The Illusion of Victory (40 page)

Spokesmen of all stripes fanned the flames of war rage with shrill pronouncements. A Detroit minister said any American who claimed to be neutral should be “jailed, interned or labelled.” The Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church published a book on German atrocities. The tome ended with an exhortation to tell the kaiser and his general staff:“You shall not skewer babes upon your bayonets . . . you shall not nail young nuns to the doors of the schoolhouses . . . you shall not mutilate the bodies of little girls and noble women.”

In Chicago the American Protective League kept what one paper called “a steady stream of handcuffed men” marching to jail, because they had been overheard exulting over the progress of General Ludendorff ’s offensives. Neither in the Windy City nor anywhere else in the country did the APL’s 250,000 “Secret Service” sleuths catch a single German spy. Nor did the real Secret Service or the agents of the Bureau of Investigation. This dearth of German spies did not deter John Revelstoke Rathom of the
Providence Journal
from concocting ever more improbable stories of evil German reservists ferreting out information about the war effort and fomenting strikes among hyphenates.
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German-Americans became favorite targets of this mounting war rage. They were beaten up on the streets of Terre Haute, Indiana, and many other cities. Theodore Roosevelt supported a call to ban the German language from the schools. Forcing German-Americans to kiss the flag or face some far more unpleasant punishment became so commonplace, newspapers stopped reporting such episodes. German-Americans who failed to subscribe to Liberty Loan drives often got their houses painted yellow. An Illinois German-American doctor who called Secretary of War Baker a fathead (something General Leonard Wood, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt did regularly) was thrown into a canal, forced to kiss the flag and told to leave town if he wanted to stay healthy.
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Inevitably, this violent spirit escalated into murder. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a member of the County Council of Defense gunned down a waiter for making a pro-German remark. The killer was acquitted. So was a policeman in an Oklahoma small town who shot a Bulgarian for saying something “seditious.” Bulgaria was allied with Germany in the war in Europe.
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In Collinsville, Illinois, not far from Saint Louis, German-born Robert Prager worked in a bakery. He had dutifully registered as an enemy alien and claimed he wanted to become a citizen as soon as possible. He had even tried to enlist, but a childhood injury had left him blind in one eye. Prager bitterly resented being refused membership in a local miners’ union because of his alien status and attacked the union leaders in a statement that he posted at various places around town. On April 4, he was seized by a drunken mob, stripped of his clothes and wrapped in an American flag. The police made a halfhearted attempt to protect him by putting him in jail. But they did nothing to stop the mob from dragging Prager out of his cell and into the countryside. There, after letting him write a farewell letter to his parents in Germany, the mob lynched him.
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The death of this innocent young man shocked the country. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both condemned it. The
New York Times
editorialized that “a fouler thing could hardly be done in America.” But not everyone felt remorse for Prager. The
Washington Post
coolly commented that it was a sign of a “healthful and wholesome awakening” to the reality of Germany’s evil in the nation’s heartland, which had for too long lagged behind the public mind of the East.
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John Lord O’Brian, one of the more liberal members of Wilson’s Justice Department, sent the president a memorandum, urging him to speak out against the spreading violence. Wilson replied that he was “very deeply concerned” about the problem. But he remained silent.

Around this time a woman friend asked the president’s advice on how to deal with German sympathizers in a school of which she was a trustee. Wilson said if the offense “was merely one of opinion,” americans should “vindicate our claim that we stand for justice and fairness and high-minded generosity” in the treatment of such people. On the other hand, if the person was “dangerous to the Government or to the community in which he lives, that is another matter.” wilson, as infected with the disloyalty mania as the rest of the country, was convinced most dissent was “another matter.”
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While the president said nothing, members of the mob that hanged Robert Prager went on trial in Illinois—and were all acquitted. The case was discussed in the Reichstag and was widely publicized in German newspapers. This uncomfortable development may have been why on July 26, 1918, Wilson finally issued a statement deploring the “mob spirit which has recently . . . shown its head amongst us.” Every lynching was “a blow at the heart of ordered law and humane justice.” He found this especially deplorable because “we are at this very moment fighting lawless passion. Germany has outlawed herself among the nations because she has disregarded the sacred obligations of law and has made lynchers of her armies.” this remark virtually nullified the overall purpose of the statement, to prevent other German-Americans from being lynched. It is further evidence of how war rage was infecting the mind of the man who had called for a war without hate.
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Lynching was to be deplored, but dissenting from the president’s war policy was still another matter. In May 1918, at Wilson’s request Congress increased the government’s power to control opinion with a Sedition Act. By a process of reasoning that can only be explained by war rage, various authoritative figures—senators, governors, cabinet officers—maintained that giving the government more power to suppress and punish dissent would reduce the incidence of lynching.
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Compared to what some people wanted, the Sedition Law was relatively mild. It punished dissent with fines and jail time. Aiming at hyphenates, Vice President Marshall said every American “not heartily of the Government” should have his citizenship revoked and his property confiscated. Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi called for abolishing political parties and amalgamating all voters into a single “loyalist pro-American party.” Others wanted to set up military courts that would not be burdened with legal technicalities and red tape.
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The new law was swiftly invoked against those who made negative comments of any sort about the war. In Lansing, Michigan, a man named Powell was irked when he was intimidated into buying a $50 war bond. He sounded off to a relative about his disillusion with the war, opining that German atrocity stories were nonsense and American soldiers were dying so the rich could increase their stock portfolios. The relative reported him to the police. Thinking the whole affair was a joke, Powell did not even hire a lawyer. A jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to twenty years in the penitentiary and fined $10,000. Too late, Powell wrote a frantic letter to the National Civil Liberties Bureau (forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union) begging for help. He had a wife and five children to support. When the mayor of Lansing tried to intervene, the judge cited him for contempt of court. Powell went to jail.
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Even more deplorable in some ways was the fate of three German Americans in Covington, Kentucky. One of them, a former policeman named C.B. Shoborg, ran a shoemaker’s shop. The three, ranging in age from midfifties to midsixties, often met there to discuss politics and other matters. Local patriots hired a detective agency to sneak a listening device into the shop. The snoopers soon heard the three friends call Theodore Roosevelt “a damned agitator” and express pleasure at the German army’s successful 1918 offensives. Although the men’s attorneys argued the conversations were private and could not have interfered with the war effort, they were all convicted under the Sedition Act. Shoborg was sentenced to ten years in prison. The other two men received slightly shorter sentences, but one, who was wealthy, was fined $40,000.
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Saddest of all was the fate of fifty-two-year old Edwin A. Seidewitz, a former mayor of Annapolis, Maryland, and one of Baltimore’s leading florists. Until the United States entered the war, he had been one of the most prosperous citizens in Baltimore; he served as president of the Rotary Club and was considered one of the “livest” men in the organization. One night at a hotel bar, shortly after war was declared, the florist met some officers from several German ships that had been trapped in Baltimore’s harbor since 1914. They were in a gloomy mood, lamenting their long separation from friends and family and the prospect of internment as enemy aliens until the war ended. Seidewitz bought them beer, and they drank together. Touched by their plight, the florist kissed one of them on the forehead in an attempt to comfort the man. Word soon swept Baltimore that Seidewitz had “kissed a German.” His floral business collapsed. He was expelled from the Rotary Club, after the directors refused to let him speak to the members in his own defense. On August 24, 1918, Edwin Seidewitz killed himself with a bullet in the head.
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The Sedition Act also added to the already considerable power of Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson, described by Colonel House as “the most belligerent member of the Cabinet.” Early in the war, Burleson had banned or harassed into silence a number of magazines and newspapers, such as the left-wing
Masses
. Wilson had been bombarded with protests from intellectuals, including his devoted follower Walter Lippmann, and had asked Burleson to be more tolerant. Burleson’s reply was a combination threat and challenge. “If you don’t want the Espionage Act enforced, I can [only] resign. Congress has passed the law and said I am to enforce it.” wilson capitulated and said with an embarrassed laugh,“Well go ahead and do your duty.”
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The Post Office’s solicitor, William H. Lamar, was even more intransigent than Burleson. He could find disloyalty and prospective treason in almost any publication that caught his suspicious eye. He banned one Irish-American magazine from the mails for printing Thomas Jefferson’s opinion that Ireland should be a republic. When the National Civil Liberties Bureau published a pamphlet pointing out a court ruling that had overturned one of Lamar’s decisions, the solicitor promptly banned the pamphlet from the mails.
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The Sedition Act gave the Burleson-Lamar team expanded powers. Anyone who used “disloyal, scurrilous, profane or abusive language” about the U.S. government, the armed forces, the flag, or the Constitution could be fined $10,000 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. When Lamar banned the liberal magazine
The Nation
, its publisher, Oswald Garrison Villard, rushed to Washington to argue his case. Lamar told him his censorship program had three main targets,“pro-Germanism, pacifism, and high-browism”—a strange agenda for an administration headed by the former president of Princeton University. It was one more illustration of the gap between Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric and reality.
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In another part of the war, politics was being semi-adjourned in the Navy Department. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels had decided it might be a good idea to get his untrustworthy assistant secretary, Franklin D. Roosevelt, out of Washington for a while. Daniels yielded to Roosevelt’s almost desperate importunities to go to Europe. On a personal level—and to some extent a political level—FDR was more and more embarrassed by Theodore Roosevelt’s four sons on the firing line while he enjoyed Washington’s version of
la guerre de luxe
.
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Daniels had grown weary of hearing stories from friends about Roosevelt’s continuing attempts to denigrate his performance as head of the Navy Department. He began noting examples in his journal, adding a Latin phrase that implied retaliation:
Carthage delenda est
. After one of these entries, he scribbled:“R[oosevelt] . . . not loyal sh’d not hesitate.” the secretary was evidently thinking of demolishing his overambitious assistant. But the kindhearted North Carolinian decided that granting Franklin his European wish—which meant a separation of several weeks—might be a better solution.
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Roosevelt was ecstatic. He was enjoying every aspect of being a man of authority in a government at war. Early on, he had confided to a friend,“It would be wonderful to be a war president.” the trip to Europe added the dimension he felt he badly needed on his war record. He took along his Harvard roommate and boon companion, Livingston Davis, whom he had hired as his aide. Davis had also acquired a Washington mistress and we know from his diary they enjoyed a torrid farewell. Whether FDR had a similar encounter with Lucy Mercer remains in the realm of speculation—but the probability must be considered strong.

By July 10, Roosevelt was aboard a new destroyer, USS
Dyer,
heading for England. While he was at sea, Quentin Roosevelt’s plane plunged to earth. The young flier’s tragic death created huge headlines in U.S. newspapers. It would have made the stay-at-home member of the Roosevelt clan look terrible. Luck as well as destiny seemed to be on FDR’s side as he approached the war zone.
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The assistant secretary’s trip across Periscope Pond, as the wartime Atlantic was sometimes called, was uneventful, although FDR’s diary noted a few hairy moments. One was a narrow escape from a four-inch shell when a green sailor pulled the lanyard of a gun when it was trained too far forward. Another close call was a half-hour lying off Ponta Delgada in the Azores with the
Dyer
’s overheated turbines shut down, converting the ship into a proverbial sitting duck for any alert U-boat captain.
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