by G. J. Meyer
This was a good time for House, who found himself restored to the president’s favor now that the question of intervention was no longer putting a strain on their relationship. Wilson welcomed the colonel’s opinions as unreservedly as in the past, and appreciated the value of his wide circle of contacts. His letters to House became nearly as effusive as they had been years earlier. “I am grateful to you all the time,” he wrote on June 1. And on August 16: “I devour and profit by all your letters.”
Meanwhile the British and French missions remained in Washington, making their case. Their objective, as one member said, was “to get enormous quantities of supplies from the United States…vast loans, tonnage, supplies and munitions, food, oil, and other raw materials.” The administration found all this perfectly agreeable and opened wide the horn of plenty.
Needs less crucial than saving the Allies from collapse were treated with similar urgency by the administration. Before April was out, by executive order, the president had created a Committee on Public Information and given the job of running it to the man whose idea it was, the longtime Wilson admirer and muckraking journalist George Creel. The purpose of what would be known as the Creel Committee was, officially, to help the American public understand that intervention had not only been necessary but was going to change the world. Unofficially, it would have many other objectives.
Curiously, the president acknowledged the dangers of creating such a body in the statement with which he announced it. “I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticize their own public officials.” What is most curious, and an example of what a paradoxical figure Woodrow Wilson could be, is his uttering such words at precisely the point when he was beginning to do the very thing about which he was warning. It brings to mind the dark thoughts about the consequences of going to war that he is supposed to have told to journalist Frank Cobb not long before asking Congress to declare war.
His first step toward undermining the Bill of Rights was to send to Congress his Omnibus Bill, so called because it cobbled together seventeen legislative measures drafted by the Justice Department in anticipation of a declaration of war. One of its articles, if approved, would have conferred on the president specific authority to censor the press. This was obviously unconstitutional and in calmer times would have been summarily dismissed as such. Wilson nonetheless declared it to be “absolutely necessary to the public safety” and threw all the resources at his disposal behind its passage. The ensuing struggle dragged on into June, with virtually the entire American press unsurprisingly opposed. (Ironically, only foreign-language publications supported Wilson. Their editors apparently hoped that they could escape accusations of disloyalty by surrendering their autonomy voluntarily.) Senator Hiram Johnson of California—the man who famously said that when war comes, truth is the first casualty—was not alone in complaining that such a measure would make it an arguably criminal offense to criticize incompetence, inefficiency, or even outright criminality in the management of the war effort.
In the form finally passed by Congress and renamed the Espionage Act of 1917, the bill was stripped of any reference to press censorship. This was the administration’s first significant defeat since the declaration of war, but the setback scarcely mattered. Even in its truncated form, the act set the stage for the most far-reaching assault on the rights of citizens in American history, before or since.
Background
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Going Dry
Wartime, with its inflamed passions and angry insistence that all citizens commit themselves to the pursuit of the same towering objective, proved to be very good for people with axes to grind or scores to settle.
If you argued fervently enough that your particular cause was patriotic—better, that the satisfaction of your demands would help win the war—you could sometimes accomplish things that had seemed impossible in peacetime.
If you could persuade the right people that those who opposed you were obstacles to victory, that they fell seriously short of being One Hundred Percent American, those right people could sometimes be persuaded not just to side with you but to attack your rivals on your behalf.
Issues that had long divided Americans thus got resolved with surprising speed once the country was at war: sometimes neither fairly nor democratically, sometimes savagely, not always lastingly, but invariably in favor of whichever side made the best case for its “Americanism” and thereby won official and public approval.
An interesting case in point, because it was also a peculiarly divisive and uniquely American one, was Prohibition. The campaign to free the people of the United States from the curse of John Barleycorn was half a century old when the war in Europe began. Though it had gained strength over the two generations following the Civil War, progress came at a glacial pace. But then two and a half years of increasingly nonneutral neutrality, during which the Preparedness Movement arose with its insistence that the nation gird itself for war, gave the enemies of strong drink a powerful boost.
Intervention provided a still more powerful boost. It allowed those Americans who believed alcohol to be intrinsically evil to position their cause as impregnably patriotic and essential to the war effort. They seized the opportunity with such force that the war became the vehicle on which Prohibition rode to enshrinement in the Constitution.
The drive to purge intoxicating beverages from American life was older than populism, progressivism, or any of the reform movements active at the start of the twentieth century save one—woman suffrage. The importation of “ardent spirits” was banned in colonial Georgia as early as 1733, and Maine outlawed the production or sale of strong drink in 1851. A Prohibition Party was founded in Oberlin, Ohio (earlier a hotbed of the antislavery movement), in 1869. It gave former abolitionists a new goal: to cleanse the nation of beer, wine, and distilled spirits. The party grew to marginally respectable size—from 1900 to 1916 its candidates for president never received fewer than two hundred thousand votes—but never became competitive with the People’s and Progressive Parties at their peaks, never mind with the Democrats and Republicans.
The same was true of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). It, too, was founded in Ohio, just a few years after the Prohibition Party, and it held its first national convention in 1874. In addition to preaching abstinence from alcohol, it became involved in such worthy causes as protecting working girls from sexual exploitation. It also displayed a busybody streak, crossing the dim line that separated reform from intrusion into citizens’ private affairs. It called for the prohibition of golf on Sundays, sounded the alarm about the practices of immigrants, and even demonstrated a potential for violence as the militant Carrie Nation began taking a hatchet to drinking establishments in the Midwest. Even so, like the Prohibition Party, the WCTU benefited from the reform impulse that had the nation in its grip at the turn of the century. In the first two decades of the new century, its membership doubled to 340,000.
The organization that put muscle into the cause and made it a real political force was not founded until 1893, the year a financial panic sparked a depression and the start of the populist revolt. This was the Anti-Saloon League. Like its two predecessors, it started in Ohio, and it quickly outgrew both. It was something new in American politics: a well-organized, well-financed interest group that used only one criterion—a willingness to vote for prohibition—in deciding which politicians to support and which to oppose. By the time Woodrow Wilson became president, the league was feared and courted by politicians in most parts of the country, the South and Midwest especially.
The work of the league, and the whole prohibition movement, was an expression of the old idea of American exceptionalism, the belief that the United States at the time of her creation was untouched by the pollutions of the Old World and must remain so in order to fulfill her destiny. These were exalted if naïve ideas, but
in the rapidly changing America of the time, an industrial power with fast-growing cities and endangered family farms, they acquired an ugly dimension. Prohibition became very intrusive indeed, and was tainted with the nativism that had made the so-called Know-Nothings of the mid-nineteenth century a potent political force. Its adherents showed an inclination to believe that only people of English and Scots-Irish ancestry, and perhaps only those who still lived on farms or in small towns and remained staunchly Protestant, were fully and truly American. Germans might be conditionally acceptable—at least the Protestant ones, and even they only until 1914. The Irish were seen as barely half civilized and were Papist to boot. As for the Jews and Poles and Italians and people from places no one had ever heard of, they, too, were turning the nation’s cities into alien places, pits of ignorance and decadence and corruption. Or so it was said. And widely believed.
Prohibition became a unique reform issue, one that was less economic or political than cultural. It also became divisive in a uniquely toxic way. It could be not just rural but smugly anti-urban, not just nativist but aggressively anti-other, not only militantly Protestant (largely Baptist and Methodist) but fiercely anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti–yellow peril. It was stronger among Republicans than Democrats until 1909, when William Jennings Bryan embraced it publicly for the first time. (He probably acted when he did because, having just failed in his third run for the presidency and having lost hope of ever reaching the White House, he was no longer worried about the big-city vote.) But characteristically, in taking up the cause, he focused on its positive side, the hope of eliminating the harm done by alcohol abuse. He never used the issue to denigrate ethnic or religious minorities, and never tried to use war fever—to which he himself remained immune—to challenge the loyalty of those who did not think drinking sinful.
But Bryan was exceptional. As Richard Hofstadter says in his classic The Age of Reform, Prohibition became poisonous, “a means by which the reforming energies of the country were transmuted into mere peevishness.” It was “a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform that had widespread appeal to a certain type of crusading mind. It was linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and the evils that accompanied it but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of urban life, and to the well-to-do classes of cultivated men.” It might even have been, at least in part, not a reform movement at all in any true sense but an unreasoning expression of resentment and fear, of hatred for the frighteningly unfamiliar new America to which the post–Civil War era had given rise.
None of which kept it from being, thanks in large measure to the tough tactics of the Anti-Saloon League, a force on Capitol Hill in 1917. In its early years, the league had concentrated on the relatively modest goal of getting state legislatures to enact local-option laws, which did not ban alcohol but gave counties and towns the authority to do so. But as its power grew and with it an impressive record of success, it broadened its horizons to embrace national goals. By 1917 dozens of states had passed local-option laws, others had outlawed alcohol altogether, and prohibition was an issue in nearly every state and local election. The league now looked to Congress for its ultimate triumph: adoption of an amendment to the Constitution.
It had reason to be confident. In the Congress elected in 1916, supporters of Prohibition (the “drys”) outnumbered “wets” by two to one. The Preparedness Movement reinforced the trend. It gave force to the argument that, in light of the Allies’ need for American exports of food, nothing edible by humans should be converted into alcohol. And that a tipsy America could not possibly be prepared to fight.
Once war was declared, all restraints were off. Distillation was banned by Congress as a waste of food crops, and just drinking beer could draw accusations of disloyalty. The nation’s beer barons with their Teutonic names were said to be financing a vast conspiracy in the service of the Beast of Berlin. Prohibitionists celebrated as a sign of divine approval the Supreme Court’s upholding, in the very month war was declared, of a 1913 law forbidding the transporting of any kind of alcoholic beverage into any dry state.
The Anti-Saloon League exploited the horror with which virtuous citizens reacted to the thought of innocent boys being exposed to the temptations of military life. The president shared these concerns, as did his secretaries of war and the navy. This, and congressional eagerness to please the prohibitionists, led to the insertion into the conscription law of a provision making it a crime to buy or give a soldier or sailor an alcoholic drink. The young Raymond R. Fosdick, once a protégé of Wilson’s at Princeton, was assigned to keep vice away from army training camps. Eventually he would claim to have put 110 red-light districts out of business in the nine months following the declaration of war. He established detention camps where fifteen thousand women convicted of prostitution were locked away, most of them until 1920.
President Wils on had never taken a clear stand on the prohibition question, fearing that it would split the Democratic Party and interfere with the war effort. He did get the Senate to stop the blanket ban on the use of grain for alcohol production, but later he signed a bill forbidding the production of any beverage with an alcohol content of more than 2.75 percent. This was enough to put many producers out of business. When American troops began arriving in France, they were allowed only “light wines” and beer. Establishments serving anything stronger were put off-limits.
The momentum had become unstoppable, passage of a constitutional amendment more and more probable. The Age of Reform would soon be giving way to the Age of Capone.
Chapter 11
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“Skin-Deep Dollar Patriotism”
ONCE THE BIG questions had been settled—the United States was going to create a huge army, it was not going to rely on volunteers, and money would be no object—the hard questions came to the fore. They had to do not with what the government was going to do but how, exactly.
How to turn many hundreds of thousands of raw recruits (not all of them impressively able or willing) into a fighting force capable of taking the field against the German “military machine.” (It was one of the achievements of Allied propaganda that no one ever spoke of a British military machine, or a Russian, or a French. The troops of the Allies were of course “boys,” and heroes. Those of the enemy were malevolent robots, disposable parts—Huns.)
And how to get the new army into action in time to make a difference.
As the costs of intervention began to come into focus, it became clear also that the Allies were going to be even more demanding than they had been before America’s declaration of war. Even after receiving tens of millions of dollars in emergency low-cost loans, even after being assured that additional billions more would be forthcoming (billions that the U.S. government would itself have to borrow and then pass along), they wanted more, and quickly. They seemed incapable of imagining that the New World, a fountain of dollars and foodstuffs and manufactured goods, might not be an infinite one.
This was spectacularly true of the French. Alexandre Ribot, who had been France’s premier for all of four days shortly before the start of the war and now in 1917 was back for a term that would last less than six months, had particularly grandiose ambitions where aviation was concerned. He informed Washington that his nation required “a flying corps of 4,500 airplanes—personnel and matériel included—to be sent to the French front during the campaign of 1918,” which meant in not much more than twelve months. By “personnel” he meant five thousand pilots and fifty thousand mechanics.
And that was barely the beginning. Altogether, Ribot added, it was going to be necessary for the United States to provide France with 16,500 aircraft “of the latest type” and thirty thousand engines to power them. This was preposterous; in 1917 there was almost no such thing as an American aviation industry. The War Department pointed out that its only air arm, which was part of the Army Signal Corps, could muster thirty-five men who had some knowledge of how to pilot an airpl
ane. It had fifty-five aircraft, all but four of them obsolete and those four classed as obsolescent. The department had ambitions of its own where aircraft production was concerned—time would show them to be nearly as unrealistic as Ribot’s—but even its inexperienced planners could see that producing any aircraft “of the latest type” was going to be a challenge. At the start of the war France, not the United States, had been the world leader in aviation technology. In the following two and a half years, the Entente nations and the Germans all made amazing technological leaps, leaving the United States further behind than ever.
Where technology and industrial capacity were not barriers, the Wilson administration was inclined to promise nearly anything the Allies requested, and Colonel House for one expected the cost of doing so to yield important diplomatic rewards. “When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking,” he wrote the president in July 1917, “because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.” Here as with regard to other matters, his crystal ball would prove to have been cloudy.
Aircraft production was just one of Washington’s weaponry problems, and far from the most serious. In fact, in almost no area was the United States prepared to equip a huge army and provide it with the firepower that modern warfare required. A grand total of fifteen hundred machine guns were available to be sent to France with the initial contingent of troops that Marshal Joffre had been promised. This was an impressive number only to the blissfully ignorant; the machine gun had become the indispensable infantry weapon of the Great War, the killing machine that more than any other was responsible for turning the war into a blood-drenched stalemate. Britain in the spring of 1917 had 80,000 such guns. By 1918 it would have 120,000.