The Great Influenza (18 page)

On April 2, three weeks after the disclosure of the note, after his cabinet unanimously called for war, Wilson finally delivered his war message to Congress. Two days later he explained to a friend, 'It was necessary for me by very slow stages and with the most genuine purpose to avoid war to lead the country on to a single way of thinking.'

And so the United States entered the war filled with a sense of selfless mission, believing glory still possible, and still keeping itself separate from what it regarded as the corrupt Old World. It fought alongside Britain, France, Italy, and Russia not as an 'ally' but as an 'Associated Power.'

Anyone who believed that Wilson's reluctant embrace of war meant that he would not prosecute it aggressively knew nothing of him. He was one of those rare men who believed almost to the point of mental illness in his own righteousness.

Wilson believed in fact that his will and spirit were informed by the spirit and hope of a people and even of God. He talked of his 'sympathetic connection which I am sure that I have with' all American citizens and said, 'I am sure that my heart speaks the same thing that they wish their hearts to speak.' 'I will not cry 'peace' so long as there is sin and wrong in the world,' he went on. 'America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.'

He is probably the only American president to have held to this belief with quite such conviction, with no sign of self-doubt. It is a trait more associated with crusaders than politicians.

To Wilson this war was a crusade, and he intended to wage total war. Perhaps knowing himself even more than the country, he predicted, 'Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.'

America had never been and would never be so informed by the will of its chief executive, not during the Civil War with the suspension of habeas corpus, not during Korea and the McCarthy period, not even during World War II. He would turn the nation into a weapon, an explosive device.

As an unintended consequence, the nation became a tinderbox for epidemic disease as well.

* 

Wilson declared, 'It isn't an army we must shape and train for war, it is a nation.'

To train the nation, Wilson used an iron fist minus any velvet glove. He did have some legitimate reasons for concern, reasons to justify a hard line.

For reasons entirely unrelated to the war, America was a rumbling chaos of change and movement, its very nature and identity shifting. In 1870 the United States numbered only forty million souls, 72 percent of whom lived in small towns or on farms. By the time America entered the war, the population had increased to roughly 105 million. Between 1900 and 1915 alone, fifteen million immigrants flooded the United States; most came from Eastern and Southern Europe, with new languages and religions, along with darker complexions. And the first census after the war would also be the first one to find more people living in urban areas than rural.

The single largest ethnic group in the United States was German-American and a large German-language press had been sympathetic to Germany. Would German-Americans fight against Germany? The Irish Republican Army had launched an uprising against British rule on Easter, 1916. Would Irish-Americans fight to help Britain? The Midwest was isolationist. Would it send soldiers across an ocean when the United States had not been attacked? Populists opposed war, and Wilson's own secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democratic nominee for president, had resigned from the cabinet in 1915 after Wilson responded too aggressively for him to Germany's torpedoing the
Lusitania.
Socialists and radical unionists were strong in factories, in mining communities in the Rockies, in the Northwest. Would they, drafted or not, defend capitalism?

The hard line was designed to intimidate those reluctant to support the war into doing so, and to crush or eliminate those who would not. Even before entering the war, Wilson had warned Congress, 'There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit,' who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life' . Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.'

He intended to do so.

His fire informed virtually everything that happened in the country, including fashion: to save cloth, a war material (everything was a war material) designers narrowed lapels and eliminated or shrank pockets. And his fury particularly informed every act of the United States government. During the Civil War Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, imprisoning hundreds of people. But those imprisoned presented a real threat of armed rebellion. He left unchecked extraordinarily harsh criticism. Wilson believed he had not gone far enough and told his cousin, 'Thank God for Abraham Lincoln. I won't make the mistakes that he made.'

The government compelled conformity, controlled speech in ways, frightening ways, not known in America before or since. Soon after the declaration of war, Wilson pushed the Espionage Act through a cooperative Congress, which balked only at legalizing outright press censorship - despite Wilson's calling it 'an imperative necessity.'

The bill gave Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson the right to refuse to deliver any periodical he deemed unpatriotic or critical of the administration. And, before television and radio, most of the political discourse in the country went through the mails. A southerner, a narrow man and a hater, nominally a populist but closer to the Pitchfork Ben Tillman wing of the party than to that of William Jennings Bryan, Burleson soon had the post office stop delivery of virtually all publications and any foreign-language publication that hinted at less-than-enthusiastic support of the war.

Attorney General Thomas Gregory called for still more power. Gregory was a progressive largely responsible for Wilson's nominating Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, a liberal and the court's first Jew. Now, observing that America was 'a country governed by public opinion,' Gregory intended to help Wilson rule opinion and, through opinion, the country. He demanded that the Librarian of Congress report the names of those who had asked for certain books and also explained that the government needed to monitor 'the individual casual or impulsive disloyal utterances.' To do the latter, Gregory pushed for a law broad enough to punish statements made 'from good motives or' [if] traitorous motives weren't provable.'

The administration got such a law. In 1798, Federalist President John Adams and his party, under pressure of undeclared war with France, passed the Sedition Act, which made it unlawful to 'print, utter, or publish' any false, scandalous, or malicious writing' against the government. But that law inflamed controversy, contributed to Adams's reelection defeat, and led to the only impeachment of a Supreme Court justice in history, when Samuel Chase both helped get grand jury indictments of critics and then sentenced these same critics to maximum terms.

Wilson's administration went further, yet engendered little opposition. The new Sedition Act made it punishable by twenty years in jail to 'utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States.' One could go to jail for cursing the government, or criticizing it, even if what one said was true. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the Supreme Court opinion that found the act constitutional (after the war ended, upholding lengthy prison terms for the defendants) arguing that the First Amendment did not protect speech if 'the words used' create a clear and present danger.'

To enforce that law, the head of what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation agreed to make a volunteer group called the American Protective League an adjunct to the Justice Department, and authorized them to carry badges identifying them as 'Secret Service.' Within a few months the APL would have ninety thousand members. Within a year, two hundred thousand APL members were operating in a thousand communities.

In Chicago a 'flying squad' of league members and police trailed, harassed, and beat members of the International Workers of the World. In Arizona, league members and vigilantes locked twelve hundred IWW members and their 'collaborators' into boxcars and left them on a siding in the desert across the state line in New Mexico. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the league for help in gaining confessions from twenty-one black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. Throughout the country, the league's American Vigilance Patrol targeted 'seditious street oratory,' sometimes calling upon the police to arrest speakers for disorderly conduct, sometimes acting more' directly. And everywhere the league spied on neighbors, investigated 'slackers' and 'food hoarders,' demanded to know why people didn't buy (or didn't buy more) Liberty Bonds.

States outlawed the teaching of German, while an Iowa politician warned that 'ninety percent of all the men and women who teach the German language are traitors.' Conversations in German on the street or over the telephone became suspicious. Sauerkraut was renamed 'Liberty cabbage.' The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
stated, 'What the nation demands is that treason, whether thinly veiled or quite unmasked, be stamped out.' Every day the
Providence Journal
carried a banner warning, 'Every German or Austrian in the United States unless known by years of association should be treated as a spy.' The Illinois Bar Association declared that lawyers who defended draft resisters were 'unpatriotic' and 'unprofessional.' Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, a national leader of the Republican Party, fired faculty critical of the government and observed, 'What had been tolerable became intolerable now. What had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason.'

Thousands of government posters and advertisements urged people to report to the Justice Department anyone 'who spreads pessimistic stories, divulges (or seeks) confidential military information, cries for peace, or belittles our effort to win the war.' Wilson himself began speaking of the 'sinister intrigue' in America carried on 'high and low' by 'agents and dupes.'

Even Wilson's enemies, even the supposedly internationalist Communists, distrusted foreigners. Two Communist parties initially emerged in the United States, one with a membership of native-born Americans, one 90 percent immigrants.

Judge Learned Hand, one of Simon Flexner's closest friends, later observed, 'That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, becomes a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent.'

But American society hardly seemed to be dissolving. In fact it was crystallizing around a single focal point; it was more intent upon a goal than it had ever been, or might possibly ever be again.

* 

Wilson's hard line threatened dissenters with imprisonment. The federal government also took control over much of national life. The War Industries Board allocated raw materials to factories, guaranteed profits, and controlled production and prices of war materials, and, with the National War Labor Board, it set wages as well. The Railroad Administration virtually nationalized the American railroad industry. The Fuel Administration controlled fuel distribution (and to save fuel it also instituted daylight savings time). The Food Admininstration (under Herbert Hoover) oversaw agricultural production, pricing, and distribution. And the government inserted itself in the psyche of America by allowing only its own voice to be heard, by both threatening dissenters with prison and shouting down everyone else.

Prior to the war Major Douglas MacArthur had written a long proposal advocating outright censorship if the nation did fight. Journalist Arthur Bullard, who was close to Wilson confidant Colonel Edward House, argued for another approach. Congress's rejection of censorship settled the argument in Bullard's favor.

Bullard had written from Europe about the war for
Outlook, Century,
and
Harper's Weekly.
He pointed out that Britain was censoring the press and had misled the British people, undermining trust in the government and support for the war. He urged using facts only. But he had no particular affection for truth per se, only for effectiveness: 'Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms' . There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other' . There are lifeless truths and vital lies' . The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.'

Then, probably at the request of House, Walter Lippmann wrote Wilson a memo on creating a publicity bureau on April 12, 1917, a week after America declared war. One outgrowth of the Progressive Era, of the emergence of experts in many fields, was the conviction that an elite knew best. Typically, Lippmann later called society 'too big, too complex' for the average person to comprehend, since most citizens were 'mentally children or barbarians' . Self-determination [is] only one of the many interests of a human personality.' Lippmann urged that self-rule be subordinated to 'order,' 'rights,' and 'prosperity.'

The day after receiving the memo, Wilson issued Executive Order 2594, creating the Committee on Public Information (the CPI) and named George Creel its head.

Creel was passionate, intense, handsome, and wild. (Once, years after the war and well into middle age, he literally climbed onto a chandelier in a ballroom and swung from it.) He intended to create 'one white-hot mass' with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.'

To do so, Creel used tens of thousands of press releases and feature stories that were routinely run unedited by newspapers. And those same publications instituted a self-censorship. Editors would print nothing that they thought might hurt morale. Creel also created a force of 'Four Minute Men' (their number ultimately exceeded one hundred thousand) who gave brief speeches before the start of meetings, movies, vaudeville shows, and entertainment of all kinds. Bourne sadly observed, '[A]ll this intellectual cohesion (herd-instinct) which seemed abroad so hysterical and so servile comes to us here in highly rational terms.'