by G. J. Meyer
“There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling,” he said. “You can’t resist the man. I can easily understand why his followers are so fond of him.”
Roosevelt was less than sweet in what he said to a companion immediately after leaving the White House. “If any other man talked to me as he did, I would feel assured,” he remarked. “If I talked to another man as he talked to me it would mean that that man was going to get permission to fight. But I was talking to Mr. Wilson. His words may mean much, they may mean little. He has, however, left the door open.” In ending his visit, he had jovially invited Joe Tumulty to join his division and come with him to France. Later he said that if Tumulty did join up, he would be regarded as a Wilson spy and kept at a “distance from headquarters except when he was sent for.”
It is pathetic to see the former president, a man of formidable intellect as well as inexhaustible vitality, spinning fantasies in this way. Wilson, understandably wary, is not likely to have said anything that a cool-headed listener could have taken as genuine encouragement. He had “left the door open” only to the extent of not saying bluntly that what TR wanted was never going to happen. A politician as experienced as Roosevelt should have understood this—his sour comments upon leaving the meeting suggest that at some level he did understand—but his hopes swamped his judgment. Though he continued to despise Wilson, he ceased for the time being to say so in public. He expected his friends to see to it that, if the president refused him his corps, Congress would give it to him.
Many Americans continued to believe that conscription would bring the end of what made their country unique among the world’s great nations. Many others continued to regard conscription as not only necessary but potentially beneficial to democracy, mixing the classes together and showing recent immigrants and the poor how to become good citizens. As the issue became entangled in the struggle over Roosevelt’s army corps, the stakes rose. Wilson and Baker knew that they could not afford to lose on such an important question at this early stage. The difficulties of the situation and the bad feeling generated by Roosevelt’s relentless politicking hardened Wilson’s conviction that attempting to build his new army with volunteers could only end badly.
Time passed, and nothing was decided. On April 23, three weeks after Wilson’s call for war, the Senate passed an amendment to the stalemated manpower bill that, if it became law, would compel the War Department to authorize Roosevelt to recruit his hundred thousand volunteers. But the House of Representatives, where pressure from the White House kept the Democratic majority in line, rejected the same amendment. Competing bills were sent to a House-Senate conference committee. Its members, dodging the real question, busied themselves with debating the age at which men should be drafted, if any ever were drafted. They deadlocked on that, too.
Women’s work, 1917
Recruiting, volunteering for the Red Cross, reporting for duty as drivers.
Congress was more relaxed about appropriating the huge sums of money the administration had begun requesting within hours of the declaration of war. It showed itself eager, in fact, to approve virtually any numbers the administration put before it, and to slow down only when presented with proposals for raising the necessary sums through taxation. Both chambers had immediately approved a loan of $200 million to Britain, and on April 24 they authorized Treasury Secretary McAdoo to raise $5 billion—an eye-watering sum in those days—by selling bonds. Three of those five billions were to be lent to the Allies, a reflection of Washington’s new awareness that the Allies were on the brink of financial collapse. London and Paris could hardly have hoped for more, at least where their finances were concerned, and at least in the short term.
Few other matters moved forward so smoothly. Amid universal professions of eagerness to cooperate and avowals that partisan bickering must be suppressed for the sake of winning the war, rancor infected everything. The president’s rejection of suggestions that he should invite Republicans to join his cabinet and thus become partners in a kind of coalition government was entirely defensible. But some saw it as petty, and at times Wilson was petty. An example was his refusal to invite senators from either party to the receptions that welcomed diplomatic missions from Britain and France during the last week of April. Regardless of whether his disdain for the Senate was justified, it would have been wise of him to do a better job of concealing it.
U.S. secretary of state Robert Lansing and British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, 1917
Meeting in Washington, openly allied at last.
The purpose of the Allies’ diplomatic missions was not only to cement their new partnership with the Americans but to reveal, now that the United States was committed, just how frightening their situation was. Their first priority was to get the United States to start sending what was most urgently needed without delay. The British arrived first, their delegation headed by Arthur Balfour, Edward Grey’s successor as foreign secretary. Balfour was intelligent, immensely sophisticated, and a son of the highest levels of the aristocracy. He was, in short, an impressive specimen of his country’s ruling class and perfectly suited to spin a web of enchantment around Colonel House.
René Viviani, former premier of France, and Marshal Joseph Joffre visit America, April 1917
“The French only asked for all the money in the world.”
The French made their appearance three days later, headed by the odd couple of René Viviani and Joseph Joffre. Viviani, born in the French colony of Algeria, was a socialist and a fiery orator who had been premier in the first year of the war. Emotionally unstable (he would end his life in an insane asylum), he was appallingly ill suited to serve as an ambassador of goodwill. His Washington hosts, inevitably, soon showed a decided preference for dealing with Joffre. A portly, grandfatherly figure, unflappably good-humored, “Papa” Joffre had won international fame for his performance as commander of the French army as it fended off the German invasion of 1914. The long stalemate that followed led to his replacement by a younger general promising quick victory, but instead of being cashiered, Joffre was given the exalted rank of marshal of France and an easy schedule of ceremonial duties. Official Washington embraced him as a hero.
The worst of their money worries having been put to rest by the American government’s largesse, the visitors began unveiling some of the hard truths concealed behind years of propaganda. They were not winning the war. In fact, they were in danger of losing it. Their casualties had been much higher than even their own citizens knew, Germany’s U-boat campaign was proving alarmingly effective, and it appeared increasingly possible that Russia would before long be removing herself from the war. The great spring offensive organized by Joffre’s successor Robert Nivelle, which had reached its climax while Joffre and Viviani were still at sea, turned out to be another disaster. If the French envoys knew that it had cost forty thousand of their countrymen’s lives, and that in the aftermath of the slaughter tens of thousands of Nivelle’s troops were refusing to obey orders, they did not share that information with their hosts. There was a limit to how much bad news the Americans needed to be told.
What Balfour and Joffre did tell their hosts was sufficient to put the lie to what David Lloyd George had told Ambassador Page, four months earlier, about wanting the United States in the war not because of her wealth or manpower but because she could be a force for good. The need for such pretense was over, and now the talk was about little except American money, American supplies, and American troops. “The French only asked for all the money in the world,” the writer and disabled veteran Lawrence Stallings would later observe sourly. The British were “more pragmatic.” They wanted only to be able to send America’s youth “off to death or mutilation in France.”
Joffre saw no point in being subtle. “We want men, men, men!” he declared, stressing the importance of sending at least a symbolic contingent of troops without delay. Only such a demonstration could put heart into soldiers and civilians whose morale was sinking under
the weight of Allied losses. A member of the British delegation, Major General G. T. M. Bridges, went a big step further. He proposed that the United States avoid the difficulties and delays of creating its own expeditionary force and instead hurry half a million men, untrained recruits if necessary, to England. There they could be trained under experienced British leadership, then moved to the continent and absorbed into the Allied armies.
Some members of the French mission endorsed this idea enthusiastically. They loved the thought of using American infantrymen to replenish their depleted battalions. Bridges was a credible advocate, having commanded a division on the Western Front, and his American listeners had few grounds for disputing his claim that the British had proved their ability to turn civilians into combat-ready soldiers in no more than twelve weeks. No one could disagree when he argued that his approach was the only conceivable way to get hundreds of thousands of American troops into action in 1917, “before what we would call the fighting season is over for the year.”
Bridges said his proposal had the endorsement of the chief of the Imperial General Staff and of Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force. It had appeal even for some of the Americans—not least those civilians faced with the task of building an American Expeditionary Force virtually from scratch. But difficulties were obvious as well. How could Americans serve in a French army whose language they did not understand? How would Irish-Americans react when ordered to put on British uniforms?
Such questions were trivial compared to the insult to American military leadership that was implicit in the Bridges proposal. The Allies wanted masses of ordinary soldiers, not officers. They wanted no officers at all, in fact, above the rank of captain. More senior officers took this as a slap in the face. To become involved in the biggest war in history, to win that war and with it promotions that otherwise might not have come in decades—these things had until recently been only the wildest dreams of the West Pointers. Were they now to be cast aside? And who were these Allied generals, to be so presumptuous? What had they done with the millions of men under their command except get them slaughtered? Why should they be given hundreds of thousands of young Americans to replace what they had squandered?
From the administration’s perspective, from Wilson’s, what made the proposal absolutely unacceptable was what it implied about America’s visibility in the war. If Washington did as Bridges was urging, there could be no American army in Europe, no American commanders, no distinctly American victories, no way to prove, when the final victory came, how much the United States had contributed to it. Much of the point of intervention—the earning of a prominent role in deciding the fate of the world after the fighting stopped—would be lost. Even if there had been no other difficulties, even if the army had not hated Bridges’s proposal, this would have been enough to keep the president from acceding.
He did, however, agree to Joffre’s first and most heartfelt request. A division of American regulars would be dispatched to Europe forthwith: not to be inserted at once into the trenches, but to prepare the way for the greater numbers that would come later and show the Allies that help was in fact on its way. Such a demonstration, a grateful Joffre assured the president, would make all the difference. One small complication would have to be overcome, and its existence showed just how unready the United States was for war on the European scale. In order to send a division, the army would first have to create a division. A European division included upwards of ten thousand infantrymen, plus artillerists and men with auxiliary functions of many kinds. The regular U.S. Army contained no unit so large and complex.
Which brought the White House and Congress back to the unresolved question of where the army was going to get the manpower it needed. The reversals through which this question went in the first half of May are too complicated, and in some cases make too little sense, to be detailed here. Congress’s inability to decide made it an object of scorn across the country. As Roosevelt’s demands came to be seen as a cause of delay, he began to lose some of his heroic luster. Even Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, for whom the former president was almost a brother, lost his appetite for fighting this latest of TR’s battles. Finally, on May 17, the conference committee settled on a bill that would introduce conscription on the administration’s terms. It authorized rather than required the War Department to allow Roosevelt and Wood to create their corps.
On the following day TR wrote to the president to “respectfully ask permission immediately to raise two divisions for immediate service at the front,” adding that he stood ready to raise four divisions “if you so direct.” Upon receiving this message, the president issued a public statement that “I shall not avail myself, at any rate at the present stage of the war, of the authorization conferred on me by [Congress’s] act to organize voluntary divisions.”
That was the end of it. Everyone understood that Colonel Roosevelt was never going to be a general.
The extent to which Congress and the nation remained uncomfortable with conscription is evident in the fact, astonishing in retrospect, that when the conference committee sent the manpower bill back to both chambers for final approval, the House of Representatives approved it by only 199 yes votes to 178 opposed, with fifty-three members abstaining. When the Senate voted, twenty-three members abstained and eight were openly opposed. Opposition remained strong, support far from unanimous.
Conscription thus became the law of the land a contentious month and a half after the president’s bill was introduced. Wilson could proceed, but no one knew how he intended to do so. He could draft men by the millions, but no one knew where he would put them. People wondered how, if the government continued to move at this pace, the United States would ever get into the war.
What the administration had won was, however, of real importance. It cleared the way for the White House not only to raise an army but also to manage the war. A pattern was being set. Issue by issue, fight by fight, Wilson was getting his way.
Colonel House, for his part, was less interested in army building than in geopolitical matters. He found it as delightful to discuss the fate of the world with Arthur Balfour as he had earlier with Edward Grey. The colonel appears to have been rendered almost childishly credulous by the elegant and quietly self-assured Balfour, the nephew of a former prime minister in addition to having served as prime minister himself. He gives every evidence of having accepted without question Balfour’s assurances that Britain was committed to standing with the United States in bringing peace and justice to a wicked world and to doing so selflessly.
When Balfour arrived in New York en route to Washington, House arranged to meet with him and afterward dispatched a report to the president. “I told Balfour I hoped England would consider that a peace which was best for all nations of the world would be the best for England,” he said. “He accepted this with enthusiasm.” House suggested a “tacit understanding” by which neither the British nor the Americans would discuss postwar peace terms with the other Allies, because they were too greedy to take a satisfactorily selfless view. Again Balfour agreed: too much discussion of too many issues could generate friction at a time when everyone had to be focused on the defeat of Germany. Talks were also unnecessary, House assured the president, because eventually “this country and Britain will be able to dictate broad and generous terms—terms that will mean permanent peace.” So many dubious assumptions are packed into those words as to make the colonel seem fatuous. It is of course possible that he was expressing not what he believed but what he knew would please Wilson.
House again sounds like an innocent in a diary entry about telling Balfour that “Great Britain and America, I thought, were great enough to rise above all petty considerations.” And about how it pleased him to see the Englishman “rise up with enthusiasm to the suggestion.” Again, the colonel’s diary was a testament to his own importance, composed with future readers in mind, at least as much as it was a candid record of what he was thinking and feeling. He could
not have remained as important as he was for as long as he did had he been as guileless as he sometimes makes himself sound.
When they reconnected in Washington, House and Balfour had a ninety-minute talk about redrawing the map of the world. They agreed that an independent Polish state must be established. (Actually, this had been an aspiration of the Germans before the war, their aim being to insert a buffer between themselves and the Russians.) The Austro-Hungarian Empire was to be broken into three autonomous countries, with leftover bits given to various neighbors. “I said to him what I once said to Grey,” House told his diary, “that if we are to justify our being in the war, we should free ourselves entirely from petty, selfish thoughts and look at the thing broadly and from a world viewpoint. Balfour agreed to this with enthusiasm.”
There were limits, however. When House suggested that they should not “look upon Germany as a permanent enemy” but as a fellow member of the family of nations once she had been chastised and democratized, Balfour found no further reserves of enthusiasm to draw upon. The colonel’s diary entry regretfully describes him as remaining “more impressed with the German menace” than with whatever new scenarios the postwar world might present.
How easy Balfour must have found all this. He wrote of liking House “tremendously,” and little wonder. Whatever the colonel said, all Balfour had to do to satisfy him was demonstrate eager agreement. It was all confidential—in fact, all of it was entirely unofficial. House was pleased, and Britain was committing to nothing.