The Illusion of Victory (31 page)

His jaw set, the AEF commander told Bliss and Robertson he had changed his mind. If the British could transport 150,000 unattached American infantrymen, they could also convey six complete divisions—and that was what Pershing now wanted. While Bliss tut-tutted in Robertson’s favor, Pershing said he would let the six divisions train with the British and if an emergency arose on the northern front, Haig could use them. Robertson stamped out in a fury and telegraphed Lloyd George for political reinforcements.

In one of the most momentous confrontations of the war, Pershing and Bliss met without “Wully” to thrash out their differences. If Pershing had lost the argument, the history of the war would have been altered, almost certainly for the worse. Bliss tried the standard gambit of the staff officer—bucking the decision up the line. He said they should cable Secretary of War Baker their differing opinions and let him decide. Pershing went into his commander-in-chief mode.“Bliss, do you know what would happen if we should do that? We would both be relieved from further duty in France and that is exactly what we would deserve.”

Bliss capitulated. “I think you are right and I shall back you up in the position you have taken,” he said.
⁷⁶

Lloyd George, Robertson, Haig and a phalanx of other British generals and politicians tried to change Pershing’s mind. For two days they argued, not always in friendly tones. Pershing bluntly asked why they had so many men in Palestine if a real emergency existed on the Western Front. Would it do any good to beat the Turks if the Germans meanwhile occupied London? At one point, he bluntly accused Haig of double-talk, and the field marshal frigidly suggested that he spoke English better than Pershing. The baffled British turned to Bliss and were dismayed to hear him say: “Pershing will speak for us.”
⁷⁷

Badly outmaneuvered by the general from the show-me state, the British had to settle for transporting the six complete divisions, a large step toward giving Pershing what they did not want him to have—an independent American army. Much later, Pershing’s chief of staff, James Harbord, said: “No greater responsibility [was] ever placed on an American commander than that which now rested on Pershing. He risked the chance of being cursed to the latest generation if, through his failure to cooperate, the war were lost.”
⁷⁸

Back in the United States, the stalled war effort, the savage infighting on Capitol Hill and anxiety about Russia’s defection stirred new war rage in superpatriots and government officials. President Wilson led the way in his Flag Day speech on June 14, 1917:“Woe to the man or group of men who seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution.” a few months later, Attorney General Thomas Gregory warned dissenters to expect no mercy “from an outraged people and an avenging government.” the
New Republic
printed a letter from a popular writer recommending that anyone who impeded America’s efficiency in “this righteous war” should be executed. The
New York Times
declared: “The patience of . . . the country has snapped.”
⁷⁹

One of the first victims of this deepening rage was movie producer Robert Goldstein, who had worked with D.W. Griffith on the controversial 1915 film
Birth of a Nation.
That movie portrayed black-white violence in the post–Civil War South in pro-Southern terms. President Wilson had screened the film in the White House and praised it, helping to make it a huge success. While the United States drifted toward war, Goldstein produced
The Spirit of ’76,
which attempted to apply Griffith’s epic treatment and strong opinions to the American Revolution. One of the most vivid scenes dramatized the 1778 Wyoming Valley massacre, in which British troops and Iroquois Indian allies laid waste the fertile settlement along the banks of the Susquehanna River, burning an estimated 1,000 homes and killing women and children as well as American militiamen. British soldiers were portrayed spearing babies on their bayonets, the way German uhlans had supposedly killed Belgian children, according to Wellington House and Lord Bryce.

Goldstein opened
The Spirit of ’76
in Chicago in the summer of 1917 and ran afoul of the local police censor. The producer went to court and successfully argued for his right to exhibit the film. But the bad publicity kept moviegoers away, and Goldstein headed for Los Angeles, where he made another try at attracting an audience after getting the approval of local censors by removing several scenes. In the exhibited film, he restored the scenes—and was promptly arrested.

The film was seized and Goldstein was soon in court. The docket read
United States vs the Motion Picture Film The Spirit of ’76
. In the prevailing atmosphere of war rage, no one regarded this listing as even slightly ironic. The judge found Goldstein guilty of exhibiting “exaggerated scenes of British cruelty,” which might make people “question the good faith of our ally, Great Britain.” The court held that the film was likely to sow disloyalty and insubordination in the armed forces and thus violated the Espionage Act. He sentenced the stunned moviemaker to ten years in the federal penitentiary.
⁸⁰

In Missouri, local vigilante groups began sending out white and blue and red cards to those suspected of dissent. The white card meant the person was under surveillance. The blue card meant he or she was in danger of arrest. The red card meant the Secret Service would soon be visiting. The State Council of Defense reported that so far, it had not been necessary to send a red card. The white and the blue induced silence. Other state councils issued booklets urging people to report anyone who offered “destructive criticism” of the government. In Hartford, the Connecticut Home Guard invaded a Socialist meeting and demanded a pledge of allegiance to the flag.“This city must be purified,” the Home Guard’s leader declared. The
New York Tribune
reported on January 22, 1918, that ten-year-olds were being organized in an “Anti-Yellow Dog League” to detect disloyalty among their neighbors.
⁸¹

The Bolshevik seizure of power and the Russians’ defection from the war intensified American ire at critics of capitalism. Many Americans, including the editors of the
New York Times,
made little or no distinction between Lenin’s far left radicals and American Socialists. “Thanks to Russian Socialism,” the
Times
wrote on December 13, 1917,“the Germans now outnumber the French and British on the Western Front.”

Part of the reason for the
Times
’s near hysteria was the New York mayoral election of 1917, which pitted an openly antiwar Socialist candidate, Morris Hillquit, against the incumbent mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, and the Democratic candidate, John F. Hylan. The
Times
endorsed Mitchel, a progressive reformer who was embarrassed by his Irish roots. To prove his patriotism, Mitchel used smear tactics against Hylan and Hillquit, calling them both pro-German (the way he had earlier smeared State Senator Robert F. Wagner). Hylan won easily, but Hillquit polled 142,178 votes, only a few thousand less than Mitchel’s total.
⁸²

Elsewhere in the country, the campaign against the Socialists was conducted with a ruthlessness that went far beyond editorial condemnations. In South Dakota, when the state chairman of the Socialist Party said he was a conscientious objector, he was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary. In Newport, Kentucky, Herbert S. Bigelow, a prominent Cincinnati minister and progressive reformer, was seized by masked men on his way to address a Socialist antiwar meeting. Driven into the countryside, Bigelow was stripped and lashed with a blacksnake whip. His head was shaved and he was drenched in crude oil. In Milwaukee, former Socialist congressman Victor Berger wrote in his newspaper, the
Milwaukee Leader,
that Congress was simply “a rubber stamp of Woodrow Wilson and the Wall Street clique.” Postmaster General Burleson banned the
Leader
from the mails—a tactic that had already silenced many other Socialist journals.
⁸³

The IWW was now considered synonymous with the hated Bolsheviks. A writer in
Forum
Magazine wrote that they were so closely allied,“if you prick one the other bleeds.” On December 26, 1917, the
New York Times
saw a “worldwide anarchist plot” that linked the Bolsheviks and the IWW with revolutionaries around the globe. The idea was not wholly fanciful. In Australia, the IWW had been banned for treason and “wholesale arson.”
⁸⁴

Early in January 1918, a group of sailors and a few civilians stormed Seattle’s Piggott Printing Company, which printed Socialist and IWW publications. They wrecked presses, smashed typefaces, and warned that the next time they visited,“it will mean death.” the leader of the raid was acquitted on the grounds of “mental irresponsibility” because the seditious articles printed by Piggott enraged him into taking the law in his own hands.
⁸⁵

War rage also complicated Senator La Follette’s attempt to defend himself against the campaign to expel him from the Senate. The Wilson administration refused to give him access to files that would prove his claim that the president knew the
Lusitania
carried ammunition in its hold. The senator found an unexpected ally in Dudley Field Malone, a progressive Democrat who had been Collector of the Port of New York when the liner sailed. Malone expressed outrage at the administration for closing its files and said he had notified Secretary of State Bryan of the ammunition. The senator also obtained from a member of the
New York Times
Washington bureau a statement that Bryan had told him he had warned Wilson about the
Lusitania
’s deadly cargo.
⁸⁶

Meanwhile, La Follette was under ferocious attack from the Vigilantes, the group of mostly Republican writers and illustrators whose services George Creel had spurned. One of their leading members, Samuel Hopkins Adams, wrote an article in the
New York Tribune
, “Is Wisconsin Against America?” claiming that La Follette had undermined the loyalty of the state. An accompanying cartoon showed the senator jamming a German helmet on the head of a crouching woman, labeled “Wisconsin.”
⁸⁷
In Washington, Woodrow Wilson issued a statement through Senator Atlee Pomerene of Ohio, claiming he did not want La Follette expelled from the Senate, because it would make him a martyr. Meanwhile, the subcommittee on privileges kept postponing a hearing, partly because Bryan refused to testify under oath, and partly because they wanted to keep the political pot boiling.

The hate campaign against La Follette continued to mount in ferocity.
Life
, in those days a humor magazine, published a “Traitor’s Number,” featuring La Follette receiving the Iron Cross from the kaiser. Another set of cartoons showed Satan inducting La Follette into the “Traitor’s Club,” with Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold and other members eagerly welcoming him. Early in January, Vice President Marshall announced he had received dozens of letters from the Vigilantes, demanding La Follette’s expulsion from the Senate. He was sending them to the senators of the states in which the writers lived.
⁸⁸

The
New York Tribune
and the
Washington Post
published excerpts from the letters. Most of these famous writers have been long forgotten. One said La Follette “speaks the language of Berlin.” Another called him a “frank seditionist.” a third claimed that the senator was the victim of “distorted mental machinery.” Perhaps the lowest blow was struck by Irvin S. Cobb, who wrote a story for the
Saturday Evening Post,
portraying a thinly disguised La Follette as an outright traitor.
⁸⁹

In his home state, La Follette endured humiliations that wounded him deeply. Various clubs expelled him. The state legislature passed a joint resolution accusing him of sedition. The faculty of the University of Wisconsin voted 421 to 2 to condemn his “unwise and disloyal utterances.” A saddened La Follette noted in his diary that “my picture was taken down from where it was hanging in all of the university buildings.” His son Phil, a student at the university, had to endure face-to-face insults and sneers.
⁹⁰

La Follette was not completely abandoned. In later years, he liked to note that a third of all the letters he received in his nineteen years in the Senate came in 1917, and they ran more than 60 to 1 in his favor. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs praised “your courage, your manhood and your devotion to the cause of the people in the face of the bitterest and most brutal persecution to which the lawless looters of this nation and their prostitute press ever subjected a faithful public servant.”
⁹¹

But the “Get La Follette” campaign continued. The American Defense Society submitted an elaborate brief, drawn by prominent New York lawyers, to the subcommittee on privileges, arguing the legality of La Follette’s expulsion. On January 8, 1918, the day the subcommittee was scheduled to finally meet (its original date had been December 3, 1917), the
New York Sun
ran a story on the brief under the headline “New Proof of La Follette’s Sedition Filed.” that same day, the senator’s son, Robert, Jr., collapsed with an acute streptococcus infection and had to be hospitalized. La Follette asked the committee to postpone the hearings, and his day of reckoning—or justification—was delayed, and delayed again, as young Bob hovered between life and death.

Eventually, Bob La Follette began to recover. But the senator used his son’s poor health as a way to evade the hearing while war rage convulsed the country. As weeks stretched into months, it became apparent that Wilson had won. Senator Robert La Follette had been reduced to silence.