This way of raising an army posed the thorny issue of how to deal with criticism and dissent. Free speech now took on an immediately critical dimension: by exhorting young men to evade the draft, opponents of the war could potentially cripple a central element of mobilization. Even without the draft, the need to whip up popular fervor behind the war—to get people to buy bonds, take essential jobs, work harder, forgo pleasures and luxuries—made dissent look dangerous. Yet an administration-sponsored bill to control speech and publications encountered stiff opposition on and off Capitol Hill. The provisions of the bill calling for press censorship, which included a section that would deny the use of the mails to publications deemed disloyal, almost failed to pass in the House. Burleson roved through the corridors of the Capitol lobbying to keep censorship provisions alive, but the Senate struck out everything except the denial of the mails. Wilson tried to keep the House-passed provisions in the final bill, but Congress rejected his pleas, and the Espionage Act he signed on June 15 did not include censorship of the press.
Even without overt censorship, this law hobbled dissent and criticism in print. Burleson exercised with a heavy hand his newly acquired power to deny the mails to publications. Socialist journals came under special attack because the party’s majority remained opposed to intervention; its perennial presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, came out of retirement to give speeches against the war. In July, Burleson suspended second-class postage rates, which were indispensable to publications that reached beyond a local readership, for socialist and radical publications, including the voice of cultural bohemianism in New York’s Greenwich Village, The Masses. Nonsocialist publications likewise fell under the ax, including Watson’s Magazine, a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic magazine edited by Georgia’s veteran demagogue and Wilson vilifier, Tom Watson. The ban also extended to books, including ones by Thorstein Veblen and former representative Charles Lindbergh, an anti-interventionist Republican progressive from Minnesota and father of the future aviator. The suspension of these journals prompted a protest directly to the president from The Masses editor Max Eastman, joined by Amos Pinchot and the journalist John Reed.15
Forwarding their protest to Burleson, Wilson observed, “These are very sincere men and I should like to please them.” He also instructed Tumulty to tell Pinchot that he was looking into the matter. In fact, he did nothing and accepted the postmaster general’s assurances that he was acting in a careful way. In response to Eastman’s renewed protests, Wilson confessed that regarding what could be said in wartime, “the line is manifestly exceedingly hard to draw and I cannot say that I have any confidence that I know how to draw it.” In October, Burleson extended his bans to the socialist newspapers The Milwaukee Leader, The New York Call, and The Jewish Daily Forward. This move ignited a fresh round of protests, which now came also from the pro-war socialist minority, mainstream newspapers, and The New Republic editors Croly and Lippmann. House, who saw Croly and Lippmann regularly, advised Wilson, “[M]ore harm may easily be done by repression. Between the two courses, it is better to err on the side of leniency.”16 He also advised sidelining Burleson and taking charge himself. Wilson did tell Burleson he disagreed with the suspension of The Milwaukee Leader, but he did not reverse the action or rein the postmaster in.
The furor died down for a while after those newspaper and magazine suspensions, but Wilson had clearly shown that he would not always protect civil liberties in wartime. He acquiesced in two other big violations of cherished freedoms—violence against and repression of ethnic minorities and radicals. In an ironic twist, intervention in World War I temporarily lifted the burden of anti-immigrant prejudice from the shoulders of southern and eastern Europeans, most of whose homelands were either fighting on the Allied side or trying to break free from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead, that era’s model minority, the German Americans, became objects of derision, discrimination, and violence. There were vigilante actions against them and at least one lynching in the Midwest. Municipalities and one state, Nebraska, enacted measures forbidding the teaching of German, and the German-language press came under suspicion and lost readers. There were reports of burning books by German authors, while orchestras fired German-born musicians and banned works by such “German” composers as Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. Despite many entreaties, Wilson declined to speak out against these abuses.17
He said nothing about actions against radicals either, and he actively condoned some of those actions. The Espionage Act empowered the Justice Department to prosecute anyone who advocated “treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.” Unlike his fellow Texan Burleson, Attorney General Gregory did not rush to wield his new power against anti-war speakers, but his restraint stemmed from preoccupation with a special perceived source of trouble—the radical Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies. The IWW was mounting union organizing drives among loggers, copper miners, and migratory farmworkers—all considered critical to mobilization. In the West, enemies of the IWW took the law into their own hands in violent incidents that summer. The biggest occurred at the middle of July in Bisbee, Arizona, where a posse rounded up more than 1,000 Wobblies who worked in the copper mines, herded them into cattle cars, and dumped them in the middle of the desert without food, water, or shelter. Then, at the beginning of August, masked men in Butte, Montana, snatched Frank Little, a disabled IWW organizer, from his hotel room, tortured him, and hanged him from a railroad trestle.18
Wilson received reports of these and other incidents from sources both hostile and sympathetic to the Wobblies. The union’s president, William D. “Big Bill” Haywood, sent telegrams demanding redress and threatening strikes. After a cabinet meeting in July, Daniels noted that the president “was indignant, but said what Haywood desires is to be a martyr.” Not making martyrs out of dissidents would remain a guiding principle for Wilson, but he deferred to Gregory, who had already instructed his subordinates to gather material against the IWW. On Gregory’s recommendation, Wilson now appointed a special investigating committee to examine evidence relating to the union. Early in September, agents of the department’s Bureau of Investigation, with the cooperation of local police, raided IWW offices in thirty-three cities, seizing files and records—more than five tons of material. At the end of September, the department secured indictments in Chicago against 166 IWW leaders, including Haywood, while other indictments came down in California, Kansas, and Nebraska. The government was moving to crush the Wobblies.19
Worse violations of civil liberties were to come, and Wilson’s actions and inaction were disturbing. Sometimes he suffered from a defect inherent in his willingness to delegate, as he gave great latitude to lieutenants whom he might have restrained. With Burleson, he was deferring to a coarse-grained political operator never known for intellectual discrimination. Gregory seemed different; he was an able attorney and staunch progressive, but like most lawyers of that era, he knew and cared little about civil liberties. Moreover, he and his U.S. attorneys found themselves constantly bombarded by state and local leaders who demanded action against dangerous radicals in their midst—in this case, the IWW. Still, freedom of speech and opinion was something Wilson seemed to care about deeply, as he had shown when he told Frank Cobb he was afraid of “ruthless brutality” and when he told J. H. Whitehouse that the government must resist “mob passion.”
Why, then, did Wilson do what he did to civil liberties? The best answer seems to lie in his conflicted attitude toward “passion.” He condemned passion in many contexts and tried to overcome it, but he knew that he had to draw on it to take action. This attitude seems to have sprung from a fundamental view of himself. The journalist Lincoln Steffens later recalled that Wilson once said to him, “An intellectual—such as you and I—an intellectual is inexecutive. In an executive job we are dangerous, unless we are aware of our limitations and take measures to stop our everlasting disposition to think, to listen to—not act.” Wilson needed, Steffens
remembered him saying, “when my mind felt like deciding, to shut it up and act. My decision might be right, it might be wrong. No matter, I would take a chance and do—something.” Yet with respect to civil liberties, his problem seemed to be less taking action himself and more remaining passive in the face of actions by others. Outwardly, Wilson affected to be oblivious to the ways his administration was dealing with dissent. In one of his few statements on the subject, in his State of the Union speech in December 1917, he asserted, “I hear the voices of dissent—who does not? I hear the criticism and the clamour of the noisily thoughtless and troublesome. … But I know that none of these speaks for the nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut their uneasy hour and be forgotten.”20 It was a lovely rationalization, but it would not hold up for long.
By the time the president gave that speech, the United States had been a belligerent for nine months, and the fortunes of war were decidedly mixed. Troops for the Western Front remained the most pressing need. More than three years of bloody stalemate in the trenches had bled the French armies nearly dry, and the British forces were not in much better shape. On the war’s other fronts, the Allies were winning only in what was then called the Near East, where the British were pushing the Turks out of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. By contrast, the Italians suffered a rout at Caporetto in October and only barely succeeded in securing a new front along the Piave River. In Russia, the long-running collapse of the Eastern Front had taken a potential turn for the worse when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government and pledged to withdraw from the war. More than ever, the Western Front was where the war would be won or lost. George M. Cohan’s wildly popular new song contained a refrain that promised “the Yanks are coming”—but how soon, and how many?
Until troops could be trained, armed, and transported to France, the United States could not make much difference in the ground war, but there was still a military role to play. Marshal Joffre had impressed upon Wilson what a morale boost it would be to have an American division fighting alongside his armies. Unfortunately, that first division did not go to the front until October, when it was assigned to a quiet sector for further training. In the meantime, the president and the War Department agreed to send over a commander of future forces at once. At the beginning of May, in consultation with the president, Secretary Baker tapped Major General John J. Pershing to lead what would be called the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). As commander of the Punitive Expedition in Mexico, Pershing had the most recent field experience of any American general. Moreover, unlike the other possible choice, Roosevelt’s close friend Leonard Wood, Pershing had refrained from publicly criticizing Wilson’s preparedness policies and restraint in Mexico. He also possessed excellent political connections; his recently deceased wife was the daughter of a senior Republican senator, Francis Warren of Wyoming, former chairman of the Military Affairs Committee.21
Pershing saw Wilson for the first and only time during the war on May 24, when Baker took him to the White House, where the president told the general he would have complete freedom in conducting operations. Wilson also reviewed Baker’s final orders to the AEF commander on May 26, the day before he left for France. Pershing was to work with the Allies but always to remember that he was leading a separate and distinct force, “the identity of which must be preserved.” Somewhat contradictorily, Pershing was told that until he had sufficient troops to operate independently, he should “cooperate as a component of whatever army you may be assigned to by the French government.” Pershing arrived in France at the middle of June. Parades and lavish ceremonies in Paris and an emotional event at which the AEF commander kissed Napoleon’s sword supplied the hoped-for morale boost. Contrary to later legend, however, it was not the laconic general but one of his aides who proclaimed, “Lafayette, we are here!”22
Such stirring public gestures notwithstanding, the underlying conflict between an independent force and inter-Allied cooperation quickly surfaced. Ramrod straight in posture and stubborn in personality, Pershing was determined not to allow his men to be amalgamated with British or French forces. Allied commanders began clamoring for company or regimental units of American soldiers, nicknamed doughboys, to replenish their own desperately thin lines, but Pershing gathered his green troops behind the lines for further training. He had a legitimate concern, but he was really putting together a separate army under his sole command. As more doughboys arrived, pressures for amalgamation grew, and at the end of the year Lloyd George interceded with Wilson through House and Wiseman. In response, Wilson had Baker cable Pershing: “We do not desire any loss of identity of our forces but regard that as secondary to the meeting of any critical situation by the most helpful possible use of the troops at your command.” Yet Wilson also told Pershing that he had “full authority to use the forces at your command as you deem wise.”23 This was one of Wilson’s few interventions in the military operations and the closest he came to communicating directly with Pershing in 1917. Despite diplomatic nods toward the British and French, he was giving his commander everything he wanted.
Any question of how American forces might be used would be moot if ships were not able to transport them across the Atlantic and deliver vital foodstuffs, machines, and munitions to the British and French. The critical elements in this situation were submarines, which had to be combated, and merchant vessels, which had to be commandeered and built. The naval war consisted mainly of submarine attacks and efforts to defend against those attacks. Between March and August 1917, German submarines sank more than 500,000 tons of Allied shipping each month and 921,211 tons in May alone. At that rate, Britain would not be able to stay in the war. Yet as Wilson and his advisers learned when the delegations visited in April, the British were loath to face up to their peril. Nor did their naval leaders seem eager to adopt what promised to be an effective defense—the convoy system, under which destroyers would escort groups of merchant ships. Admiral Sims, who reached London four days after the declaration of war, urged sending all available destroyers immediately, and by June twenty-four American destroyers were operating in British waters.
This move struck Wilson as only a start. He took much greater personal interest in naval affairs than army affairs, and he did not hesitate to deal directly with his commander on the scene. British reluctance to adopt the convoy system prompted him, with Daniels’s concurrence, to cable Sims early in July to get the admiral’s view of the matter. Sims replied with a review of Britain’s naval situation and a recommendation to press the British harder to cooperate in convoy duties. By September, the rate of losses dropped to 300,000 tons, in part because the navy had taken over convoy duties for ships carrying doughboys to France. These improvements gratified Wilson but did not completely satisfy him. In August, he made one of his few trips out of Washington, to visit the Atlantic fleet before it sailed for European waters. Speaking off the record aboard the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, he again disparaged British “prudence” and reluctance to try new things: “I should like to see something unusual happen, something that was never done before.”24
Foiling the submarines solved only half the problem of getting soldiers and supplies to the war. The other half consisted of coming up with enough ships to carry them. During the preceding half century, the once-proud American merchant marine had withered away, the victim of devastation wrought by Confederate raiders during the Civil War and the shift of the economy inward under the impact of the Industrial Revolution. British ships had been carrying most of the massive trade with the Allies since 1914, but Wilson had new tools at hand to try to remedy the situation. The Shipping Act passed in 1916 as part of the second installment of the New Freedom empowered the president to establish the U.S. Shipping Board, which could purchase ships, including interned German vessels, and set up shipyards. The shipbuilding program produced spectacular results, spending $270 million to establish 341 new yards that employed nearly 400,000 workers and
launched nearly 100 ships a day after the middle of 1918.25
Behind those accomplishments, however, lay conflict and tardiness. A turf battle broke out between William Denman, a businessman and Democratic campaign contributor who was chairman of the Shipping Board, and General George Washington Goethals, the legendary builder of the Panama Canal, who was head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the board’s operating subsidiary. This pair squabbled about nearly everything, and in July the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee told Wilson that the “fight between Denman and Goethals is disgusting the Senate, and the House and every sensitive man in the United States.”26 Wilson pulled off a graceful end to this scrap by getting both men to resign quietly. As the new chairman of the Shipping Board, he named Edward N. Hurley, a Chicago businessman and Democratic activist who had no background in shipping but soon brought discipline and harmony to the board. Later, to head the Emergency Fleet Corporation, he appointed the steel tycoon Charles M. Schwab, who supplied the boldness that Wilson valued. Unfortunately, Hurley’s and Schwab’s efficiency would come too late to make much difference to the outcome of the war. Most of the doughboys would cross the ocean in commandeered private vessels or Allied ships. America’s much-ballyhooed “bridge of ships” would serve mainly to bring the doughboys home in 1919.
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