John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

William Jennings Bryan, sitting in the press gallery, was so moved he burst into tears. When he was invited to the platform at the opening of the night session he got almost as much applause as Woodrow Wilson’s name when it was first mentioned. Like a good party man he eulogized the President. In spite of their differences about ways and means, their aims were the same. The President had kept the peace.

Ollie James of Kentucky was permanent chairman. Senator James was a large loud man. A reporter from the New York Times described him as having “the face of a prizefighter, the body of an oak and the voice of a pipe organ.” He opened up with “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

The words were met with a wild scream of excitement.

He described the long lonely struggle of the man in the White House to keep America neutral and to restore peace to the warring nations of Europe. “If that be evil and vacillating may God prosper it and teach it to the rulers of the world.”

“The delegates did not rise to their feet,” wrote the Times reporter, “they leaped. ‘Keep it up Ollie, keep it up,’ they shouted.”

The senator described the President’s victory in the Sussex case: “Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun or shedding a drop of blood, he wrung from the most militant spirit that ever brooded above a battlefield the concession of American demands and American rights.”

“Repeat,” the crowd shouted.

Ollie James boomed out the sentence again. They made him repeat it a second time. Then they cheered for twentyone minutes which was one minute more than they had given Woodrow Wilson’s name.

Late that night Wilson’s nomination, which was a foregone conclusion, was carried with but a single dissenting vote. When the platform was put together next day someone, no one ever remembered who, inserted the phrase that became the keynote of the campaign: “He kept us out of war.”

While the Democrats were shouting for peace in St. Louis events in the world were taking a more and more warlike turn. Earl Kitchener, the British war leader, went down on the Hampshire that hit a mine off the Orkneys. The German armies were pressing, with men and metal, on the fortresses of the Verdun salient, where the French were defending their positions with desperate courage. The British were preparing to take the pressure off Verdun by squandering the recruits Kitchener’s drillmasters had trained in a reckless offensive on the Somme.

In Mexico, Carranza, egged on, it was whispered, by German agitators, was trying to unite all factions in a holy war against the gringo. Daily he called on Pershing to take his troops off the sacred soil of the Mexican republic.

Attacks on Americans, from Mazatlán to the Gulf of Mexico, became so threatening that the President instructed the state governors to call out the militia. On June 22 a group of Negro troopers from Pershing’s 10th Cavalry was ambushed at Carrizal by carranzista forces. The Mexican general who laid the trap was killed. Three American officers were dead or missing and twentythree troopers and a Mormon scout were captured and taken to Chihuahua.

Daily notes passed back and forth between Washington and Mexico City. The National Guard, now enlisted under federal orders, started taking up positions on the border. Peace societies and South American diplomats offered their good offices. On June 29 Carranza backed down and telegraphed his people in Chihuahua to turn loose the captured Americans. The twentyfour men were placed on a train for El Paso.

A couple of days later, while the news of the petering out of the Verdun offensive was encouraging Allied supporters, German prestige in America received a great boost with the appearance in the Chesapeake of a German merchant submarine. The Deutschland , loaded with dyes, had crossed the Atlantic unarmed and unscathed in spite of the British blockade.

Wilson’s campaign made a slow start. The President’s health was bothering him. Daily problems tied him to his desk in the White House. Vance McCormick, retired mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and like Newton D. Baker a grassroots reformer from the progressive wing of the party, took the place of the petulant McCombs as campaign manager. Wilson described him glowingly as a steam engine in boots, but he had trouble finding campaign contributors. Betting in New York was still two to one on Hughes.

Henry Morgenthau, the wealthy real estate promoter and financier who had been the leading Wilson man in moneyed circles ever since a speech of Wilson’s had set tears streaming down his face years before, was back on leave from his embassy to Turkey to serve as treasurer; but, in spite of the help of Bernard Baruch who was rising like a new comet on the Wall Street sky, he was having tough going. Men of means favored Hughes.

Josephus Daniels used to tell an amusing tale in later years of how he was called in as a friend of Edison’s and Henry Ford’s to try to induce these gentlemen to part with some folding money. Both men were invited to lunch at Vance McCormick’s suite at the Biltmore in New York. No alcoholic beverages were served, but, when McCormick and Daniels tried to edge up to the topic of campaign contributions, the two great mechanical innovators became exceedingly skittish.

There was a gas and electric chandelier above the table with large groundglass globes. Henry Ford suddenly cried out to Edison, “I’ll bet you anything you want to bet that I can kick that globe off that chandelier.”

Though only the first course had been served, the table was pushed aside and Edison began limbering up his legs in the middle of the room. Daniels’ story was that the electrical wizard made the highest kick he’d ever seen and smashed the globe to smithereens. Ford missed by a fraction of an inch.

Through the rest of the lunch Edison was busy crowing over Ford: “You are a younger man than I but I can outkick you.”

It wasn’t till the arrival of the icecream that McCormick could get his guests’ attention back to the needs of the Democratic campaign. All his pretty speeches about the President’s great work for peace were of no avail. Ford was a little leery of the word since the razzing he’d taken over the fiasco of his “peace ark” the winter before. “All this campaign spending is the bunk,” he said. “I wouldn’t give a dollar to any campaign committee.”

In the end he was induced to run a series of newspaper advertisements which kept Ford products in the public eye at the same time as they gave reasons why people should vote for Woodrow Wilson. All McCormick got out of Edison was a catchy statement: “They say Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has but I notice he usually blunders forward.”

One reason why money was shy was Wilson’s appointment of a Louisvilleborn Boston lawyer named Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Brandeis, a scholarly product of the Harvard Law School, had made his career in the harrying of monopolies and trusts in the interests of the consumer. Bigness was his bugaboo. He was the knight errant of the small man. Conservatives looked with suspicion upon his glittering pronouncements. Even Taft, broadminded as he was, considered his appointment “the worst possible,” and every conservative voice in the country was raised against him in the bitter battle for approval of his appointment in the Senate.

Another reason was the La Follette Act establishing improved working conditions for American seamen, and greatly increasing the cost of operating merchantships under the American flag, which business blamed the President for conniving at. A third was the amendment to the Clayton Act exempting laborunions from the antitrust laws. A fourth was the Adamson Law establishing an eight hour day and arbitration procedures for railroad labor. To most of the business community the eight hour day was still a red flag to a bull.