John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

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A dazzling work of American history from the author of the “U.S.A. trilogy”. Beginning with the assassination of McKinley and ending with the defeat of the League of Nations by the United States Senate, the twenty-year period covered by John Dos Passos in this lucid and fascinating narrative changed the whole destiny of America. This is the story of the war we won and the peace we lost, told with a clear historical perspective and a warm interest in the remarkable people who guided the United States through one of the most crucial periods.
Foremost in the cast of characters is Woodrow Wilson, the shy, brilliant, revered, and misunderstood “schoolmaster”, whose administration was a complex of apparent contradictions. Wilson had almost no interest in foreign affairs when he was first elected, yet later, in proposing the League of Nations, he was to play a major role in international politics. During his first summer in office, without any…

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Mr. Bryan’s Last Stand

Against this background of mounting hysteria Bryan manfully held his ground for arbitration, mediation and peaceful solutions. Lansing, who now had the President’s ear, rebuffed his suggestion that ships carrying war munitions be forbidden to carry passengers. Bryan wanted Americans at least to be warned against travelling on belligerent ships, and for some means to be found to put off dangerous issues for arbitration after the war was over. He admitted the need to protest to Germany, but he asked for a simultaneous protest to England against Allied treatment of neutral shipping, to show Germany “that we are defending our rights against aggression from both sides.”

Lansing’s draft of a severe note to Berlin telling the Germans they would be held to “strict accountability” for the loss of American lives became, in spite of Bryan’s protests, the basis for the document the President wrote out on his own typewriter, as usual all alone in his study. At the last moment Bryan induced Wilson to prepare a statement to the press to be issued at the same time, emphasizing the ancient friendship between the American and German peoples, and suggesting again the postponement until peacetime of conflicts that could not be settled by diplomatic means.

When Tumulty saw Secretary Bryan’s press release the excitable Irishman had a fit. He alerted several members of the cabinet and pointed out to his boss that taking the sting out of the note this way would only encourage the Germans to sink more ships. The President, who had confidence in his secretary’s popular touch, was convinced. Most of the cabinet members whom Wilson consulted agreed. When Tumulty joined Secretary of War Garrison for lunch at the Shoreham after his bout with the President he was still pale and shaking. “I’ve just had the worst half hour of my life,” he said. Garrison told him he ought to have a medal of honor for his good work.

By this time President Wilson had decided that the country demanded a stiff protest even at the risk of breaking off relations with Germany. Bryan was not convinced. Not a man to keep his ideas to himself, in an expansive moment he assured Dr. Dumba, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, that the United States had no intention of going to war, but only wanted a German assurance that ruthless submarine warfare would stop.

Dumba, a bald, stooping, mustachioed figure, whom Lansing found to be “the most adroit and at the same time the most untrustworthy of the diplomatic representatives of the Central Powers,” immediately transmitted these soothing words to his government via the German radio station in Berlin.

There U. S. Ambassador Gerard was dramatizing the importance of the Lusitania note by making sleepingcar reservations for his wife and himself to Switzerland. Zimmermann, who had been given a copy of the radiogram before it was forwarded to Vienna, read it out triumphantly to Gerard as a proof that President Wilson’s Lusitania note was merely for home consumption. Gerard cabled the news to House. House cabled the President and the fat was in the fire.

Secretary Bryan called in Dumba to his office. Dumba admitted that the language of his message had been misconstrued, and Bryan issued a repudiation of the whole interview to the press. The Peacemaker was editorially tarred and feathered by the eastern newspapers.

Meanwhile in Berlin the advocates of ruthless submarine warfare were quoting Bryan’s words as proof that no amount of frightfulness would bring the United States into the war. As a result the German foreign office dispatched a highly unsatisfactory reply to the American note. House in London, who had been working for just the sort of mutual abatement of the two blockades that Bryan wanted as the first step towards a mediated settlement, gave up his mission in despair. He returned home, accompanied as usual by his wife and his secretary, Miss Denton, who coded and decoded his private messages. This time House’s little group sailed on the St. Paul of the American Line.

The pro-Allied press was in a fever against Bryan and his pacifism. The Republicans, in New England especially, now committed to intervention on the Allied side, poured out their scorn on the ineffectiveness of President Wilson’s stream of notes. Theodore Roosevelt called the Lusitania sinking an act of piracy and made it clear that if he’d been President none of this would have been allowed to happen.

The Peacemaker Resigns

Bryan’s position in the administration was becoming impossible. His pacifism and his arbitration treaties were the laughingstock of editorial writers. At a cabinet meeting called to discuss the German answer to the Lusitania note, which Frank Cobb described in the World as “the answer of an outlaw who assumes no obligation towards society,” the Secretary of State seemed, as Secretary of Agriculture Houston recalled it, “to be laboring under great strain, and sat back in his chair most of the time with his eyes closed.” Suddenly he snapped out, “You people are not neutral. You are taking sides.”

The President was nettled. With a cold flare in his gray eyes he said in the voice which he could make so icy, “Mr. Secretary, you have no right to make that statement. We are all honestly trying to be neutral against heavy difficulties.”

The Germans were claiming that they had a right to sink the Lusitania as an armed ship carrying munitions of war. Counsellor Lansing got up an elaborate brief refuting the German contentions point by point, but as Woodrow Wilson revised it, his chief theme became “the sinking of this passenger ship involves principles of humanity which throw into the background any special circumstances of detail.”

Wilson was seeing the drowned bodies of women and children washed up on the Irish coast. Bryan was sending him copious messages meanwhile begging for mention of arbitration and asking for a parallel note to England. To Wilson, as to most Americans, the quarrel with England, about the money value of goods and seized cargoes and the technicalities of contraband, was in a different category from the quarrel with Germany, which involved human lives. He wrote Secretary Bryan “with the warmest regard and with a very solemn and by no means self-confident sense of deep responsibility,” that he could not agree with him. Bryan decided he would have to resign.

It was a Saturday. Bryan went around to see McAdoo, whom he considered the member of the cabinet closest to the President. Perhaps he thought McAdoo might help him argue the President around to his point of view.

McAdoo set to work to talk Bryan out of the idea of resigning and right after lunch drove over to see Mrs. Bryan. Everybody had confidence in Mrs. Bryan’s level head. Mrs. Bryan came right out with it. Her husband felt that Colonel House’s opinions were given more weight than her husband’s. Lansing furnished the background. The President wrote all the state papers. The Secretary of State was playing the part of a figurehead.

Then she went on to tell of her husband’s sleepless nights, his agony of mind. McAdoo begged the Bryans to think it over for a day or two and suggested she take her husband out to the country for the weekend. The Bryans jumped at the suggestion and drove out to a friend’s house in Silver Spring. The magnolias were in bloom, mockingbirds sang through the moonlit June night but Bryan could get no repose. Sunday he took a long walk. That night Mrs. Bryan got a doctor to prescribe a sleeping powder. Monday morning he woke up refreshed but with his determination unshaken.

The Bryans were hardly back in their house on Calumet Place Monday morning, when McAdoo came in with fresh arguments. Bryan would be accused of having resigned to embarrass the Administration. His career would be ruined. “I believe you are right,” Bryan answered solemnly. “I think this will destroy me … it is merely the sacrifice one must not hesitate to make to serve his God and his country.”

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