John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The Secretary of War was engrossed with the complications of the expanding army. McAdoo at the Treasury took a broad view of the needs of the war machine, but, although still Mac, and a member of the family at White House meals, he was not listened to as carefully as in the past: Edith Wilson suspected him of having been opposed to her marrying the President.

There remained the roundabout method of approach through the good offices of the confidential colonel in his New York apartment, but House’s visiting hours were limited; and sometimes even he had to wait for days for the privilege of visiting the President in his study.

It was inevitable that out of the welter of jostling commissions, striving to bring order out of the chaos of production and supply, certain agencies should assume primacy over the rest. Bernard Baruch of the Advisory Commission’s subcommission on raw materials developed extraordinary talents as coordinator of coordinators. Before long the commission he headed became the War Industries Board and central in the organization of supply.

Bernard M. Baruch had no administrative training whatsoever. At fortyseven he had accumulated a fortune which Wall Street estimated in the tens of millions as a lone speculator on the stock exchange. Although flatterers called him a financier, he showed neither pride nor shame in his career as speculator.

Baruch was the son of a German Jewish doctor who had emigrated to America as a very young man and served as a surgeon in the Confederate Army. His mother, known in the family as Miss Belle, came of a prominent Sephardic family long established in the South. He was born and spent the first ten years of his life in Camden, South Carolina, where his father, a wellread man of varied interests, practiced medicine and carried on agricultural experiments that were more prophetic than profitable. Miss Belle gave music lessons.

When Bernard was eleven, Dr. Baruch, who wasn’t making much of a go of it in Camden, moved his family to New York. Bernard went through the public schools and the City College. He grew up a tall slender active youth. A blow from a bat in a ballgame that ended in a scrimmage left him permanently deaf in one ear. Although his parents wanted him to be a professional man he couldn’t decide what career to take up.

About the time he graduated his father became resident physician at a summer hotel on the Jersey coast Bernard, who had already shown more interest in poker than in his studies, became a habitué of the Monmouth track. He had a good memory and an analytic mind. He devoted himself to gambling with singlehearted devotion. An adventurous spirit carried him out to Cripple Creek. There he did surprisingly well playing poker, but when he invested his winnings in mining stock, he lost every cent. He came home broke and took a job as a customers’ man in a brokerage house at twentyfive dollars a week.

Twentyfive dollars a week was considered good pay for a young man in the nineties. Baruch had presence. His ebullient charm was mingled with a certain unassuming personal dignity. He never lost his pleasant South Carolina manners. Un prince d’Israel , Clemenceau was to call him.

With his savings out of his paycheck he began to speculate in earnest. His retentive memory and his knack for analyzing every factor of a business situation stood him in good stead. He paid no attention to Wall Street gossip but made it his business to know what was behind every stock he traded in.

At twentyseven he married, and bought himself a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

His associates and customers were in the higher brackets. He traded in tobacco with Thomas Fortune Ryan. At the outbreak of the Spanish War, he got to a cable before any of the other brokers, and made a killing in the London Stock Exchange. His specialty was playing the bull market. At thirtyfour he was a millionaire and already somewhat disgusted with moneymaking. He had friends in every walk of life. Garet Garrett kept telling him he ought to turn his great abilities to the public service.

From the days when he was a small boy in Camden he’d loved to shoot quail. He bought himself one of the great South Carolina plantations, known as Hobcaw Barony, near Georgetown. There he entertained lavishly. He indulged his taste for racehorses.

A congenital Democrat, and known to be openhanded with his money, he was much sought after by the politicians. Democratic chairman McCombs introduced him to Governor Wilson at a fundraising dinner in 1912.

Immediately Baruch became a devoted adherent of Woodrow Wilson’s. The feeling was mutual. Wilson liked Baruch, he found him learned in matters pertaining to finance and industry on which he himself admitted ignorance. Here was a financier from wicked Wall Street who had no pride in his money bags, who liked to talk about human values, who listened with reverence to Wilson’s plans for the country. He called Baruch “Dr. Facts.”

In the dark days of the 1916 campaign Baruch was a solace. He brought his aging parents to Shadow Lawn to tea. He became a family friend. McAdoo esteemed him highly. Mrs. Wilson liked his humorously deferential manner. He shared with Grayson a passion for horseflesh. Though the recently appointed admiral was a notoriously bad shot, he was often invited to hunting parties at Hobcaw Barony.

When Baruch went to work with the Advisory Commission his colleagues marvelled at how little he exploited his “in” at the White House. Already he was being talked of as the man to head a general purchasing agency. The multimillionaires who dominated steel and iron and copper and tin listened to Baruch as one of themselves. At the same time he’d made his money in such a way that he had no ties with any particular industry. He’d taken advantage of them all, playing the rise and fall of Wall Street’s tides. His knack for sizing up the potentialities of the various industries, which had made him a master speculator, prepared him for the worldwide trading operations of procurement for war. He had zest for the work, and the shrewdness needed to pick good subordinates and to back them up unreservedly so long as they did what he considered a good job. Being new at administration he had no bad habits of “reference and deference” to overcome.

Only to the President did he defer. With a boyish sort of heroworship he tried to anticipate Woodrow Wilson’s every wish. Whenever he arranged a set of purchases or dug out a piece of information, he made Woodrow Wilson feel that he was doing it for him, personally.

Baruch had at that point no legal authority to corner raw materials. His operations depended on cajolement and the patriotic appeal. His associates worried themselves sick during the summer and fall of 1917, wondering why he didn’t ask the President directly for the powers he needed to enforce his demands; why he allowed Secretary Baker, who distrusted him, to build a rival agency in the War Department under Stettinius of J. P. Morgan and Co. As Secretary Lane liked to say, Woodrow Wilson moved slowly as a glacier. Perhaps he was afraid of stirring up Democratic oratory in Congress by appointing a Wall Street man.

Finally, when McAdoo tried to enlist Baruch for a Treasury post, Wilson revealed his intentions: “I’m mighty sorry but I can’t let you have Baruch for the Finance Corporation,” he wrote his soninlaw. “He has trained now in the War Industries Board until he is thoroughly conversant with the activities of it from top to bottom, and as soon as I can do so without risking new issues on the Hill I am going to appoint him chairman of that board.”

That strenuous summer of 1917 saw the beginning of the proliferation of federal agencies that grew into the leviathan of years to come. Since nobody in government had the ability to run them, they had to be run by businessmen who signed on for the duration.