18

WAGING WAR

As he rode up in the White House elevator on the night of April 2, 1917, after delivering his war address to Congress, Woodrow Wilson reportedly remarked to his young cousin, “Fitz, thank God for Abraham Lincoln.” Fitz Woodrow, a grandson of Wilson’s uncle Jimmy, later recalled asking why he had said that and got the answer, “I won’t make the mistakes that he did.”¹ Wilson did not explain to Fitz Woodrow what mistakes he thought Lincoln had made, but he would soon use the Lincoln precedent to answer congressional critics. The remark was noteworthy because it gave a clue to how he meant to wage war. He intended to plunge in fully and decisively. Many in Congress and elsewhere appeared to believe that the United States would mostly continue to furnish food, munitions, and money to the Allies. During the next eighteen months, supplies and naval assistance from America would prove essential to enabling the British and French to hold out against repeated and redoubled German onslaughts. But anyone who thought Wilson would limit his country’s role in the war to such things had sorely misread this man’s mind and spirit. He meant to wage war with every resource at his command, and he meant to do it his way.

America’s biggest resource was manpower. Its population of more than 103 million was larger than that of any of the major countries at war except troubled, faltering Russia. Unlike the other belligerents, the United States had barely begun to tap its pool of men of military age. This advantage also posed the biggest problem. In order to field forces of any size on the Western Front, the country would have to expand its army of around 300,000 men, including the National Guard, possibly ten times or more. That would require recruiting, training, and equipping more men than the nation had ever put under arms. Then those men would need to be transported to seaports on the Atlantic coast and shipped to Europe. Such mobilization would require harnessing agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation on an unprecedented scale—all on top of meeting mounting demands from the Allies for food, machines, and munitions. This president and his administration were facing the biggest wartime challenge since the Civil War, with the added obstacle of having to fight overseas, more than 3,000 miles away.

From the outset, Wilson grasped the immensity of his task. The day after he signed the declaration of war, he wrote a memorandum to himself on his typewriter, which he titled “Programme.” Under the heading “Measures for war,” he listed additions to the army and navy and “all legislation needed to put the country in a thorough state of defense and preparation for action.” Under the heading “Bills for the safeguarding of the nation,” he wrote down measures to oversee and restrict public speech and expression and “various restrictions on trading with the enemy.” He also had plans for seizing interned enemy ships, securing other maritime provisions, increasing the powers of the Federal Reserve, and taking “control of the Railroads for military purposes.” He disclosed a key part of his plan for the armed forces that day when he told Walter Lippmann that “registering all men of military age”—the draft—would be part of the program that the War Department was about to submit.²

Wilson tackled each of these items, which he saw as related parts of a unified whole. “We are mobilizing the nation as well as creating an Army,” he told Congressman Carter Glass on April 9, “and that means that we must keep every instrumentality at its highest pitch of efficiency and guided by thoughtful intelligence.” He believed that public opinion and the economy were essential to such mobilization. “Talked about censorship,” Josephus Daniels noted that day. “He will appoint [George] Creel as head.” They also talked about munitions, and Wilson asked if Bernard Baruch would do. Daniels asserted that he would, adding, “He is somewhat vain.” Wilson reportedly asked, “[D]id you ever see a Jew who was not?” Those two veteran Democratic Party activists would get two of the most important civilian posts in the war effort. Creel got his right away. Some form of censorship to protect national security seemed unavoidable, but thoughts varied widely about how to impose such measures. Creel advised against using the word censorship and advocated overlaying control of information with lots of positive publicity, although he did not use the word propaganda. That approach appealed to Wilson, who wanted to get people to support the war voluntarily as much as possible. On April 13, he issued an executive order setting up a “Committee on Public Information” (often called the CPI), with Creel as chairman.³

Bernard Baruch had to wait awhile for his appointment. Economic mobilization was more complicated and involved competing actors and agencies. War finance came first. With his usual gusto, McAdoo issued a statement to the press on April 9 that included a request to Congress for authority to raise $5 billion in bonds. The Treasury would eventually raise more than $15 billion through five mass subscription drives—soon to be dubbed Liberty Loans. In addition to financing two thirds of war expenditures, the Liberty Loans would feature extensive advertising and big rallies in major cities, with appearances by such movie stars as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford and such sports heroes as Ty Cobb. Liberty Loan advertising and rallies would dovetail with the activities of Creel’s CPI in whipping up popular enthusiasm for the war. The remainder of the war financing would come from taxes, particularly from ratcheting up income and inheritance taxes on the wealthy and levies on corporate profits.

Other aspects of economic mobilization took shape more slowly, but Baruch had a hand in most of them. Wilson appointed him to several newly created agencies, including the Allied Purchasing Commission and the General Munitions Board. These appointments, which were mostly advisory, brought Baruch into regular contact with Secretary of War Baker and Secretary of the Navy Daniels and, most important, with Wilson, the last giving him an opportunity to apply his well-honed charm to a man he admired immensely. Daniels correctly spotted Baruch’s vanity about his looks; Wilson’s retort is the only anti-Semitic remark anyone ever recorded him making. In fact, Wilson found Baruch appealing because he was both a fellow expatriate southerner and a prime example of “the man on the make.” He was a close friend McAdoo’s and a proudly self-styled “speculator” who had a restless, probing mind that tapped into Wilson’s penchant for boldness. Within two months of American entry into the war, Baruch would present comprehensive outlines for control and coordination of shipping and industrial and agricultural production. The president soon gave Baruch still another appointment, to what was as yet only an advisory committee, called the War Industries Board. Later, under Baruch’s chairmanship, the WIB would become the spark plug of industrial mobilization.⁴

A little more than a week into the war, the president shared some of his thinking with the public. In a statement to the press—written, as usual, on his own typewriter—he maintained that besides fighting forces, the United States and the Allies required food, shipping, and equipment, which, in turn, demanded greater efficiency from American workers, who would be “serving the country and conducting the fight for peace and freedom just as effectively as the men on the battlefield or in the trenches.” He urged farmers to grow bigger crops, and he asked farmers in the South to grow foodstuffs rather than cotton. He admonished businessmen to forgo “unusual profits” and reminded railroad workers and managers that they were maintaining vital arteries for the war effort. “The supreme test of the nation has come,” he concluded. “We must all speak, act, and serve together.”⁵ Except for a few flashes of eloquence, this was not one of his more stirring utterances, and it seems odd that he did not give a speech. He would deliver fewer speeches during the opening year of the war than he had done before, except during the first months after Ellen’s death. That would be unfortunate because he was depriving himself of opportunities to educate people about his deep and sophisticated vision of war and peace. Instead, superheated patriotism, fomented and abetted by the CPI and militants outside government, would fill this void in public persuasion.

Oddly, too, this statement made no mention of the centerpiece of comprehensive mobilization—the draft. Four days later, he acknowledged the omission when he told a Democratic congressman that the draft would allow keeping military-age men in critical occupations and would establish “the idea that there is a universal obligation to serve.” Backing the draft drew Wilson into a political fight with members of his own party on Capitol Hill. Opposing him in the House were Claude Kitchin and Champ Clark, and in the Senate some leading Democrats likewise expressed doubts. Despite that opposition and skepticism, the draft bill secured passage quickly and easily. Administration supporters in both houses beat back attempts to attach a volunteer alternative. The high point of the debate came when Clark stepped down from the Speaker’s chair to deliver an impassioned two-hour oration against the whole concept of conscription, climaxing with the well-remembered line: “In the estimation of Missourians there is precious little difference between a conscript and a convict.” Clark was fighting a forlorn battle. Kitchin declined to join him, and Bryan announced that he was supporting the president. Meanwhile, pro-draft organizations were staging big rallies in the Northeast and Midwest. The House approved the draft bill on the evening of April 28 by a vote of 307 to 24, and the Senate followed suit that same night by a margin of 81 to 8.⁶

This easy win masked a sharp, partly personal conflict. The idea of filling army units with volunteers appealed to more than nostalgia for the minutemen of 1776 and many in the blue- and gray-clad ranks of the Civil War. In the Senate, Lodge tried to secure volunteer divisions so that Roosevelt could lead one of them. Military and civilian leaders in the War Department adamantly opposed such divisions. Besides sharing Wilson’s concern that such volunteers would wreak havoc in civilian occupations critical to war production, they feared that a unit headed by someone with Roosevelt’s fame and glamour would skim away able officers eager for conspicuous chances at combat.⁷

The old adversary was not easy to put off. On the afternoon of April 10, four days after the declaration of war, Roosevelt came to call at the White House. According to one staff member, Wilson greeted Roosevelt coolly but soon “‘thawed out’ and was laughing and ‘talking back.’ They had a real good visit.” Roosevelt recalled that he said, “Mr. President, what I have said and thought, and what others have said and thought, is all dust in a windy street, if we can make your [war] message good. … [I]f we can translate it into fact, then it will rank as a great state paper, with the great state papers of Washington and Lincoln.” He was lathering on flattery by appealing to what he regarded as Wilson’s vanity as a “phrasemaker.” He also offered Tumulty a commission in the proposed division and toured the White House for sentimental reunions with staff members who fondly remembered him and his family. Wilson bent the rules to allow reporters and photographers with movie cameras to interview Roosevelt on the White House portico. Afterward, Tumulty confessed to being taken with their visitor’s high spirits and charm. “Yes,” he recalled Wilson replying, “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.”⁸

Wilson did, in fact, resist Roosevelt, who sensed that he might not be swaying the president. He thought that with anyone else he could count on his request being approved, but he could not tell with Wilson: “He has, however, left the door open.” Wilson let others shut the door. Three days later, Secretary of War Baker wrote to inform Roosevelt that the Army War College had unanimously recommended against his proposal for a volunteer division. This was, Baker maintained, “a purely military policy” based on the need to train troops adequately and on the judgment that any expeditionary force to Europe should be commanded by experienced professional officers. Roosevelt believed that the decision came from Wilson, who was spurning him out of jealousy and spite.⁹Wilson would not have been human if thoughts of foiling a bitter rival had not crossed his mind. Moreover, Roosevelt could not hide his desire to horn in on running the war—which might have been an argument for trying to co-opt him with a high-level appointment. Lincoln had gathered his main political rivals into his cabinet so that he might watch them and presumably have them work for rather than against him. On the other hand, McKinley’s experience did not recommend trying to harness Roosevelt in a subordinate role.

Yet personal motives were only part of the decision. There were diplomatic as well as military reasons not to send Roosevelt to France. He would thunder for an all-out, shoulder-to-shoulder crusade alongside Britain and France against not only Germany but also the other Central powers, and that was not the way Wilson intended to deal with the situation. He wanted to keep his distance from the Allies. On April 14, he told J. H. Whitehouse, a visiting member of Parliament, that he intended to remain “detached from the Allies,” particularly because he did not agree with some of their recent pronouncements about peace terms, such as breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead of a sweeping victory, he still wanted “a negotiated settlement, whenever that was possible,” with America “at the back of the settlement, a permanent guarantee of future peace.” In short, he still clung to the vision he had put forward in his “peace without victory” speech. He also told Whitehouse that he worried that the American press could be irresponsible and might stir up “mob passion.”¹⁰

In such a frame of mind, Wilson preferred to avoid high-level meetings with the principal Allies, but that was not possible. The British immediately asked to send a delegation to Washington, to be headed by Foreign Secretary Balfour. Not to be outdone, the French likewise requested the Americans to receive the minister of justice, René Viviani, who would be accompanied by Marshal Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre, the victor at the battle of the Marne in 1914 and former commander of France’s armies. Balfour’s ship landed in New York on April 22, and he went to see House in the morning before proceeding to Washington. This was no mere courtesy call. Late in 1916, the British had started using the colonel as their principal channel of communication between their intelligence officers and the president.

One of those officers was Sir William Wiseman. Ingratiating and prone to intrigue, Wiseman resembled his new contact so much that one historian has called him “a young House with an Oxbridge accent.” They quickly struck up an intimate friendship reminiscent of the colonel’s early relationship with Wilson, and in the fall of 1917 the Englishman rented an apartment in the building where House lived. They soon became co-conspirators in conducting diplomacy, with each one sometimes acting behind the back of his government, as House had done earlier with his House-Grey Memorandum.¹¹

Wiseman set up the meeting on April 22 between Balfour and House, who advised the foreign secretary on how to deal with the president, particularly cautioning him to avoid any discussion of an alliance or peace terms. The colonel also advised against replacing Spring-Rice as ambassador in Washington because the present arrangement, relying on his own contacts, was working well. In Washington that afternoon, cheering crowds and a cavalry escort greeted the British visitors. The following day, the French delegation arrived in Hampton Roads, Virginia, and transferred to the Mayflower, which brought them up the Potomac to Washington. This began monthlong sojourns for both delegations, replete with dinners, parades, visits to other cities, and meetings with important pro-Allied Americans, most notably Roosevelt. In deference to wartime austerity, official entertaining in Washington was less than sumptuous, and Edith Wilson was usually the only woman present at the formal dinners.

Serious discussions came in Wilson’s separate meetings with Balfour and Viviani. Balfour’s first visit with Wilson at the White House went stiffly, because, according to House, Lansing was present, along with Spring-Rice. “Lansing has a wooden mind and constantly blocked what I was trying to convey,” House said Wilson told him, so the president suggested an after-dinner meeting of just the three of them. That arrangement suited House, who again briefed Balfour on how to deal with Wilson, advising him to disclose the terms of Britain’s secret treaties with Italy and other co-belligerents. When the three men met, they pored over a map of Europe and Asia Minor and discussed specific terms of peace involving Poland and the Balkans and the division of Austria—what Balfour called “dividing up the bearskin before the bear was killed.” House was delighted because the topics discussed were “exactly the same as Balfour and I had covered.” He was also pleased because earlier Balfour had “arranged to keep in constant communication through Wiseman.”¹²

With his French visitors, Wilson talked about immediate problems. Viviani agreed with him that the most pressing need was to defeat the submarines by adopting new defensive measures and building more ships. Wilson insisted that the Allies must make their needs known, and he stuck by his vision of a peace settlement, explaining that “annihilation of a nation” only bred desire for revenge. In a separate meeting with Marshal Joffre and an interpreter, Wilson learned how much the French wanted American troops—and the sooner, the better—for a big morale boost. The men talked in detail about how to transport and deploy large numbers of American soldiers.¹³ Wilson was getting a better idea of what waging this war would require.

In keeping with his established practice as president, he delegated much of the war effort while setting policies and directions. Baker took care of raising and training the army. No cabinet member enjoyed greater confidence and respect from Wilson than Baker, whom Wilson would stand by steadfastly. The war secretary set about immediately implementing the draft, which the administration called Selective Service. Baker and the man he picked to run this new system, Enoch Crowder, the army’s provost marshal general, strove to overcome bad memories of the Civil War draft. Crowder kept military officers out of the actual process of selecting draftees and set up a network of more than 4,000 boards composed of local civilians. Baker also enlisted mayors, governors, and civic leaders to support the kickoff of the draft on June 5, when all eligible young men were required to register. Wilson lent his voice to the occasion with a brief speech, in which he asserted that the spirit of obligation ran even deeper than the spirit of voluntarism.

Between the dash of presidential admonition and the elaborate public relations campaign, registration day went off smoothly. Ten million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty reported to their local draft board, and everyone from Baker on down felt relieved. Two weeks later, a blindfolded secretary of war drew from a big glass bowl capsules containing numbers randomly assigned to groups of registrants. During the summer, local boards used those numbers to call up the first 687,000 draftees, who reported to hastily built training camps in September. At the outset, problems arose from exemptions granted to farmers and workers in industries deemed critical to the war effort. One such well-publicized exemption went to the heavyweight-boxing champion Jack Dempsey, who took a job in a shipyard. In the South, all-white local boards tended to call up disproportionate numbers of African Americans. Likewise, neither the Selective Service System nor local boards showed much sensitivity toward conscientious objectors, who were usually jailed, often under brutal conditions. Despite those shortcomings, the draft operated with unforeseen smoothness and set a good tone for mobilization.¹⁴

This way of raising an army posed the thorny issue of how to deal with criticism and dissent. Free speech now took on an immediately critical dimension: by exhorting young men to evade the draft, opponents of the war could potentially cripple a central element of mobilization. Even without the draft, the need to whip up popular fervor behind the war—to get people to buy bonds, take essential jobs, work harder, forgo pleasures and luxuries—made dissent look dangerous. Yet an administration-sponsored bill to control speech and publications encountered stiff opposition on and off Capitol Hill. The provisions of the bill calling for press censorship, which included a section that would deny the use of the mails to publications deemed disloyal, almost failed to pass in the House. Burleson roved through the corridors of the Capitol lobbying to keep censorship provisions alive, but the Senate struck out everything except the denial of the mails. Wilson tried to keep the House-passed provisions in the final bill, but Congress rejected his pleas, and the Espionage Act he signed on June 15 did not include censorship of the press.

Even without overt censorship, this law hobbled dissent and criticism in print. Burleson exercised with a heavy hand his newly acquired power to deny the mails to publications. Socialist journals came under special attack because the party’s majority remained opposed to intervention; its perennial presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, came out of retirement to give speeches against the war. In July, Burleson suspended second-class postage rates, which were indispensable to publications that reached beyond a local readership, for socialist and radical publications, including the voice of cultural bohemianism in New York’s Greenwich Village, The Masses. Nonsocialist publications likewise fell under the ax, including Watson’s Magazine, a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic magazine edited by Georgia’s veteran demagogue and Wilson vilifier, Tom Watson. The ban also extended to books, including ones by Thorstein Veblen and former representative Charles Lindbergh, an anti-interventionist Republican progressive from Minnesota and father of the future aviator. The suspension of these journals prompted a protest directly to the president from The Masses editor Max Eastman, joined by Amos Pinchot and the journalist John Reed.¹⁵

Forwarding their protest to Burleson, Wilson observed, “These are very sincere men and I should like to please them.” He also instructed Tumulty to tell Pinchot that he was looking into the matter. In fact, he did nothing and accepted the postmaster general’s assurances that he was acting in a careful way. In response to Eastman’s renewed protests, Wilson confessed that regarding what could be said in wartime, “the line is manifestly exceedingly hard to draw and I cannot say that I have any confidence that I know how to draw it.” In October, Burleson extended his bans to the socialist newspapers The Milwaukee Leader, The New York Call, and The Jewish Daily Forward. This move ignited a fresh round of protests, which now came also from the pro-war socialist minority, mainstream newspapers, and The New Republic editors Croly and Lippmann. House, who saw Croly and Lippmann regularly, advised Wilson, “[M]ore harm may easily be done by repression. Between the two courses, it is better to err on the side of leniency.”¹⁶ He also advised sidelining Burleson and taking charge himself. Wilson did tell Burleson he disagreed with the suspension of The Milwaukee Leader, but he did not reverse the action or rein the postmaster in.

The furor died down for a while after those newspaper and magazine suspensions, but Wilson had clearly shown that he would not always protect civil liberties in wartime. He acquiesced in two other big violations of cherished freedoms—violence against and repression of ethnic minorities and radicals. In an ironic twist, intervention in World War I temporarily lifted the burden of anti-immigrant prejudice from the shoulders of southern and eastern Europeans, most of whose homelands were either fighting on the Allied side or trying to break free from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead, that era’s model minority, the German Americans, became objects of derision, discrimination, and violence. There were vigilante actions against them and at least one lynching in the Midwest. Municipalities and one state, Nebraska, enacted measures forbidding the teaching of German, and the German-language press came under suspicion and lost readers. There were reports of burning books by German authors, while orchestras fired German-born musicians and banned works by such “German” composers as Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. Despite many entreaties, Wilson declined to speak out against these abuses.¹⁷

He said nothing about actions against radicals either, and he actively condoned some of those actions. The Espionage Act empowered the Justice Department to prosecute anyone who advocated “treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.” Unlike his fellow Texan Burleson, Attorney General Gregory did not rush to wield his new power against anti-war speakers, but his restraint stemmed from preoccupation with a special perceived source of trouble—the radical Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies. The IWW was mounting union organizing drives among loggers, copper miners, and migratory farmworkers—all considered critical to mobilization. In the West, enemies of the IWW took the law into their own hands in violent incidents that summer. The biggest occurred at the middle of July in Bisbee, Arizona, where a posse rounded up more than 1,000 Wobblies who worked in the copper mines, herded them into cattle cars, and dumped them in the middle of the desert without food, water, or shelter. Then, at the beginning of August, masked men in Butte, Montana, snatched Frank Little, a disabled IWW organizer, from his hotel room, tortured him, and hanged him from a railroad trestle.¹⁸

Wilson received reports of these and other incidents from sources both hostile and sympathetic to the Wobblies. The union’s president, William D. “Big Bill” Haywood, sent telegrams demanding redress and threatening strikes. After a cabinet meeting in July, Daniels noted that the president “was indignant, but said what Haywood desires is to be a martyr.” Not making martyrs out of dissidents would remain a guiding principle for Wilson, but he deferred to Gregory, who had already instructed his subordinates to gather material against the IWW. On Gregory’s recommendation, Wilson now appointed a special investigating committee to examine evidence relating to the union. Early in September, agents of the department’s Bureau of Investigation, with the cooperation of local police, raided IWW offices in thirty-three cities, seizing files and records—more than five tons of material. At the end of September, the department secured indictments in Chicago against 166 IWW leaders, including Haywood, while other indictments came down in California, Kansas, and Nebraska. The government was moving to crush the Wobblies.¹⁹

Worse violations of civil liberties were to come, and Wilson’s actions and inaction were disturbing. Sometimes he suffered from a defect inherent in his willingness to delegate, as he gave great latitude to lieutenants whom he might have restrained. With Burleson, he was deferring to a coarse-grained political operator never known for intellectual discrimination. Gregory seemed different; he was an able attorney and staunch progressive, but like most lawyers of that era, he knew and cared little about civil liberties. Moreover, he and his U.S. attorneys found themselves constantly bombarded by state and local leaders who demanded action against dangerous radicals in their midst—in this case, the IWW. Still, freedom of speech and opinion was something Wilson seemed to care about deeply, as he had shown when he told Frank Cobb he was afraid of “ruthless brutality” and when he told J. H. Whitehouse that the government must resist “mob passion.”

Why, then, did Wilson do what he did to civil liberties? The best answer seems to lie in his conflicted attitude toward “passion.” He condemned passion in many contexts and tried to overcome it, but he knew that he had to draw on it to take action. This attitude seems to have sprung from a fundamental view of himself. The journalist Lincoln Steffens later recalled that Wilson once said to him, “An intellectual—such as you and I—an intellectual is inexecutive. In an executive job we are dangerous, unless we are aware of our limitations and take measures to stop our everlasting disposition to think, to listen to—not act.” Wilson needed, Steffens remembered him saying, “when my mind felt like deciding, to shut it up and act. My decision might be right, it might be wrong. No matter, I would take a chance and do—something.” Yet with respect to civil liberties, his problem seemed to be less taking action himself and more remaining passive in the face of actions by others. Outwardly, Wilson affected to be oblivious to the ways his administration was dealing with dissent. In one of his few statements on the subject, in his State of the Union speech in December 1917, he asserted, “I hear the voices of dissent—who does not? I hear the criticism and the clamour of the noisily thoughtless and troublesome. … But I know that none of these speaks for the nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut their uneasy hour and be forgotten.”²⁰ It was a lovely rationalization, but it would not hold up for long.

By the time the president gave that speech, the United States had been a belligerent for nine months, and the fortunes of war were decidedly mixed. Troops for the Western Front remained the most pressing need. More than three years of bloody stalemate in the trenches had bled the French armies nearly dry, and the British forces were not in much better shape. On the war’s other fronts, the Allies were winning only in what was then called the Near East, where the British were pushing the Turks out of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. By contrast, the Italians suffered a rout at Caporetto in October and only barely succeeded in securing a new front along the Piave River. In Russia, the long-running collapse of the Eastern Front had taken a potential turn for the worse when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government and pledged to withdraw from the war. More than ever, the Western Front was where the war would be won or lost. George M. Cohan’s wildly popular new song contained a refrain that promised “the Yanks are coming”—but how soon, and how many?

Until troops could be trained, armed, and transported to France, the United States could not make much difference in the ground war, but there was still a military role to play. Marshal Joffre had impressed upon Wilson what a morale boost it would be to have an American division fighting alongside his armies. Unfortunately, that first division did not go to the front until October, when it was assigned to a quiet sector for further training. In the meantime, the president and the War Department agreed to send over a commander of future forces at once. At the beginning of May, in consultation with the president, Secretary Baker tapped Major General John J. Pershing to lead what would be called the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). As commander of the Punitive Expedition in Mexico, Pershing had the most recent field experience of any American general. Moreover, unlike the other possible choice, Roosevelt’s close friend Leonard Wood, Pershing had refrained from publicly criticizing Wilson’s preparedness policies and restraint in Mexico. He also possessed excellent political connections; his recently deceased wife was the daughter of a senior Republican senator, Francis Warren of Wyoming, former chairman of the Military Affairs Committee.²¹

Pershing saw Wilson for the first and only time during the war on May 24, when Baker took him to the White House, where the president told the general he would have complete freedom in conducting operations. Wilson also reviewed Baker’s final orders to the AEF commander on May 26, the day before he left for France. Pershing was to work with the Allies but always to remember that he was leading a separate and distinct force, “the identity of which must be preserved.” Somewhat contradictorily, Pershing was told that until he had sufficient troops to operate independently, he should “cooperate as a component of whatever army you may be assigned to by the French government.” Pershing arrived in France at the middle of June. Parades and lavish ceremonies in Paris and an emotional event at which the AEF commander kissed Napoleon’s sword supplied the hoped-for morale boost. Contrary to later legend, however, it was not the laconic general but one of his aides who proclaimed, “Lafayette, we are here!”²²

Such stirring public gestures notwithstanding, the underlying conflict between an independent force and inter-Allied cooperation quickly surfaced. Ramrod straight in posture and stubborn in personality, Pershing was determined not to allow his men to be amalgamated with British or French forces. Allied commanders began clamoring for company or regimental units of American soldiers, nicknamed doughboys, to replenish their own desperately thin lines, but Pershing gathered his green troops behind the lines for further training. He had a legitimate concern, but he was really putting together a separate army under his sole command. As more doughboys arrived, pressures for amalgamation grew, and at the end of the year Lloyd George interceded with Wilson through House and Wiseman. In response, Wilson had Baker cable Pershing: “We do not desire any loss of identity of our forces but regard that as secondary to the meeting of any critical situation by the most helpful possible use of the troops at your command.” Yet Wilson also told Pershing that he had “full authority to use the forces at your command as you deem wise.”²³ This was one of Wilson’s few interventions in the military operations and the closest he came to communicating directly with Pershing in 1917. Despite diplomatic nods toward the British and French, he was giving his commander everything he wanted.

Any question of how American forces might be used would be moot if ships were not able to transport them across the Atlantic and deliver vital foodstuffs, machines, and munitions to the British and French. The critical elements in this situation were submarines, which had to be combated, and merchant vessels, which had to be commandeered and built. The naval war consisted mainly of submarine attacks and efforts to defend against those attacks. Between March and August 1917, German submarines sank more than 500,000 tons of Allied shipping each month and 921,211 tons in May alone. At that rate, Britain would not be able to stay in the war. Yet as Wilson and his advisers learned when the delegations visited in April, the British were loath to face up to their peril. Nor did their naval leaders seem eager to adopt what promised to be an effective defense—the convoy system, under which destroyers would escort groups of merchant ships. Admiral Sims, who reached London four days after the declaration of war, urged sending all available destroyers immediately, and by June twenty-four American destroyers were operating in British waters.

This move struck Wilson as only a start. He took much greater personal interest in naval affairs than army affairs, and he did not hesitate to deal directly with his commander on the scene. British reluctance to adopt the convoy system prompted him, with Daniels’s concurrence, to cable Sims early in July to get the admiral’s view of the matter. Sims replied with a review of Britain’s naval situation and a recommendation to press the British harder to cooperate in convoy duties. By September, the rate of losses dropped to 300,000 tons, in part because the navy had taken over convoy duties for ships carrying doughboys to France. These improvements gratified Wilson but did not completely satisfy him. In August, he made one of his few trips out of Washington, to visit the Atlantic fleet before it sailed for European waters. Speaking off the record aboard the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, he again disparaged British “prudence” and reluctance to try new things: “I should like to see something unusual happen, something that was never done before.”²⁴

Foiling the submarines solved only half the problem of getting soldiers and supplies to the war. The other half consisted of coming up with enough ships to carry them. During the preceding half century, the once-proud American merchant marine had withered away, the victim of devastation wrought by Confederate raiders during the Civil War and the shift of the economy inward under the impact of the Industrial Revolution. British ships had been carrying most of the massive trade with the Allies since 1914, but Wilson had new tools at hand to try to remedy the situation. The Shipping Act passed in 1916 as part of the second installment of the New Freedom empowered the president to establish the U.S. Shipping Board, which could purchase ships, including interned German vessels, and set up shipyards. The shipbuilding program produced spectacular results, spending $270 million to establish 341 new yards that employed nearly 400,000 workers and launched nearly 100 ships a day after the middle of 1918.²⁵

Behind those accomplishments, however, lay conflict and tardiness. A turf battle broke out between William Denman, a businessman and Democratic campaign contributor who was chairman of the Shipping Board, and General George Washington Goethals, the legendary builder of the Panama Canal, who was head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the board’s operating subsidiary. This pair squabbled about nearly everything, and in July the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee told Wilson that the “fight between Denman and Goethals is disgusting the Senate, and the House and every sensitive man in the United States.”²⁶ Wilson pulled off a graceful end to this scrap by getting both men to resign quietly. As the new chairman of the Shipping Board, he named Edward N. Hurley, a Chicago businessman and Democratic activist who had no background in shipping but soon brought discipline and harmony to the board. Later, to head the Emergency Fleet Corporation, he appointed the steel tycoon Charles M. Schwab, who supplied the boldness that Wilson valued. Unfortunately, Hurley’s and Schwab’s efficiency would come too late to make much difference to the outcome of the war. Most of the doughboys would cross the ocean in commandeered private vessels or Allied ships. America’s much-ballyhooed “bridge of ships” would serve mainly to bring the doughboys home in 1919.

Overseas shipping was just one transportation problem the Wilson administration faced. Despite the recent proliferation of cars and trucks, the great majority of people and goods in 1917 still moved by rail. Earlier conflicts with railroad management did not stop Wilson from seeking management’s voluntary cooperation. In July, a new supervisory agency, the Railroads’ War Board, issued an order to expedite shipments by tagging critical items. The order backfired when freight agents tagged everything bound for eastern ports and backed-up freight cars clogged lines as far west as Pittsburgh and Buffalo. In addition, railroads would not allow other lines’ engines to operate on their tracks, and most of them squirreled away their freight cars. The tagging mess eventually got straightened out, but delays and bickering grew worse in the fall as industrial production picked up. The railroads demanded rate increases, which the ICC refused to grant, and the unions once more threatened to go out on strike.²⁷

The president’s closest advisers, particularly McAdoo, pressed him to use his authority under the Adamson Act to take over the railroads. Tumulty likewise lobbied for seizing control of the lines and appointing McAdoo to run them. Wilson resisted outright government ownership, which many progressives had long wanted, but on December 26 he issued a proclamation assuming control of the railroads as a wartime measure. Speaking to a joint session of Congress a week later, he explained that he was taking this action “only because there were some things which the government can do and private management cannot.”²⁸ Soft-pedal this action as Wilson might, there was no disguising its boldness. This was one of the farthest-reaching assertions of government power in economic affairs in American history. Nothing else in the war at home would go this far, but only because less coercive methods appeared to work elsewhere.

Food also posed a pressing need, for both the troops and the Allies. A bill to deal with food and fuel production and distribution introduced a month into the war stirred up heavy resistance on Capitol Hill. Conservatives in both houses bridled at the extension of presidential power and government interference in the economy. In the Senate, John W. Weeks of Massachusetts succeeded in attaching an amendment to set up a “Joint Committee on Expenditures in the Conduct of the War.” This move brought a sharp rejoinder from Wilson. In a public letter to Congressman Asbury Lever of South Carolina, who was chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and the House-Senate conference committee on the bill, he argued that Weeks’s proposal would “render my work of conducting the war practically impossible” by usurping functions that belonged to the executive branch. In a barb aimed at Republican critics, he cited “a very ominous precedent in our history” for such interference—namely, the joint congressional committee during the Civil War that “rendered Mr. Lincoln’s task all but impossible.” Wilson’s argument and lobbying succeeded in getting the conference committee to drop the disputed provision, and as finally passed, this law, which came to be called the Lever Act, gave him the powers he had requested.²⁹

The food-control measure was the brainchild of the man whom Wilson had already chosen as food administrator—Herbert Hoover. The now forty-three-year-old mining engineer and international businessman had earned a heroic reputation since 1914 as head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the multinational group that was feeding the civilian population of German-occupied Belgium, a task that had involved him in diplomacy as much as food delivery. Hoover brought enormous intelligence and energy to his new job, together with a distinctive approach. No friend of bureaucracy, he kept his agency as small as possible while enlisting several thousand volunteers. He also tried to avoid rationing by promoting voluntary restraint in consumption. Because wheat was a critical commodity, the Food Administration promoted “wheatless days.” To conserve meat and poultry for military consumption and overseas shipment, it likewise promoted “meatless days.” With stories about Hoover appearing regularly in newspapers and magazines, he became what one observer called “the benevolent bogey of the nation.” People were supposed to eat foods in specified categories sparingly and thereby “Hooverize” their plates; parents told children they could not have a spoonful of sugar on their cereal “because Mr. Hoover would not like it.” One of his own agency’s slogans even called him “Herbert Hoover, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”³⁰

Yet Hoover much preferred to use carrots than sticks, real or implied, in his crusade to get Americans to eat less and produce more. His agency rivaled Creel’s CPI in rousing popular sentiment. Housewives, grocers, and restaurateurs, as well as the public in general, became targets for relentless pep talks, posters, and advertisements—with such messages as “Food is sacred. To waste is sinful;” “Wheatless days in America make sleepless nights in Germany;” and “Save beans by all means.” Twenty million people signed a pledge to follow Food Administration guidelines in conserving food; in return, they received buttons to wear and stickers to put in their windows. The Food Administration also exhorted people to plant vegetable gardens for home consumption and to raise sheep and knit scarves and mittens for the troops. Edith Wilson set an example by signing the pledge and displaying her sticker in a White House window, planting a “war garden” on the grounds, and, along with her stepdaughters, knitting for the troops. Her husband made a similar gesture by bringing in a flock of much-photographed sheep to graze on the South Lawn. Wilson liked Hoover’s go-getting, boosterish methods, and he appreciated the administrator’s feats of raising wheat production by nearly half—despite a harsh winter and loss of farmers to the armed forces—and curbing price speculation by setting up a government corporation that bought the entire crop. No other American would come out of World War I with a more stellar public reputation than Hoover.³¹

The Lever Act addressed another critical requirement for the war effort: fuel. That meant coal, which railroads, most ships, offices, homes, and factories still relied on for power. Wilson set up a Fuel Administration and appointed as its head his friend from the Princeton faculty and now president of Williams College, Harry Garfield. Before the fuel administrator took his new post, however, an owner-led Committee on Coal Production forged agreements to stabilize prices and boost production. Suspecting machinations by a “coal trust,” Garfield scrapped those agreements and pushed prices down. By the year’s end, coal shortages plagued the eastern part of the country, worsened by the coldest winter in three decades. People stole coal, and local authorities would stop coal trains and distribute their cargoes to residents. In January 1918, Garfield tried to meet the crisis by ordering all factories east of the Mississippi to shut down for four days, and he called for “heatless Mondays,” which came to be dubbed “Garfield days.” The coal shortage and tie-ups in deliveries stirred up a storm of protest and on Capitol Hill roused critics of the administration, who demanded investigations and offered new measures to trim Wilson’s authority. The protests would pass, and the fuel crisis would subside, but Garfield, who earned the scornful epithet “the professor,” did not come out of the war with much of a public reputation.³²

Efforts to manage industrial production did not fare well during the summer and fall of 1917 either. The War Industries Board, a shell agency, suffered from weak and divided authority. For that and other reasons, business committees set up under the WIB did little to bring order to the production and distribution of manufactured goods. Unlike the Food and Fuel Administrations, the board had no price-fixing powers and could not enter into contracts—a prerogative that the military and naval procurement bureaus jealously guarded. Confusion reigned, and the board’s first and second chairmen quit after a few months in exhaustion and frustration. The WIB would not begin to function with a semblance of effectiveness until Wilson made Baruch its chairman at the beginning of March 1918.³³

Waging war also affected major social problems at home, particularly in race relations. The migration of African Americans out of the South to northern cities had been growing, partly in response to the rising demand for workers in war-related industries. These newcomers to the North usually found hostility, discrimination, and, increasingly, violence. At the beginning of July, a “race riot”—in reality, a white rampage—raged for a day in East St. Louis, Illinois, leaving thirty-nine blacks and nine whites dead and black neighborhoods burned out. In response to pleas for federal action, Wilson asked Attorney General Gregory, “Do you think we could exercise any jurisdiction in this tragical matter? I am very anxious to have any instrumentality of the Government employed that could … effectively … check these disgraceful outrages.” For once, he seemed to be reacting compassionately in the face of racial injustice.³⁴

Wilson did not follow that impulse, however. Gregory advised that no federal action was warranted, although he counseled the president against saying so. Tumulty warned him nevertheless that “[u]ntil some statement is issued by you deprecating these terrible things, I am afraid the pressure will grow greater and greater.” The president did not make a statement, but on August 14 he met with four black leaders and allowed them to tell the press that he deplored the violence, was seeking to punish offenders, and would seek to prevent future outbreaks. That tepid response did nothing to quell the violence. On August 23, shooting broke out in Houston, Texas, between black troops and a white mob; fifteen whites and three blacks died before white troops and local police restored order. The next day, Daniels noted some of Wilson’s remarks at a cabinet meeting: “Race prejudice. Fight in Houston, Texas. Negro in uniform wants the whole sidewalk.” The army summarily hanged thirteen black soldiers and sentenced forty-one to life in prison, while later courts-martial sentenced sixteen more to death.³⁵

The incident in Houston highlighted the touchy issue of African Americans in the military. The navy had only 5,000 blacks serving during the war, and the marines had none. The army, however, had 10,000 black enlisted men and some officers in April 1917, and despite misgivings and protests from some white southern politicians, the War Department planned to induct many more. Though born and raised in West Virginia, Newton Baker differed from other cabinet members in his relaxed attitude toward race, and his assistant secretary who oversaw race relations, Frederick Keppel, held liberal views. That was not the case among the army’s officers, however, many of whom assumed that black inductees would be put only in labor battalions—as many were—but black leaders moved to forestall such plans. In May, the NAACP called for full black support of, and full black participation in, the war. In the organization’s journal, The Crisis, W. E. B. DuBois declared, “If this is OUR country, then this is OUR war.” In October, after the first African American draftees were called up, Baker appointed a black special assistant, Emmett J. Scott, an administrator at the Tuskegee Institute. Wilson had little to do with these initiatives, and he condoned a move by the army in the opposite direction when it denied a command to the highest-ranking black officer, Colonel Charles Young, a West Point graduate, by imposing a highly suspect medical retirement on him.³⁶

Four hundred thousand African Americans would see army service during the war, with a quarter of them going overseas. They served in a single all-black division and other segregated units, all commanded by white officers. Black inductees received training in separate areas of larger camps. The only all-black training facility was an officers’ school outside Des Moines, Iowa, which turned out more than 600 graduates at junior ranks. The school lasted only a few months because the military high command decided against black units having black officers—a decision that had adverse consequences. Although some white officers commanding black units acted with fairness and sometimes with goodwill, many of them resented their postings as second-class duty and looked down on their men through the distortions of racist stereotypes. To make matters worse, many black soldiers trained at camps in the South, where segregation prevailed on the base as well as off. Their separate facilities were anything but equal, and as one investigator observed, “Where there was a shortage they were the ones to suffer.” Labor battalions suffered most. At one camp in Virginia, soldiers spent the harsh winter of 1917–18 sleeping in tents, without blankets, fresh clothes, bathing facilities, or medical attention. A large number of them died.³⁷

As the NAACP’s activity indicates, African Americans played an active role in trying to shape their part in the war. In 1917, they protested against both the “race riots” and the punishment meted out to the soldiers in Houston. After the East St. Louis riot, 1,500 black men, women, and children marched in New York in what they called the Negro Silent Protest Parade, and the marchers petitioned Congress and the president. After the sentencing of the soldiers in Houston, the NAACP gathered 12,000 signatures on a petition requesting investigation and review and sent a delegation to read the petition to the president at the White House on February 19, 1918. The man who read the petition was James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP’s executive secretary. Wilson asked his visitors questions and told them a couple of stories about his youth in the South. “When I came out,” Johnson later wrote, “it was with my hostility toward Mr. Wilson greatly shaken; however, I could not rid myself of the conviction that at bottom there was something hypocritical about him.”³⁸

Wilson would later commute the sentences of some of the men condemned in the Houston riot, and he would spark some hope by the way he addressed an equally ominous cloud on the racial horizon—an epidemic of lynchings. According to reports by the NAACP, nearly 100 black people were lynched in 1917 and 1918, and a number of prominent individuals, black and white, wrote to implore the president to speak out against the crime. The most potent plea came from one of Wilson’s few black acquaintances, Robert R. Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor as principal of the Tuskegee Institute. On June 15, 1918, Moton told the president that on recent travels in the South he had found “more genuine restlessness, and perhaps dissatisfaction on the part of colored people than I have ever before known.” Lynching was the cause of those attitudes, and Moton urged “a strong word, definitely from you” against it. In reply, Wilson said, “I have been seeking an opportunity to do what you suggest and if I do not find it soon, I will do it without an opportunity.”³⁹

On July 26, the president issued a statement “on a subject which so vitally affects the honor of the Nation and the very character and integrity of our institutions.” He decried the “mob spirit” of lynching as a blow against liberty and justice: “I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of rights than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior.” He urged governors and all law-enforcement officers to stamp out “this disgraceful evil.”⁴⁰ Wilson’s eloquence now tended to be more tinged with passion than his pre-war speaking, and this statement anticipated an argument later generations would make—that racial injustice sullied America’s image abroad and efforts to lead the world.

His denunciation of lynching gave a hint of what a powerful civil rights president he might have been if he had put his heart and mind into the cause. But they were not there. His reluctance to enter the war for fear of further depleting the white race disclosed what really moved him. His muttering about black soldiers’ wanting “the whole sidewalk” in Houston revealed how readily he accepted the customary racial inequalities and indignities of the time. His friendly meeting with the NAACP leaders shows he had learned from the clash with William Monroe Trotter and the Birth of a Nation fiasco—but only that he must maintain his politeness and self-control. His relations with Robert Moton showed that he could work with a moderate black leader, although he had ignored entreaties to make a public statement at the time of Booker T. Washington’s death, three years earlier. Wilson had put any ethnic and religious prejudices he ever felt far behind him, and he would soon work easily and sympathetically with nonwhite leaders from other parts of the world. Why, then, did the glaring injustice of racial prejudice on his own doorstep and in his own household not engage his mind and spirit?

Like his acquiescence in wartime repression of civil liberties, this failure of moral conscience remains puzzling. He did leave clues about why did he not take action against racism. When James Weldon Johnson—who was a poet and a black man who read white attitudes with great sensitivity—called the president a hypocrite, he put his finger on something important. Wilson’s denunciation of lynching deplored the passion, disorder, and sullied international image of white Americans rather than injury, horror, and death of black Americans. That viewpoint was consistent with his earlier depiction of slavery as an economic curse, but not necessarily a moral one, on the South, and it put him in line with other southern critics of slavery, going back to Jefferson, who deplored the peculiar institution’s impact on masters and other whites but remained indifferent to the plight of the enslaved.

Wilson’s southern birth and upbringing had shaped his approach to race, but not in a simple way. Violence, lynching, and virulent racism, particularly the demagoguery of such firebrands as Vardaman and Watson, grieved him, and he would soon mount a drive to purge southern politics of retrograde actors and influences. His impatience with agitation over race from any quarter made him resemble northern whites of that time more than fellow southerners, but he had grown up despising abolitionists and regarding Reconstruction as an injustice. Further, his southern Presbyterian upbringing made him oppose mixing religion in politics and thereby separated him from the small number of white Christians of that era who came to see racism as a sin. Ironically, his learned, sophisticated Protestantism, which otherwise influenced him profoundly for the better, may have kept him from making the leap of faith of evangelicals who recognized African Americans as fellow children of God. This was perhaps Woodrow Wilson’s greatest tragedy: the North Star by which he steered on his life’s spiritual and intellectual journey may have prevented him from reaching his full stature as a moral leader and rendering still finer service to his nation and the world.⁴¹

By the time he made his statement about lynching, Wilson was addressing another issue that he had come to see as part of the war effort—woman suffrage. The two wings of the movement dealt with him in starkly contrasting ways. The militant Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (NWP) continued to berate him for refusing to endorse a constitutional amendment. The party’s picketers outside the White House displayed banners labeling him “Kaiser Wilson”—a hypocrite who professed to promote freedom abroad while not extending it to women at home—and began chaining themselves to the White House fence and disrupting traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. During the summer of 1917, more than 200 women were arrested, and 97 went to jail. The tense situation exploded on July 14, when District of Columbia policemen arrested sixteen prominent members of the NWP, including the wife of a New Jersey Progressive leader who, with her husband, had recently been a dinner guest at the White House, and the sister-in-law of former Secretary of War Henry Stimson. After being held a few days in jail, these women received presidential pardons, which they indignantly refused.⁴²

Wilson did not react to this affair the way he did to some other repressions of dissent. On July 19, he summoned to the White House Louis Brownlow, the D.C. commissioner who oversaw the police. “Mr. Wilson was indignant,” Brownlow later recalled. “He told me that we had made a fearful blunder.” He wanted the women pardoned and released, but the attorney general had ruled that pardons could not take effect unless accepted. The collector of the Port of New York and a strong suffrage advocate, Wilson’s friend Dudley Field Malone, was able to change the prisoners’ minds. For Wilson, the main consequence of the July 14 arrests was a painful break with Malone. In September, after a face-to-face argument over whether the president should push Congress to pass a suffrage amendment, Malone resigned and accused Wilson of showing bad faith toward the nation’s women. “I know of nothing that has gone more to the quick with me or that seemed more tragical than Dudley’s conduct,” Wilson told House. “I was stricken by it as I have been by few things in my life.” He thought “passion has run away with him,” and he quoted Kipling’s line about keeping your head when everyone else is losing his. “We must not let the madness touch us. It is the sort of strength I pray for all the time.”⁴³

Wilson kept his head on the suffrage issue, with help from leaders of the other, more moderate, wing of the movement. Carrie Chapman Catt and Helen Gardener of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) stayed on the president’s good side by distancing themselves from the NWP and conspicuously enlisting themselves and their organization behind the war effort. Catt also artfully suggested to Wilson in May that suffrage might be viewed “possibly as a war measure”—as a way to symbolize the spread of democracy and recognize women’s support of the war. Gardener followed up by proposing that the president might inform the chairman of the House Rules Committee that he favored setting up a special committee on suffrage. These women knew the right approach to use with Wilson. He obliged them by telling the chairman, “I am writing this line to say that I would heartily approve. I think it would be a very wise act of public policy and also an act of fairness to the best women who are engaged in the cause of woman suffrage.” The Rules Committee complied, and a suffrage committee was established.⁴⁴

During the rest of 1917, Wilson declined to come out for an amendment, but Catt kept up her campaign of support and flattery and solicited tactical advice from him about suffrage campaigns in the states. In October, he publicly endorsed the effort in New York, linking woman suffrage to the international “struggle between two ideals of government.” Those words undoubtedly helped, but the tide was already running strongly in favor of the cause. In November, suffrage prevailed on referenda in New York and Rhode Island—the first states in the Northeast to come over—as well as in North Dakota, Nebraska, and Arkansas—the first southern state. On Capitol Hill, the House scheduled a vote on an amendment in January 1918. The head of the Women’s Bureau of the Democratic National Committee, Elizabeth Bass, appealed to Wilson to come out in support of the amendment. She argued that his doing so would help the party in upcoming elections and “would enthrone you forever in the hearts of the women of America as the second Great Emancipator.”⁴⁵

Such flattery aside, Wilson now came around to support the suffrage amendment. On January 9, the day before the House voted, he met with Democrats on the suffrage committee and allowed them to release a statement that the president “very frankly and earnestly advised us to vote for the amendment as an act of right and justice to the women of the country and the world.”⁴⁶ As one of the Democrats recalled two weeks later, the president told them that passing the amendment would send the right message to the world and would acknowledge women’s service to the nation. That presidential endorsement, together with the results of the state referenda, did the trick. On January 10, 1918, the amendment squeaked through by a vote of 274 to 136, just two more than the required two-thirds. It was the first time that a house of Congress had endorsed woman suffrage.

The other half of the battle on Capitol Hill proved harder to win. During the spring and summer of 1918, Wilson actively lobbied senators on behalf of the amendment. He wrote to and met with southern Democrats who persisted in opposing suffrage, and he urged the governor of Kentucky to appoint a pro-suffrage successor to replace a Democratic senator who had died. At the middle of June he presented Catt and a delegation from NAWSA with a public letter that saluted women’s support of the war and declared that the Senate should acknowledge the debt. As a vote neared at the end of September, Catt wrote to him “in sheer desperation” because the amendment appeared to be two votes short of the necessary two thirds, and she begged him to issue another public appeal. McAdoo also took the drastic step of going to the White House on September 29, knowing, as he later recalled, “that the President did not like to discuss, or consider any public business on Sunday.” He urged Wilson to appear in person before the Senate the next day, arguing that even if the amendment fell short, such an appeal would help elect pro-suffrage candidates in November and thereby assure passage in the next Congress. Wilson listened noncommittally, but later that afternoon Edith Wilson telephoned McAdoo to say that he was working on a speech.⁴⁷

Wilson spoke to the Senate on September 30, 1918. He had addressed this chamber only once before, with the “peace without victory” address in January 1917, and once more he gave the senators little warning. This time, however, he brought with him the entire cabinet, except Lansing, who opposed suffrage. He begged the senators’ pardon for his unusual move, pleading the “unusual circumstances of a world war in which we stand and are judged in the view of our own people and our own consciences but also in the view of all the nations and peoples. … We have made partners of women in this war, shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” He closed by asking the senators to lighten his burden in waging war and “place in my hands instruments, spiritual instruments, which I do not now possess and sorely need, and which I have daily to apologise for not being able to employ.”⁴⁸

This time, his lobbying and eloquence failed to carry the day. On October 1, the suffrage amendment fell short of passage by the predicted two votes. Democrats split, twenty-six in favor and twenty-one against—all but three from southern or border states—while twenty-seven Republicans voted in favor and only ten against. Wilson and the suffragists stuck to their guns. In the 1918 elections, NAWSA targeted four anti-suffrage senators for defeat and succeeded in helping to knock off two of them, including Weeks of Massachusetts. Wilson renewed his plea for the amendment in his State of the Union address in December and lobbied senators, but on February 10, 1919, they again failed to pass the amendment. The president continued to lobby senators, even meeting with a newly elected Democrat during the peace conference in Paris. On May 20, he cabled a message about suffrage to Congress, which made the amendment its first order of business. The House passed it on the same day as his message was conveyed, 304 to 89, and the Senate followed suit on June 4 by a vote of 56 to 25.

Wilson was not able to help much during the drive for ratification. After he returned from the peace conference in July, the fight to secure Senate approval of the Treaty of Versailles and membership in the League of Nations consumed nearly all his time and energy, until he suffered a stroke at the beginning of October. Later, in his semi-invalid condition, he did send messages, drafted by Tumulty, to state legislatures urging ratification. By mid-1920, the amendment stood just one state short of the thirty-six required for ratification. At Catt’s request, he telegraphed the governor of Tennessee, asking him to call a special session of the legislature to consider the amendment. The governor complied, and on August 18 Tennessee narrowly approved the amendment, thereby enabling women to vote nationwide for the first time in the 1920 elections. American women, starting with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, deserved the lion’s share of credit for this final, long-belated achievement of nationwide woman suffrage, but among men Woodrow Wilson deserved more approbation than anyone else.⁴⁹

Woman suffrage became the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution because in December 1917 Congress had already passed, and in January 1919 the states had ratified, the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States. Prohibition had been gathering strength for several years, and after the country entered the war, supporters used arguments for conserving grain and appeals to crusading idealism and sacrifice to push their cause over the top. Wilson had never backed prohibition, and since his run-ins with “dry” groups in 1912 he had studiously avoided saying anything about the issue. His only real involvement came at the end of the legislative process. In October 1919, just three weeks after suffering the stroke, he vetoed the Volstead Act, the law enforcing prohibition. Tumulty wrote the message, almost certainly with Edith Wilson’s consent, and Secretary of Agriculture Houston revised it. Given Wilson’s physical weakness and almost total isolation during the first month after the stroke, it is doubtful that he ever saw the message or knew anything about the veto, which Congress promptly overrode.⁵⁰

Domestic problems did not occupy all that much of his time because war leadership brought heavy new burdens. “My days are so full now as to come near to driving me to distraction,” he lamented to Harry Fine in May 1917. Edith Wilson similarly recalled, “People descended upon the White House until their coming and going was like the rise and fall of the tides. To achieve anything amid such distractions called for the most rigid rationing of time.” Wilson was used to rationing his time, and before long he got his customary routine back in place. He managed to get in golf games, and Edith and Grayson persuaded him to go horseback riding with them. For distraction, he also went to vaudeville shows at Keith’s Theater on Fifteenth Street, and after dinner he would sometimes put a record on the player and say to Edith, “Now I’ll show you how to do a jig step.” He tried to teach her to ride a bicycle, but her lessons with him in the White House basement were not successful. She also recalled that at the end of every evening, “my husband would go back to his study for a look at The Drawer [the day’s accumulated official documents]. … He would take up one paper after another—and so work until the small hours.”⁵¹

A trip in August to visit the fleet afforded a chance for recreation amid official duties, and in September he and Edith spent a week cruising off the New England coast. In October, Wilson enjoyed a different kind of distraction when John Singer Sargent came to the White House to paint his portrait. The president had not wanted to sit for Sargent; according to House, Wilson was afraid to do so because of Sargent’s “alleged faculty of bringing out the latent soul of his sitter.” Still, this was an offer he could not refuse. The project had originated early in 1915, when Sargent had come out of retirement to help raise money for the British Red Cross. The director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Sir Hugh Lane, had put up the considerable sum of £10,000 (nearly $50,000 at the exchange rate of the time) for a portrait, but he had not chosen a subject for the portrait before his death in the sinking of the Lusitania, and the trustees of the gallery later picked President Wilson. The sittings lasted for more than a week, and Edith recalled, “My husband said he never worked harder than he did to entertain Sargent while he posed.”⁵²

In the finished portrait, the president is seated with his right hand lightly grasping one arm of the chair and his left hand draped over the other arm in a relaxed manner. The portrait does not highlight Wilson’s long jaw and nose, and it gives a true impression of his solid though not stocky physique. His expression is pensive, and his posture conveys an air of calm strength and contained energy. Overall, the portrait is a favorable, perhaps flattering, but not heroic depiction of Wilson—a contrast to Sargent’s only other rendition of a president, the one he had done fourteen years earlier of Theodore Roosevelt standing at the foot of a staircase, his right hand resting on a large round finial that is easy to mistake for a globe. Sargent commented on the contrast between the experiences of painting these two presidents. “The White House is empty,” he told a friend. “How different from the days of Roosevelt who posed or didn’t pose in a crowd.”⁵³

This portrait drew mixed reactions among Wilson’s family and friends. Edith later said it disappointed her because it lacked “virility” and made Wilson look older. House agreed, saying it depicted “an esthetic scholar rather than a virile statesman.” By contrast, Bob Bridges, who saw the portrait in New York before it went to Ireland, wrote “Tommy” to say, “I like it hugely. I can see you getting ready to tell a story, with the quirk to the right side of your mouth.” Bridges acknowledged that the art critics disliked it: “What they want is a stern-looking Covenanter with a jaw like a pike.”⁵⁴

Even with the workload of the wartime presidency, Wilson still kept the most important areas of foreign policy largely to himself. He continued to leave areas he considered less important—such as Asia, Latin America, and, now, Mexico—to Lansing. He also left most of the specific dealings with Britain to others, particularly House and Wiseman. To enhance his cohort’s influence at home, the colonel had Wiseman meet the president personally. “It is important that he should be able to say that he has met you,” House explained, adding, “Sir William has been the real ambassador over here for some time.” The meeting took place on June 26, 1917, at an official reception at the Pan American Building, and onlookers were reportedly goggle-eyed as the president spent so much time with this hitherto unknown person. On a trip back to London, that contact helped Wiseman pursue his and House’s agenda, which included the appointment of a special envoy to handle financial matters. The man chosen for that job, Lord Reading, the lord chief justice of England and a Liberal Party insider, came to America in September, temporarily accompanied by John Maynard Keynes. Reading soon forged a good relationship with McAdoo and others in Washington, and at the beginning of 1918 he succeeded the ailing Spring-Rice as ambassador.⁵⁵

Wilson did not spend much time with relations with the other Allies either. France’s ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, continued to enjoy pleasant, correct, if not close relations with the president, who had little contact with the Italians beyond formalities and relegated the Japanese to Lansing’s sphere. Russia did concern him, however. Immediately after entering the war, Wilson extended a $325 million credit to Russia and dispatched a high-level mission headed by Elihu Root, secretary of state under Roosevelt. The Root mission spent a month in Russia during the summer of 1917 but did little to help the Russian war effort. Part of its purpose was to show what would later be called bipartisanship by enlisting a top Republican, but it accomplished little in that direction too. Root later told his biographer that the mission had been “a grand-stand play”—a show of Wilson’s sympathy for the new post-czarist government—“that’s all he wanted.” George Creel remembered Wilson saying a year and a half after the mission that “its failure was largely due to Russian distrust of Mr. Root.”⁵⁶

Wilson’s grand design in waging war remained to seek peace without victory. In May, he reminded an Alabama congressman that in the war address he had restated his devotion to a liberal, nonpunitive settlement. In his only major speech during the nation’s first six months at war, a Flag Day address on June 14, he declared “that this is a Peoples’ War for freedom and self-government amongst all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon it. … [W]oe be to that man or that group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution.” That bit of public rhetoric sounded more forthrightly militant than he may have wished, because his private thoughts followed a more twisted path. In July he told House, “England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means. … If there is to be an interchange of views at all, it ought to be between us and the liberals in Germany, with no one else brought in.”⁵⁷

Wilson was referring to a resolution just passed in the Reichstag that called for efforts to make peace. Another initiative came from the pope, who in August publicly called for a settlement on the basis of status quo ante bellum, together with future disarmament and international arbitration. To many people, that looked like peace without victory, but Wilson did not agree. In his reply to the pope on August 27, he stated, “Our response must be based upon the stern facts and upon nothing else.” America wanted “not a mere cessation of arms … [but] a stable and enduring peace,” which required saving “the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government” that had “planned to dominate the world.” True peace could come only from the people, not from the governments, of the Central powers. “God grant that it may be given soon and in a way to restore the confidence of peoples everywhere in the faith of nations and the possibility of covenanted peace.” In walking a fine line between military resolve and generous peace terms, Wilson was establishing himself as the moral and ideological leader of his side in the war.⁵⁸

House prided himself on having a hand in the matter. The colonel had differed with Lansing and others in the State Department and Wilson himself about whether to reply to the pope, and he wrote, “I am sure I have a more complete picture of the situation than either the President or Lansing.”⁵⁹ That was a dangerous attitude for any presidential adviser, no matter how intimate, to harbor, and it portended eventual trouble. For the present, however, House’s relationship with Wilson seemed stronger than ever. Curiously, it did not depend on direct contact. After the British mission to Washington in April, the two men did not see each other again for more than four months, although they wrote to each other frequently.

The separation ended with Wilson’s previously mentioned visit to the colonel’s summer home during the cruise in September. They engaged in two days of conversation that ranged widely. On the first day, Wilson berated Lansing and discussed a possible cabinet shuffle, as well as shipping and naval matters, and on the second day they discussed peace terms. House noticed that his guest sometimes had difficulty resuming a line of thought after an interruption. “He smiled plaintively,” the colonel recorded, “and said: ‘You see I am getting tired. This is the way it indicates itself.’” House also brought up a matter that Wiseman had passed on to him—support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which the British were about to endorse in what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration. Wilson was sympathetic but did not think it was the right time for any commitment.⁶⁰

During the next two months, House met with Wilson three times for similar broad-ranging talks. The colonel pressed him to speak out again on the future basis of peace, especially the elimination of trade barriers on land and sea, and to demand that a new German government make peace. Wilson gave House two signs of how much he trusted and relied on him: he chose the colonel to represent him at the meeting of the Inter-Allied War Council in November, and he asked him to set up an organization to plan for a peace settlement. The idea for a planning body originated with Wilson, who told House that he wanted to begin systematic work to lay out the American position for post-war negotiations and asked, “What would you think of quietly gathering about you a group of men to assist you to do this?” House jumped at the idea, replying that this was “one of the things I have had in mind for a long while. I shall undertake the work and will go about it at once.”⁶¹

The colonel’s activities resulted in the Inquiry, a freestanding organization outside the State Department that would become famous as a covey of experts who brought knowledge and brainpower to the gathering of information and analysis about matters involved in a peace settlement. Actually, in setting up the Inquiry, House acted like the political operator he was. As the organization’s head, he picked his brother-in-law, Sidney Mezes, a former president of the University of Texas who was now president of City College of New York. He also enlisted Walter Lippmann, who had taken leave from The New Republic to work for Baker in the War Department. More than half of the overwhelmingly male staff found their way into the organization through personal connections to five universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago. Few of the recruits possessed up-to-date knowledge of areas outside western Europe; the academic study of most of the world in the United States was such that expertise in those areas was simply not available. The Inquiry staff strove to make up in enthusiasm and idealism for their lack of knowledge.⁶²

The Inquiry played an important role in Wilson’s foreign policy much sooner than anyone expected. The last two and a half months of 1917 were a dark hour for the Allies. A two-week period at the end of October and beginning of November witnessed the Italian debacle at Caporetto and the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Elsewhere, signs of war-weariness were manifest. Earlier in the year, mutinies had broken out in French units on the Western Front, and at the end of November a public plea for peace negotiations came from a former British foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne. At the Inter-Allied War Council meeting in Paris, House supported Lloyd George’s successful push for the creation of a supreme war council to provide a unified command on the Western Front. The colonel also tried to get the Allies to issue a declaration that they were not fighting war for purposes of aggression or indemnity. Wilson backed this move, but his endorsement failed to sway the Allied leaders, and the conference issued no statement of war aims.

Such recalcitrance did not deter Wilson, who was warming up for his own statement. In his State of the Union address in December, he lambasted the rulers of Germany and asked Congress to bring greater force to bear against them by declaring war on Austria-Hungary. At the same time, he insisted that “we do not wish in any way to impair or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” In future peacemaking, he eschewed “any such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna. The thought of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated standards of right and wrong, is the air governments must henceforth breathe if they would live.” Referring specifically to the “peace without victory” address, he affirmed, “We are seeking permanent, not temporary, foundations for the peace of the world and must seek them candidly and fearlessly.”⁶³

When House returned from Europe, Wilson decided at once, the colonel noted, “to formulate the war aims of the United States. I never knew a man who did things so casually. We did not discuss the matter more than ten or fifteen minutes when he decided he would take the action.” House was pleased, although he wished the interallied conference had done it. Wilson asked him to have the Inquiry prepare “a memorandum of the different questions which a peace conference must necessarily take up for solution. I told him I already had this data in my head. He replied that he also had it, but he would like a more complete and definite statement such [as], for instance, a proper solution to the Balkan question.”⁶⁴ The Inquiry speedily drafted a memorandum that covered the major areas of a peace settlement, and House gave a copy to the president when he was in Washington on December 23.

Wilson does not seem to have consulted that memorandum, in part because other work interfered and in part because he managed to gather his family for Christmas and New Year’s at the White House. Jessie and Nell came with their husbands and small children, Stockton Axson journeyed from Texas, where he was teaching at Rice Institute, and Ellen’s sister, Madge Axson Elliott, and her husband, Ed Elliott, arrived from California. On Christmas morning, Madge gave Wilson a silk hat, which he set on his head at a jaunty angle and said, “Ha! I see the fine Machiavellian hand of Brooks,” meaning the White House valet, who worried about the president’s being properly attired. New Year’s Eve was not a happy occasion, Madge recalled: “The news from France had been bad, and Woodrow’s eyes were grave. He sat a little apart, not sharing our casual talk.” He pulled out a volume of Wordsworth’s poetry and read aloud “Ad Usque,” which he said had been written “when all Europe had fallen to Napoleon and England was threatened.” The opening lines are:

Another year! Another deadly blow.
Another mighty Empire overthrown.
And we are left, or shall be left, alone,
The last that dare to struggle with the Foe.⁶⁵

•   •   •

On January 4, House brought with him a revised and expanded memorandum from the Inquiry, and they spent the evening discussing general terms and looking over maps and data. The next day—which House called “a remarkable day”—the men started work at ten-thirty in the morning “and finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it, at half past twelve o’clock [at night].” They worked from the Inquiry memorandum, on which Wilson made revisions in his handwriting and shorthand notes in the margins. Using his typewriter, he set out a series of fourteen statements, most of them a phrase or single sentence, adapted from the memorandum. When they finished, Wilson asked House to number them in the order he thought they should go. The colonel started with the general terms and ended with the territorial ones. Wilson agreed, “with the exception of the peace association which he thought should come last because it would round out the message properly, and permit him to say some things at the end which were necessary.” This numbered sequence would become the salient feature of Wilson’s speech—the Fourteen Points.⁶⁶

They talked again the following day, even though it was a Sunday, and Wilson then went into his study alone to write out his speech, first in shorthand and then on his typewriter. The next day, they talked about Russia—a special concern because the Bolsheviks had negotiated an armistice with the Germans and opened peace talks at Brest-Litovsk—as well as Poland and Turkey. A complication arose when news reached them that Lloyd George had just given a speech in London in which he coined the phrase self-determination and promised freedom to subject nations under the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires. Wilson thought Lloyd George had pre-empted what he wanted to say, but House assured him his speech “would so smother the Lloyd George speech that it would be forgotten and that the President would once more become the spokesman for the Entente, and, indeed, for the liberals of the world.” Reassured, Wilson kept the speech secret from everyone except House and Edith, including the cabinet and Tumulty. The night before he delivered it, he was so keyed up that he talked late into the night and read aloud again from Wordsworth. In the morning, Edith and House persuaded him to play golf before going to the Capitol.⁶⁷

Wilson again wanted to give one of the greatest speeches of his life, and again he succeeded. Appearing in the House chamber just after noon on January 8, he opened by referring to the negotiations between Germany and Russia at Brest-Litovsk, which had just broken off. Those negotiations were significant because they challenged the Allies and America to state their aims in the war. He complimented Lloyd George for having spoken about the Allies’ aims and said, “I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond, with utter simplicity and frankness.” Americans wanted only “that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.”⁶⁸

Now came the Fourteen Points, which took up the rest of the speech, except for the final four paragraphs. Wilson stated each one by number—a Roman numeral in the printed text. The first five were brief and general:

I.            Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at …

II.            Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas …

III.            The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers … among all the nations consenting to the peace …

IV.            Adequate guarantees … that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

V.            A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims … [in which] the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight.

The next nine points treated territorial matters. Point VI, the longest of all, assured Russia of “unhampered and unembarrassed” sovereignty and stated, “The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations … will be the acid test of their good will.” Point VII called for the evacuation and restoration of Belgium. Point VIII addressed Alsace-Lorraine as “the wrong done to France … which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.” Point IX promised Italy borders “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” Point X offered “[t]he peoples of Austria-Hungary … the freest opportunity of autonomous development.” Point XI held out independence and security to “the several Balkan states.” Point XII promised sovereignty to the Turks and “autonomous development” to other peoples in the Ottoman Empire, along with free navigation through the Turkish straits. Point XIII called for “[a]n independent Poland” with boundaries drawn according to nationality and “a free and secure access to the sea.” The final point, XIV, read: “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”⁶⁹

He closed by pledging to fight for those points because they would assure a just and stable peace and remove the main causes of war. He assured the Germans once more of America’s goodwill and rejected any notion of forcing them to change their government. “We have spoken now, surely,” he declared,

in terms too concrete to admit of any further doubt or question. An evident principle runs through the whole programme I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak. Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could stand upon no other principle, and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything that they possess. The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they are ready to put their strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test.⁷⁰

The Fourteen Points speech lived up to House’s promise that it would make Wilson the spokesman for “the liberals of the world.” He did bring off a remarkable coup with the Fourteen Points. His rhetoric was not as grandiose as Lloyd George’s, and he did not use the term self-determination nor lay it down as a general principle to be applied at all times and in all places. Later, Wilson would use that term—it was too good to resist—but he would always be circumspect about making excessive promises. Significantly, he continued to spurn the call to break up the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and urged only “autonomy” for their subject nationalities. This restraint flew in the face of British and French efforts to foment revolts among such peoples as the Slavs of Central Europe and the Arabs and Armenians of Asia Minor, and it reflected an appreciation of how destabilizing the breakup of those empires might be. The Fourteen Points did not express starry-eyed idealism, yet they became a beacon of inspiration, thanks to the president’s measured eloquence and moral authority.

What Wilson hoped to accomplish with the Fourteen Points was less than totally clear. One obvious aim was to get the Bolsheviks to stop negotiating with the Germans and possibly woo them back to the Allied side. Whether that overture would succeed remained to be seen. Another goal was to rally critical and war-weary elements in the Allied countries, particularly socialists and other liberals, toward whom Wilson was reaching out informally. Those overtures did seem promising. Most of all, perhaps, Wilson was aiming his words and ideas at the Germans. His repeated assurances of friendship toward them, coupled with condemnation of their government—which he now toned down—extended an invitation to them to make peace on reasonable terms. The Fourteen Points put flesh on the skeleton of peace without victory, and Wilson was once again inviting both friend and foe to accept a liberal, nonpunitive settlement. Such a settlement could end the war without him and millions of others having to tread further down this grim and passion-racked path of waging war.