by G. J. Meyer
Wilson and House both hoped the Allies would tell the world that the president’s response spoke for them, and the colonel appealed to the British Foreign Office to make this happen. The Allies were united in declining to cooperate. They wanted no part of the president’s disavowals of punitive damages, territorial gains, and other fruits of victory.
So none of it mattered in the end, except as a measure of how profoundly the president’s thinking had changed since the days when he expressed bafflement at the causes of the war. His actions made it clear that he had no interest in what Berlin or Vienna thought, either about the pope’s appeal or about his own response to it. As for the Allies, France’s premier had already damned Benedict’s message as anti-French. In London, where the papacy was in any case regarded as malignant, ridiculous, and irrelevant, Lloyd George clung to his insistence on winning the war with a knockout blow. Signals of interest in the pope’s plan did emerge from the chaos that was now Russia, but no one cared. Benedict’s initiative was dead.
The episode served to remind Wilson that, determined though he now was to wage war until the German regime was undone, he also had a pacific flank to protect. He needed to shore up his position as the champion not of war but of a solid lasting peace—of war as the portal to such a peace. He needed to show the world that he remained simultaneously the great visionary and the great realist, a hardheaded warrior but also a beacon of light to the world. To do that, he needed to be able to demonstrate that he knew more than any pope, or any other head of government, about the questions that would have to be answered when the war was finished.
To this end, he invited Colonel House to assemble a collection of experts on Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, on history, geography, warfare, economics, and ethnography. He used secret parts of the White House budget to put these people to work. Their assignment was to identify the key questions that would face the postwar world and develop possible answers. House recruited his brother-in-law, the president of City College in New York, to take charge of the project, and Walter Lippmann of The New Republic became its secretary. It was based at the New York offices of the American Geographical Society and grew rapidly. Called the Inquiry, in short order it was comparable to the faculty of a substantial university.
Soon thereafter the president sent House back to Europe at the head of a special mission including senior representatives of the army and navy and such war-related government functions as food management, finance, shipping, and munitions. The mission’s objective was to put these specialists together with their opposite numbers from the Allied governments and work out ways to improve coordination and efficiency. House also had instructions to try to get the leading Allied nations to state their war aims in clearer, more complete terms than they thus far had done. As on previous occasions, this last objective proved impossible, and House’s failure to achieve it exposed the limits of American influence even after intervention. The French and especially the British, having seen little need to be submissive to a neutral United States, could see no need at all now that the United States was irreversibly on their side. Where war aims were concerned, House would return home with empty hands.
Unrestricted submarine warfare, meanwhile, was having a devastating effect. In the month of America’s declaration of war, the U-boats sank 850,000 tons of shipping, far more than in any previous month and just short of the campaign’s monthly goal. What was just as troubling, the number of new submarines going into service was well above the number being destroyed. On the other side of the ledger, however, the blockade that had driven the Germans to declare all commercial ships fair game was also inflicting new levels of pain. Data acquired by the State Department showed that the daily caloric intake of German civilians was now far below—perhaps less than half—the level required to maintain health. Civilian mortality was a third higher than in 1913, and the incidence of tuberculosis had doubled. “The death rate among old people is huge,” the department stated, “as it is with small children.”
Affecting as it did tens of millions of noncombatants, the blockade was on its way to becoming possibly the most successful and important initiative of the war, though it was not much boasted of at the time and would be largely expunged from the story told by the victors afterward. The whole German nation was on a downward slope to starvation, the old and the small first, with fat intake per person at 12 percent of the prewar level, meat consumption at 18 percent, and calories per day descending toward their 1918 level of one thousand. The situation in Austria-Hungary was if anything worse. After the war, doctors would estimate that between 7 and 11 percent of Vienna’s civilian wartime deaths had been caused by starvation, which was a contributing factor in another 20 to 30 percent. More than 90 percent of Vienna’s children were mildly to severely malnourished. The overall state of the Hapsburg empire is encapsulated in the fact that its troops were being issued paper underwear.
President Wilson, whether he appreciated it or not, benefited greatly from the fact that while U-boat sinkings were sensational events beautifully suited to the generation of headlines, the starvation of the civilian populations of central Europe happened with excruciating slowness and was a taboo subject for the newspapers of the Allies and the United States. It never had to be thought of by the American public, which in fact knew virtually nothing about it.
Wilson’s new approach to the world crisis was producing momentous changes in the government he headed. Never again, even after the war ended and the country’s immense new army was disbanded, would the federal budget be less than five times its prewar level. The very tenor of American life was changing, sometimes in disturbing ways. Self-styled patriots were finding in the war an unanswerable justification for attacks on individuals, groups, and movements of which they disapproved or that they viewed as a threat to themselves, their way of life, or (always a favorite phrase) “One Hundred Percent Americanism.” Instances of lynching, the ultimate weapon in keeping blacks in their place, would rise from thirty-eight in 1917 to fifty-eight in 1918 and more than seventy in 1919. Overall, with the death count from riots added in, the number of African-Americans killed by mobs during this period probably reached two hundred. On July 26, 1917, at the urging of Joe Tumulty, the president issued a public “Denunciation of Lynching and the Mob Spirit.” It was a strong statement, calling lynching a “disgraceful evil.” But it put so much emphasis on the damage that lynching did to Americans’ stature as “the champions of democracy” that it seems fair to wonder if Wilson would have said anything if he had not been concerned about the effect on America’s international reputation and therefore on its propaganda.
Lincoln Steffens, one of journalism’s most effective muckrakers, described the state of the nation in December 1917:
The war is dividing men along the class line. It is becoming a class war. This is the conviction I got on my lecture trip across the country. Business men and the upper class generally are for the war, honestly, but passionately, aggressively. Accused of sordid motives, and conscious of making money, they are developing a moblike madness which is understandable but harmful. Officials and the press are catching it. Labor and the lower classes are not exactly against the war, but they are not for it; not yet, and the attitude of the upper class and the policy (or some acts) of some parts of the government and press are packing the workers back into a suppressed, sullen opposition.
Toil and trouble
Labor unrest contributed significantly to domestic turbulence as the war came to an end.
A particularly ferocious domestic war was waged against those elements of the American labor movement that did not follow the AFL in giving the government unqualified support. The most notorious remained the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. They were widely and bitterly despised, often as a result of their own acts, at least as often because of viciously hostile press coverage. The war against Germany became, for the Wobblies’ domestic enemies, a chance to get rid of them once and for all. Thus several state
s, as soon as war was declared, passed “criminal syndicalism” laws intended to make the IWW an outlaw organization, less because of anything the Wobblies were doing than because of what they were—or were perceived as being. Fully 95 percent of IWW members eligible for the draft registered, and few of those called up failed to report for duty. In the six months following the U.S. declaration of war, three Wobbly locals went out on strike, compared with 518 locals of the AFL.
All the same, it was inevitable that the IWW’s membership would see the war as a capitalist conspiracy; they saw almost everything as being for the benefit of the rich. The leaders, however, saw the danger of open opposition and were careful not to declare themselves. Their caution made no difference. They found themselves and their organization under attack on a broad front. Just a few months after the declaration of war, the Wilson Justice Department, in cooperation with local and state authorities and the leading industrial associations, took action calculated to put the IWW out of business and its leadership behind bars.
The destruction of the IWW was set in motion on June 8, 1917, in the Anaconda Copper Company’s Speculator Mine in Butte, Montana. A fire broke out underground, an estimated 160 miners perished, and the cause was found to be the company’s failure to install escape hatches in concrete bulkheads. Some of the dead, rescue teams discovered, had torn away not just their fingernails but the first joints of their fingers in trying to claw open locked doors. Four days after the fire, fifteen thousand members of the United Metal Mine Workers went out on strike. The company refused to meet with their representatives.
Seven days later a veteran IWW organizer named Frank Little, a part-Cherokee whose limp and one blind eye testified to his hard years in the labor wars, arrived on the scene. He gave fiery speeches, rich in the rhetoric of the militants. He condemned the conduct of the mining companies, capitalism generally, the police and state and federal troops, thereby making himself the most conspicuous man in Butte. At three one morning, men identifying themselves as officers of the law showed up at Little’s boardinghouse. They pulled him out of bed, tied him to the bumper of a car, and dragged him through the streets until his kneecaps were torn off. They then hanged him by the neck from a railway trestle, disappearing into the darkness after pinning a sign to his dead body. “Others take notice,” it said. “First and last warning.”
The New York Times, no voice of moderation where labor disturbances were concerned, dutifully described Little’s murder as “detestable” but went on to say that “the IWW agitators are in effect, and perhaps in fact, agents of Germany. The Federal Authorities should make short work of these treasonable conspirators against the United States.” At no level of government did anyone see reason to investigate Little’s murder.
By the time of the killing, the IWW was the target of vigilante and official violence in the copper-mining fields of Arizona, where police and company-paid gunmen were working together to break an organizing campaign. Police did not bother to get a warrant before raiding a dance organized by the Wobblies to raise money for the campaigners and their families. The police chief would later testify that there had been no disturbance at the dance before his men moved in, “but I knew that money would be collected for the IWW, who are known to be enemies of the United States Government.”
That belief could justify almost anything. When miners walked out in Arizona, newspapers informed their readers that the whole thing was a plot to cripple the war effort by depriving the nation of urgently needed copper, and that the IWW was financed by Germany. Citizens were assured that action had to be taken, the niceties of the law set aside. Early on the morning of July 2, in the mining town of Bisbee, a vigilante force operating under the auspices of the local Citizens Protective League and supported by three mine-owning corporations went into action. It rounded up 1,146 IWW members, people believed to be friendly to the IWW, and persons unknown to the townsfolk and therefore suspect. They were kept for a while in a baseball park, then loaded into cattle cars and transported to the little desert station of Hermanas, New Mexico, where they were left to fend for themselves. Two days earlier sixty-seven presumed Wobblies and friends of Wobblies had been similarly shipped to California and dumped there.
President Wilson sent a warning to the governor of Arizona about the dangers of allowing citizens to take the law into their own hands. He also appointed a mediation commission to look into the situation; nothing would come of that. The newspapers served as mouthpieces of the companies while denying the strikers any opportunity to explain themselves. The Los Angeles Times praised the Arizona vigilantes for providing “a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy.” The Sacramento Bee condemned “the idiocy, if not the infamy” of the president in appointing a committee to negotiate with the IWW. A sensible man does not “confer with a mad dog,” the paper said, “he shoots the dog.”
On September 5, with President Wilson’s approval, agents of the Justice Department assisted by other law enforcement agencies staged simultaneous raids on IWW offices and the homes of Wobblies in thirty-three cities, scooping up every piece of paper they could lay hands on in a search for evidence of German government involvement and violations of the Espionage Act. Further raids followed, not always by men able to show warrants. Eventually five tons of material were collected and shipped to Chicago: personal letters, books, pamphlets, flyers, doodles, all of it scoured for proof of wrongdoing. Traces of German money, unsurprisingly, never turned up. Words that could be interpreted as violations of the Espionage Act’s broad language were found in abundance; this, too, was hardly surprising, considering that the source was the IWW. That most of the alleged violations had been committed before the Espionage Act became law was of no concern to the prosecutors.
The penultimate blow came on September 28. The federal district court in Chicago handed down indictments against 166 senior Wobblies: officers and officials of every description in every part of the country, with emphasis in the West, where the union was strongest. One step only remained: to get them convicted and put away. That did not seem likely to be difficult.
In an act as unprecedented as the conscription of millions of men or the attack on the Wobblies, in December 1917 the president by proclamation seized control of the nation’s railway system, by far the largest in the world. It was put under a new Federal Railroad Administration, with Treasury Secretary McAdoo as director-general. This was something that railroad-hating populists and progressives had long advocated. Such people immediately applauded Wilson’s action, which had been prompted by the threat of a nationwide railway strike. They called for its being made permanent through nationalization of the entire system.
They were in for a surprise. McAdoo in running the railroads took the Wilson administration’s approach to most financial problems that had anything to do with the war. He made plain his willingness to spend whatever was required to keep the trains running. He gave the unions almost everything they asked, incurring costs that put a new strain on the federal budget and led to higher charges for passengers and shippers. As all this unfolded, longtime advocates of nationalization found themselves having second thoughts. What was the good of it, if the result was a financial boon for the owners and higher prices for everyone else? Progressivism itself was being thrown into confusion. The movement became increasingly uncertain about what its long-term aims should be and how to achieve them.
Background
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“Disgusting Creatures”
The long fight to secure voting rights for women, like the crusade to rid America of strong drink, reached its climax during the war and largely because of it.
And woman suffrage proved to be a tougher issue for the Democratic Party, and for Woodrow Wilson personally, than prohibition ever was. Like prohibition, it pitted core elements of the party against one another, threatening a disastrous split. Unlike prohibition, it did not do the same to the Republicans.
It forced the president to reverse himself first on
whether women should have the vote, then on how that objective should be achieved. His changes of direction put him at odds with his adoring wife, who as a demure southern lady found the suffragettes repulsive.
As a political cause, woman suffrage was even older than prohibition. At least as much as prohibition, it was entangled in all the racial, economic, and class issues of America’s turn of the century. The question of women’s place in public life had been generating heat as early as the 1830s, when women became active in the abolition movement and were denounced for doing so even by some male abolitionists. In those days there was widespread opposition to allowing women to speak in public; few men could imagine them voting, much less running for office. When a series of National Women’s Rights conventions was held in the 1850s, the participants, in the midst of being heckled by male onlookers, had heated debates about whether they should seek the franchise. They drew vociferous disapproval from members of the clergy for presuming to raise such questions.
Women’s rights, like prohibition, remained in the shadow of abolitionism until the Civil War ended slavery. Peace brought the founding of the American Equal Rights Association, which championed voting rights for freed slaves and women alike. The end of the 1860s saw the introduction into Congress of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, a Reconstruction measure aimed at prohibiting the denial of voting rights on the basis of race. Two new groups came into existence as the Equal Rights Association broke apart over the amendment. The National Woman Suffrage Association worked to defeat the amendment, demanding that it be broadened to cover women as well as former slaves. The rival American Woman Suffrage Association supported the amendment as it stood, and as it was ratified in 1870. The two groups would dominate the women’s movement over the next twenty years, and remain hostile to each other.