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Another division of the CPI produced motion pictures, which were initially documentary in nature. As the war continued, the film industry produced feature films centering on the war that grew increasingly brutal in their portrayal of the enemy. Lon Chaney starred in The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. In The Heart of Humanity, Erich von Stroheim played a brutal “Hun” who attempts to rape a nurse before throwing a baby out a window. D. W. Griffith himself produced another wartime epic, about young lovers in France torn apart by the war and reunited by killing a sadistic German rapist. If that were not enough to rouse any American, the CPI distributed posters and window cards—based on almost 1,500 original drawings contributed by the artists themselves. At the beginning of the war, the artwork represented mostly romantic evocations of the glories of the great cause. Howard Chandler Christy and James Montgomery Flagg painted flag-clad beauties urging Americans to “Sow the Seeds of Victory” by considering “every garden a munitions plant.” Flagg would also create one of the most enduring American images, a recruiting poster showing a white-haired Uncle Sam wearing a star-spangled top hat and declaring, “I WANT YOU FOR U.S. ARMY.” A year later, the American posters turned ugly, depicting Germans as slobbering apes carrying off Lady Liberty. War exhibits traveled the state-fair circuit, not only spreading the American message but also generating income in the millions of dollars.
Beyond America, the CPI spread its word to the Allies, the neutral nations, and the enemy. Creating a daily news service to publicize stories by both wire and the wireless, America opened small offices in all the major capitals of the world, except those of the Central Powers. Stories about American education, finance, labor, medicine, and agriculture were sent everywhere, as were the speeches of Woodrow Wilson, marking the first time in history that the speeches of a head of state received universal distribution. “Every conceivable means was used to reach the foreign mind with America’s message,” Creel said; that included the novel idea of inviting leading foreign correspondents—particularly those from neutral nations—to come to America. Upon America’s entrance into the war, the CPI had received $5.6 million from the President’s discretionary fund and a Congressional appropriation of $1.25 million; in the end, it earned some $3 million from its films and expositions, thus costing the government less than $5 million. Creel called this a bargain for waging a “world-fight for the verdict of mankind.” But there were hidden costs in trying to win that verdict.
On June 15, 1917, the Sixty-fifth Congress passed the Espionage Act—one of the most provocative pieces of legislation in American history. It represented the greatest possible expression of patriotism and the suppression of free speech. In 1798, when the young nation had almost gone to war with France, President Adams had propounded the Sedition Act, which made the publication of “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government or its representatives a crime. Adams’s opposition—chiefly Jefferson and Madison—considered the act a violation of the First Amendment. Sixty-five years later, when the states were at war with one another, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus on several occasions and imposed martial law based on the Constitution’s allowance whenever rebellion or invasion threatened “the public Safety.” Furthermore, he stifled free speech in punishing critics of his policies.
At least as far back as the sinking of the Lusitania, Wilson had been concerned about Germany’s covert activities. He had addressed the subject head-on in his 1915 State of the Union Address when he spoke of naturalized United States citizens “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” The President had asked Congress for legislation to help combat this problem. “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out,” he said. On April 2, 1917, the President appealed for the authority Adams and Lincoln had been given, with enough power to make good on his vow to deal with any disloyalty in the nation “with a firm hand of stern repression.”
Congress had introduced several new bills, including one from Representative Edwin Webb of North Carolina and Senator Charles Culberson of Texas targeting espionage and treason. They included all the powers the President might need, including a provision to monitor information of, from, and about the government—essentially making it illegal for a person to publish information that the President declared “useful to the enemy” in time of war. It amounted to nothing less than censorship.
While the bulk of the bill dealt with spies and saboteurs, a few sections wandered into gray areas, particularly in empowering the executive branch. One section, for example, declared it illegal even to “attempt to cause disaffection in the military,” while another allowed the Postmaster General to determine which writings were of a “treasonable or anarchistic” nature and, as such, subject to the ban.
Democratic liberals, to say nothing of the journalists Wilson had courted for four years, could hardly believe that he could condone such legislation. Progressive Republicans, such as Senators William E. Borah and Hiram Johnson, and the predictable chorus of right-wing Republicans, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, opposed him as well. Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane called upon the President to comment on the importance of “the absolute freedom of the press.” Wilson replied that he could “imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic . . . their indisputable right to criticize their own public officials.” He insisted that he would regret the loss of “patriotic and intelligent criticism” during the trying times and said, “So far as I am personally concerned, I shall not expect or permit any part of this law to apply to me or any of my official acts, or in any way to be used as a shield against criticism.”
Even with that assurance, the bill struck at the very heart of a free society. It asserted that the chosen leaders of a nation should have the right in times of war to suspend the normal freedom of the press. Opponents contended there was never good reason to withhold or doctor information, while supporters maintained that absolute transparency in a time of war might threaten national security.
Congressman Webb opened the House debate by condemning the press for conveying the impression that his bill trampled upon the First Amendment. At a time when men were offering their lives to win the war, he thought newspapers should be willing to sacrifice the right to publish stories the President thought injurious. The nation had given Wilson its trust to command its Army; so too should he be entitled to control its information. Representative Dick Thompson Morgan of Oklahoma, a Republican, said: “In time of great national peril, it is necessary sometimes that individual citizens shall be willing to surrender some of the privileges which they have for the sake of the greater good.”
Morgan’s own Senator could not have disagreed more. “I am opposed to any censorship of the press at this time,” said Democrat T. P. Gore, “because censorship goes hand in hand with despotism.” A strong disciple of the freedom of speech, he said that censorship strikes at the very foundation of a free democracy. Hiram Johnson called the amendment “vicious” and “un-American.” Lucien Price, an astute political pundit, editorialized in The Boston Daily Globe that May, “The American people could not long endure the necessary war-time conscription of men and property, if the truth were also conscripted.” He called his fellow citizens “the greatest reading public in the world,” one that could not tolerate “a shutdown of news just as they enter the war themselves.”
Tumulty sent Wilson an excerpt from a biography of John Adams, which claimed that the greatest blunders of the Federalist Party were the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and that “no one has ever been able heartily or successfully to defend these foolish outbursts of ill-considered legislation which have to be abandoned, by tacit general consent, to condemnation.”
When a canvass of votes in the House suggested that censorship as included in the Webb bill would not prevail, the President stepped up to reaffirm his position that cen
sorship was “absolutely necessary to the public safety.” He sent Representative Webb a letter—to be released to The New York Times—expressing his confidence that the great majority of the American press would observe “a patriotic reticence about everything whose publication could be of injury”; but he still insisted that there were in every country “some persons . . . whose interests or desires will lead to actions on their part highly dangerous to the nation in the midst of a war.”
The censorship section was cut from the bill, and that compromise allowed the overwhelming nonpartisan passage of the Espionage Act. What remained left a watchdog government with enough authority to intimidate. Much of what had been excised was inserted in a later piece of legislation, the Sedition Act of 1918, which prohibited “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States,” or its military or naval forces or the uniforms or the flag thereof; and it prohibited any language intended to cast upon them “contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute.”
For all his experience raking muck, Creel proved himself remarkably adept at sanitizing. While the recent debate had raged, he composed a detailed memorandum to help organize the CPI. Topic number one was “censorship,” a word, he said, that was “to be avoided.” Creel suggested nothing nefarious; indeed, he insisted the entire spirit of his agency must be “one of absolute co-operation. It must go upon the assumption that the press is eager and willing to do the handsome thing, and its attitude must be one of frankness, friendship and entire openness.” He and the President were on the same page; and, for the most part, the White House and the press remained mutually respectful throughout the war.
Wilson seldom abused the arsenal of powers the Congress had granted him. “From the war’s beginning,” David Lawrence observed, “Mr. Wilson made frequent visits . . . to the different war bureaus. He developed the habit of dropping in when least expected.” Lawrence suggested these visits were part of his exercise and relaxation regimen—a chance to stretch his legs—but he was also exerting the common touch, keeping the rapidly expanding government bureaucracy a place where even the President might drop in on any given day.
With Wilson’s “ability to delegate work, his loyalties to subordinates, and his speed in evaluating problems,” Herbert Hoover would recollect forty years later, “he proved a great administrator.” Hoover added that Wilson’s “religious and moral upbringing expressed itself in a zeal for financial integrity which characterized the conduct of a war practically without corruption.”
To the stirring drumbeat of the CPI, the people of the nation compensated for their deprivations with a spirit that had not united them since the country’s founding. Everybody pitched in. Just as the British Royal Family shook all German nomenclature from its family tree—Battenbergs becoming Mountbattens, and the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha adopting the family name Windsor—so too did Americans expunge all things Teutonic. Across the country, hamburgers were rechristened “liberty steaks,” and sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage.” German shepherds were called Alsatians; Berlin, Iowa, turned into Lincoln, Iowa; and Brooklyn’s Hamburg Avenue was renamed after Wilson. Some school boards discontinued teaching the German language. Otto Kahn, a German-born partner in the New York banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company as well as the chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Company, wrote the President to ask whether he felt opera in German sung by German artists should continue in his opera house. Wilson hated to see the loss of German opera, but he left the decision to Kahn and his board—which chose to bar German works. With all the changes, German Americans unavoidably became victims of hysteria, discrimination, and, in one instance, lynching. Aware of the bigotry, Wilson urged tolerance, speaking repeatedly and reassuringly of his “confidence in the entire integrity and loyalty of the great body of our fellow-citizens of German blood.” Considering the general spirit of the nation, he would later reflect “that America was never so beautiful as in the spring, summer and autumn of 1917 when people were stirred by a passion in common, forgot themselves and political differences in an urge to put all they had, all they were, to use in a great purpose.”
Despite Woodrow Wilson’s having no military experience, he proved to be a highly effective Commander in Chief—decisive and delegative. His battle plan had two fundamentals: first, that the nation would submit to a national draft; second, that the United States would not send those fighting men abroad as “replacement troops” for the Allies but as United States soldiers fighting under the American flag.
Among Congress’s first pieces of business after its declaration of war was a Selective Service bill. Recognizing the inadequacy of mustering a volunteer Army (only thirty thousand men had signed up by the end of April 1917), Congress debated the need for conscription, America’s first mandated military service since the Civil War. While such an act struck many as the very sort of autocracy the soldiers would be sent to fight against, Wilson asserted that the heart of the selective draft was the idea that “there is a universal obligation to serve and that a public authority should choose those upon whom the obligation of military service shall rest.” It provided for a system that was both fair and functional, giving control to local draft boards in their creation of a national Army, determining not only who but how each man in the pool might serve. A local board might determine that a fellow volunteering to fight in France could better serve by remaining in his wheat field or coal mine. Wilson believed such a bill would create the greatest impression of “universal service in the Army and out of it, and if properly administered will be a great source of stimulation.” A section of the Selective Service bill stated that, unlike in the Civil War draft, nobody could purchase or otherwise furnish a substitute for himself.
One fifty-eight-year-old Rough Rider could hardly contain himself. Itching to be back in uniform and in the spotlight, Theodore Roosevelt had quietly assembled his own division, communicating for months with men all over the country who wanted to serve with him. Only three days after the declaration of war, he went to Washington, determined to see Wilson. He had no formal appointment; but he told those around him, “I’ll take chances on his trying to snub me. He can’t do it! I’d like to see him try it!”
Late the next morning, Tumulty telephoned to say that the President would see the former President at noon. They met in the Green Room and promptly got past the awkwardness of their previous vicious rivalry. In truth, Wilson had invited TR to the White House three years earlier for a delightful half hour of nonpolitical conversation over glasses of lemonade; but on this spring day, the Colonel came on a very specific mission. He commended Wilson on his war message and on his bill for selective conscription and then proposed the division he hoped to lead. Roosevelt found Wilson slightly awkward, sounding defensive about his policy of the last three years over which they had crossed swords. “Mr. President,” Roosevelt interjected, “what I have said and thought, and what others have said and thought, is all dust in a windy street, if now we can make your message good. Of course, it amounts to nothing, if we cannot make it good. But, if we can translate it into fact, then it will rank as a great state paper, with the great state papers of Washington and Lincoln. Now, all that I ask is that I be allowed to . . . help get the nation to act, so as to justify and live up to the speech, and the declaration of war that followed.” After half an hour, the two men were bantering and laughing together.
Before leaving the White House, TR asked if he might call upon Tumulty in the executive office. Wilson summoned his secretary to the Red Room, where there were handshakes and backslaps. Roosevelt heartily greeted several of his former household staff and said to Tumulty, “You get me across and I will put you on my staff, and you may tell Mrs. Tumulty that I will not allow them to place you at any point of danger.” Back on the street, he told the crowd of newsmen, “The President received me with the utmost courtesy and consideration,” and said that the President would rule on his request “in his
own good time.” Wilson asked Tumulty what he thought of the Colonel, and he replied that the man’s enthusiasm was overwhelming. “Yes,” said Wilson, “he is a great big boy. I was, as formerly, charmed by his personality. There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can’t resist the man. I can easily understand why his followers are so fond of him.” Not aware that TR still felt little more than contempt for Wilson, the President seriously considered the Colonel’s proposition.
Roosevelt lingered in the capital, where he granted audiences and courted old friends from Congress, hoping they might include a provision in the Selective Service bill that would allow volunteer forces to go directly to the front while America trained her conscripted Army. “We owe this to humanity,” he wrote the Democratic chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. The Selective Service Act passed on May 18, 1917, and included this Roosevelt exception, to be executed at the President’s discretion. Wilson announced that day that he would not avail himself of any volunteer divisions, that to do so “would seriously interfere with . . . the prompt creation and early use of an effective army.” He determined that such divisions would contribute little to the effective strength of the armies currently engaged against Germany.
No matter what good theater it might make to send TR to the Western Front, Wilson could see no strategic reason to do so. He wired Roosevelt that his conclusions were based “entirely upon imperative considerations of public policy and not upon personal or private choice,” but the Roosevelt camp had its doubts. “It seemed to us that the President’s refusal was undoubtedly influenced by political considerations,” wrote TR’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who suggested that there simply was not room for another star on the world stage—one President behind a desk, another leading a charge. Said Alice, “It was the bitterest sort of blow for Father.”