John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The crowd was immense. One of the Ford publicitymen, a bigmouth named Bingham, led pacifist cheers through a megaphone. “Get together all you friends of peace,” he’d shout.

He led cheers for Henry Ford, for Jane Addams, for Rosika Schwimmer, for Thomas Edison and for Judge Lindsey. As the final whistle blew Henry Ford was seen at the rail with an armful of red roses which he threw down one by one to his friends on the dock below. A man named Ledoux was so moved that he jumped overboard after the Oscar II left the pier and tried to swim after the ship.

The same day that the newspapers carried rollicking stories of Henry Ford’s Peace Pilgrims sailing out of New York on the “peace ark” they carried the news that Captain Boy-Ed the German naval attaché and Fritz von Papen were being recalled from Washington at the request of the United States Government. It was Wilson’s answer to the sinking in the Mediterranean, with heavy loss of life, of the passenger liner Ancona in disregard of the German pledges in the Arabic case.

The peculiarly brutal circumstances of the sinking of the Ancona , the shelling of the liner and its torpedoing before there was any opportunity to lower the boats, sent a shudder through the newspapers, but there was as yet little real war spirit. The President sensed a demand for a sterner stance. In his public speeches he was beginning to take the word “preparedness” away from the warhawks.

He had been particularly stung by some remarks T.R. made offhand to the reporters after delivering a speech to Leonard Wood’s amateur cadets at their Plattsburg camp. Asked about the administration slogan “We must stand by the President,” T.R. squeaked out: “The right of any President is only to demand public support because, if he does well, he serves the public well, and not merely because he is President.”

His next statement rankled so Wilson never forgave him; or Leonard Wood either, for having sponsored T.R.’s appearance: “To treat elocution as a substitute for action, to rely on highsounding words unbacked by deeds is proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of shame.”

Wilson’s answer came in an address before the Manhattan Club in New York: “We have it in mind to be prepared, but not for war, but only for defense.” The word “prepared” brought down the house.

At the same time preparedness meant something quite different to the President than it did to the pro-Allied fanatics who wanted the United States, by immediately backing up the French and British, to ensure Germany’s defeat. Wilson was turning over in his mind the prospects opened up by an intimation from Sir Edward Grey through his confidential colonel:

“… To me,” the British Foreign Secretary wrote, “the great object of securing the elimination of militarism and navalism is to get security for the future against aggressive war. How much are the United States prepared to do in this direction? Would the President propose that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side against any power which broke a treaty? I cannot say which governments would be prepared to accept such a proposal, but I am sure that the Government of the United States is the only government that could make it with effect.”

A tentative plan, gradually forming in discussion between Colonel House and the President, was to intervene on the side of the Allies, if, when the moment came, Germany refused to accept mediation. Thus without too much bloodshed, the Administration could force a negotiated peace on the basis of limitation of armaments, freedom of the seas, arbitration and the sanctity of treaties.

Colonel House, in the high style of his daydreams when he was writing Philip Dru, Administrator , was building for the President an image of himself as peacemaker to the world. “This is the part,” the colonel wrote him from New York on the very day of his farewell interview with Herbert Hoover, “I think you are destined to play in this world tragedy, and it is the noblest part that has ever come to a son of man. This country will follow you along such a path, no matter what the cost may be.”

House meanwhile had been trying for some sort of a commitment from Grey. All he could get out of Spring Rice was a stream of complaints about how American insistence on neutral rights was hurting the Allied cause. Sir Edward Grey’s last letters were so full of gloom over Allied failures in Gallipoli, Russian failures in the east and the rising butcher’s bill in the stalemated entrenchments in the west that he seemed to have forgotten the mirage of a League of Nations he’d been dangling under the colonel’s nose.

According to House, Page too was in a blue funk. All Page could write of was the growing unpopularity of Americans in England. The British seemed to be blaming every new fumble in their military strategy on the failure of the American public to get sufficiently aroused about German atrocities. Meanwhile von Bernstorff, in a panic since the dismissal of von Papen and Boy-Ed, was assuring House that the German Government would welcome a peace emissary from the President.

Like Noah from the Ark President Wilson decided to send out one more bird of peace from Washington. Maybe this time he’d come back with an olive branch.

The colonel went abroad as the President’s accredited though unofficial representative. His trip was paid for out of executive funds. House and his party carried their first passports. To keep tabs on travelling Americans who might be acting as agents for the belligerents the State Department was now demanding that American citizens carry passports abroad.

On December 28 fully equipped with diplomatic documents, Colonel and Mrs. House and the intrepid Miss Denton drove down to the Holland-America Line dock to tempt the wintry seas, by now dangerously infested with floating mines. Among the ship’s company was Brand Whitlock, the man of letters, ex-political reformer and mayor of Toledo who was the very emotional U. S. minister to Belgium (and a thorn in the flesh of brusque and businesslike Hoover), and Captain Boy-Ed, travelling home under a British safeconduct.

“When we reached the pier,” House noted in his diary (dutifully typed by Miss Denton), “there was the greatest array of newspapermen with cameras and moving-picture machines I have ever seen. There must have been fifty of them ranged up to do execution. I was perfectly pleasant, acceding to their demands, and posing for them something like five minutes … Before leaving the pier, the General Manager of the Holland-America Line had our things moved from the cabin we had engaged to the cabin-de-luxe, consisting of a sitting-room, two bedrooms and two baths.”

Copious reports of what Colonel House had said and not said appeared in the papers next morning. No, the colonel was definitely not going to transmit the President’s orders to his ambassadors abroad. He had no instructions to work for mediation, nothing to say about peace. He would make no demands on the British or on the Germans. No that wasn’t what the President had in mind. Under a cloud of denials the colonel retired to his deluxe cabin as the ship’s siren started booming. An enterprising journalist added to the confusion by printing a composite picture showing Boy-Ed, Minister Whitlock and Colonel House engaged in what seemed to be friendly conversation.

Ten days before House and his party sailed for Falmouth, the President and Mrs. Galt were married in Washington. They were married at eight o’clock in the evening at Mrs. Galt’s narrow brick house on Twentieth Street.

It was a cold day, gusty after rain. Only members of both families were present, but that made up a group of forty or fifty. Mrs. Galt wore a black velvet gown. The ceremony was performed by their two favorite ministers under a bower of maidenhair fern studded with orchids, which had been constructed by the gardeners from the White House conservatory in Mrs. Galt’s livingroom. Pyramids of American beauty roses virtually filled the small house.