John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

This was the historian Wilson speaking. He clearly understood that the Selective Service law, supplemented by the espionage bill Congress had in the works, would give him more power than any President had enjoyed before him.

The lag in recruiting during the past year of war prosperity and high wages had combined with what they read of the failure of recruiting in Britain to convince Wilson and his War Department that the only way an army large enough to make its weight felt in the present war could be raised was by some sort of compulsory military service. A large body of moderate Republican opinion led by William Howard Taft, whose pulpit was the League to Enforce Peace, had for some time been calling for universal military training on the Swiss model. Long before the declaration of war, the Judge Advocate General, a skinny little Missourian named Enoch Herbert Crowder, had been at work on a conscription bill.

Conscription was a bitter dose for Wilson’s Democrats to swallow. A draft army had long been as anathema as alcohol to Bryan and his supporters. Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House, declared as the debate opened that in his opinion a conscript was the next thing to a convict.

While, with the help of the Republicans, Crowder’s bill was being rammed down the throats of reluctant congressmen, the Judge Advocate General’s office was in a fever of activity. The most original feature of the bill, by which registration and selection for the draft would be in the hands of the same civilian boards that handled registration for voting, was largely the contribution of Crowder’s assistant, Major Johnson, an irrepressible young cavalry officer who, like his boss, had studied law in leisure moments of his military career. Hugh Johnson was making it his business quietly to alert the state governors, and the sheriffs of about ten thousand counties, as to what would be expected of them when the moment came. He found them almost universally cooperative. At the same time he attended to the printing, in secret and before the money to pay for them had been appropriated, of some ten million registration cards at the government printing office.

Secretary Baker had convinced the President that, so that there should be no opportunity for opposition to organize, as little time as possible should be allowed to elapse between the passage of the law and registration day. They both spent sleepless nights remembering the bloody riots against Lincoln’s draft in the Civil War. They dreaded the reaction of the large enemy alien population enrolled in German vereins and foreign language societies. The Irish were unpredictable. The Socialists, though their votes had diminished in the last election and their leadership was split on the war issue, were still to be reckoned with. Trouble was expected from women’s peace leagues and from the pacifist fringe of the labor movement, from the I.W.W. and from foreignborn anarchists stirred to frenzy against capitalist war by such agitators as Emma Goldman.

The Judge Advocate General’s office worked fast. Before the ink was dry on the President’s proclamation the machinery for registration was well on the way to completion. Crowder was appointed Provost Marshal General to administer it.

At the same time the Department of Justice, without waiting for the additional powers to curb free speech which administration lawyers were incorporating in the espionage bill Congress was hotly debating, mobilized a force of special agents to nip anticonscription agitation in the bud. Attorney General Gregory made the announcement from Washington that, “Any spoken or written word, uttered or written for the purpose of interfering with the purpose of the Selective Service Act, will result in prompt arrest of the person or persons responsible.”

In New York two Columbia students and a Barnard girl were taken into custody for getting up a protest against conscription. In Columbus, Ohio, some more students and a printer were arrested for preparing an antiwar poster and charged with treason. A Socialist meeting was raided in Topeka, Kansas. In Kansas City the three Browder brothers were arrested, along with several other persons, for declaring in public that they would refuse to register. In Wichita Falls, Texas, the members of a Socialist group, calling themselves the Farmers and Laborers Protective Union, were hauled off to jail. Eight prospective draftdodgers were picked up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and several in small towns in Wisconsin.

In New York the police overawed the disloyal and the foreignborn, and the youthful radicals who packed to overflowing mass meetings held by an Anti-Conscription League in Madison Square Garden, and at Hunts Point Casino in the Bronx. The President found it necessary to issue a fresh proclamation warning draftdodgers who were trying to leave the country, and agitators against registration, that they would run afoul of the Selective Service Act.

Enthusiastic citizens began to take the law into their own hands. Soldiers and sailors attended pacifist meetings to howl down the orators. Many a man lost his job because he spoke English with an accent. In Racine, Wisconsin, the employees of a tin plant made a machinist, heard to mutter against conscription, crawl across the floor on his knees to kiss an American flag. In Omaha a young man suspected of being a socialist was chased by a mob, and only escaped by outrunning them.

On Capitol Hill a battle raged over censorship of the press. Wilson was insisting that a clause be inserted in the espionage bill giving him power to censor the newspapers. This was too much even for his most faithful adherents among the nation’s journalists. Letters and telegrams against censorship piled up on Tumulty’s desk. He was reminded of the bad odor the Alien and Sedition Laws had left in the history books. Even the warmongering New York Times published editorials against censorship. Tumulty, who as usual had his ear among the grass roots, formulated his opinion in writing. “I know how strongly you feel on the matter of a strict censorship, but I would not be doing my full duty to you … if I did not say … that there is gradually growing a feeling of bitter resentment against the whole business.”

When the House voted censorship down Wilson, hoping it might be restored to the bill in the Senate, invited some of his most energetic opponents among the Republican old guard to the White House. Henry Cabot Lodge, after spending two hours talking to the President, along with Senator Gallinger and Senator Knox, made an entry in his diary: “The President has at last discovered that without the Republicans he would not and could not get his legislation … He was most polite and talked well, as he always does so far as expression goes. We discussed revenue, food control and censorship chiefly. The two latter were his objects.” … Lodge added selfrighteously: “We told him perfectly pleasantly some truths which he ought to have heard from those who surround him.”

In spite of the agreeable way the President conducted the interview, Lodge still hated the man. “I watched and studied his face tonight as I have often done before — a curious mixture of acuteness, intelligence, and extreme underlying timidity — a shifty, furtive, sinister expression can always be detected by a good observer … The man is just what he has been all along, thinking of the country only in terms of Wilson.”

In the end the President had to content himself with an Espionage Act shorn of specific powers of press censorship. As it turned out the powers conferred on the presidency by the mass of wartime legislation were so extensive that censorship was hardly needed. So long as the war lasted most of the news that appeared in the newspapers was piped to them through the administration’s Bureau of Public Information.