John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

When the Democrats, in spite of the loss of several southern conservatives who voted with the Republicans, were able to marshal enough voices to pass the measure with the help of three Republican progressives from the Middle West, the Republican minority, ably marshalled by Lodge and Root, talked it to death in one of the longest and bitterest filibusters yet recorded. The Sixtythird Congress adjourned March 4, 1915, without the shipping bill’s being brought to a vote in the Senate. The Administration introduced it again in the next Congress.

The chief objection voiced by the two scholarly conservatives was that if the government bought the German ships and Great Britain did not recognize the transfer of registry, there would be immediate danger of war with the Allies. Lodge seems to have convinced himself, furthermore, that the bill would legalize a gigantic deal by which McAdoo, working through Kuhn, Loeb and Co., would buy up idle German shipping at great personal profit. In their speeches they both decried government in business as state socialism and the end of individual liberty.

McAdoo claimed to be merely motivated by the practical consideration of reducing the cost for American shippers. He used to say that the Republican filibuster cost the American people a cool billion dollars. He insisted that he believed in private enterprise “as a theory, but economic theories, I have observed, often fail in practice. Private initiative becomes extremely timid in times of peril and uncertainty … Shipowners were making so much money … that they were satisfied … More ships would mean lower freight rates and less profit … When the bill was first introduced, ships might have been bought or constructed at the cost of about forty dollars a ton. But when the measure was finally enacted, eighteen months later, they were selling at prices that ranged from one hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars a ton.”

The President was grimly stimulated by the opposition of the “entrenched interests.” It was the Princeton quads all over again. He never could understand how reasonable men could honestly disagree with him.

In a speech in Indianapolis during the congressional campaign that fall he violently attacked the leaders of the Republican filibuster: “These gentlemen are now seeking to defy the nation and prevent the release of American products to the suffering world which needs them more than it ever needed them before.” His violence shocked his supporters.

Writing to his friend, Mrs. Toy, who had remonstrated with him, he apologized a little ruefully for letting himself be carried away by the “psychology of the stump” but added to his own defense: “I think you cannot know to what lengths men like Root and Lodge are going, who I once thought had consciences and I now know have none … We are fighting as a matter of fact the most formidable (covert) lobby that has stood against us yet in anything we have attempted; and we shall see the fight to a finish.”

William Jennings Bryan, who sat dreaming of peace in ducktails and crash suits under the high dark ceilings of the old War and State Building, couldn’t for the life of him understand why Wilson and McAdoo wouldn’t allow a clause to be inserted in their shipping bill ruling out the purchase of ships from the belligerents. He assured the President that this would satisfy the southern conservatives who shared the misgivings of Lodge and Root about government operation of Austrian and German ships. Never strong on practical details it did not occur to him that these were the only ships to be had.

For two years he had loyally squandered his personal influence in behalf of every administration measure but his heart wasn’t in the shipping bill. As a practicing Christian he observed the letter of the Ten Commandments. War was murder. He couldn’t quite convince himself that war trade wasn’t complicity with murderers.

He believed passionately in neutrality. His first thought was for a sort of Jeffersonian embargo on any dealings with the warring nations. In the early weeks of the war he almost managed to convince President Wilson that American bankers must not be allowed to make loans to the belligerents. Money was the worst kind of contraband. Personally, as a private man, he was in favor of cutting off the shipping of munitions. Impractical as he was he had to recognize that the economic wellbeing of the country depended on exports.

Though the American people, in spite of widespread indignation at the German violation of Belgian neutrality, were as anxious to keep out of the war as their Secretary of State was, the geography of the conflict early forced them into an undeclared and somewhat unwilling partnership with Great Britain and France. Britannia ruled the waves. While armies fought to a stalemate along the Aisne, the British Navy swept German commerce off the seas and bottled up the German fleet behind the fortified island of Heligoland. An Order in Council of August 20 established a blockade of Germany and Austria modelled on the blockade which a hundred years before had brought Napoleon to his ruin. Neutral ships were intercepted and escorted into British ports to be inspected for contraband of war even if they were bound for neutral countries. Contraband was just about any class of goods the British authorities decided might give aid and comfort to the enemy.

Secretary Bryan, with the President’s fervent backing, at first tried to enforce the old American theory of freedom of the seas. Early in the war he dispatched notes to all the belligerents asking them to conform to the Declaration of London. This was a set of rules affirming the rights of neutral shipping in wartime drawn up by an international conference in the winter of 1908 and 1909. Unfortunately the Declaration of London had not been ratified either by Great Britain or the United States.

These rules would have greatly benefited the neutral nations and would have made impossible the starving out of Germany which was developing as the basic British strategy of the war.

The British showed no interest in giving up any of the advantages which came to them from their mastery of the ocean. There followed a prolonged wrangle between the State Department and the Foreign Office, kept somewhat within bounds by the terms of Bryan’s arbitration treaty. The British pressed for as much blockade as they could get without completely alienating American sympathies, and the United States pressed for as much freedom of the seas as could be had without playing too much into the hands of the Central Powers.

Bryan was often absent from his desk. He had accepted the office with the understanding that he would lecture for part of the year. He must be allowed to make his living. His position in Washington as second fiddle to the President fed his rather innocent vanity and enabled him to entrench himself in the party leadership by finding jobs for deserving Democrats, but his heart was on the Chautauqua circuit. He loved money and he loved applause. When hostile newspapers blamed him for such undignified behavior as lecturing for money he struck back: “Mingling with the multitude is not a cause for reproach … The forum is not below the level of official life. It is not stepping down to go from the desk to the platform.”

Happier stirring the hearts of the plain people than knitting his brows over problems each more insoluble than the last that kept appearing on his desk he left the day to day paper work to his counsellor, Robert Lansing, who acted as Secretary of State when he was away. Lansing was a rather solemn, steelyhaired upstate New Yorker, now in his early fifties. His old associates from Amherst College days and from the Watertown bar still addressed him affectionately as Duke. He had made himself a career in international law and married into diplomacy by his union with the daughter of John W. Foster, the respected Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. Lansing reported directly to the President.