Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  The Army Appropriations Act had also established the Council of National Defense, a committee of a half dozen Cabinet Secretaries (War, Interior, Navy, Commerce, Agriculture, and Labor) who worked in concert with a seven-member commission, boasting the likes of labor leader Samuel Gompers and a half dozen business tycoons, including Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Co. The committee’s most significant personage from the private sector was an almost mythical figure named Bernard Baruch, who was identified in a press release as a banker.

  “I am not a banker, and never have been,” Baruch himself would later state; “. . . I regarded myself as a speculator.” The son of a German Jewish doctor and a mother whose Sephardic ancestors settled in colonial New York, Baruch grew up in South Carolina and then New York, where he graduated from its City College. A self-made millionaire by thirty, mostly through shrewd investing, he continued to amass a fortune, along with a reputation for being a scrupulous financial wizard. As the war approached, Baruch had been so concerned that the nation was not prepared for all eventualities that he had written friends within the Administration. The President invited him to the White House for an exchange of ideas, and—shortly after that—to join the Council of National Defense. “Next to my father,” Baruch would recall, “Wilson had the greatest influence on my life. He took me out of Wall Street and gave me my first opportunity for public service.”

  The Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense was created to advance “the coordination of industries and resources for the national security and welfare.” That meant managing the logistics as well as the economics of mustering, lodging, training, equipping, and transporting millions of men. As his Cabinet showed, Wilson believed in tapping leaders from outside the government to serve inside his administration. Baruch admired how each of his colleagues naturally assumed the lead in his field of expertise. The president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad headed the committee on transportation, the director general of the American College of Surgeons oversaw medicine and sanitation, Rosenwald supervised dry goods, clothing, and supplies, and Baruch looked after raw materials and minerals. “From the time the problem of industrial mobilization first gripped my interest,” Baruch recalled, “. . . I had recognized that victory in modern war depended upon the speed and efficiency with which the nation could convert its economy from peace and employ its resources for war.”

  He created a template for all the major industries in America by enlisting national leaders in each industry—from aluminum to zinc. When a demand for copper, for example, suddenly surged along with its price, Baruch called on Daniel Guggenheim and other magnates and reasoned with them to meet the government’s needs at a fair price. Not only did this price-fixing save the government $9 million but it led industry to put patriotism before profits, enabling cooperation between people instead of corporations. When French Ambassador Jean-Jules Jusserand complained that gasoline shipments to France were being stalled, Baruch got to the heart of the problem with one telephone call to a colleague on the oil committee. Through these powerful appointments and cooperative committees, Wilson was able to cut through endless red tape.

  Baruch urged the President to create “a centralized purchasing agency with authority over prices and the closing of defense contracts.” Wilson could not go that far, but he did establish a War Industries Board, in which military leaders sat with industrial bosses and could at least coordinate the purchase of war supplies. Products were simplified and standardized, allowing for mass production, which was more efficient and economical. The WIB’s power was minimal; but once Baruch was named its chairman, he realized he could regulate where he could not negotiate. His committee assumed influence by becoming the nation’s “priority machine”—directing, restraining, and stimulating war production as situations demanded, allocating materials where required, and ending unhealthy competition. Practicalities often determined policies. Should a locomotive, for example, be sent overseas to transport soldiers to the front or sent to South America to haul nitrates for bullets? Taking the stays out of women’s corsets supplied enough metal for two warships.

  Like Wilson, Baruch found it abhorrent that they should have to discuss prices and profits when “blood will flow so freely and suffering will become so great”; but the American entrance into the war was about to create the greatest burst of production in the nation’s history. With it would come torrents of money. From the start of his work, Baruch sought to “reduce prices to the point we believe proper, yet keep wages up, preserve our financial strength, keep production of these absolutely vital materials at full blast and increase our resolution and determination to conduct the war to a successful conclusion.” Instead of fixing prices, Baruch preferred flexibility; and he thought a strong centralized purchasing power could do much to control the economy, through the contracts it dispensed and “moral suasion.”

  President Wilson created an alphabet soup of boards and agencies to supervise the various aspects of the war effort, all of which he coordinated. While the President never saw the value in a “coalition cabinet” that consciously teamed rivals, he observed a policy of inclusion. His administration benefited from literally dozens of Republicans, many from the worlds of banking and business: three Republican Assistant Secretaries of War served Newton Baker, alongside Morgan banker E. R. Stettinius, who was put in charge of supplies; five of the eight members of the War Trade Board were prominent Republicans, as was the Red Cross chief, H. P. Davison, another Morgan banker; Republicans Frank Vanderlip of National City Bank ran the War Savings Stamps Campaign, and Russell C. Leffingwell (later a Morgan partner) became an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Former President Taft headed the National War Labor Board; and Harvard Law Professor Felix Frankfurter, a former Bull Mooser, left Cambridge to become an assistant to Secretary Baker, to act as Judge Advocate General and to chair the War Labor Policies Board, on which Navy Undersecretary Franklin Roosevelt would serve. Wilson also created a special War Cabinet—which met on Wednesdays in his study. Its core included: the Secretaries of the Treasury, War, and Navy Departments as well as Baruch; Williams College President (and son of a Republican President) Harry Garfield, whom Wilson named to oversee the Federal Fuel Administration; Edward N. Hurley, a tool industry tycoon who had chaired the Federal Trade Commission and was reassigned to the United States Shipping Board; Democratic Party chairman Vance McCormick, head of the War Trade Board; and the man who distinguished himself more in the war years than any other Wilson appointee, a mild-mannered Quaker named Herbert Clark Hoover.

  Orphaned at nine, Hoover was raised by an uncle in Oregon before entering the inaugural class at Stanford University, from which he graduated with a degree in geology. Starting his career as a mining engineer, he traveled to Australia and China, where he devised a process for extracting zinc. He became both a respected scholar in his field and a wealthy consultant. By the time the war began, Hoover had become a financier living in London. With over 100,000 Americans—mostly tourists—desperate to get home, he organized a committee to engineer their return. So effective was he, Ambassador Page called upon him to consider applying that same sort of American know-how to the feeding of Belgians in need. Hoover excelled at the task, performing feats of diplomatic and commercial magic in getting millions of tons of food distributed to ten million starving men and women. Shuttling across Europe, Hoover saw German deprivation as well, the result of the British food blockade. At Wilson’s behest, he returned to Washington, where the President asked him to organize American food activities. He agreed, so long as he could continue to head the Belgian relief as well. He imposed one other condition: that he would receive no payment for his services and that the whole of the force under him, exclusive of clerical assistance, would do the same.

  Unsentimental and brusque, Hoover expressed alarm and pessimism after assessing the current food situation, and with good reason. America’s prior year’s production of cereals—in
cluding wheat, corn, oats, barley, rice, and rye—was four-fifths of the six billion bushels it had been the year before; and adverse weather already assured that the coming year would yield even less. To make matters worse, adequate national rail service was not yet up and running to accommodate the crops on hand.

  At age forty-two, he embarked upon what one scholar called “the greatest experiment in economic organization the world had seen”—a nationwide exercise in extra production and economy. The President strong-armed Congress into passing a Food and Fuel Control Bill that granted power to the Administration to fix prices and exert other controls over the production and distribution of living essentials. The Lever Act—named for its South Carolinian sponsor—became an omnibus bill overloaded with excess baggage, riders from Representatives who bartered for inclusion of their pet causes in exchange for their votes. In this instance, the growing movement of Prohibitionists had their say, attaching a rider that banned the production of distilled spirits from any produce that might be used for food.

  The entire nation rolled up its sleeves and tightened its belt so that as much food could be sent to Europe as possible. The Administration called upon the nation to go “meatless” at least one meal a day and one day a week, commonly Monday; it sent a similar request to go “wheatless,” at least once a day and all day Monday and Wednesday. In time, at least one “sweetless” day of the week was encouraged, usually Saturday. Billboards and newspapers featured appeals to save food. Housewives enrolled as “members of the Food Administration”; their numbers included Edith Wilson, who signed a pledge endorsing “food conservation,” for which she received a red, white, and blue card featuring spears of wheat, which she displayed in a White House window, like an ordinary housewife. Herbert Hoover’s moon face became the symbol of economizing, if not deprivation, as mothers withheld spoonfuls of sugar from their children’s cereal in his name; and the verb “Hooverize” entered the lexicon—“to be sparing or economical.”

  Hoover delivered phenomenal results. At the start of the war, the United States could pledge to export 20 million bushels of wheat; it sent 141 million. In just one quarter of a year, the country restricted its consumption of sweets enough to send 500,000 tons of sugar abroad. In addition to beef, the nation increased its pork production by a million tons. American restaurants reported having saved thousands of tons of meat, flour, and sugar in a single two-month period. Dumps nationwide noticed discernible decreases in garbage. Its first year in the war, America sent Europe twice as much food as it had the year before.

  Americans conserved fuel as well. Because the industrial and military need for coal and oil became insatiable, management rewarded workers with wages and the basic standard of living increases that unions had been demanding for years; union membership soared. Energy czar Garfield closely monitored the national fuel supply; and when shortages appeared, he ordered non–war related factories to shut down for days at a time or one day a week. Citizens and businesses protested the clumsy manner in which the Administration dropped such actions upon them; and, in fact, the government never adequately explained that the closures were more about allowing a day for the transportation system to meet war demands. Political opponents grumbled persistently about the Administration’s lack of readiness, harshly criticizing Wilson’s inadequacy as a leader; but all good citizens bundled up nonetheless as they endured “heatless” Mondays. Even the Wilsons observed “gasless Sundays,” substituting a ride in a horse-drawn carriage for their weekend limousine drives. The switch was thrown on electric advertisements, streetlights dimmed, and “lightless” nights were eventually ordered, twice a week, even on Broadway. Wilson introduced Daylight Saving Time to America, which created an extra hour of farm work every day and which saved an hour of artificial light, reducing the use of electric and coal power.

  Within weeks of America’s entry into the war, Edith Wilson was tending eight sheep her husband had brought to graze on the White House lawn. The flock trimmed the grass, thus saving manpower; and at shearing time, they provided ninety-eight pounds of “White House Wool”—two pounds of which were sent to each state and the Philippines—which raised at auction close to $100,000 for the Red Cross. Edith also pulled out her old sewing machine and sat for hours, making pajamas for the sick and injured. (Whenever their fingers were free, all the Wilson women observed the Red Cross motto of “Knit Your Bit,” by producing socks and sweaters. Margaret contributed to the war effort by embarking on two long concert tours, which earned some $10,000 for the cause.) Whenever the President saw a Food Administration or Red Cross card in somebody’s window, his eyes filled. “I wish I could stop and know the people who live here,” he would say, “for it is from them that I draw inspiration and strength.”

  The President hoped the rest of the country might share his feelings. Toward that end—and to carry the “Gospel of Americanism” to every corner of the globe—the President established the most controversial board of all, the Committee on Public Information. While other government boards dealt primarily with the nuts and bolts of winning the war, the CPI dealt with the ephemeral business of public perception—what Secretary Baker called “mobilizing the mind of the world so far as American participation in the war was concerned.” Where the knee-jerk reaction for most countries going to war, he said, was to impose strict censorship, the CPI intended to expose information. Or so it would have people believe.

  Because the United States had entered the Great War for neither territory nor treasure but for intangible ideals, the President felt the need to capture the public’s hearts and minds. He hired a journalist named George Creel—a muckraker out of Denver who had been a Wilson loyalist in the last two elections—to head the CPI. The Great War differed most essentially from previous conflicts in its recognition of public opinion as a major force, Creel wrote in his memoir How We Advertised America. “The trial of strength was not only between massed bodies of armed men, but between opposed ideals, and moral verdicts took on all the value of military decision.”

  Ever since the incursions in Mexico, there had been a delicate balance between the White House and the newspapers regarding coverage of military operations. Although the number of press conferences had sharply declined from weekly events to only two in all of 1916, Wilson’s administration still offered plenty of access and transparency. “Starting with the initial conviction that the war was not the war of an administration, but the war of one hundred million people,” Creel would write, “we opened up the activities of government to the inspection of the citizenship. A voluntary censorship agreement safeguarded military information of obvious value to the enemy, but in all else the rights of the press were recognized and furthered.” But “information” was a product manufactured by people’s minds; and as such, it could not be measured like wheat, meat, and sugar. And though the CPI maintained that no other belligerent nation allowed “such absolute frankness with respect to every detail of the national war endeavor,” the fine line between fact and opinion—between morale-building and manipulation—all but disappeared. With $100 million to spend at its own discretion, the CPI would issue all the war news it considered fit to print. The department did not overtly censor information, but it covertly shaped it.

  Secretary Baker said the war “was to be won by the pen as well as by the sword.” Tellingly, Creel enlisted teams of not just historians but also publicists to write pamphlets outlining “America’s reasons for entering the war, the meaning of America, the nature of our free institutions, our war aims” and stacking them alongside the “misrepresentations and barbarities” of the German government. A few dozen of these booklets went into production, each extolling a different aspect of the American vision. An army of volunteers blanketed the country with seventy-five million copies; millions more were spread around the world. Another team issued an official daily newspaper, reporting on the activities of each government department. And Creel conscripted some of the most respected write
rs in America—including Owen Wister, Booth Tarkington, William Dean Howells, and Edna Ferber as well as journalists Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and William Allen White—to write about the American way of life in “letters,” which were translated and delivered to any foreign press that would publish them.

  To help fight years of German propaganda and to recraft what the Administration considered an unfair image of the United States, Creel hired several bright young men, including one who would not only distinguish himself immediately but would also emerge later as one of the most important propagandists of the century, a pioneer in the field of public relations. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, headed the CPI’s export service. Born in Vienna and raised in New York, where he became a press agent shortly after graduating from Cornell, Bernays appreciated his uncle’s work in exploring unconscious desires; and, perhaps better than anybody else at the CPI, he recognized the importance of tapping less into what the masses thought than into what they felt.

  The CPI created a speakers division, which organized meetings across the country—forty-five “war conferences,” providing information about America’s evolving status in all the battles. It oversaw an organization called the Four Minute Men—seventy-five thousand speakers who volunteered in more than five thousand communities, where they generally appeared in motion picture theaters during the four minutes it took for the projectionists to change the reels. More than 750,000 speeches, on topics ranging from food conservation to “Maintaining Morals and Morale,” were delivered to an estimated eleven million audience members—every one, Creel said, “having the carry of shrapnel.”