John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

“The President has maintained and rather increased his influence in Congress and in the country, but he is as mysterious as ever. When he summons the newspaper men he talks to them at length and in excellent language, but when they leave his presence they say to each other, What on earth did he say? When he sees the members of Congress he reads them a lecture and tells them what he thinks is good for them to know, which appears to them to be very little. He asks the advice of no one.”

In Mexico armed men kept springing up from the blood of the dead Madero. His mystique of democracy spread in strange forms to even the remotest hamlets where Spanish was hardly spoken, much as the reforming zeal of the Theodore Roosevelt era infected the North American backlands with a yearning for righteousness. In the United States the reforms took legal shape according to the ancient traditions of Anglo-Saxon comity; but in Mexico the young men who trooped out of the mountain cornfields and the dry maguey plantations and the irrigated sugarcane to make a revolution, found themselves slaves of the only social formation they knew outside of the communal village and the hacienda: the robber band under a chieftain who enforced his will with the gun.

The Mexicans remained puzzling to Woodrow Wilson to the last.

He had family perplexities too. Right along he had hated the idea of his daughters having beaux. At Princeton his sarcasms tore to pieces the young men the girls occasionally ventured to bring home to meals. Jessie managed to win her father’s approval of a college professor and married him. “The pang of it is still deep in my heart,” the President wrote Mrs. Peck after the wedding.

Now Eleanor, after an effort to keep her engagement secret for fear of her father’s wrath, was about to marry his Secretary of the Treasury. The press, inevitably nosy about the doings of nubile young women in the White House, was filling the society pages with rumors of Eleanor’s and Margaret’s engagement to this man and that. One day the President betrayed his underlying tension by lashing out at the newspapermen Tumulty worked so hard to keep in a cosy frame of mind.

“I am a public character for the time being,” he announced at a press conference, his sharp jaw jutting and his eyes flashing behind his nose-glasses, “but the ladies of my household are not servants of the government and they are not public characters. I deeply resent the treatment they are receiving at the hands of the newspapers … It is a constant and intolerable annoyance … If this continues,” he glowered into the embarrassed faces assembled in front of his desk, “I shall deal with you, not as President, but as man to man.”

The men trudged out of the oval office like schoolboys who had been tonguelashed by the headmaster.

It was hard for Wilson to keep his serenity amid so many worries. His greatest anxiety was about his wife. Ellen Wilson’s health was worse. She had a fall in her room one day, but she wouldn’t stay in bed. She laughed off her symptoms, appealing from their father to her daughters. “This goose keeps worrying about me for no reason at all.”

She was busy with a private project. While her husband worried about the Colorado mine strike, and the need to send troops to the Mexican border to keep the bandits from spilling over into United States territory, and busied himself piloting antitrust legislation through Congress, Ellen Wilson was lobbying for a bill of her own. As a southerner she had been raised to look out for the wellbeing of Negroes. Now in Washington she found families living in back alleys under conditions she felt were a disgrace to the national capital. She joined the group of social workers to get through a bill to clean up these conditions. All her ebbing strength, all her quiet charm and winsome ways, went into backing her housing bill.

In April the President stole a few days off to take his wife to White Sulphur Springs. He was trying to believe that the change of air would do her good. A nurse went along.

The presidential party had hardly settled at the Greenbrier before a dispatch from Secretary Bryan appeared on Wilson’s breakfast table. Huerta’s commander at Tampico had arrested a navy paymaster and the crew of a ship’s boat flying the American flag. The detention was short but Admiral Mayo, in command of the American fleet hovering off the Mexican coast, was demanding the punishment of the guilty Mexicans and a twentyone gun salute in apology for the insult to the flag.

The President hurried back to Washington. For a week the cables back and forth to the chargé d’affaires, who replaced the recalled ambassador in Mexico City, resounded with that twentyone gun salute.

Huerta was sorry. His officers were sorry. It had all been a mistake. Huerta offered to arbitrate the dispute at The Hague.

The President refused. Arbitration would mean recognizing the bloodstained old drunkard. Instead he delivered himself of an ultimatum, giving Huerta until April 19 to salute the American flag. “People seem to want a war with Mexico,” he told his daughters when they brought their mother back from the springs, “but they shan’t have it if I can prevent it.”

To Wilson this seemed the chance he’d been looking for to put the Mexican dictator out of office. To Huerta it looked like a chance to rally the Mexican people behind him. Already his prestige was rising so that wealthy Mexicans were subscribing to a loan to be used to buy munitions for his army.

When the news reached Washington that a shipment of arms was about to be landed at Vera Cruz from the Hamburg-America steamer Ypiranga , Wilson went before the two houses of Congress and obtained a joint resolution empowering him to use the army and navy to enforce his demands. The yellow press was all for cleaning up “the mess in Mexico.” Western senators even talked of taking over Central America clear to the Panama Canal.

Meanwhile Bryan and Wilson decided that, since no state of war existed and they didn’t intend it should exist, it would be most incorrect to seize the cargo off a friendly ship on the high seas. They must wait until the shipment was unloaded and seize the arms on Mexican soil.

At eleven in the morning on April 21, 1914, a thousand marines landed from the American fleet off Vera Cruz and occupied the customhouse. The Mexicans fought back. Another three thousand men had to be landed next day. Before quiet was restored in Vera Cruz a hundred and twenty-six Mexicans were dead and the American forces had lost nineteen dead and seventyone wounded.

President Wilson was very profoundly shocked.

Some good came of the affair. The sanitary methods which had proved successful in Cuba and in Panama were applied to the area occupied by American troops to the lasting benefit of the veracruzanos , and the dreadful old fortress prison of San Juan de Ullúa was opened to the light of day and its miserable victims turned loose.

The violation of Mexican soil, if it didn’t unite the warring factions in support of Huerta, at least gave unanimity to their hatred of the gringos. American consulates were burned, American property was looted, Americans were murdered. The cry of indignation resounded throughout Latin America and found a selfrighteous echo in the London press.

Sober opinion in the United States, particularly among the reforming element the President depended on for support, was almost wholly against him. In one of his moments of selfdeception he had told the reporters the day before the landing that the purpose of the naval demonstration was not to eliminate Huerta but “to compell the recognition of the dignity of the United States … I have no enthusiasm for war but I have enthusiasm for the dignity of the United States.”