by G. J. Meyer
And this tally conceals a terrible possibility. The bodies of nearly 90 percent of the men supposedly killed in action were not found or accounted for. There is reason to suspect that many of them were not killed at all but captured and never allowed to return home.
Chapter 19
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An Army at Last
IN WASHINGTON, AS the summer of 1918 turned to autumn, even the war was coming to matter less—to seem less urgent, certainly—than the approach of November’s midterm elections. Election Day was imminent and real, a certainty that had to be faced. The war, by contrast, had about it something of the infinite. It seemed almost to have been there always, as remote as it was terrible, its eventual end a possibility, a vagueness, a mere hypothesis. No one in the White House or the War Department or on Capitol Hill could imagine that a conflict that had been deadlocked for four years now, that the Germans had appeared to be winning only six months earlier, would be ending in victory by the time the voters went to the polls.
What members of Congress did understand was that the fates of many of them were inextricably entangled in the issues to which the war had given rise. Still unresolved, incredibly, and becoming ever more troublesome as the costs of intervention continued to outstrip constantly rising Treasury Department projections, was the old question of how to pay the bills. The administration continued to propose increased taxes, especially on high personal incomes, business profits, and luxury purchases, and continued to be supported by the progressives. But the House of Representatives was not happy. Its members—all of whom would go before the voters in a few weeks—complained that it would be suicidal to raise taxes so shortly before an election. They complained, too, about President Wilson’s insistence that they remain in Washington, completing and passing a revenue bill, while back home other politicians were busily campaigning to take their seats. Democrats were complaining more loudly than the Republicans that they wanted to adjourn and go home.
On May 28 President Wilson had addressed Congress and delivered a sermon on the duty of members to stay in the capital and attend to the nation’s business. He already had most of the press on his side in this matter—nothing was easier than to ridicule congressmen for not wanting to do their jobs—and newspaper approval of his speech made adjournment unthinkable. The lawmakers stayed in session, if not cheerfully, and began looking for every excuse to slip homeward for a few days of electioneering. Progress toward passage of the administration’s $7 billion revenue bill remained so slow as to be nearly imperceptible.
In his speech Wilson had uttered another of the phrases with which he so often snagged the attention of headline writers and the nation. “Politics is adjourned,” he declared. “The election will go to those who think least about it.” He meant that voters could be depended upon to reward those who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to their duties, to winning, and paying for, the war. At least one historian has argued that the statement was misunderstood from the start, that Wilson meant it to apply to the passage of the revenue bill only, not to the whole of the war effort, much less to all the government’s business. Perhaps that is true, though a reading of the speech does not show it to be unquestionably true. Certainly the president would have had to be naïve to a bizarre extent to imagine a national election free of partisan passion, especially with the country and the Congress as sharply divided—along regional, economic, and ideological lines—as they were at that time.
Misunderstood or not, the “politics is adjourned” catchphrase actually worsened partisanship in 1918, turning it more bitter than it otherwise would have been. Coming in the wake of the things Wilson had said earlier about support of his policies being the acid test of loyalty to the nation, it offended Republicans in and out of Congress. They saw Wilson as purposely putting them in a double bind, simultaneously singling them out for blame and warning them not to try to defend themselves. Democrats were not noticeably happier; many felt that they were being bullied into submission, their chances of reelection jeopardized by the administration’s actions, particularly its tax proposals and price controls. Though the current ceiling of $2.20 per bushel was a significant increase over the levels of the years preceding, it angered many western growers and others engaged in the grain trade. Such people had looked forward to reaping a bonanza as demand ran further and further ahead of supply. Now they saw their dreams of quick riches evaporating even as their costs—the price of fertilizers and farm machinery and other essentials, all of them uncontrolled—rose crazily and the producers of such things merrily cashed in. There was also long-standing resentment of the government’s failure, thanks to the Bourbons, to cap the price of cotton.
Wilson himself made certain that politics could not be adjourned by involving himself in many of the summer’s Democratic state conventions and primary elections. The primaries proved to be a mixed bag. A number of congressmen deemed to have been insufficiently supportive of the war or the administration did lose their bids for renomination, much to the president’s satisfaction. But in some instances, White House intervention produced only backlash.
Indiana, because its Democratic and Republican organizations could be depended upon to follow the lead of their respective national parties, became a crucible in which the terms of the national campaign were worked out. At Wilson’s instruction, his secretary Joe Tumulty and Postmaster General Burleson drafted a platform for Indiana’s Democrats. The president carefully edited their work before sending it on to Indianapolis, where it was adopted without difficulty and set the pattern for Democrats everywhere. It emphasized winning the war to the exclusion of all other priorities, and the consequent importance of giving the president a supportive Congress. So as to leave no doubt on this score, the Democratic National Committee declared the election a referendum on the conduct of the war, “drawing special reference to the leadership of Woodrow Wilson.”
Implicit in all this was the now-familiar suggestion that the Republican Party, and many Republican officeholders, were deficient in the kind of loyalty on which victory would depend. Colonel House, reverting to his original role as Wilson’s political strategist, thought the Democrats could keep the opposition divided by drawing a distinction between bad Republicans, personified by Theodore Roosevelt, and those good Republicans represented by William Howard Taft. This came to naught, however, when TR and Taft met for the first time in years and announced that they had put their differences behind them. Taft, who had often provided the administration with valuable support and refrained from criticizing it sharply in public, was motivated both by his wish to restore a treasured friendship and by dissatisfaction with such things as the administration’s high-cost, low-output military aircraft program. What TR wanted was to heal the divisions in the Republican Party well in advance of the 1920 presidential election, which he intended to win.
Colonel House, meanwhile, was confiding to his diary that Wilson appeared to be planning what no American president had ever attempted: a run for a third term. “I sounded him on another term, and I see evidence of his being a candidate,” an entry of August 16 says. “I am opposed to a third term in ordinary circumstances, but after looking over the different possibilities, I have come to believe that it may be necessary for the President to undertake another four years. The end of the war is drawing too near the end of his term to make it possible for him to properly solve the many problems arising at the Peace Conference, and the after war problems which are certain to need wise solutions.” A change of presidents would of course deprive the world not only of Wilson’s “wise solutions” but of House’s as well. There is nothing to suggest that the colonel felt ready for retirement.
The Republicans’ Indiana convention, coming two weeks after the Democrats’, found the party in an exceptionally combative mood. Delegates did exactly what their Democratic counterparts had done, adopting a platform that would serve as the national party’s template through the months remaining until Election Day. It damned Wilson first for not doin
g more to prepare the nation for war, then for bad management after intervention. Later in the summer this would give the party’s national convention its theme, with one element added: the fury of the western states over the cap on the price of wheat.
The Republicans out-Wilsoned Wilson in demanding that the war continue until Germany was utterly crushed. This removed any doubt that the 1918 campaign would be about one thing above all, the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, and that it would be an ugly affair. As The Washington Post observed, “Politics is not adjourned, and there is no adjournment in sight.”
Even with opposition to the war silenced, political discourse continued to be suffused with bitterness. Congressmen resented the president not only because of his policies but even more because of his contempt for Capitol Hill and his inability or unwillingness to conceal it. In May, under White House pressure and trapped by their complaints about inefficiencies in the war effort, both houses had passed the Overman Act, an administration measure that expanded the president’s power by authorizing him to reorganize government agencies without involving Congress. Even many who voted for the act disliked it. They were not mollified when the administration used it to good effect.
Congress showed much greater willingness to cooperate with the White House in handling another administration proposal that became law in May. This was a bill to strengthen and broaden 1917’s Espionage Act. It was called the Sedition Act to distinguish it from its predecessor, and it carried the suppression of free speech to new extremes. It was both an expression and an intensification of war fever, so far-reaching that even a bellicose Congress inserted a provision that it would become null when the war ended.
Like the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act drew its power from language so elastic and imprecise as to cover nearly any interpretation a zealous prosecutor or judge might choose to impose upon it. It criminalized the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” in connection with the U.S. government, its flag, and its armed services. It outlawed the saying or doing of “anything, except by way of bona fide and not disloyal advice to an investor or investors, with intent to obstruct the sale by the United States of bonds or other securities.” Persons convicted of such acts could be, and not uncommonly would be, given fines amounting to several years of the average American’s income and sentenced to years, even decades, in prison.
Senate Republicans, conservatives and progressives alike, provided almost the only congressional opposition to this obviously unconstitutional measure. The Senate passed it by a vote of forty-eight to twenty-six all the same, and the House approved it not so much by a landslide as by an avalanche. Of the 294 votes cast, only one, that of New York socialist Meyer London, was against it.
Even a leading historian with unmistakable admiration for Woodrow Wilson, John Milton Cooper, Jr., has called the measure “the most repressive legislation in American history.” It was quickly put to use, with socialists and the scattered remnants of the IWW providing the choicest targets as usual. The Justice Department’s success in stripping the IWW of its leadership emboldened it to now target prominent socialists. A big step in this direction came on June 16, when the U.S. Attorney for Northern Ohio slipped quietly into a rally organized by the Ohio State Socialist Council in Canton. He was there to observe a speech by Eugene V. Debs, head of the national Socialist Party. The prosecutor had with him a stenographer who took down Debs’s words. Federal agents meanwhile moved through the crowd, demanding to see draft registration cards, spreading unease.
In a long speech studded with familiar leftist rhetoric—capitalism was a dirty system, the war was the work of the capitalists, et cetera—Debs never directed any remarks at potential draftees specifically and never advocated resistance to the Selective Service System. His caution didn’t matter. On June 29 he was indicted on ten counts of violating the Espionage Act and the new Sedition Act. At his trial, which soon followed, Debs acknowledged that he had said everything he was accused of saying but denounced the criminalization of such statements as a violation of the Bill of Rights. A jury of men whose average age was seventy, and whose average net worth of approximately $50,000 made them unlikely to have much sympathy for socialists, needed little time to reach a decision. Debs became one of more than 850 Americans convicted of violating the Espionage or Sedition Acts between 1917 and 1919. “I ask no mercy,” the felon told the court, “and I plead no immunity.” By June he was on his way to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta and the start of a ten-year sentence.
One did not have to be well known, or even an activist, to attract the wrath of the government. In Lansing, Michigan, an ill-fated Mr. Powell made the mistake of complaining to a relative about being pressured to buy a war bond, venting as he did so his skepticism about German atrocities and his belief that the wealthy were responsible for American intervention. The relative did what good citizens were being instructed to do: he reported Powell, who was charged with Sedition Act violations. Finding the whole thing absurd, supposing conviction to be impossible, Powell went to court without a lawyer and was shocked to find himself hit with a fine of ten thousand dollars and a twenty-year prison sentence. Lansing’s mayor tried to intervene on Powell’s behalf and was himself cited for contempt of court. Powell, breadwinner for a wife and five children, was taken off to serve his sentence. A New Hampshire man who said that “this is a Morgan war and not a war of the people” could consider himself blessed by comparison: he got a mere three years.
The Sedition Act, like the Espionage Act, was an administration initiative from start to finish, prepared in the Justice Department, sent to Congress by the president, and pushed to passage by the White House. If intended to spare the president the awkwardness of congressional hearings into his administration’s failure to enforce the Espionage Act even more aggressively than it had, it was cowardly as well as a constitutional monstrosity. Senior Justice Department officials would later defend their actions as a way of preventing a rabid Congress from enacting even worse provisions, and as an attempt to reduce instances of mob violence by persuading prospective vigilantes that the government was doing enough. However unsatisfactory this defense might be, it was, unfortunately, not altogether absurd. By the summer of 1918 much of the country was half out of its mind where the war was concerned. It is not inconceivable that Congress, left to itself, might have undertaken something reminiscent of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. By the end of the war, 1,597 people would be charged under the Sedition Act—enough, one would think, to satisfy even the most demanding patriots.
In Europe the character of the war was changing dramatically. On August 8 a massive assortment of British, French, Australian, Canadian, and American divisions, supported by six hundred tanks and shoals of heavy artillery, attacked the Germans on both sides of the River Somme just west of Amiens. The result was unprecedented and unexpected even by the man in charge, Sir Douglas Haig. For the first time since the war began, Allied forces achieved a true breakthrough on the Western Front. They quickly advanced nearly ten miles, scattering five German divisions, killing, wounding, or capturing at least 27,000 troops, and gathering up four hundred enemy guns. Ludendorff, in despair, called it “the black day of the history of the German army in the war.”
But this success was followed by a fresh lesson in how hard it was to sustain an offensive and consolidate its gains even after a stunningly brilliant start. After that first day, the Germans somehow managed not only to close the hole in their line but to mount a counterattack that recovered much of the lost ground. Thus even this Battle of Amiens ended as Allied offensives always had, with the trench line not greatly changed. War-weary and threadbare as the German troops were, happy to surrender as many had shown themselves to be, they were still not behaving like a defeated army.
The German high command had to decide how to respond to the fact that the Allies now had the initiative. In a series of contentious meetings at his headquarters in Spa, Paul von Hindenburg argued for a general pul
lback to the safety of the Siegfriedstellung, the Hindenburg Line. Ludendorff refused. A new foreign minister, Admiral Paul von Hintze, was present at the gathering. With shaking hands and tears in his eyes, he urged peace negotiations, to begin as soon as possible. Again Ludendorff refused, and Hindenburg agreed with him, saying there must be no peace overtures until the military situation became more stable.
Nothing was decided except that Hintze, distraught over the accelerating disorder he had left behind in Berlin, was authorized to feel out the queen of the Netherlands about her possible service as a mediator. Nothing would come of this, and so nothing at all changed. Kaiser Wilhelm was present as always, and as usual he had no serious part in the discussions. Even at the beginning of the war, he had complained that “the General Staff tells me nothing and never asks my advice. If people in Germany think that I am the Supreme Commander they are grossly mistaken. I drink tea, saw wood, and go for walks.” That was truer than ever as the war approached its climax.
There were new difficulties on the Allied side, too. On August 15, when Foch ordered Haig to mount an attack on a particularly well-defended sector of the front, the British commander in chief refused. Years of being accused of throwing away the lives of his men in futile offensives had rubbed him raw, and he wanted no more of the same. Foch cheerfully backed down, the extent of his authority as supreme commander being ambiguous at best, and the two were able to agree on an attack in Picardy, against less formidable defenses, six days thence. This was preceded on August 20 by another attack by Mangin’s Tenth Army, which succeeded this time in forcing the Germans out of Soissons. The capture of the city came just a little too late, however, to trap the last of the troops that Ludendorff was pulling out of the Marne salient. In their haste, the Germans were obliged to leave behind quantities of equipment and supplies that they could ill afford to lose.