66

  The next day, Pershing met King George V at Buckingham Palace. The king, illustrating how much moonshine was floating between the two allies, said he looked forward to seeing some of the 50,000 planes the Americans had produced while waiting to get into the war. Pershing cleared his throat and informed His Majesty that the U.S. Army Air Service had a grand total of fifty-five training planes. He might have added, but probably didn’t, that most of them were obsolete.67

  Pershing also met Admiral William Sims, who informed him that the British were losing the war at sea; 1.5 million tons of ships had gone to Davy Jones’s locker in April and May. This news cast grave doubt on the possibility of bringing a large American army to France. Equally worrisome was a meeting with General Sir William “Wully” Robertson, chief of the imperial staff. Robertson was Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s boss and the gruff defender of Haig’s mass slaughters in Flanders. Robertson immediately urged Pershing to bring his men to the British sector of the Western Front. When Pershing informed Wully that he and his staff had decided to operate in Lorraine, on the right flank of the French army, Robertson became visibly less charming. He curtly informed Pershing that there was no hope of finding enough ships to bring an American army to France. Equally unencouraging was a visit with Prime Minister Lloyd George, who told Pershing the British were going to need every available ship to feed their home front.

  Pershing and his chief of staff, Major James Harbord, also visited a British training camp. There they got a quick lesson in trench warfare, with its emphasis on hand grenades and mortars, two weapons that were receiving scant attention in the U.S. Army. Harbord was appalled by the undernourished, uninspired draftees, a glimpse of what the British class system produced in the slums of London and other cities.68

  After five days in England, the Americans headed for France aboard a channel steamer. At Boulogne they endured a ceremonial reception that took hours. Harbord confided to his diary that even Pershing questioned out of the corner of his mouth how many times the band was going to play the “Star-Spangled Banner” and the “Marseillaise.” There were endless speeches in French, which neither Pershing nor 99 percent of his staff understood. But they got the essential message: The French were extremely glad to see them.

  One reason for the long ceremony was the French desire to have Pershing reach Paris as people were finishing their day’s work. The government wanted the maximum number of citoyens to see him. Arriving at the Gare du Nord (the huge, vault-roofed train station) at 5:20 P.M., Pershing and his staff endured another rendition of the two national anthems and joined the top politicians in the French government, plus Marshal Joffre and other generals, in a motorcade to the Hôtel Crillon.69

  The two-mile journey should have taken fifteen minutes. Instead it consumed an hour of the most frantic emotion that the dazed Americans had ever witnessed. Streets, rooftops, windows, were packed with French men and women who wept Niagaras of tears and screamed,“Vive l’Amérique! ” and “Pair-shang!” until it seemed as if the din would shatter glass and even concrete, not to mention eardrums. Men and women burst through the police lines to kiss the hands and cheeks of officers and enlisted men and shower them with roses.

  Major Harbord, riding in the second car, lost sight of Pershing in the car ahead of him as the berserk French engulfed the motorcade. Harbord began to wonder somewhat nervously if people climbing onto his car thought he was Pershing. One enlisted man almost had his arm wrenched off when he tried to shake hands with the swarming welcomers. The motorcars, not built to run in low gear for long periods, began smoking ominously.“Though I live a thousand years,” Harbord later wrote,“I shall never forget that crowded hour.”

  In front of the Crillon, thousands more people were packed shoulder to shoulder in the immense Place de la Concorde, screaming, “Pair-shang! Pair-shang!” French officials prevailed on the general to step out on a balcony to acknowledge the frantic cheers and prevent the crowd from storming the building. There were French and American flags at each end of the balcony. A breeze blew the Tricolor toward Pershing. Though he usually froze when confronted by a large crowd, this time his presence of mind did not desert him. He kissed the fluttering folds and the crowd erupted into even wilder frenzy.70

  Pershing found the demonstration immensely touching—and alarming. These people obviously regarded him as the savior of France. How could he manage that feat with a single division? The general’s uneasiness intensified later that night, when U.S. Ambassador William C. Sharp gave a dinner for Pershing and a roster of French and American dignitaries. In a brief speech, the ambassador hailed the soldiers’ arrival and closed with an unnerving “I hope you have not come too late.”71

  The Germans made it clear that this was precisely their opinion.“The arrival of the general without an army was turned into a triumphal march,” sneered Berlin’s press bureau. If the kaiser’s men had seen a memorandum inserted into the U.S. Army files on May 28, their sneers would have been even more triumphant—and the French might have greeted Pershing with curses rather than cheers. Acting Chief of Staff Tasker Bliss (Chief of Staff Hugh Scott had been sent to Russia with a U.S. mission) wrote that “General Pershing’s expedition is being sent . . . to produce a moral effect. . . . Our general staff has made no [other] plans for prompt dispatch . . . of considerable forces to France.”72

  Two days later, Pershing met the writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an old friend from the days when he headed the ROTC at the University of Nebraska. Fisher had been living in France for several years. She told him the French were as good as beaten. They had lost 2 million men to wounds and death in the last three years.“T
here is a limit to what flesh and blood . . . can stand . . . and the French have just about reached that limit,” mrs. Fisher said.

  This dose of gloom became acute when Pershing visited General Henri-Philippe Pétain, the acting commander of the French army, at his headquarters outside Paris. Pétain gave him the details of General Nivelle’s failed offensive in April. Nivelle had claimed to have a formula for smashing through the German army in forty-eight hours. Instead, the Germans, forewarned of his attack, had inflicted 120,000 casualties on the massed French infantry before they even reached the main defense line. Whereupon the French army not only stopped fighting—it mutinied. One division attempted to march on Paris to overthrow the government.“Down with the war!” they shouted. The rebellion spread swiftly through sixteen army corps until there were only two divisions that showed any readiness to fight.

  Pétain had raced up and down the battle line, arresting some of the more outspoken mutineers, placating others by promising better food, more leaves and an absolute end to mass attacks.“We must wait for the Americans,” he said. If Wilson had not declared war on April 2, a German victory would have been inevitable. Instead, the mirage of a vast American army on its way enabled Pétain to stabilize the situation—though he admitted to Pershing that many divisions were still mutinous and the whole army could be described as being in a state of “collective indiscipline.”73

  There were signs that defeatism had also penetrated the French government. Pétain urged Pershing to cable Wilson, asking him to say something to the politicians that would “strengthen their resolution.” the general was not imagining things. A thirty-five-year-old Socialist named Pierre Laval had recently told the French Chamber of Deputies:“We are not here to lie to ourselves. There is in France a weariness of war and a pressure for peace.” the deputies had exploded into prolonged applause.74

  Pétain relapsed into a morose silence, which continued at a lunch for Pershing and his staff. As the Americans struggled to make small talk with Pétain’s staff in spite of the language barrier, the French general burst out, “I hope it is not too late!” By this time, Pershing had no illusions about what he and Woodrow Wilson were confronting on the Western Front: defeat.75

  Chapter 4

  CREELING AND OTHER ACTIVITIES THAT MAKE PHILIP DRU UNHAPPY

  Oblivious to the looming disaster in France, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information was hard at work creating the war will in America. By July he had assembled a small army of writers, editors, artists, actors and speakers who were churning out patriotic pamphlets, books, films and speeches for the American public. An upper echelon of former muckrakers, all ardent progressives like Creel, were given prominent roles. The CPI’s motto was “faith in democracy . . . faith in fact.” the Four Minute Men were urged to rely on facts and avoid “hymn[s] of hate.”

  Ethnic groups were a major target. Creel put an idealistic social worker, Josephine Roche, in charge of a department that began creating “loyalty leagues” in ethnic communities. Within a year, she was working with no less than twenty-nine nationalities. Pamphlets were printed in the various languages, including German, to explain how the United States got into the war. On July 4, 1918, Irish-America’s favorite tenor, John McCormack, sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while representatives of these groups stood in reverent silence outside Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. This event is a good example of why Creel’s penetration of ethnic opinion on the war remained at the skin-deep level.1

  The mailed fist was by no means eliminated from the government’s propaganda policy. A committee of university professors was organized to read ethnic newspapers looking for “material that may fall under the Espionage Act.” Although Creel did his utmost to conceal it, the propaganda chief was part of the Wilson censorship apparatus.“In no degree was the agency [the CPI] an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression,” he later declared in his usual take-no-prisoners style. In fact, Creel was a member of the Censorship Board, established by Wilson’s executive order on October 12, 1917, as a clearinghouse for censors operating throughout the government. The board had representatives from the Post Office, the War Department, and the War Trade Board, who conferred regularly with Creel.2

  Another government worry was the labor movement. Already, the flood of war money from Great Britain and France had sent prices into an inflationary spiral. Workers were restless, and the Germans’ idea that strikes could be induced by skillful agitators was by no means a fantasy. Creel had an enthusiastic supporter in Samuel Gompers, the short, pugnacious former English cigar maker who headed the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Well before 1917, Gompers had proclaimed his dislike of the radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Socialists, and others with negative attitudes toward American capitalism. When the war turned them into critics of J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab and other bankers and industrialists who were making millions out of supplying the Allies, Gompers’s attitude became uncompromising detestation. In a shrewd move, Wilson gave the AFL boss a seat on the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense. Gompers felt he—and the labor movement—were halfway to nirvana.3

  A CPI department of industrial relations won Gompers’s unqualified endorsement. He warmly approved Creel’s policy of filling factories and offices with dramatic posters and slogans aimed at convincing wage earners that they had a stake in the war. Creel spun off a separate organization, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, to answer the attacks of the Socialists and the IWW and put Gompers in command of it.

  Along with the Four-Minute Men, the centerpiece of Creel’s early propaganda effort was the Official Bulletin, an eight-page daily newspaper (eventually thirty-two pages) in tabloid format, which went to every paper in the United states, as well as to government agencies, military camps and the nation’s 50,000 post offices. Below its title were the words “Published Daily Under Order of the President by the Committee on Public Information, George Creel, Chairman.” Individuals could subscribe for five dollars a year, and the circulation climbed rapidly to a peak of 115,031. The paper published nothing but good news about the U.S. war effort. Wilson considered this hybrid creature his invention—which it was in some respects. Creel had initially opposed the idea. The president gleefully told Joe Tumulty that the Official Bulletin was an immense success. He added that Creel was astonished by the way it was being lapped up and reprinted by thousands of newspapers.4

  Score one for Philip Dru.

  II

  Not all reporters believed the Official Bulletin was trustworthy, in spite of its lofty origins. Not a few saw it as a government plot to co-opt their jobs and chafed under the restrictions imposed by the “voluntary” censorship that the newspapers had promised to maintain about war news. On July 4, this skepticism caught Creel in the first of many mistakes. The five regiments Pershing had selected, now called the First Division, arrived in France just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July in Paris. Creel decided the successful voyage merited a similar celebration in the United States. The CPI ground out a story of the soldiers’ perilous trip across the Atlantic, during which their escorting warships had fought off repeated attacks by German submarines, and several of the undersea “pirates” had been sunk. It made the July 4 front page of almost every newspaper in the country. Editorial writers burbled about this first proof of America’s fighting prowess coming on the nation’s birthday.

  An Associated Press reporter in England interviewed the officers on the escort ships, who laughed out loud at Creel’s version of the voyage. They said there had been no attacks on the convoy and no submarines had been sunk. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels picked up the phone and scorched the ears of Melville Stone, the president of AP, demanding the story’s retraction. The thoroughly cowed Stone sent out a “kill” order. But across the nation, the presses were already rolling and thousands of dismayed editors were calling Creel picturesque names, few of them printable.5

  Aft
er more hugger-mugger, a new, mildly exciting version of the story was published on July 7. There were two minor brushes with submarines, both of which lasted only a few minutes.“No Attack in Force” said a subhead in the New York Times, although the paper tried hard to get some excitement out of the second encounter, claiming the submarine was “blown up” by a depth charge. In a nearby column, the paper reported that Republican Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania called Creel’s overheated version a national disgrace and demanded an investigation of the Committee on Public Information. A Times editorial seemed to agree with the senator; it called Creel’s appointment a blunder. A few weeks later, the paper wryly referred to the CPI as “the Committee on Public Misinformation.” In many papers, a new word,“creeling,” became synonymous with government hot air.6

  III

  With progressive reformers heading the army (Secretary of War Newton Baker) and the navy (Secretary Josephus Daniels) and with a late convert to progressivism in the White House, the U.S. government was determined to make sure the vast mobilization of the nation’s men had a positive moral outcome—in addition to winning the war. One of the by-products of progressivism was the social purification movement, which inveighed against saloons, brothels and the red-light districts that were tolerated in many cities. Wilson put an energetic thirty-three-year-old reformer, Raymond B. Fosdick, in charge of making the army and navy training camps and their neighborhoods “clean.”

  The administration inserted a clause in the Selective Service Act that made it a crime to sell or give a drink to a serviceman. Fosdick ruthlessly closed down saloons and brothels in the vicinity of army camps and shipped some 15,000 women convicted of prostitution to detention centers, where most were held until 1920. By the end of 1917, Fosdick was boasting that he had wiped out 110 red-light districts. Much of the policing was done by women volunteers, formed into local Protective Leagues. These volunteers were equally tough on amateurs, arresting any woman who behaved promiscuously with soldiers and subjecting her to a physical examination to see if she had venereal disease.