by G. J. Meyer
A bloc of progressive senators from both parties—the “willful” few who had voted against the war, joined now by some who had supported intervention—called for a war profits tax of 80 percent. Told by indignant conservatives that such a rate would wreck the economy, they replied that Britain had started with a 50 percent tax on war profits, later raised it to 80, and suffered no obvious ill consequences. Treasury Secretary McAdoo, worried that too high a rate would affect his ability to sell bonds, opined that 31 percent would suffice. Eventually he would get his way.
When in May the House Ways and Means Committee approved a tax increase for individuals and companies in the highest brackets, a closing of loopholes, and the doubling of an excess-profits tax enacted back in March, opponents shifted their lobbying into high gear. The Senate Finance Committee held weeks of hearings that provided a high-visibility platform for antitax views. After sitting through these hearings, Hiram Johnson observed wearily that they had “brought into sharp relief the skin-deep dollar patriotism of some of those who have been loudest in declamations on war and in their demands for blood.”
Making soldiers and sailors
Dental hygiene, calisthenics, learning to handle a rifle—all part of getting ready for war.
On May 24, two weeks after his arrival in the capital, General Pershing was taken to the White House by Secretary Baker and introduced to the president as the newly appointed commander not just of the First Division but of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). Pershing, stunned by how little the general staff had done or was trying to do to prepare for war in Europe, was surprised again by Wilson’s failure to ask questions or give him any instructions. He had expected some discussion of what worried the general staff most: British persistence in urging that America’s conscripts be handed over to the Allies for training or for integration into the Allied armies after basic training in the States. But the president did not mention the subject. In time Pershing would see the advantages of serving a chief executive who took as little interest in military matters as Wilson did in the work of most government departments. It freed him to make his own decisions and stake out his positions with little fear of interference.
On that same day, the House of Representatives passed a version of the tax bill that provided for only $1.8 billion in new revenue, not nearly enough to meet the need even in the near term. Even so, the Senate soon pared it by 11 percent, after which it hung in the limbo of a conference committee.
Doing his bit
Financier J. P. Morgan, Jr., supports a war bond drive with a $10,000 check.
Four days after seeing the president, Pershing boarded a ship bound from New York for England. With him went 191 handpicked men, a multiple of the number the general staff had in Washington. This was an early indication of the determination of the expeditionary force’s new commander not to operate on the small scale that had long been habitual for the army. He also took with him two sets of written orders, one signed by Secretary Baker, the other by Army Chief of Staff Tasker H. Bliss, although Pershing and his chief of staff had written it themselves. Both instructed Pershing to keep the AEF entirely separate from the armies of the Allies and to refuse all suggestions or requests or demands to the contrary. He, Baker, and Bliss all understood that he was going to need such an order.
When in October the revenue bill reached the president’s desk at last, six months after it was first proposed, it was a pathetically puny thing. The revenue stream that it created was scarcely more than a trickle when compared with the Treasury Department’s second bond drive, which was then in preparation, would raise another $4.6 billion, and would be followed by a series of later, still larger drives. Meanwhile the head of a steel company noted that he and his counterparts were “all making more money than the average human being ought to.” Postwar congressional inquiries would establish that in 1917 the profits of the Savage Arms Corporation amounted to 60 percent of its sales, the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company increased its profits eightfold between 1914 and 1918, and DuPont’s stock dividend was at the war’s end sixteen times what it had been at the start.
There could no longer be any doubt that the war was going to be financed mainly through borrowing. This was painless in the short term but worrisome in the long. It transferred immense amounts of wealth to the buyers of the bonds, which were a boon to high-income investors because the interest was tax-free; this increased the initial nominal return of 3.5 percent (later it would be higher) to an actual 9.5 percent. The bonds burdened the future with debt and were powerfully inflationary.
Every answer seemed to bring new questions in its wake, and every solution gave rise to new problems. Troubles rolled in like waves in the ocean. Some were of tsunami proportions.
Secretary McAdoo informed Congress that the government’s financial needs just for the current fiscal year were going to be five billion dollars higher than he had estimated in May.
General Pershing, who shortly after arriving in Europe had told Washington that he was going to need a million men by May 1918, now revised his figures, too. In order to do what he had been sent across the water to do, he reported, he was going to need three million.
What had been done and spent so far was obviously no more than a good start. Only a fool would have tried to say where it was all going to end.
Background
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Destiny’s Child
In February 1917, with American intervention in the Great War seeming not only inevitable but imminent, the identity of the general who would be chosen to command American troops in Europe was pretty much taken for granted in the White House and the War Department.
It was not John Pershing, excellent though his credentials and connections were.
It was not Major General Leonard Wood, whose connections were even better than Pershing’s and whose credentials included past service as army chief of staff. He had burned too many bridges with his intrusions into partisan politics and razor-tongued criticism of the Wilson administration’s reluctance to go to war. And Secretary of War Baker, who had observed him in the field during summer maneuvers, thought he had grown too fat.
It was assumed, rather, that if an American army did go to war, it would do so under the command of Frederick N. Funston, the most remarkable figure to have risen to the rank of general in the U.S. Army in the half century after the Civil War. Unlike Pershing, he was not a West Pointer; in fact, he failed the West Point admissions test at age eighteen and never graduated from any college. He did not even become a member of the regular army until he was thirty-five years old.
He was a swashbuckler, though a diminutive one at five foot five and 120 pounds, as dashing as a character out of a boys’ adventure story. He never put on a uniform until he was thirty, spending his early manhood as a railroad worker, newspaper reporter, and botanical researcher in Alaska. He finally became a soldier by running off to Cuba to join the rebellion against Spain. He rose to lieutenant colonel in the Cuban revolutionary army and saw much action before contracting malaria and finding it advisable, his weight having fallen to ninety-five pounds, to return home to Kansas.
When the United States declared war on Spain, Funston’s experience in Cuba (plus, as seems likely, the influence of his father, whose political career had included election to Congress) won him appointment as colonel in the newly formed Kansas Volunteers. Then he was off to the Philippines, and the hard, ugly war to suppress the insurrection there. Funston became a legend. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor and in 1900 was promoted to brigadier general of volunteers. He applied for a commission in the regular army and was turned down. He was slated for discharge and return to the States when, in March 1901, he planned and led an operation that captured the leader of the rebels, Emilio Aguinaldo. For this he was made, at age thirty-five, the youngest general in the regular army.
He was as flamboyant as he was tough, rarely careful with his words. When a reporter asked him about alleged atrocities in the Philippines, he
boasted that “I personally have strung up thirty-five Filipinos without trial.” He said that Americans calling for withdrawal “should be dragged out of their homes and lynched.” President Roosevelt reprimanded him for one such outburst but to little effect. Funston was stationed in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake and showed firmness bordering on brutality in dealing with looters. Later he applied similarly rough tactics to striking miners in Nevada. Despite criticism, most of the public saw him as both colorful and needed, a pillar of law and order. In 1914 he commanded the troops that occupied Veracruz, Mexico, and later that year was promoted to major general, the army’s highest rank at the time. He was not yet fifty, had been a general for fifteen years, and now had overall command in the Southwest, including the Mexican conflict.
John Pershing, though almost five years older than Funston, was junior to him in rank and unknown to the public. When he took his force of cavalry across the border in pursuit of Pancho Villa, it was to Funston that he reported.
But then came the night of Saturday, February 17, 1917. President and Mrs. Wilson were among the guests at a dinner party at the home of Secretary of War Baker. They were at the table when someone knocked at the front door. It was the army major who had duty at the War Department that night. A telegram had arrived, and he thought Wilson and Baker should see it. It reported that Fred Funston had dropped dead of a heart attack in San Antonio.
“What now, Newton?” the president asked. “Who will take the army over?”
Baker turned an inquiring look on the major.
“I cannot of course speak for the army,” said Douglas MacArthur, young for his rank, son of a general and Civil War hero, himself a rising star. “But for myself the choice would be General Pershing.” That was how MacArthur would remember it. Baker remembered General Tasker H. Bliss as the man MacArthur named.
In any case, no one except the bitterly disappointed Leonard Wood would find much reason to disagree with the choice of Pershing to head the AEF. Not even Wood’s good friend Theodore Roosevelt could muster any real indignation, because he was Pershing’s friend, too, and in fact had been responsible for his rise to the senior ranks of the army. With Funston out of the picture, there were few alternatives to Pershing, really. The general staff was headed by men whose combat experience had ended with the Indian Wars, some of them too old for the Western Front. Pershing was the only active-duty general with recent experience in leading large numbers of troops against armed enemies. And there was little in his background to which anyone could reasonably object.
General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, 1918
He “inspired confidence but not affection—personal magnetism seemed lacking.”
Born in small-town Missouri, the son of a family of Alsatian origin and very limited means, Pershing had entered West Point at the unusually advanced age of twenty-one because it offered a college education at government expense. His success as a cadet (he was class president and held top rank as “first captain”) is sometimes attributed to his being older than his classmates, a man among boys, but there was more to it than that. Robert Lee Bullard, who would become one of the highest-ranking generals of the AEF, recalled that First Captain Pershing “inspired confidence but not affection. Personal magnetism seemed lacking.” He wrote that Pershing’s “exercise of authority was then and always has been since, of a nature peculiarly impersonal, dispassionate, hard and firm.” A bit of a cold fish, evidently, if only in the professional part of his life.
There was another part, clearly. Almost paradoxically, Bullard recalled also that Pershing was what the young men of the time called the “spoony” type: fond of the ladies. Like his stern, coldly military bearing, this would be a lifelong trait, one that he would attempt with imperfect success to keep concealed from view.
He graduated in 1886, in time to witness the last of the Indian Wars. This led to the dreary life of a junior officer whiling away the peacetime years in the dusty outposts of a small army whose senior members often stayed on active duty into old age, blocking the paths to promotion. (Douglas MacArthur’s father, who as a teenage Civil War hero attained the rank of colonel, later spent twenty-three years as a captain on the western frontier.) Young Pershing, restlessly ambitious, earned a law degree at the University of Nebraska while on active duty. He expected to resign his commission as soon as a sufficiently attractive opportunity came his way, but the Spanish-American War came first. Suddenly the army became interesting.
In Cuba he served with the Tenth Cavalry, one of the army’s four black regiments, thereby acquiring a rude nickname that was later domesticated as Black Jack. He had met Roosevelt when TR was New York City’s police commissioner, and the two had hit it off. Now he was serving with Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt. Their units fought side by side in the assault on San Juan Hill. Pershing was commended for gallantry and given the temporary rank of major.
Next came assignment to the Philippines. When Pershing arrived, a captain once again, Fred Funston was already a regular army general in spite of having served no apprenticeship in the lonely weather-beaten forts of the Great Plains. Pershing performed well, as before, but for the rest of his career he would be dogged by rumors that he contracted gonorrhea twice and fathered half-Filipino bastard children. He denied all of it, but to little avail. (A decade later these rumors would still be potent enough to cause him to be denied appointment as superintendent at West Point.)
The most important factor in Pershing’s rise happened in 1905. Stationed in Washington, he courted and won Helen Frances Warren, daughter of Francis Warren of Wyoming, Republican chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. From that point, things happened fast. Pershing, accompanied by his bride, was sent to Tokyo as military attaché and from there became an American observer of the war in which Japan astonished the world by inflicting a humiliating defeat on Russia. In 1906 President Roosevelt intervened personally to move his old comrade in arms up four ranks in a single leap, from captain to brigadier general. Pershing thus leapfrogged over 862 more senior officers and was much resented as a result. Between them, however, the president and Senator Warren had more than enough clout to stifle objections.
Nine years later Black Jack Pershing was serving under Fred Funston in the Southwest when a searing tragedy struck. A fire at San Francisco’s Presidio, where the general’s family awaited his return from the border, killed “Frankie” Pershing and the couple’s three small daughters. Only their son, Warren, survived, rescued by a servant; he was sent to live with his grandparents in Washington, and his father went on with what now seemed a blighted life. He was thus on duty, available to answer destiny’s call, when Funston keeled over after dinner at a Texas hotel. The timing was crucial: the United States was at the time only seven weeks from going to war.
Pershing knew what was at stake, knew he had a better chance than most of being summoned, and was not prepared to leave things in destiny’s fickle hands. On April 10 he sent President Wilson a letter:
“As an officer of the army, may I not extend to you, as commander in chief of the armies, my sincere congratulations upon your soul-stirring address to Congress on April 2d. Your strong stand for the right will be an inspiration to the citizens of this Republic. It arouses in the breast of every soldier feelings of the greatest admiration for their leader.”
Colonel House could hardly have done it better. And any questions that Pershing’s Republican connections might have raised at the White House were answered by his father-in-law’s willingness to cooperate with the administration. First Senator Warren switched from supporting Theodore Roosevelt’s army corps request to opposing it. Then his clout as chairman of the Military Affairs Committee proved crucial in blocking the creation of the proposed Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. One must assume that he would have acted no differently if the father of the grandson he was now raising had not been in line for the European command. Be all that as it may, less than two mont
hs after writing to the president, Pershing was on a ship bound for England.
As he took up his new duties, the two most deeply entrenched aspects of his character made themselves apparent. First, and most conspicuously, there was the strong-jawed man of few words, the consummately professional soldier. Even the British were impressed to see their preconceptions about bigmouthed, excessively friendly Yanks so utterly contradicted. From the start Pershing insisted that, while in France, the American army was going to adhere to the standards of West Point. Officers’ tunics, for example, would have no pockets; objects had a way of being deposited in pockets, making the wearer look lumpy. Fraternization between American soldiers and French women was firmly discouraged, and the military police were instructed—to the astonishment of the French—to enforce a ban on prostitution. Men who contracted venereal disease were to be court-martialed and, after medical treatment, would serve three months at hard labor and lose two-thirds of their pay. The wives of officers, even the most senior officers, were forbidden to travel to France.
Behind all this, invisible to nearly everyone, the “spoony” Pershing survived. A wealthy American gave him the use of a fine apartment at 73 rue de Varenne in Paris. With impressive speed Pershing acquired, and installed in the apartment, a twenty-two-year-old mistress, an artist of Romanian extraction named Micheline Resco. The general would keep the apartment, and the girl in it, even after moving his headquarters far from Paris. He would keep them as long as he was in Europe.