John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Every new disclosure of German intrigue deepened House’s conviction that the United States would be drawn into the war on the side of the Allies. He wanted American involvement to come about in such a way that the United States could dictate the terms of the peace that had to follow.

In his talks with Sir Edward Grey in London, he had already broached the idea of an alliance of nations to keep the peace. But first the war had to be brought to an end. To dictate a rational peace in a world where only force was respected the United States had to have at least a potential army. Josephus Daniels, with the help of the Navy League and other powerful congressional lobbies, was doing a good job building up the fleet. The army was Saturday’s child.

In his letters to the President, House was trying, through suggestions phrased with oleaginous tact, to bring his friend around to an understanding of the need for preparedness. Wilson still shied off from the word. Preparedness had taken an evil connotation in his mind because Theodore Roosevelt, whom he was coming to consider his archenemy, was calling for it in every speech he made.

Early in August the retired Chief of Staff called on Colonel House in Manchester. Major General Leonard Wood was a New Englander who had gone into the army from the Harvard Medical School. A vigorous broadshouldered man, full of enthusiasm for frontier life, he found while serving in the campaign against Geronimo that he was more interested in soldiering than in doctoring. It was Wood who helped T.R. organize the Rough Riders and who was in command at San Juan Hill. As military governor of Cuba he backed Walter Reed in his investigation of the causes of yellow fever. In the Philippines he helped pacify the Moros.

Wood was the living examplar of the New Nationalism. No more given to keeping his opinions to himself than his friend T.R., his army career proved stormy. Taft appointed him to the newly instituted post of Chief of Staff. Now he was organizing officers training camps to prepare for the war he was sure would come. Since the Democratic administration furnished him with no funds, the students paid their own way. He wanted House to convince the President that the regular army should immediately be raised to full strength. He was talking up universal military service on the Swiss model.

The immediate aim of his visit was to urge House to argue the President into letting him go to the western front for a while as an observer. He promised to do it without publicity. He pointed out that American officers had no idea of how the war was actually being fought.

House couldn’t have agreed with the general more wholeheartedly. He passed on Wood’s suggestions to Wilson at Cornish but got no reply. Perhaps it was enough for the President that Wood was a friend of T.R.’s.

Wilson remained the man of words. He was working long hours at his solitary typewriter trying to find just the right words that would convince the Germans on the one hand and the British on the other that they must bind themselves to respect neutral rights at sea. Considerations of power politics failed to hold his attention. On problems of action he liked to have his mind made up for him. But how could he trust any other man’s judgement? He was getting a somewhat petulant attitude towards all his various advisers and passing on the carbons of their reports on White House flimsy to Mrs. Galt with derogatory remarks pencilled in the margins.

Only Edith Galt thoroughly understood his lonely dedication to doing the right thing. He had already told his daughters of their approaching engagement. The daughters approved.

While the President was taking Mrs. Galt and the ladies of the family on summer automobile rides to show them his favorite views over the New Hampshire lakes, he was letting Colonel House bear the brunt of a new tangled dispute with Great Britain over cotton. The President was making no bones of the fact that as soon as he extorted a satisfactory agreement from the Germans on the Lusitania sinking he was going to turn his attention to the highhanded conduct of the British blockade.

During Sir Edward Grey’s much needed vacation, watching his birds and enjoying the North Country dialect of his farmhands at Falloden, Asquith’s coalition cabinet decided that, come what might, they had to take cotton off the free list. The British were detaining more neutral ships than ever. They had already seized two hundred thousand bales of American cotton consigned to Rotterdam; but, to avoid bringing the issue to a head, were paying for them at prevailing market rates.

The South, where so many good Democrats lived, was in an uproar again at the prospect of cotton being declared contraband. Lansing was issuing preliminary warnings through Ambassador Page. It was up to House, who had won the British Foreign Minister’s private esteem, directly and working through Spring Rice, to convince the British that only by generous treatment of the cotton interests could they avoid agitation in Congress for that embargo on the export of munitions which the German propagandists were working so hard to obtain.

House put the dilemma clearly in two cables, coming as authorized by the President, to Sir Horace Plunkett in mid July. He frightened Spring Rice with the picture of an aroused South shouting for an embargo.

The British Cabinet saw reason and put into effect what became known as the Crawford plan, since it was finally formulated by Sir Richard Crawford, their embassy’s commercial adviser, with the advice of prominent cotton brokers and of the governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The British Treasury would send agents into the exchanges in Liverpool, New York and New Orleans to support the price of cotton. The United States Government would submit, at least tacitly, to cotton’s being declared absolute contraband. It might cost the British twenty million pounds, but it would be a fair price to pay to stave off the arms embargo.

House and Spring Rice conferred almost daily. Officially the President was supposed to be in the dark on these negotiations, but practically he gave his approval of each step through the confidential colonel.

As soon as von Bernstorff got wind of the Crawford plan he rushed into the State Department with a German offer to buy three million bales at the market price if the United States would guarantee their transport to Germany. Blockade was outbidding blockade in the cotton exchanges. The cotton interests began to take heart. Wilson, in high righteousness, denounced the German plan as an attempt to bribe the American people.

The British had barely reached a happy solution of the cotton imbroglio before a new crisis began to loom. The pound sterling that had ruled world finance for a hundred years was in trouble. The British were running out of credit.

McAdoo, who saw at once that American war prosperity depended on Allied credit to finance the munitions trade, was trying to talk the President into reversal of his earlier attitude, assumed under Bryan’s influence, that the financing of warloans would be an unneutral act.

While McAdoo, to whom as a moneyhungry southerner the soaring stockmarket, high wages, boom prices for cotton and wheat were the chief consideration, worked in Washington, J. P. Morgan wrestled with the financial community in New York, which still harbored many neutral and even pro-German elements. Little by little regulations against discounting Allied paper through the Federal Reserve banks were relaxed.

The German submarine command gave the pro-Allied bankers a hand by sinking on August 19, just as their foreign office seemed about to talk turkey on the Lusitania protests, the British liner Arabic , of fifteen thousand tons, outward bound out of Liverpool for New York. There were fortyfour casualties, and two Americans among the killed. The news threw the President into an agony of indecision. “I greatly need your advice what to do in view of the sinking of the Arabic,” Wilson wrote House.