Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  America’s biggest resource was manpower. Its population of more than 103 million was larger than that of any of the major countries at war except troubled, faltering Russia. Unlike the other belligerents, the United States had barely begun to tap its pool of men of military age. This advantage also posed the biggest problem. In order to field forces of any size on the Western Front, the country would have to expand its army of around 300,000 men, including the National Guard, possibly ten times or more. That would require recruiting, training, and equipping more men than the nation had ever put under arms. Then those men would need to be transported to seaports on the Atlantic coast and shipped to Europe. Such mobilization would require harnessing agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation on an unprecedented scale—all on top of meeting mounting demands from the Allies for food, machines, and munitions. This president and his administration were facing the biggest wartime challenge since the Civil War, with the added obstacle of having to fight overseas, more than 3,000 miles away.

  From the outset, Wilson grasped the immensity of his task. The day after he signed the declaration of war, he wrote a memorandum to himself on his typewriter, which he titled “Programme.” Under the heading “Measures for war,” he listed additions to the army and navy and “all legislation needed to put the country in a thorough state of defense and preparation for action.” Under the heading “Bills for the safeguarding of the nation,” he wrote down measures to oversee and restrict public speech and expression and “various restrictions on trading with the enemy.” He also had plans for seizing interned enemy ships, securing other maritime provisions, increasing the powers of the Federal Reserve, and taking “control of the Railroads for military purposes.” He disclosed a key part of his plan for the armed forces that day when he told Walter Lippmann that “registering all men of military age”—the draft—would be part of the program that the War Department was about to submit.2

  Wilson tackled each of these items, which he saw as related parts of a unified whole. “We are mobilizing the nation as well as creating an Army,” he told Congressman Carter Glass on April 9, “and that means that we must keep every instrumentality at its highest pitch of efficiency and guided by thoughtful intelligence.” He believed that public opinion and the economy were essential to such mobilization. “Talked about censorship,” Josephus Daniels noted that day. “He will appoint [George] Creel as head.” They also talked about munitions, and Wilson asked if Bernard Baruch would do. Daniels asserted that he would, adding, “He is somewhat vain.” Wilson reportedly asked, “[D]id you ever see a Jew who was not?” Those two veteran Democratic Party activists would get two of the most important civilian posts in the war effort. Creel got his right away. Some form of censorship to protect national security seemed unavoidable, but thoughts varied widely about how to impose such measures. Creel advised against using the word censorship and advocated overlaying control of information with lots of positive publicity, although he did not use the word propaganda. That approach appealed to Wilson, who wanted to get people to support the war voluntarily as much as possible. On April 13, he issued an executive order setting up a “Committee on Public Information” (often called the CPI), with Creel as chairman.3

  Bernard Baruch had to wait awhile for his appointment. Economic mobilization was more complicated and involved competing actors and agencies. War finance came first. With his usual gusto, McAdoo issued a statement to the press on April 9 that included a request to Congress for authority to raise $5 billion in bonds. The Treasury would eventually raise more than $15 billion through five mass subscription drives—soon to be dubbed Liberty Loans. In addition to financing two thirds of war expenditures, the Liberty Loans would feature extensive advertising and big rallies in major cities, with appearances by such movie stars as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford and such sports heroes as Ty Cobb. Liberty Loan advertising and rallies would dovetail with the activities of Creel’s CPI in whipping up popular enthusiasm for the war. The remainder of the war financing would come from taxes, particularly from ratcheting up income and inheritance taxes on the wealthy and levies on corporate profits.

  Other aspects of economic mobilization took shape more slowly, but Baruch had a hand in most of them. Wilson appointed him to several newly created agencies, including the Allied Purchasing Commission and the General Munitions Board. These appointments, which were mostly advisory, brought Baruch into regular contact with Secretary of War Baker and Secretary of the Navy Daniels and, most important, with Wilson, the last giving him an opportunity to apply his well-honed charm to a man he admired immensely. Daniels correctly spotted Baruch’s vanity about his looks; Wilson’s retort is the only anti-Semitic remark anyone ever recorded him making. In fact, Wilson found Baruch appealing because he was both a fellow expatriate southerner and a prime example of “the man on the make.” He was a close friend McAdoo’s and a proudly self-styled “speculator” who had a restless, probing mind that tapped into Wilson’s penchant for boldness. Within two months of American entry into the war, Baruch would present comprehensive outlines for control and coordination of shipping and industrial and agricultural production. The president soon gave Baruch still another appointment, to what was as yet only an advisory committee, called the War Industries Board. Later, under Baruch’s chairmanship, the WIB would become the spark plug of industrial mobilization.4

  A little more than a week into the war, the president shared some of his thinking with the public. In a statement to the press—written, as usual, on his own typewriter—he maintained that besides fighting forces, the United States and the Allies required food, shipping, and equipment, which, in turn, demanded greater efficiency from American workers, who would be “serving the country and conducting the fight for peace and freedom just as effectively as the men on the battlefield or in the trenches.” He urged farmers to grow bigger crops, and he asked farmers in the South to grow foodstuffs rather than cotton. He admonished businessmen to forgo “unusual profits” and reminded railroad workers and managers that they were maintaining vital arteries for the war effort. “The supreme test of the nation has come,” he concluded. “We must all speak, act, and serve together.”5 Except for a few flashes of eloquence, this was not one of his more stirring utterances, and it seems odd that he did not give a speech. He would deliver fewer speeches during the opening year of the war than he had done before, except during the first months after Ellen’s death. That would be unfortunate because he was depriving himself of opportunities to educate people about his deep and sophisticated vision of war and peace. Instead, superheated patriotism, fomented and abetted by the CPI and militants outside government, would fill this void in public persuasion.

  Oddly, too, this statement made no mention of the centerpiece of comprehensive mobilization—the draft. Four days later, he acknowledged the omission when he told a Democratic congressman that the draft would allow keeping military-age men in critical occupations and would establish “the idea that there is a universal obligation to serve.” Backing the draft drew Wilson into a political fight with members of his own party on Capitol Hill. Opposing him in the House were Claude Kitchin and Champ Clark, and in the Senate some leading Democrats likewise expressed doubts. Despite that opposition and skepticism, the draft bill secured passage quickly and easily. Administration supporters in both houses beat back attempts to attach a volunteer alternative. The high point of the debate came when Clark stepped down from the Speaker’s chair to deliver an impassioned two-hour oration against the whole concept of conscription, climaxing with the well-remembered line: “In the estimation of Missourians there is precious little difference between a conscript and a convict.” Clark was fighting a forlorn battle. Kitchin declined to join him, and Bryan announced that he was supporting the president. Meanwhile, pro-draft organizations were staging big rallies in the Northeast and Midwest. The House approved the draft bill on the evening of April 28 by a vote of 307 to 24, and the Senate followed suit that same night by a margin of
81 to 8.6

  This easy win masked a sharp, partly personal conflict. The idea of filling army units with volunteers appealed to more than nostalgia for the minutemen of 1776 and many in the blue- and gray-clad ranks of the Civil War. In the Senate, Lodge tried to secure volunteer divisions so that Roosevelt could lead one of them. Military and civilian leaders in the War Department adamantly opposed such divisions. Besides sharing Wilson’s concern that such volunteers would wreak havoc in civilian occupations critical to war production, they feared that a unit headed by someone with Roosevelt’s fame and glamour would skim away able officers eager for conspicuous chances at combat.7

  The old adversary was not easy to put off. On the afternoon of April 10, four days after the declaration of war, Roosevelt came to call at the White House. According to one staff member, Wilson greeted Roosevelt coolly but soon “‘thawed out’ and was laughing and ‘talking back.’ They had a real good visit.” Roosevelt recalled that he said, “Mr. President, what I have said and thought, and what others have said and thought, is all dust in a windy street, if we can make your [war] message good. … [I]f we can translate it into fact, then it will rank as a great state paper, with the great state papers of Washington and Lincoln.” He was lathering on flattery by appealing to what he regarded as Wilson’s vanity as a “phrasemaker.” He also offered Tumulty a commission in the proposed division and toured the White House for sentimental reunions with staff members who fondly remembered him and his family. Wilson bent the rules to allow reporters and photographers with movie cameras to interview Roosevelt on the White House portico. Afterward, Tumulty confessed to being taken with their visitor’s high spirits and charm. “Yes,” he recalled Wilson replying, “he is a great big boy. I was, as formerly, charmed by his personality. There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can’t resist the man.”8

  Wilson did, in fact, resist Roosevelt, who sensed that he might not be swaying the president. He thought that with anyone else he could count on his request being approved, but he could not tell with Wilson: “He has, however, left the door open.” Wilson let others shut the door. Three days later, Secretary of War Baker wrote to inform Roosevelt that the Army War College had unanimously recommended against his proposal for a volunteer division. This was, Baker maintained, “a purely military policy” based on the need to train troops adequately and on the judgment that any expeditionary force to Europe should be commanded by experienced professional officers. Roosevelt believed that the decision came from Wilson, who was spurning him out of jealousy and spite.9 Wilson would not have been human if thoughts of foiling a bitter rival had not crossed his mind. Moreover, Roosevelt could not hide his desire to horn in on running the war—which might have been an argument for trying to co-opt him with a high-level appointment. Lincoln had gathered his main political rivals into his cabinet so that he might watch them and presumably have them work for rather than against him. On the other hand, McKinley’s experience did not recommend trying to harness Roosevelt in a subordinate role.

  Yet personal motives were only part of the decision. There were diplomatic as well as military reasons not to send Roosevelt to France. He would thunder for an all-out, shoulder-to-shoulder crusade alongside Britain and France against not only Germany but also the other Central powers, and that was not the way Wilson intended to deal with the situation. He wanted to keep his distance from the Allies. On April 14, he told J. H. Whitehouse, a visiting member of Parliament, that he intended to remain “detached from the Allies,” particularly because he did not agree with some of their recent pronouncements about peace terms, such as breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead of a sweeping victory, he still wanted “a negotiated settlement, whenever that was possible,” with America “at the back of the settlement, a permanent guarantee of future peace.” In short, he still clung to the vision he had put forward in his “peace without victory” speech. He also told Whitehouse that he worried that the American press could be irresponsible and might stir up “mob passion.”10

  In such a frame of mind, Wilson preferred to avoid high-level meetings with the principal Allies, but that was not possible. The British immediately asked to send a delegation to Washington, to be headed by Foreign Secretary Balfour. Not to be outdone, the French likewise requested the Americans to receive the minister of justice, René Viviani, who would be accompanied by Marshal Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre, the victor at the battle of the Marne in 1914 and former commander of France’s armies. Balfour’s ship landed in New York on April 22, and he went to see House in the morning before proceeding to Washington. This was no mere courtesy call. Late in 1916, the British had started using the colonel as their principal channel of communication between their intelligence officers and the president.

  One of those officers was Sir William Wiseman. Ingratiating and prone to intrigue, Wiseman resembled his new contact so much that one historian has called him “a young House with an Oxbridge accent.” They quickly struck up an intimate friendship reminiscent of the colonel’s early relationship with Wilson, and in the fall of 1917 the Englishman rented an apartment in the building where House lived. They soon became co-conspirators in conducting diplomacy, with each one sometimes acting behind the back of his government, as House had done earlier with his House-Grey Memorandum.11

  Wiseman set up the meeting on April 22 between Balfour and House, who advised the foreign secretary on how to deal with the president, particularly cautioning him to avoid any discussion of an alliance or peace terms. The colonel also advised against replacing Spring-Rice as ambassador in Washington because the present arrangement, relying on his own contacts, was working well. In Washington that afternoon, cheering crowds and a cavalry escort greeted the British visitors. The following day, the French delegation arrived in Hampton Roads, Virginia, and transferred to the Mayflower, which brought them up the Potomac to Washington. This began monthlong sojourns for both delegations, replete with dinners, parades, visits to other cities, and meetings with important pro-Allied Americans, most notably Roosevelt. In deference to wartime austerity, official entertaining in Washington was less than sumptuous, and Edith Wilson was usually the only woman present at the formal dinners.

  Serious discussions came in Wilson’s separate meetings with Balfour and Viviani. Balfour’s first visit with Wilson at the White House went stiffly, because, according to House, Lansing was present, along with Spring-Rice. “Lansing has a wooden mind and constantly blocked what I was trying to convey,” House said Wilson told him, so the president suggested an after-dinner meeting of just the three of them. That arrangement suited House, who again briefed Balfour on how to deal with Wilson, advising him to disclose the terms of Britain’s secret treaties with Italy and other co-belligerents. When the three men met, they pored over a map of Europe and Asia Minor and discussed specific terms of peace involving Poland and the Balkans and the division of Austria—what Balfour called “dividing up the bearskin before the bear was killed.” House was delighted because the topics discussed were “exactly the same as Balfour and I had covered.” He was also pleased because earlier Balfour had “arranged to keep in constant communication through Wiseman.”12

  With his French visitors, Wilson talked about immediate problems. Viviani agreed with him that the most pressing need was to defeat the submarines by adopting new defensive measures and building more ships. Wilson insisted that the Allies must make their needs known, and he stuck by his vision of a peace settlement, explaining that “annihilation of a nation” only bred desire for revenge. In a separate meeting with Marshal Joffre and an interpreter, Wilson learned how much the French wanted American troops—and the sooner, the better—for a big morale boost. The men talked in detail about how to transport and deploy large numbers of American soldiers.13 Wilson was getting a better idea of what waging this war would require.

  In keeping with his established practice as president, he delegated much of the war effort while setting policies and directions. Baker took
care of raising and training the army. No cabinet member enjoyed greater confidence and respect from Wilson than Baker, whom Wilson would stand by steadfastly. The war secretary set about immediately implementing the draft, which the administration called Selective Service. Baker and the man he picked to run this new system, Enoch Crowder, the army’s provost marshal general, strove to overcome bad memories of the Civil War draft. Crowder kept military officers out of the actual process of selecting draftees and set up a network of more than 4,000 boards composed of local civilians. Baker also enlisted mayors, governors, and civic leaders to support the kickoff of the draft on June 5, when all eligible young men were required to register. Wilson lent his voice to the occasion with a brief speech, in which he asserted that the spirit of obligation ran even deeper than the spirit of voluntarism.

  Between the dash of presidential admonition and the elaborate public relations campaign, registration day went off smoothly. Ten million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty reported to their local draft board, and everyone from Baker on down felt relieved. Two weeks later, a blindfolded secretary of war drew from a big glass bowl capsules containing numbers randomly assigned to groups of registrants. During the summer, local boards used those numbers to call up the first 687,000 draftees, who reported to hastily built training camps in September. At the outset, problems arose from exemptions granted to farmers and workers in industries deemed critical to the war effort. One such well-publicized exemption went to the heavyweight-boxing champion Jack Dempsey, who took a job in a shipyard. In the South, all-white local boards tended to call up disproportionate numbers of African Americans. Likewise, neither the Selective Service System nor local boards showed much sensitivity toward conscientious objectors, who were usually jailed, often under brutal conditions. Despite those shortcomings, the draft operated with unforeseen smoothness and set a good tone for mobilization.14