Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  Of course, the Ross legends had as much to do with his talent for horseplay as anything else. Even by San Francisco’s estimable standards, he was considered a character. He navigated the city in a temperamental Stutz roadster, and if he wasn’t playing cribbage at the tony Bohemian Club he might be sitting in on a poker game in a pineapple warehouse. His antics are suggested by some of the nicknames he acquired at this time: “Punk” Ross, “Roughhouse” Ross, “Hangover” Ross. When the local press club needed new furniture, it was Ross who led a midnight raid on the Danish exhibit of the (by then closed) Panama-Pacific Exposition, relieving it of its wicker furnishings. On another occasion, he stumbled onto a bewildered Polynesian chieftain who had been diverted, somewhat against his will, to San Francisco. For several days he assumed personal custody of the chief, who spoke no English. Ross took pains to introduce him to department stores, cable cars, and, most satisfyingly, bock beer.

  Almost without his realizing it, a year went by, then two, and Ross was still in San Francisco. For the first time in his career, he was not impelled to try the next town over the hill. He was thoroughly captivated by the city’s climate and civility, its cosmopolitan charm, its expansive cultural menu. He began to get a reputation as a ladies’ man after he was caught sending flowers to the receptionist at his dingy residential hotel. San Francisco was taking off some of the frontiersman’s rough edges and imposing a little discernment on his palate (an education that would resume soon in Paris, then in postwar New York). Beyond this, he continued to read hungrily—so much that his blowsier friends began to wonder if he might not be a closet intellectual. He read Conrad, Kipling, O. Henry. He rejoiced, predictably, in Twain’s surgical examination of James Fenimore Cooper’s “literary offenses.” But what he read most avidly was the work of Herbert Spencer, the English positivist who is credited with the concept of social Darwinism. Spencer’s philosophy became the single biggest shaper of Ross’s own worldview. He had been reading Spencer since his teens, perhaps steered by the testimonials of such devotees as Clarence Darrow and Jack London. On the other hand, at that time in America Spencer’s influence could be found everywhere. This was especially so in the West, where his ideas about the survival of the fittest married very nicely with the code of rugged individualism. “The generation that acclaimed Grant as its hero took Spencer as its thinker,” explained the social historian Richard Hofstadter. Spencer offered a comprehensive explanation of the world, but he wasn’t technical or overly intellectual. This accessibility attracted Ross and countless others of limited formal education. Spencer’s profound influence is apparent not merely in Ross’s political outlook, which was classically laissez-faire on everything from war to income tax, but in the fact that all his life he would drop Spencerian aphorisms into conversations or correspondence where he felt they were appropriate.

  In the early months of 1917 it became obvious that America would join the World War. Ross had ample time to consider what he would do upon the formal declaration of war, which came on April 6. A few days later he passed by an army recruiting station for a railway regiment, the Eighteenth Engineers. He was drawn to the placard’s boast: “First to France; First to Fight.” Persuading half a dozen friends to join him, he enlisted.

  A railway unit appealed to Ross. After six years of following train tracks, he had become something of an expert on the subject. Years later, as a passenger in the private car of W. Averell Harriman, whose father had built the Union Pacific, he regaled his host with reminiscences of his tramp days. Harriman was so taken that he gave Ross the car’s brass nameplate as a souvenir.

  So it was that Ross left San Francisco, bound not for another newspaper this time, but for boot camp.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE STARS AND STRIPES

  About that slogan: it was the “First to France” part, needless to say, that spoke more seductively to Ross’s soul than the “First to Fight” part. This is not to suggest he was a coward, because he wasn’t, or that he didn’t sincerely believe it was America’s duty to bring the Boche to heel, because, by God, he did. But for Ross, as for countless thousands of other American provincials, motivation to march off to war had less to do with getting shot at or gassed than with the opportunity to see something of the world. The enterprise had a romance attached to it that no amount of carnage would wring out.

  The Engineers were true to their word: Ross was, in fact, one of the first twenty-five thousand Americans in France. In getting there, however, he outsmarted himself twice over. He was induced by a common sucker’s promise—a quick corporalcy—which didn’t materialize, and he somehow got the impression that a railway regiment meant relatively cozy duty. “He and a pal had put one over the Army by enlisting in the Engineers, and he told it as a good joke,” said the artist and writer Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge, who roomed with Ross in France and whose wife had worked with him in San Francisco. “Little did he know the Army! The Engineers being one of the hardest worked units. I guess he thought it would be some kind of paper work.” Soon enough he would learn otherwise.

  After boot camp at Fort Lewis, Washington, the regiment spent what seemed like an eternity traveling in the dead of summer—a week on a train to New York; another train to Canada, where they boarded a transport ship for surreptitious passage to Britain; then finally to France. The transatlantic crossing, in August, was especially unpleasant. “There were 2,600 troops aboard—my own regiment and another—quartered between decks in what originally provided space for one thousand steerage passengers,” Ross wrote to friends back in San Francisco. “The first morning all my stuff, carefully stowed under the bunk, was under two feet of water and some of it floated off.” The Engineers came to be stationed in Bordeaux, where, by late summer, Ross’s supposedly cushy unit was building port installations and spending much of its time literally digging ditches. If he was humbled by this ignominious turn of events, he was at least thankful for being beyond harm’s reach. He closed an early letter to his parents by saying, “By way of comfort—mutually—may [I] remark that I have it on rather good authority that this railroad regiment never will get in the danger zone. Good night.”

  The Eighteenth Engineers comprised ragtag, undisciplined westerners, men whose personal wear and tear matched or exceeded Ross’s own. Many were surly and/or alcoholic; ditch-digging did nothing to improve their outlook. The argumentative, unsoldierly Ross fit in well enough, though he did distinguish himself with a measure of natural leadership. For instance, he helped start up a respectable regimental publication, The Spiker, and was its second editor. This initiative perhaps explains why he was nominated for officer’s training school—though it was also suggested, not altogether facetiously, that the commanding officer hit on the idea to get Ross out of his hair. Either way, Ross was delighted; aside from escaping manual labor, he would be in for a second lieutenant’s commission if things worked out. But that was before he got to the officer’s training camp itself in Langres, high in the foothills of the Vosges range in northeastern France. Arriving with the onset of winter, he soon realized he had been consigned to hell without the heat. Langres was wet, cold, muddy—in a word, miserable. Ross proceeded to flunk the officer’s examination—“I was too flip with my answers to the goddamn silly questions”—but stayed on as a company clerk. Paperwork better suited the cerebral private than spadework, but there was nothing to be done about the dank chill. Even Christmas at Langres was depressing. After sitting down to a holiday meal of beans, Ross and a friend decided they might at least wash down this indignity with champagne. They scrounged a bottle, but the military police warned them not to drink it on the premises. “For two hours we hunted for a place to down it comfortably, eventually consuming it standing in the snow behind the Army Staff College, drinking out of one mess cup by turns. After eating deux oeufs—omelette—et pommes frites—oui, oui—oui, oui—I went back to the barracks. The stove was as cold and the room as dismal as the rest of the day had been. The whole room—twenty men—went to bed at
eight o’clock to keep warm.”

  As yet Ross was unaware of an idea that was hatching, at this same time, at the American Expeditionary Forces headquarters of General John J. Pershing in Chaumont. An official A.E.F. newspaper was under consideration. The notion had been kicked around before, but now an ambitious second lieutenant in the army censor’s office, Guy T. Viskniskki, was pressing for it. The idea appealed on many counts. News from the States was hard to come by in Europe, and outdated in any case. American troops already were complaining about being out of touch with home. Beyond that, Viskniskki argued, the paper would be an effective tool for purposes of morale and propaganda, not to mention an efficient vehicle for disseminating army directives. Pershing was persuaded. Shortly after Christmas of 1917, he approved a weekly publication; it would be called The Stars and Stripes, and Viskniskki was ordered to get it up and running as soon as possible.

  The Stars and Stripes would have appropriate military supervision, of course, and censorship would be applied as necessary. To Pershing’s great credit, he saw to it that even though the newspaper was formed under the auspices of the A.E.F. general staff, his officers for the most part resisted the military impulse to meddle. Pershing also knew that if The Stars and Stripes was to have credibility with the soldiers it was intended for, the reporters and editors needed to be chosen, by and large, from the enlisted men themselves. Even with the commander in chief’s blessing, however, staffing proved difficult. Viskniskki culled the ranks for experienced journalists, but even when they could be found, their commanding officers often were reluctant to lend them out.

  Back in Langres, this was not exactly the problem for Private Ross. As company clerk, he had seen some of the earliest communiqués about The Stars and Stripes and recognized it as his ticket back to civilization. He immediately put in for a transfer and formally applied to the paper, characterizing his newspaper career in as flattering terms as he could muster. But going by the book got him nowhere; all his requests were ignored. His frustration mounted until direct action was required, and one night he simply walked away from Langres. “Without saying goodbye, go to hell, or anything else to the commandant, he caught a truck for Paris,” a colleague marveled. Actually, Ross tended to avoid trucks, trains, and other official conveyances because he was, after all, A.W.O.L., so he mostly stuck to the back roads, on foot, for the one hundred fifty miles to Paris. After a few days, on or about February 15, 1918, he turned up at the newspaper’s makeshift offices at the Hôtel Ste.-Anne, not far from the Louvre and the Palais Royale, a portable Corona in hand. The second issue of The Stars and Stripes had just gone to press, produced by an exhausted start-up staff so small that it could be numbered on one hand. They were so glad to see Ross—they would have been glad to see anyone, much less a man with a typewriter—that Viskniskki promptly squared away Ross’s transfer papers ex post facto.

  As the officer in charge of The Stars and Stripes, Viskniskki—invariably just “Visk” except to his face—was responsible for its staffing, production, distribution, and, at least nominally, its content. He was an efficient bureaucrat. He was also bullying, humorless, officious, and, alas, regular army (a veteran of the Spanish-American War). In civilian life he had worked for a newspaper syndicate, but to the newspaper’s staff, most of whom were masquerading as soldiers anyway, the gaunt Visk was a “military son of a bitch” to whom they took an instant dislike. They especially resented, and endlessly thwarted, his attempts to run the paper on something like a military basis. (Visk once placed Ross under house arrest because the Paris edition of the New York Herald beat him on a story. After a few hours of watching Visk scurry back and forth, Ross stopped him to ask, “May the private have the lieutenant’s permission to go to the can?”)

  Another private, Hudson Hawley, an ersatz machine gunner from the Twenty-sixth Division, was one of the earliest recruits and wrote most of the first two issues. Arriving with Ross was Private John T. Winterich, 496th Aero Squadron, a versatile writer and editor. Two weeks later there appeared a short, corpulent sergeant, most recently an orderly with a field hospital and, before that, theater critic of The New York Times. Alexander Woollcott had a moon face, and with round wire-rim eyeglasses sitting atop his hook nose, he looked to Ross like nothing so much as “a human owl in sergeant’s stripes.” Woollcott had taken the once-lowly theater job at the Times and, by dint of his hyperbolic prose and personal audacity, made something of a reputation on Broadway. Rejected for combat duty because of poor eyesight, he had signed up with a medical unit, performing admirably enough to be promoted to sergeant. The Stars and Stripes had gotten wind of Woollcott’s transfer, and Ross especially, still smarting from his New York rejection, was none too pleased. He strode up, towering over the new arrival. “Where’d you work?” Ross demanded. “The New York Times—dramatic critic,” replied Woollcott evenly. With this Ross threw back his head and broke into exaggerated laughter—until Woollcott cut him dead. “You know,” he said, “you remind me a great deal of my grandfather’s coachman.” In this way Ross and Woollcott began what would become a long, mystifying, and, it must be said, ultimately perverse friendship.

  Private H. W. Ross of The Stars and Stripes-and his calling card. (Brown Brothers)

  With the addition of two exceptional artists—Albian A. Wallgren, whose forte was comic drawing, and Baldridge, whose illustrations were more serious and inspirational—Ross, Hawley, Winterich and Woollcott formed the editorial core of The Stars and Stripes. There would be other notable staffers. Captain Franklin P. Adams, whose bags Private Ross lugged from the train station, was in civilian life the popular New York Tribune columnist F.P.A. And Lieutenant Grantland Rice arrived just after the paper decided to suspend its sports page (a symbol of frivolity) until hostilities ended, so he contributed some fine combat reportage instead. Yet even as the overall employment of The Stars and Stripes swelled into the hundreds, Ross, Winterich, Woollcott, Hawley, Baldridge and Wallgren remained an ad hoc editorial council that essentially decided the content and set the tone of the paper. They were much more dedicated to the men than to the military. Rank meant little to them, to the utter consternation of some of their superiors. Their rogue behavior was reinforced by the harum-scarum nature of the Stars and Stripes operation. Personnel came and went, and the office itself was moved three times. The first, the Hôtel Ste.-Anne, also housed German prisoners.

  The Stars and Stripes was a happy marriage of form and function. By providing a common voice and articulating an unwavering sense of purpose, the paper, perhaps more than anything other than combat itself, coalesced the disparate, cobbled-together American units into an army. As predicted, it became instantly popular, and for one overriding reason: it was relentlessly, unapologetically in the service of the enlisted man. It was a good newspaper, equal parts news service, bulletin board, department store, advice column, and inspiration sheet. It ran to eight pages and appeared every Friday. It cost a dime—a great deal considering that English-language Paris papers could be had for a few pennies—but the soldiers paid gladly. As promised, there was much news from the States; The Stars and Stripes even maintained a “correspondent” in New York who regularly cabled long features and shorter news items of interest from the home front. Dispatches from the war itself were most prominent, of course, with related editorials and the inevitably bracing tales of courage. The paper was informative, brash, and sometimes blunt. It tweaked the brass when necessary. Unfailingly, the tone was soldier-to-soldier.

  Arguably the most important features of the paper were those that allowed enlisted men to speak for themselves. Their letters to the editor, jokes, stories, and poetry offered trench-level perspectives on the war, and they accounted for much of the paper’s appeal. Predictably, there were many gripes: about the food, mess sergeants, “cooties” (lice), the cumbersome headgear, and the hated spiral puttees—leggings which inexplicably were adapted from the uniform of British troops in India who had worn them as a precaution against snakebite. But it was
the “doughboy doggerel” more than anything else that revealed the heart and soul of the A.E.F. Soldier-poets were so numerous that the newspaper got more than five hundred submissions a week. Two samples from the issue of September 6, 1918, typify the general tone:

  Goodbye, pal; I don’t know where you’re camping now,

  Whether you’ve pitched your tent ’neath azure skies,

  Or whether o’er your head bleak storm winds blow.

  I only know

  That when they sounded final taps for you

  Something within my heart died, too.

  —From “Requiem,” Fra Guido

  Fighting Germans is what I crave,

  But fighting cuckoos makes me rave.

  I’ll save them till I find a Boche,

  And plant them in his shirt, by gosh!

  —From “The Cuckoos,” John J. Curtin

  Still, it was only when the Americans began fighting in earnest that The Stars and Stripes came into its own. This was during the last great German offensive, in the spring of 1918, and the Allied counteroffensive of that summer. These were long, horrific, storied battles: Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, the Argonne Forest, St.-Mihiel. Reporting on them, The Stars and Stripes moved well beyond a mere service publication to a unique chronicler of history. Reporters rode to the battlefields in cars and, when they couldn’t find haystacks, slept in the backseats. Dozens of staffers contributed to the war coverage, but it was the ubiquitous Woollcott, the paper’s chief correspondent, who became the pudgy symbol of The Stars and Stripes for enlisted men (in part thanks to Wallgren, who routinely caricatured Aleck in his cartoon strips). Woollcott truly was fearless, to the point at times of foolhardiness. Ross traveled with him often and carried away the image of Woollcott “trundling along in some exposed spot amidst calls of warning and shouts of ‘Get the hell out of there!’ ”