John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

In six years a change had come over the political landscape. The reform movements which had smoothed the way for Wilson’s leadership were losing their power or developing new aspects. During the years of the century’s youth the American people hungered and thirsted for righteousness. T.R. and Bryan and Woodrow Wilson built their political careers on popular faith in selfgoverning institutions, and on belief in the eventual triumph of Christian ethics. Now many of the reforms had come to pass. Senators were elected by popular vote. Woman’s suffrage was a fact. With many of the great aims attained the generous passion for civic virtue was degenerating into a series of smallminded manias.

Backed by an effective and bigoted organization prohibition was sweeping the country. Long before the war a good deal of reforming zeal had spent itself in efforts to suppress gambling and prostitution. Now the evils of drink became such an obsession that a man could hardly attain the office of notary public without being endorsed by the Anti-Saloon League.

In lashing the people up to a maximum war effort the Wilson administration unleashed blind hatreds and suspicions against foreigners and foreign ideas, and in fact against any ideas at all, that could hardly be controlled once their imagined usefulness, as a part of the psychology of total war, was at an end.

Such enthusiasts for political reform as remained were estranged by the prosecution of dissenting voices. As the suppressive measures weakened, movements like La Follette’s Progressive Party and the Nonpartisan League in Minnesota and the Dakotas, which were in many ways the heirs of Bull Moose, would come back into the open, but as agrarian or farmer-labor groupings. Somehow they had lost their national character.

When their leaders would speak of the war it would be no longer in terms of the Wilsonian slogans. They would not find the world made safe for democracy. The recollection would be too fresh in their minds that while Wilson’s Department of Justice conducted something like two thousand prosecutions of socialists, pacifists, syndicalists or alleged pro-Germans, hardly an effort was made to check the brutal profiteering that grew out of the cost-plus system. “Merchants of death” would be the reformers’ theme.

The young radicals who, at an earlier day, followed the progressives in their hue and cry against malefactors of great wealth, and in practical efforts to refurbish the selfgoverning process, were turning to the Russian Revolution for inspiration. John Reed, whose Ten Days that Shook the World made the October days real to thousands of Americans, became an archetype of the indignant youth of the time who failed to find any idealism in massacres at the fighting fronts or in repression of workingclass movements by the Department of Justice.

In Soviet Russia they were finding the righteous cause their fathers sought in following Wilson and Roosevelt and Bryan. To them the soviets were spontaneous selfgoverning assemblies like New England town meetings. The Soviet Government had repudiated secret diplomacy and was fostering selfdetermination of national minorities. Lenin had brought peace to the soldiers and land to the peasants. The repressions and massacres conducted in the name of the proletariat were shrugged off as temporary phenomena in the war against a host of enemies financed by capitalist governments, or as capitalist fabrications on the order of the Sisson documents.

Obstreperous and nonconformist youth, which a generation before might have listened to Woodrow Wilson with respect, was now attracted to the various socialist and syndicalist ideologies which were already beginning to harden into the Communist dogma.

The bellwether of those disillusioned with democratic methods would be Lincoln Steffens. Steffens, the most influential writer of the muckraking era, had been T.R.’s personal friend. He had glorified in print the labors of Bob La Follette in Wisconsin and of Newton Baker in Cleveland. Now Steffens, who had been the guide and philosopher of a whole generation of indigenous muckrakers and of the reform movement from coast to coast, was suddenly to make public his loss of faith in the tradition he had served for a lifetime. Stopping in after a trip to the Soviet Union, to call on his friend the sculptor Jo Davidson — whom he found fingering the clay for a bust of Bernard Baruch — Steffens was heard portentously announcing: “I have been into the future and by God it works.”

Organized labor was of two minds. Although Samuel Gompers kept the official leadership of the A.F. of L. in line behind the President, “a baneful seething,” stimulated by the Bolshevik-inspired revolutions that were sweeping Europe, continued under the surface. The foreignborn, stung by discrimination and harassment in America, dreamed of joining the triumphant uprising of the world proletariat. Repression bred resentments even among native Americans. It was hard for working men and women to forget that Debs was serving time in Atlanta.

Superficially, in spite of the deep popular misgivings of which the Republican victory at the polls was an inconvenient symptom, everything was as it had been. With the news of the armistice a sense of reprieve swept over the country. There was hardly a family that didn’t have men at the front or in training. Mothers, fathers, wives, sweethearts could take a deep breath and say to each other that their dear ones were safe. The elation of victory threw a certain halo about the figure of the President. His appeal to the crowd had never been greater. Yet mistrust was creeping in behind the cheers of the crowds.

The Administration was losing its favorable press. Though in private, newspapermen had long been outspoken against George Creel’s highhanded performances as presidential propagandist, the treatment of Woodrow Wilson himself, even by the opposition papers, remained respectful to the point of servility. He still had devoted adherents among the ablest journalists of the time. When the critical spirit began to express itself in the editorial columns, the tone was more of sorrow than of anger.

Three days after the armistice the President astonished the nation by using his wartime powers to seize the Atlantic cables. The move was ascribed to George Creel. Editorial writers explained sarcastically that Creel was planning to use his control of the cables to censor and distort the news of the Peace Conference as his “Committee of Public Misinformation” had censored and distorted the news from the fighting fronts. Hardly a voice was raised in the President’s defense.

The flurry over the nationalization of the cables had hardly subsided before the story broke that McAdoo was resigning as Secretary of the Treasury and as Director of Railroads. The President’s soninlaw was generally considered the strongest man in the Cabinet. Mac himself never did much to disguise the fact that he was of this opinion too; he snorted to House that the rest of the cabinet members were “nothing but clerks.” Although White House intimates knew that Mac had suffered a couple of spells of illness attributed to overwork and had been discussing with the President and his confidential colonel the reasons that would soon impel him to return to private life, the news of his abrupt resignation at such a critical juncture aroused a storm of gossip.

As an apostle of free enterprise Mac was resigning in protest against the President’s policy of nationalizing public utilities. He could no longer go along with Baker’s inefficiency in the War Department as revealed by the Hughes report on the shortcomings of the airplane production program. He had thrown up his job in a peeve because the President wouldn’t appoint him to serve at the Peace Conference.