The Illusion of Victory (15 page)

It was now May 17, six weeks since Wilson had made his war speech. That afternoon, John M. Parker of Louisiana visited the White House. One of the South’s major political figures, he had been nominated as vice president by the Progressive Party in 1916. When Roosevelt decided not to run as a Progressive, Parker had campaigned for Wilson and helped him carry several key states. Parker urged the president to give Roosevelt his division and put General Wood in charge of it:“I beg of you . . . at this crisis not to play politics!” he said.

Wilson kept his temper and replied that it was the Republicans who were playing politics: “I do not propose to have politics in any manner, shape or form influence me in my judgment.”
¹⁴

The truth—or lack thereof—in those words was demonstrated within twenty-four hours, when Wilson refused to appoint two men to important posts in the War Department, because they were Republicans. One of them was Henry L. Stimson, President Taft’s secretary of war. Stimson would have to wait until another war with Germany to win an appointment from a Democratic president. For the present, he satisfied his martial ardor by joining the fighting army as a colonel in the Seventy-Seventh Division.
¹⁵

The president signed the conscription bill on May 18, and added a public rejection of Roosevelt as a volunteer general.“This is not the time for any action not calculated to contribute to the immediate success of the war,” Wilson intoned.“The business now in hand is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision.”
¹⁶

This rejection surely has to be one of Wilson’s strangest utterances. He made the war sound like something that was going to happen in a laboratory. It was not what those who opposed conscription wanted to hear. They still feared that blood would run in the streets on draft registration day. Wilson was responding to those who had opposed volunteerism, because, in Walter Lippmann’s words, to make it work would require a newspaper campaign that “manufactured hatred,” in the style of the British press. A prominent Boston banking house had made a similar argument in a circular letter, claiming that volunteers could only be obtained by letting the press stir up “an unjustified sense of crisis,” which would be bad for the stock market. Once more, we see these insiders assuming that the war was as good as won by the Allies—and Wilson agreeing with them. All concerned were also covertly admitting that enthusiasm for the war was neither deep nor widespread.
¹⁷

In the evening of May 18, Henry Cabot Lodge and two Republican senatorial colleagues visited Wilson in the White House. The atmosphere was superficially cordial. They talked for almost two hours, discussing how to get food to the Allies as fast as possible without causing shortages in the United States, which had experienced two poor wheat harvests in a row. Another topic was censorship—how to deal with war news, good and bad, and with antiwar opinion. Lodge was in an arrogant mood. He and his colleagues enjoyed telling Wilson “some truths which he ought to have heard from those who surround him.. . . Without the Republicans he could not get his legislation.” The wrangle over the conscription bill made that fact very clear.

More important than politics was Lodge’s personal reaction to Wilson:“I watched and studied his face tonight as I have often done before—a curious mixture of acuteness, intelligence and extreme underlying timidity—a shifty, furtive sinister expression can always be detected by a good observer.”
¹⁸

More than political partisanship separated these two men. Lodge was a strong advocate of U.S. involvement in world affairs. From his election as senator in 1893, his greatest ambition was to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He saw an active foreign policy as crucial to forming America’s national character.

Lodge believed that American idealism could become a more significant force in world affairs than the often “sordid” imperialism of Britain, France and Russia. He was also a strong advocate of some sort of international organization that would keep the peace. In 1915, in a speech to Union College’s commencement exercises, he said world peace could only be maintained by “united nations” that were willing to use force when necessary.
¹⁹

For Lodge the worst foreign policy sin was inaction and pale neutrality. During the first 21/2 years of World War I, Wilson seemed to embody these vices. Wilson’s claim that the United States was “too proud to fight” (in a speech after the
Lusitania
sinking) and his pursuit of peace without victory had struck Lodge as close to blasphemy. The declaration of war had not changed his opinion of the president’s character.
²⁰

There was another reason why Wilson did not consider it his job to arouse patriotic enthusiasm for volunteerism—or conscription. He had found the right man for this formidable task, and he was already hard at work. His name was George Creel.

A native of Missouri, the forty-one-year-old Creel often styled himself as “the original Wilson man.” He had boomed Wilson to run for president as early as 1905, when he was still presiding over Princeton University. At that time, Creel was a muckraking journalist of some renown and a political dreamer who liked to think big. He was also not given to moderation. A journalist friend said: “To Creel there are only two classes of men. There are skunks and the greatest man who ever lived. The greatest man is plural and includes everyone who is on Creel’s side in whatever public issue he happens to be concerned with.” In a rare moment of candor, Creel admitted this description was not entirely wrong.

In the 1916 campaign, Creel had written a book,
Wilson and the Issues,
and worked hard for the president’s reelection. A few days after war was declared, Wilson summoned Creel to the White House to discuss how to deal with the information side of the conflict. In Britain and France, iron censorship was the rule and the generals and admirals in the State, War and Navy Building were demanding a similar setup in the United States. Creel told Wilson it was not
supp
ression but
ex
pression that the country needed. Public opinion about the war had been “muddled,” Creel said, by the thirty-two-month battle between German and Allied propaganda. Creel recommended forming a Committee on Public Information that would handle the war news and inspire Americans to see the struggle as a patriotic crusade.
²¹

The idea jibed with an approach to news that Wilson had long favored. In his first term, his attempts to ingratiate himself with the Washington press corps had been an egregious failure. Most reporters, he had concluded, were only interested in “the personal and trivial rather than in principles and politics.” He had eventually abandoned press conferences and given Joe Tumulty the job of dealing with newsmen. For a while Wilson toyed with the idea of creating a government publicity bureau that would dispense the “real facts” while the newspapers supposedly continued to distort and trivialize them.
²²

The Committee on Public Information would, Wilson hoped, be the realization of this dubious dream. He made Creel chairman of the enterprise. To bolster his authority, Wilson added three cabinet members to the committee, Secretary of State Lansing, Secretary of War Baker and Secretary of the Navy Daniels. Chairman Creel held one meeting with these gentlemen, listened gravely to their advice, and never conferred with them again.“The Committee on Public Information was George Creel,” wrote Mark Sullivan, a fellow newspaperman who knew him well.“It continued to be George Creel after a hundred and fifty thousand people were taking part in its incredibly varied and far flung activities.”
²³

Creel’s goal was to create the “war will.” In a democracy, he believed, this will depended on “the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in a supreme effort of spirit and sacrifice.” that consecration could only be achieved by creating “a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that [would] meld the people of the United States into one white hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.” The feverish prose was typical Creel.
²⁴

Creel was also not shy about playing politics. When the Vigilantes, a patriotic organization that had been fighting for preparedness, offered Creel the services of some eighty leading writers, the former muckraker replied: “We don’t want you. You’re all Roosevelt men!” Creel was not planning to share his fiefdom with anyone.
²⁵

Reports from British agents in the United States to Wellington House made it clear that a patriotic state of mind was virtually nonexistent in the United States two months after Wilson’s war message. “There is evidence that in many localities the people have only entered the war with reluctance and with a feeling of inevitability rather than with any enthusiasm,” wrote the author of the
American Press Résumé
on May 23, 1917. Joe Tumulty nervously informed Colonel House that “the people’s ‘righteous wrath’ seems not to have been aroused.” the widespread lack of enthusiasm observed by British Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice and intelligence chief William Wiseman before Wilson’s April 2 speech was obviously not overdrawn.
²⁶

A few days after Creel began to organize his committee, a young man named Donald Ryerson of Chicago burst into his office and told Creel that he headed a group of volunteer speakers who were making patriotic talks in movie theaters. In ten minutes, Creel escalated the idea to a national effort dubbed Four Minute Men, and put Ryerson in charge of it. From its first days, Creel said with typical hyperbole, the Four Minute Men “had the projectile force of a French .75” (the French army’s favorite artillery piece). Soon, tens of thousands of these local orators were at work. In movie theaters across the nation, a glass slide was thrown on the curtain before or after the main feature.

The Creel committee sent the Four Minute Men various bulletins about the state of the war effort, including several sample speeches written by top advertising copywriters on the committee’s staff. The speakers were warned against stereotyped oratory and urged to transform the material into personal statements whenever possible. They soon expanded their operations from movie theaters to lodge and labor union meetings, church halls, lumber camps, and even Native American reservations. Before the war ended, no less than 75,000 Four Minute Men would be orating on Creel-assigned topics, aimed at creating a white-hot war will.
²⁸

The first topic, on which the volunteer orators spoke from May 12 to May 21, was “Universal Service by Selective Draft.” the goal was to infuse draft registration day, June 5, 1917, with moral uplift. The orators were working in tandem with Secretary Baker, who was striving to make the draft palatable. Long before Congress finally passed the bill, he was printing the 10 million forms on which the draftees would register. He wanted to make registration similar to going to the polls to vote.

Baker also did his utmost to keep the army out of sight. The selection of the registered men would be handled by local citizens, under the direction of state governors. On the day Wilson signed the bill, Baker persuaded him to issue a sonorous proclamation, calling on Americans to make registration a “great day of patriotic devotion and obligation.” He hoped his fellow citizens would see to it that “every [eligible] male person” was included on “these lists of honor.”

The president was telling Americans to report anyone who tried to dodge the obligation. But this unpleasant directive was largely buried beneath the speeches of the Four Minute Men and the complementary oratory urged by Baker on mayors and chambers of commerce throughout the nation. As often as possible, the word “service” was substituted for the harsher “conscription.” It was a word that blended nicely with the ideals of progressive reform that had swept the nation in the decade before the war.
²⁹

Behind the patriotic rhetoric, a mailed fist was also at work. In Snyder, Texas, seven men were arrested on May 22 and charged with seditious conspiracy for “planning to resist conscription by force.” Similar arrests took place in Michigan, Illinois, Washington and other states. A Mexican-American was arrested in Los Angeles. Socialists—antiwar to a man—were jailed in Detroit and Cleveland. When two men tried to get a court order to prevent the governor of Missouri from enforcing registration, they also wound up behind bars. In New York, three men were arrested for passing out antidraft literature. Two of them ended up in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. On May 25, the
Los Angeles Times
ran a headline: “Death for Treason Awaits Anti-Draft Plotters.” A week later, the same paper reported that the nation’s ports were under surveillance to make sure no one fled abroad to escape registration.
³⁰

The result of this mixture of exhortation and intimidation was a success that astonished Baker and Wilson and everyone else. Very little blood ran in the streets. In most towns and cities, almost 10 million men registered without a murmur of protest. Resistance was sporadic and widely scattered.

In Butte, Montana, where there was a large Irish-American enclave, six hundred members of a club named after two Easter Rebellion martyrs marched behind a twelve-foot-long red banner inscribed “Down with War!” the protesters were confronted by local militia with fixed bayonets. In the ensuing melee, shots were fired and about twenty men were arrested. The city was put under martial law. In two Oklahoma counties, a mix of white tenant farmers, blacks and Native Americans fought a pitched battle with sheriff ’s deputies before fleeing into the hills.
³¹