Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Overseas shipping was just one transportation problem the Wilson administration faced. Despite the recent proliferation of cars and trucks, the great majority of people and goods in 1917 still moved by rail. Earlier conflicts with railroad management did not stop Wilson from seeking management’s voluntary cooperation. In July, a new supervisory agency, the Railroads’ War Board, issued an order to expedite shipments by tagging critical items. The order backfired when freight agents tagged everything bound for eastern ports and backed-up freight cars clogged lines as far west as Pittsburgh and Buffalo. In addition, railroads would not allow other lines’ engines to operate on their tracks, and most of them squirreled away their freight cars. The tagging mess eventually got straightened out, but delays and bickering grew worse in the fall as industrial production picked up. The railroads demanded rate increases, which the ICC refused to grant, and the unions once more threatened to go out on strike.27

  The president’s closest advisers, particularly McAdoo, pressed him to use his authority under the Adamson Act to take over the railroads. Tumulty likewise lobbied for seizing control of the lines and appointing McAdoo to run them. Wilson resisted outright government ownership, which many progressives had long wanted, but on December 26 he issued a proclamation assuming control of the railroads as a wartime measure. Speaking to a joint session of Congress a week later, he explained that he was taking this action “only because there were some things which the government can do and private management cannot.”28 Soft-pedal this action as Wilson might, there was no disguising its boldness. This was one of the farthest-reaching assertions of government power in economic affairs in American history. Nothing else in the war at home would go this far, but only because less coercive methods appeared to work elsewhere.

  Food also posed a pressing need, for both the troops and the Allies. A bill to deal with food and fuel production and distribution introduced a month into the war stirred up heavy resistance on Capitol Hill. Conservatives in both houses bridled at the extension of presidential power and government interference in the economy. In the Senate, John W. Weeks of Massachusetts succeeded in attaching an amendment to set up a “Joint Committee on Expenditures in the Conduct of the War.” This move brought a sharp rejoinder from Wilson. In a public letter to Congressman Asbury Lever of South Carolina, who was chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and the House-Senate conference committee on the bill, he argued that Weeks’s proposal would “render my work of conducting the war practically impossible” by usurping functions that belonged to the executive branch. In a barb aimed at Republican critics, he cited “a very ominous precedent in our history” for such interference—namely, the joint congressional committee during the Civil War that “rendered Mr. Lincoln’s task all but impossible.” Wilson’s argument and lobbying succeeded in getting the conference committee to drop the disputed provision, and as finally passed, this law, which came to be called the Lever Act, gave him the powers he had requested.29

  The food-control measure was the brainchild of the man whom Wilson had already chosen as food administrator—Herbert Hoover. The now forty-three-year-old mining engineer and international businessman had earned a heroic reputation since 1914 as head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the multinational group that was feeding the civilian population of German-occupied Belgium, a task that had involved him in diplomacy as much as food delivery. Hoover brought enormous intelligence and energy to his new job, together with a distinctive approach. No friend of bureaucracy, he kept his agency as small as possible while enlisting several thousand volunteers. He also tried to avoid rationing by promoting voluntary restraint in consumption. Because wheat was a critical commodity, the Food Administration promoted “wheatless days.” To conserve meat and poultry for military consumption and overseas shipment, it likewise promoted “meatless days.” With stories about Hoover appearing regularly in newspapers and magazines, he became what one observer called “the benevolent bogey of the nation.” People were supposed to eat foods in specified categories sparingly and thereby “Hooverize” their plates; parents told children they could not have a spoonful of sugar on their cereal “because Mr. Hoover would not like it.” One of his own agency’s slogans even called him “Herbert Hoover, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”30

  Yet Hoover much preferred to use carrots than sticks, real or implied, in his crusade to get Americans to eat less and produce more. His agency rivaled Creel’s CPI in rousing popular sentiment. Housewives, grocers, and restaurateurs, as well as the public in general, became targets for relentless pep talks, posters, and advertisements—with such messages as “Food is sacred. To waste is sinful;” “Wheatless days in America make sleepless nights in Germany;” and “Save beans by all means.” Twenty million people signed a pledge to follow Food Administration guidelines in conserving food; in return, they received buttons to wear and stickers to put in their windows. The Food Administration also exhorted people to plant vegetable gardens for home consumption and to raise sheep and knit scarves and mittens for the troops. Edith Wilson set an example by signing the pledge and displaying her sticker in a White House window, planting a “war garden” on the grounds, and, along with her stepdaughters, knitting for the troops. Her husband made a similar gesture by bringing in a flock of much-photographed sheep to graze on the South Lawn. Wilson liked Hoover’s go-getting, boosterish methods, and he appreciated the administrator’s feats of raising wheat production by nearly half—despite a harsh winter and loss of farmers to the armed forces—and curbing price speculation by setting up a government corporation that bought the entire crop. No other American would come out of World War I with a more stellar public reputation than Hoover.31

  The Lever Act addressed another critical requirement for the war effort: fuel. That meant coal, which railroads, most ships, offices, homes, and factories still relied on for power. Wilson set up a Fuel Administration and appointed as its head his friend from the Princeton faculty and now president of Williams College, Harry Garfield. Before the fuel administrator took his new post, however, an owner-led Committee on Coal Production forged agreements to stabilize prices and boost production. Suspecting machinations by a “coal trust,” Garfield scrapped those agreements and pushed prices down. By the year’s end, coal shortages plagued the eastern part of the country, worsened by the coldest winter in three decades. People stole coal, and local authorities would stop coal trains and distribute their cargoes to residents. In January 1918, Garfield tried to meet the crisis by ordering all factories east of the Mississippi to shut down for four days, and he called for “heatless Mondays,” which came to be dubbed “Garfield days.” The coal shortage and tie-ups in deliveries stirred up a storm of protest and on Capitol Hill roused critics of the administration, who demanded investigations and offered new measures to trim Wilson’s authority. The protests would pass, and the fuel crisis would subside, but Garfield, who earned the scornful epithet “the professor,” did not come out of the war with much of a public reputation.32

  Efforts to manage industrial production did not fare well during the summer and fall of 1917 either. The War Industries Board, a shell agency, suffered from weak and divided authority. For that and other reasons, business committees set up under the WIB did little to bring order to the production and distribution of manufactured goods. Unlike the Food and Fuel Administrations, the board had no price-fixing powers and could not enter into contracts—a prerogative that the military and naval procurement bureaus jealously guarded. Confusion reigned, and the board’s first and second chairmen quit after a few months in exhaustion and frustration. The WIB would not begin to function with a semblance of effectiveness until Wilson made Baruch its chairman at the beginning of March 1918.33

  Waging war also affected major social problems at home, particularly in race relations. The migration of African Americans out of the South to northern cities had been growing, partly in response to the rising demand for workers in war-related industries. These newcomers to th
e North usually found hostility, discrimination, and, increasingly, violence. At the beginning of July, a “race riot”—in reality, a white rampage—raged for a day in East St. Louis, Illinois, leaving thirty-nine blacks and nine whites dead and black neighborhoods burned out. In response to pleas for federal action, Wilson asked Attorney General Gregory, “Do you think we could exercise any jurisdiction in this tragical matter? I am very anxious to have any instrumentality of the Government employed that could … effectively … check these disgraceful outrages.” For once, he seemed to be reacting compassionately in the face of racial injustice.34

  Wilson did not follow that impulse, however. Gregory advised that no federal action was warranted, although he counseled the president against saying so. Tumulty warned him nevertheless that “[u]ntil some statement is issued by you deprecating these terrible things, I am afraid the pressure will grow greater and greater.” The president did not make a statement, but on August 14 he met with four black leaders and allowed them to tell the press that he deplored the violence, was seeking to punish offenders, and would seek to prevent future outbreaks. That tepid response did nothing to quell the violence. On August 23, shooting broke out in Houston, Texas, between black troops and a white mob; fifteen whites and three blacks died before white troops and local police restored order. The next day, Daniels noted some of Wilson’s remarks at a cabinet meeting: “Race prejudice. Fight in Houston, Texas. Negro in uniform wants the whole sidewalk.” The army summarily hanged thirteen black soldiers and sentenced forty-one to life in prison, while later courts-martial sentenced sixteen more to death.35

  The incident in Houston highlighted the touchy issue of African Americans in the military. The navy had only 5,000 blacks serving during the war, and the marines had none. The army, however, had 10,000 black enlisted men and some officers in April 1917, and despite misgivings and protests from some white southern politicians, the War Department planned to induct many more. Though born and raised in West Virginia, Newton Baker differed from other cabinet members in his relaxed attitude toward race, and his assistant secretary who oversaw race relations, Frederick Keppel, held liberal views. That was not the case among the army’s officers, however, many of whom assumed that black inductees would be put only in labor battalions—as many were—but black leaders moved to forestall such plans. In May, the NAACP called for full black support of, and full black participation in, the war. In the organization’s journal, The Crisis, W. E. B. DuBois declared, “If this is OUR country, then this is OUR war.” In October, after the first African American draftees were called up, Baker appointed a black special assistant, Emmett J. Scott, an administrator at the Tuskegee Institute. Wilson had little to do with these initiatives, and he condoned a move by the army in the opposite direction when it denied a command to the highest-ranking black officer, Colonel Charles Young, a West Point graduate, by imposing a highly suspect medical retirement on him.36

  Four hundred thousand African Americans would see army service during the war, with a quarter of them going overseas. They served in a single all-black division and other segregated units, all commanded by white officers. Black inductees received training in separate areas of larger camps. The only all-black training facility was an officers’ school outside Des Moines, Iowa, which turned out more than 600 graduates at junior ranks. The school lasted only a few months because the military high command decided against black units having black officers—a decision that had adverse consequences. Although some white officers commanding black units acted with fairness and sometimes with goodwill, many of them resented their postings as second-class duty and looked down on their men through the distortions of racist stereotypes. To make matters worse, many black soldiers trained at camps in the South, where segregation prevailed on the base as well as off. Their separate facilities were anything but equal, and as one investigator observed, “Where there was a shortage they were the ones to suffer.” Labor battalions suffered most. At one camp in Virginia, soldiers spent the harsh winter of 1917–18 sleeping in tents, without blankets, fresh clothes, bathing facilities, or medical attention. A large number of them died.37

  As the NAACP’s activity indicates, African Americans played an active role in trying to shape their part in the war. In 1917, they protested against both the “race riots” and the punishment meted out to the soldiers in Houston. After the East St. Louis riot, 1,500 black men, women, and children marched in New York in what they called the Negro Silent Protest Parade, and the marchers petitioned Congress and the president. After the sentencing of the soldiers in Houston, the NAACP gathered 12,000 signatures on a petition requesting investigation and review and sent a delegation to read the petition to the president at the White House on February 19, 1918. The man who read the petition was James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP’s executive secretary. Wilson asked his visitors questions and told them a couple of stories about his youth in the South. “When I came out,” Johnson later wrote, “it was with my hostility toward Mr. Wilson greatly shaken; however, I could not rid myself of the conviction that at bottom there was something hypocritical about him.”38

  Wilson would later commute the sentences of some of the men condemned in the Houston riot, and he would spark some hope by the way he addressed an equally ominous cloud on the racial horizon—an epidemic of lynchings. According to reports by the NAACP, nearly 100 black people were lynched in 1917 and 1918, and a number of prominent individuals, black and white, wrote to implore the president to speak out against the crime. The most potent plea came from one of Wilson’s few black acquaintances, Robert R. Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor as principal of the Tuskegee Institute. On June 15, 1918, Moton told the president that on recent travels in the South he had found “more genuine restlessness, and perhaps dissatisfaction on the part of colored people than I have ever before known.” Lynching was the cause of those attitudes, and Moton urged “a strong word, definitely from you” against it. In reply, Wilson said, “I have been seeking an opportunity to do what you suggest and if I do not find it soon, I will do it without an opportunity.”39

  On July 26, the president issued a statement “on a subject which so vitally affects the honor of the Nation and the very character and integrity of our institutions.” He decried the “mob spirit” of lynching as a blow against liberty and justice: “I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of rights than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior.” He urged governors and all law-enforcement officers to stamp out “this disgraceful evil.”40 Wilson’s eloquence now tended to be more tinged with passion than his pre-war speaking, and this statement anticipated an argument later generations would make—that racial injustice sullied America’s image abroad and efforts to lead the world.

  His denunciation of lynching gave a hint of what a powerful civil rights president he might have been if he had put his heart and mind into the cause. But they were not there. His reluctance to enter the war for fear of further depleting the white race disclosed what really moved him. His muttering about black soldiers’ wanting “the whole sidewalk” in Houston revealed how readily he accepted the customary racial inequalities and indignities of the time. His friendly meeting with the NAACP leaders shows he had learned from the clash with William Monroe Trotter and the Birth of a Nation fiasco—but only that he must maintain his politeness and self-control. His relations with Robert Moton showed that he could work with a moderate black leader, although he had ignored entreaties to make a public statement at the time of Booker T. Washington’s death, three years earlier. Wilson had put any ethnic and religious prejudices he ever felt far behind him, and he would soon work easily and sympathetically with nonwhite leaders from other parts of the world. Why, then, did the glaring in
justice of racial prejudice on his own doorstep and in his own household not engage his mind and spirit?

  Like his acquiescence in wartime repression of civil liberties, this failure of moral conscience remains puzzling. He did leave clues about why did he not take action against racism. When James Weldon Johnson—who was a poet and a black man who read white attitudes with great sensitivity—called the president a hypocrite, he put his finger on something important. Wilson’s denunciation of lynching deplored the passion, disorder, and sullied international image of white Americans rather than injury, horror, and death of black Americans. That viewpoint was consistent with his earlier depiction of slavery as an economic curse, but not necessarily a moral one, on the South, and it put him in line with other southern critics of slavery, going back to Jefferson, who deplored the peculiar institution’s impact on masters and other whites but remained indifferent to the plight of the enslaved.

  Wilson’s southern birth and upbringing had shaped his approach to race, but not in a simple way. Violence, lynching, and virulent racism, particularly the demagoguery of such firebrands as Vardaman and Watson, grieved him, and he would soon mount a drive to purge southern politics of retrograde actors and influences. His impatience with agitation over race from any quarter made him resemble northern whites of that time more than fellow southerners, but he had grown up despising abolitionists and regarding Reconstruction as an injustice. Further, his southern Presbyterian upbringing made him oppose mixing religion in politics and thereby separated him from the small number of white Christians of that era who came to see racism as a sin. Ironically, his learned, sophisticated Protestantism, which otherwise influenced him profoundly for the better, may have kept him from making the leap of faith of evangelicals who recognized African Americans as fellow children of God. This was perhaps Woodrow Wilson’s greatest tragedy: the North Star by which he steered on his life’s spiritual and intellectual journey may have prevented him from reaching his full stature as a moral leader and rendering still finer service to his nation and the world.41