The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  At the time of the U.S. declaration of war, twenty thousand African Americans were in military service, half with the regular army’s four black regiments, half in segregated National Guard units of seven states and the District of Columbia. Many black men were eager to volunteer, if only because an army private’s meager pay was more than they could earn at home, but this became difficult when the War Department opted to rely on conscription. Nevertheless, four hundred thousand black men ultimately served, nearly all in the army. (They were excluded from the Marine Corps and were given only the most servile positions—as stewards serving officers, for example—in the navy.) They were a larger percentage of the nation’s armed forces than African Americans were of the population, in part because exemptions were granted far more freely to whites.

  Military service led less often to liberation than to new forms of humiliation. African Americans found themselves training in the worst facilities. (Those at Newport News, Virginia, spent the winter of 1917–18 in tents without floors, stoves, or blankets.) They had to make do with the least and shoddiest equipment. Many were engaged not in training at all but in brute manual labor. “Our drilling,” one conscript would recall, “consisted in marching to and from work with hoes, shovels and picks on our shoulders.”

  If challenged—which it wasn’t, in any serious way—the War Department could have said that there was no need to train most black draftees for combat because there was no possibility of their facing the enemy. And that was largely correct: 75 percent of all the African Americans who served (and nearly 90 percent of the draftees) were assigned to labor battalions. The same was true of the two hundred thousand sent to France: they made up one-thirtieth of the AEF’s combat troops, one-third of its laborers. The laborers wore blue denim instead of khaki, and their contribution was to dig ditches, build roads, load and unload ships and railcars and trucks, and bury the dead. When Pershing complained to Washington that too many of the “colored stevedore troops” assigned to his ports had “tuberculosis, old fractures, extreme flat feet, hernia, venereal diseases all existing prior to induction,” he was probably not exaggerating. The reason was the eagerness of many draft boards to be rid of young black males, and the general staff’s willingness to put them to work regardless of their physical condition.

  Those who later claimed that the army wanted its black troops to fail as fighters could point to the fact that not one of the regular army’s all-black regiments was sent to France. If obliged to respond to such accusations, the generals might have replied that most blacks were unfit for the most demanding kinds of duty. And they could have offered evidence: the low scores of most black draftees on what the army called its intelligence test. Never mind that the test judged “intelligence” by asking who wrote “The Raven,” why a woman named Rosa Bonheur was famous, and where Overland automobiles were manufactured. Nor were the army’s manpower planners likely to have been lying when they said that many black draftees had never heard of Germany and could barely read or write. The average black draftee had had 2.6 years of schooling, versus 4.7 for immigrants and 6.9 for native-born whites. A fourth of all draftees were illiterate, and only 18 percent had ever sat in a high school class. This was a failure of the society, not of the army.

  When progressives and organizations such as the NAACP lobbied for the commissioning of black officers, a special training camp was opened for the purpose at Fort Des Moines in Iowa. In the autumn of 1917 it graduated its first class of 639 lieutenants and captains. Almost all were assigned to the newly formed and all-black Ninety-Second Infantry Division, which would later see extensive action. (Uniquely, the Ninety-Second’s officer corps was for a time 80 percent black. None of the black officers, however, held a rank above captain. Throughout the war, duty assignments were arranged in such a way as to make it impossible for black officers to qualify for higher promotion.)

  By graduation day at Fort Des Moines, the Houston shoot-out had taken place and the presumed culprits had been executed. That may explain why there were no subsequent classes. The army shut the camp down and did not replace it. The number of black officers who served during the war would ultimately reach eleven hundred, or 1 percent of the officers in an army that was 13 percent black. Some were commissioned as doctors, dentists, and the like, though many black professionals found themselves serving as enlisted men in positions that, when held by whites, always brought a commission.

  The plain fact is that the army didn’t want black soldiers, commissioned or otherwise. Former chief of staff Leonard Wood had refused to admit blacks to the so-called Plattsburg volunteer officer training camps, established before U.S. entry into the war, warning that such a step could lead to interracial marriage and make Americans “a breed of mongrels.” No one has ever argued that Wood’s views were not typical of the army’s senior command, or that they were any less prevalent among the leadership of the AEF in France than in the stateside army.

  The white South shared the army’s lack of enthusiasm for black troops. Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi spoke for his state’s gentlefolk and rednecks alike in warning that soon there would be “arrogant strutting representatives of the black soldiery in every community.” The Justice Department, taking such concerns seriously, undertook the systematic surveillance of whatever it was that fell under the heading of “Negro activities.” The War Department, when it resumed the induction of blacks, promised that in every cantonment they would be outnumbered by whites by a margin of no less than two to one.

  It would be unfair to single out President Wilson for special blame. By the standards of his native South he was a racial moderate, and he was squarely in the mainstream of the United States of his time. His general passivity where racial discrimination was at issue might almost be considered commendable in a southerner who had been almost nine years old when the Civil War ended, and who had heard his adored father deliver sermons about “how completely the Bible brings human slavery underneath the sanction of divine authority.” A New Englander who did graduate studies under the young Wilson at Bryn Mawr recalled that he had been something new in her experience, a man “who had no special sympathy for Negroes as human beings.” A Princeton acquaintance described him as “the best narrator of darky stories I have ever heard in my life.” In his book Division and Reunion, Wilson wrote of the white people of the antebellum South that “their relations with their slaves were honorable, their responsibility for the existence of slavery among them remote.”

  It is in any case certain that he never regarded racial equality as an issue of even minor importance, and that he did nothing to keep the war from becoming another chapter in the unending tragedy of black life in America.

  Chapter 14

  ____

  “A Moblike Madness”

  HIRAM JOHNSON, WHO as governor of California had been among the West’s leading progressives and Theodore Roosevelt’s running mate in 1912, ran for the Senate in 1916 in the expectation that he could add his voice to those of Robert La Follette and other reformers and help make things happen in Washington. But he found, upon taking his seat in 1917, that the reform impulse had grown feeble there. “Everything here is war,” he complained in a letter home. “To suggest a social program or a domestic policy would simply afford an opportunity to those who believe in none to boll [sic] you over.”

  Johnson was among those learning that to be in national politics in 1917, or in almost any position of responsibility in government, was to be entangled in the almost innumerable issues that intervention had either created or brought to the fore. Many of the most sensitive questions—how the war was going to be paid for, whether it was being properly managed, what to do about profiteers—remained, exhaustingly, unresolved. But Johnson was wrong about reform having become impossible. In some ways the opposite was true. After years of conflict and slow progress or no progress at all, advocates of prohibition, woman suffrage, and even racial equality were finding new opportunities to press their demands. In doing so
they made the nation’s always-contentious capital more turbulent than it had been in decades.

  It could almost seem, at times, that everyone hated everyone, most obviously across party lines. That most eminent and powerful of Senate Republicans, Henry Cabot Lodge, reported after a two-hour visit to the White House that he found Wilson “a curious mixture of acuteness, intelligence and extreme underlying timidity, [with] a shifty, furtive, sinister expression.” The air was thick with such venomous talk. With the United States now in the war, it could be directed at those who had opposed intervention without fear of repercussions.

  Lodge’s great friend Theodore Roosevelt, wanting to be either in the White House or at the front, was so consumed with frustration and resentment that he seemed at times to have lost his reason. He condemned pacifism as “the tool and ally of German militarism” and proposed that conscientious objectors be used to clear minefields. Though he continued to speak hatefully of Wilson, the two were no longer all that far apart. The president, once hopeful of ending the war without allowing anyone to win it, now wanted a victory so complete as to leave Europe and the world transformed. He viewed those who did not share his vision as disdainfully as TR viewed him. “What I am opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity,” he told an AFL gathering. “My heart is with them, but my mind has contempt for them. I want peace, but I know how to get it, and they do not.” Contempt: Wilson was a past master. And increasingly it was the lens through which millions of his fellow citizens were learning to view one another.

  Congressmen of both parties had questions about the costs and progress of the war effort, and they wanted answers. The unwillingness of Wilson and his cabinet to confer with them, or even to share information, turned their doubts into suspicion. It was self-defeating, the administration’s remoteness from Capitol Hill; it kept even friendly senators and representatives from knowing how much was being accomplished by the likes of War Secretary Baker and Navy Secretary Daniels, or understanding the magnitude of the obstacles they faced. Almost as many Democrats as Republicans felt alienated from the cold and distant figure in the White House, and there was much talk of a need for hearings and investigations. The administration was going to be hard-pressed to head such things off when Congress reassembled in December.

  December was still four months in the future when, on August 1, 1917, Pope Benedict XV issued a detailed call for peace. It proposed an end to the slaughter on the basis of seven points, among them the evacuation of all occupied territories, no payment of indemnities, global disarmament, freedom of the seas, and the creation of new mechanisms for the arbitration of international disputes. The White House was not pleased—indeed, it was thunderstruck. Wilson, with his Scots-Presbyterian roots, would not likely have found it easy to accept the leadership of the Roman pontiff under almost any circumstances, but in this case the circumstances were particularly unfavorable. Benedict was trespassing on territory that the president saw as his exclusively. He was supposed to be the peacemaker.

  And the intrusion came at an awkward time. Wilson, trying to keep the nation focused on the great task of defeating Germany, was discouraging even the mention of peace talks in the American press. Colonel House was somewhat more receptive; he saw that a curt rejection of the pope’s message would put the United States and the Allies in a bad light. He got Wilson’s attention by reminding him of a danger about which the two of them had long been in agreement: that the crushing of Germany would create a central European power vacuum that Russia might be best positioned to fill. That had always been a worrisome thought. Now, with the Bolsheviks ruling Russia, it was a horrifying one. It pointed to the desirability of halting the war short of Germany’s utter destruction.

  Nonetheless, Secretary of State Lansing sent a letter warning the president that the pontiff was probably in cahoots with the Central Powers—with Austria in particular, because it was a Catholic country. This was preposterous on the face of it; on the Allied side, Belgium and France were both heavily Catholic, not to mention Benedict’s native Italy, and any papal preference for the Hapsburgs of Vienna would have been neutralized by the staunch Lutheranism of the Hohenzollern regime in Berlin. The Austrians knew themselves to be on the verge of collapse, and already saw negotiations as the only way they might possibly escape ruin. But that hardly made the pope their agent, never mind Germany’s. Lansing’s warning was, in part at least, an expression of the anti-Catholic bias that historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., described as the oldest and deepest of American prejudices, reaching back to the Pilgrim Fathers. It was so firmly embedded in establishment Americans of a century ago, so taken for granted, that they were incapable of seeing it as a bias at all.

  In 1916 it had nearly broken the heart of President Wilson’s devoted private secretary and jack-of-all-trades, the able, amiable, and loyal Joe Tumulty. Through Wilson’s first term Tumulty had remained the same invaluable asset that he had been in the New Jersey statehouse, a shrewd guide to the intricacies of Democratic Party politics and a favorite of the Washington press corps. But important people thought it unseemly that such a figure should be part of the president’s innermost circle. It was whispered that he must be a secret agent of the Vatican. The second Mrs. Wilson began pushing for Tumulty’s dismissal. Edith Galt Wilson, who in girlhood had received exactly two years of formal schooling, decided to her disgust that Tumulty—a university graduate and lawyer who knew Latin and read and spoke Italian and, with his Jesuit education, was at home in the works of Plato and Cicero—was “common.” She meant that he was Irish and Catholic and happy to mix with people of all stations in life, even reporters and machine politicians. Colonel House joined her campaign, in spite of having encouraged Wilson to hire Tumulty back in New Jersey in 1910. Possibly he did so in the knowledge that Edith had no liking for him, either, and in the hope (a vain one, if he entertained it) of winning her approval by helping her cleanse the White House of an Irish-Catholic taint. They succeeded—or nearly did.

  Wilson and Tumulty

  Informed of his dismissal, the faithful Irishman expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to serve “so closely with so great a man.”

  Wilson tried to get Tumulty to go by saying he wanted him to run for the Senate in New Jersey. The secretary declined the honor. Wilson then tried to appoint him to a comfortable civil service post away from Washington. Again Tumulty said no thanks, taking the hint this time and adding that if he was not wanted, he preferred to just go home. Wilson agreed that that would be best. Tumulty wrote a letter thanking the president for the privilege of “having been associated so closely with so great a man.” His departure was averted in the eleventh hour by a newspaperman named David Lawrence, who had been a Princeton undergraduate when Wilson was the university’s president. Lawrence called at the White House one quiet Sunday, saw Wilson alone, and managed to change his mind about dismissing Tumulty. But one of the closest and most positive relationships of Wilson’s professional life had been damaged. Throughout his second term, his secretary had to carry on his duties under the unfriendly gaze of the ever-present Edith.

  Wilson showed no inclination even to acknowledge the pope’s appeal. Weeks went by without his doing anything about it. Colonel House, however, was worried. He urged the president to at least appear to take it seriously, if only for public relations purposes. When Wilson finally did respond, a month after the appeal was issued, he began with language that, if not intentionally condescending, was certainly susceptible to being read that way.

  “Every heart that has not been blinded and hardened by this terrible war must be touched by this moving appeal of His Holiness the Pope, must feel the dignity and force of the humane and generous motives which prompted it, and must fervently wish that we might take the path of peace he so persuasively points out,” the president wrote. “But it would be folly to take it if it does not in fact lead to the goal he proposes.” Which, he went on to explain, it did not come close to doing.

  Colon
el House, keeping his hand in, told the president that his reply was “the most remarkable document ever written, for surely there was never one approved throughout the world by every shade of political opinion.”

  If only. Wilson was trying—without success, as he would soon enough find—to walk a thin line of his own drawing. He wanted to show himself to be absolutely committed to the Allies but also well disposed toward the German people, opposed to “punitive damages, the dismemberment of empires, the establishment of selfish and exclusive economic leagues.” Knowing that one or more of the Allies wanted each of these things, he attempted to avoid offending them by dismissing negotiations with Germany as impossible because “we cannot take the word of the present rulers of Germany as a guarantee of anything,” and because promises, proposals, and offers of agreement, “if made by the German Government, no man, no nation, could now depend on.” In short, the Allies need not worry about the possible outcome of negotiations because negotiations were out of the question.

  Wilson’s response was, in essence, Thank you for the nice thoughts, Mr. Pope, and permit me to explain why you are not being helpful. Those of us who are fighting this war know that there can be no peace worth having until “the free peoples of the world” have been delivered from “the menace and actual power of a vast military establishment, controlled by an irresponsible Government, which, having secretly planned to dominate the world, proceeded to carry the plan out without regard either to the sacred obligations of treaty or the long-established practices and long-cherished principles of international action and honor.”