John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Ambassador Page in London was cooperating loyally with Hoover’s relief work. It was at his table that Hoover and House first met. The colonel supported him from the beginning, but now House had let Hoover know that his project was in danger in America. A discharged and disgruntled associate was filling the lobbies of Congress with talk of Hoover’s highhanded negotiations with the warring governments. It was claimed that Belgian Relief was operating like a sovereign state. Senator Lodge was out for Hoover’s scalp and threatening prosecution under the Logan Act.

As soon as he arrived in America, House arranged for Hoover to see the President. Hoover found him completely sympathetic. The fact that Lodge was on Hoover’s trail was in his favor. The President publicly commended the work of the Belgian Relief Commission and helped select an advisory committee of prominent New Yorkers to raise funds.

When T.R. heard of Hoover’s difficulties he invited him to lunch at Oyster Bay and talked his ear off. “Mr. Roosevelt kept me all afternoon — making havoc of several appointments.” When Hoover told him of a frigid interview with Lodge in Boston, T.R. almost laughed himself sick. He said Lodge could see involvements in Europe under every bush. “I’ll hold his hand,” he said.

On this American trip, by which he assured the continuation of Belgian Relief, Hoover’s last interview, like his first, was with House. For the confidential colonel, he was becoming an important source of information on the realities of the war.

Hoover’s work carried him back and forth across the battlelines. He was one of the few Americans who could appreciate the blind unreasoning hate the brutalities of warfare aroused in both camps. The execution of Edith Cavell, an English nurse who helped smuggle Belgian and escaped British prisoners out of Brussels, had thrown the Allied peoples into a fresh paroxysm of anger. Yet House and the President persisted in thinking these warmad populations could be made to listen to reason. Hoover felt this hope was unrealistic, at least for the present. House urged Hoover to dissuade the Germans from any more Zeppelin bombings of London. Hoover had little that was encouraging to say along that line. As soon as he brought House up to date Hoover drove straight to the Holland America Line pier where he was catching the Rotterdam , sailing at noon.

To cross the Atlantic in those days was like moving to a different planet. Peace and war were two worlds. Only determined idealists like Jane Addams, the queenbee of Chicago settlement house workers, who had been presiding at a women’s peace congress at The Hague, came back hopeful. She and a number of other pacifist ladies pestered House all summer to induce the President to appoint delegates to join with other neutrals in a permanent commission seated at The Hague to keep on making peace proposals until one was accepted.

House told the ladies, tactfully of course, that they were misinformed. The President knew better than they did what the best methods were to promote peace.

The peace agitation would not down. Peace societies were proliferating over the country. Herbert Hoover’s old preceptor, David Starr Jordan of Stanford, who headed the American Peace Society, turned up in House’s study asking for an appointment with President Wilson to present the resolutions passed at a congress in San Francisco. A few days later it was David Starr Jordan’s secretary, a popeyed and voluble young man named Louis P. Lochner, who took up an hour of the colonel’s time to talk permanent mediation. With him was none other than Henry Ford.

Henry Ford was in his heyday. Model T’s were chugging along every dirt road in the country. Ford’s mass production had revolutionized transportation. He had turned the tables on the bankers and learned how to finance his own concerns. Ford’s five dollars a day had laid the foundation for the highwage economy. Millions were pouring in faster than he could find a use for them.

Ford’s formation was that of a rural mechanic. To the mind of a simple rural mechanic from the American middlewest war was plumb madness. Why couldn’t these crazy Europeans be made to see reason: give up murder and destruction and go to work. If they spent the billions they were throwing away into massacre and destruction on useful production they could make more money in a year than any of the odd lots of real estate they were fighting for was worth.

Lochner and an ardent Hungarian lady named Rosika Schwimmer had talked Ford into backing Jane Addams’ plan for permanent mediation. Suppose it cost a couple of million dollars to send a committee to Europe to end the war. How better could he advertise Tin Lizzie?

House complained in his notes that young Lochner wouldn’t let Mr. Ford get a word in edgewise: … “just as soon as I got him discussing his great industrial plant at Detroit and the plans for the uplift of his workmen, the young man would break in.… Ford I should judge is a mechanical genius … who may become a prey to all sorts of faddists who desire his money.” House found Ford’s ideas about peace “crude and unimportant.”

Instead of letting the confidential colonel dash cold water on Lochner’s scheme, which was to charter a steamship to take a peace commission to Europe, Ford brashly suggested that House come along. House couldn’t be induced to consider it. For fear German propagandists might get hold of the idea he immediately wrote Ambassador Gerard in Berlin disclaiming any connection with the peace pilgrims. “Of course there’s no need to tell you that the Government are not interested in it, either directly, indirectly, or otherwise.”

The Ford Peace Ship turned out a saturnalia for the press. The word peace was already as unfashionable among up to date people in America as it was in England. Wiseguy reporters found plenty to poke fun at.

The expedition consisted of eightythree delegates, including one state governor; the wellknown reformer and judge of the juvenile court in Denver, Ben Lindsey; Ben Huebsch the New York publisher, and the lovely suffragist Inez Millholland Boissevain. There was an assortment of clergymen, professionals of the peace associations and plain crackpots.

The secretarial staff amounted to fifty. Among them were publicitymen from the Ford organization instructed to watch over the Old Man. The press was represented by S. S. McClure, fiftyfour reporters and three movie photographers. Eighteen college students were invited along for the ride. A Western Union messengerboy named Jake stowed away and was allowed to join the technical staff. As the Oscar II was about to sail somebody let loose two squirrels on the deck.

Ford, a tonguetied man who spoke in bunches, aroused the sophisticated risibilities of the press a few days before he sailed by blurting out to his interviewers: “We’ll get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas … The main idea is to crush militarism and get the boys out of the trenches … War’s nothing but preparedness. No boy would ever kill a bird if he didn’t first have a slingshot or a gun.”

“Do you actually expect to get the boys out by Christmas?” a reporter tried to pin him down. Ford gave him his famous grin. “Well there’s New Year’s and Easter and the Fourth of July, isn’t there?”

Ford’s great disappointment came when his dear friend Thomas Edison refused to sail with him. Jane Addams pleaded illness. John Burroughs the naturalist, another of Ford’s cronies, came to see him off, his mane of white hair flowing in the breeze, but said he was too old to go.

William Jennings Bryan, who had at first seemed willing to go along, delivered a moving address instead on the Hoboken dock. He was still insisting he would join the delegation in Holland. He made a point of shaking every individual pilgrim by the hand. A pair of the pilgrims added to the gaiety of the scene by getting themselves married in the firstclass saloon before the ship sailed.