17. The Irony of Fate
It must not be forgotten that as many people who admired, adored, or were fondly amused by TR, there were just so many who detested him roundly. Oh, not in the country at large; but among the bosses and the Lords Proprietors of the Democracy, That Damned Cowboy had enraged plenty of people. There were few toes on which he had not gleefully trodden, and the more likely they were to have corns, bunions, or ingrown nails, the harder he had stomped; and the list of people whom he had steamrollered was long. The country found it ‘bully,’ but his victims thought TR himself was precisely that.
The danger that inheres in not suffering fools gladly is that there a great many fools in this world, and if they ever manage to coalesce, they will outnumber you.
Finding that the Republicans were no more willing to constitute themselves the personal party of William Jennings Bryan than the Democracy had been, Bryan had bolted his second party, taking many Republican dissidents with him, and, in memory of the fin-de-siècle Grange movement that had supported him in his Cross of Gold days, had founded a new party called the Grange Party. It appeared to consist, functionally, of only two members, himself and Bob La Follette, his running-mate. Most of the Republicans who had bolted with Bryan kept running after Bryan stopped, realizing that an election year was not the best time to create a new party from scratch; instead, they either sat the election out or joined, not without misgivings, the only alternative party that had an actual functioning party structure and organization: the Socialists. Given that the Socialists consistently polled in such low numbers that they had to fight every four years merely to get on the ballot, this promised all the effect of sitting the election out, with the added misery of having to tramp to the polls. The Bryanites and ex-Bryanites would affect the election only negatively.
The Republican regulars, relieved of the Albatross of the Platte that had hung from the party’s neck through two election cycles, nominated the perennial House Minority Leader, ‘Uncle Joe’ Cannon of Illinois.
That meant, once again, that the presidency would effectively be decided by the Democrats’s choosing of a nominee. A similar problem had prevailed in Maryland politics not long before, and the renascent machine had made the mistake of believing that the sea-green incorruptible president of Johns Hopkins, a Virginian from Staunton, in the Valley, who held an AB and a JD both from the University of Virginia, would make an attractive and personally irreproachable candidate, but would be too inert actually to meddle with The Bosses.
They would not be the last to underestimate Thomas Woodrow Wilson. He had accepted the nomination, won the governorship of Maryland, and promptly cooperated with the US Attorney’s anti-corruption task force to ensure that machine politics did not in fact succeed in reestablishing itself in Maryland. The Democrats who loathed TR had no liking for Governor Wilson, either, and they recognized the severe risk that, unlike Roosevelt, Wilson might actually devote more time to trust-busting than to the Navy; but the fact that President Roosevelt despised, distrusted, and detested Governor Wilson overcame their better judgment, and they helped deliver the nomination to a man who was their mortal enemy far more than he was Roosevelt’s.
The other respect in which Woodrow Wilson was regularly underestimated – usually to the great discomfiture of those who made the error – was in the common failure to recognize the sheer depth and drive of his ambition. As a child in his father’s dour Presbyterian manse – a child dreamy, dyslexic, and thus considered deficient, backwards, hopeless – he had drawn up visiting cards for himself: ‘Thomas W. Wilson, United States Senator of Virginia.’ Having lashed himself to succeed in an academic career, and having in the process acquired most of the academic’s faults of temperament, he had not lowered his sights, but, rather, raised them. He intended to be president, and he intended his presidency to be historic.
His ambition was equal to the challenge, and his plans worthy of history. He purposed nothing less than finally abolishing even the legal form of slavery, maintaining all the foreign and defense achievements of the Hogg-Roosevelt years, and eclipsing TR as a trust-buster: incidentally and merely as lagniappe thereby wooing the small farmer away from the Republican Party and cementing the Democracy as the only major party in the country.
‘It would,’ he mused, ‘be an irony of fate if my administration should have to be devoted to foreign affairs.’
Nemesis listens carefully for such rash statements.
Duly nominated and duly elected, President Wilson embarked upon the duties of office with sublime self-confidence. If he had inherited a war between Austria and Russia, why, so too had he inherited a fleet and an army that made that war largely irrelevant. Relations with an increasingly stable Mexico had never been better; the same was true of relations with Canada, the Dominican Republic, Liberia, and Madagascar.
In August of 1913, the president attended the opening of an aeroplane factory in, appropriately enough, North Carolina. By September, the Army had radically revolutionized its logistics structures. In February of 1914, the new
Oklahoma joined the fleet, and in April, Austria allowed Russia the hollow pretence of ‘peace’ for the trifling fee of ceding to Austria Pskov, Smolensk, Novgorod, Belozersk, Vyazma, Kursk, Sostka, Klimovitsi, Simferopol, Belgorod, Luga, Maryupol, Kharkov, Lugansk, Valmiera, Mitava, Dinaburg, Kapsukas, and Shavli.
Meanwhile, the new president was beavering away diligently at schemes to transform the social and economic structure of the country on utopian lines, to regular gusts of rage – unfortunately for the president, the rage was anything but incoherent, and the press and public lapped it up – from the general vicinity of Sagamore Hill, New York.
It seemed that the only sadness of the term would be a state funeral for General Leonard Wood, TR’s old friend, who died on April 28, 1914.
It was then that Nemesis struck, from a clear sky. On May 11, 1914, despite and despising the American guarantee, Prussia declared war upon France. France mobilized, Sardinia-Piedmont joined the war as her ally, and the United States suddenly found themselves locked in a titanic struggle against the jackbooted Hun.
It was, as President Wilson stated to Congress in asking that war be formally declared, ‘a war determined upon by the Prussian Crown as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools.’ Congress wasted no time in declaring the country to be at war, and the administration, however distasteful it found the task, wasted none in waging war.
The Navy answered the call immediately. In less than a week, the 6th, 23d, 24th, 25th, and 26th Squadrons were off the Gironde estuary. The 15th Squadron took station in the Florida Strait, the 7th and 12th patrolled the Atlantic seaboard, and the 8th was making for Ushant. Within two weeks of the declaration of war, the German coasts were under close American blockade, the Mediterranean coasts of France were patrolled by the
Texas and her associated squadron, and the Prussian High Seas Fleet was bottled up in the harbor of Danzig.
The Army also was answering the call; it just took a bit longer to get there. Unwisely, as it seems to us in hindsight, the administration acceded to panicked French requests that the First Army, under Pershing, and Second Army, under the Marine Commandant, MG Smedley Butler USMC, be lent them, and that XI Corps be sent immediately to Carcassone to operate with the French forces, by the fastest means possible – which of course meant on American transports.
As of June, 1914, American surface ships and submarines controlled the Channel, the Dover Strait, the North Sea, the Heligoland Bight, the Kattegat, and the entire Baltic, and had put a cork in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic (lest Austria decide to make the same mistake as had Prussia). Prussia and the lesser German states were utterly and completely blockaded.
On June 25, XI Corps landed on French soil, on July 6, Tuscany joined the Allies, and on July 30, Spain stepped forward as well.
Meanwhile, however, to the mounting fury of everyone involved, the French were demonstrating just why they had already lost half their country to the Germans. Pershing had very nearly resigned when his First Army had been placed, even nominally, under French command, being dissuaded only by Theodore Roosevelt, whom public outcry had forced Wilson to bring into the Cabinet as Secretary of War. It now transpired that, having assumed responsibility for First and Second Armies, the French were incapable of providing for them, resulting in attrition to the units
while they were still garrisoned in the United States. As for
why the two Armies were still kicking their heels stateside, it also transpired that the French had not sufficient shipping to transport them to the theater of operations. To complete the indictment, the French had promptly managed to sacrifice XI Corps to the last man in a losing battle in Tulle.
President Wilson was icily, monumentally furious; Mr Roosevelt volcanically enraged. The French, confronted with a hell of ice and fire, gave way, and the United States resumed control of their own forces.
Equally furious, and remaining so even after the problem was solved, General Butler died of a heart attack on January 3, 1915, at Fort Polk. First and Second Armies were merged under General Pershing, and thoroughly brought to strength, trained, and drilled until they dropped, whilst the Navy churned out transports day and night and set up a chain of overwhelming naval force from Hampton Roads to St Malo.
On April 9, 1915, First Army Group embarked upon the transports. On May 10, it arrived at Rennes, 200,000 Americans strong, from sappers to signalmen, horse, guns, and foot; its commander, John J. Pershing, promoted to General of the Armies, a rank higher than any American had ever held, in order that no plume-hatted moron of a field marshal could doubt that the Americans were here to do business, and had best be let do so under their own commanders, under their own flag, in their own manner, and on their own terms.
Ten days later, First Army Group made contact with the Prussians at Nantes. The Prussians were veterans of a hundred battles, the proud scions of the most militarist state in Europe, from Foot Grenadier to Uhlan to the commander, von Kluck. By June 6, 1915, those who still lived were a broken and routed rabble, fleeing the field with their weapons cast down to speed them in their ignominious flight.
On July 18, First Army Group, pursuing, arrived in Le Mans and encountered Ludendorff’s crack veterans. Within forty-eight hours, Ludendorff and his shattered remnants were in headlong retreat to Blois.
The exultant Americans, their bloodlust up, followed, under such newly-blooded divisional commanders as George S. Patton, whose father had served with Stonewall and whose infant babysitter and spinner of yarns had been the aged John Singleton Mosby; Douglas MacArthur, son of one of Burnside’s Boys from the great days of colonial campaigning; Joe Stilwell, the acidulated Yankee whose family had wanted him to ‘jine th’ Navy, ayup,’ like a good New Englander; and George Catlett Marshall, cousin of R. E. Lee, of Lee’s military aide COL Charles Marshall, and of every FFV in Virginia. It wasn’t war, it was a foxhunt.
And on August 7, 1915, First Army Group ran the fox to earth: the re-collected ragtag of Kluck’s and Ludendorff’s commands, gathered behind the huge veteran army commanded by von Hindenburg, men who had never known defeat in a thousand fights.
Seven days later, the Battle of Blois was over, again to fairly light American losses: over, as the Prussians, torn to ragdolls, down to between a third and a tenth of their original strength, reeled and fled.
First Army Group followed, to Bourges.
On September 10, 1915, the Prussian High Seas Fleet began its death-ride, sallying from port into the cold waters of the Baltic, determined to vindicate von Tirpitz and the Kaiser. Under the watching eyes of the dubiously neutral Scandinavian fleet, whose ratings manned the yards to cheer the Prussians on, it drew towards the Americans. It never got within range. The United States Navy lost a few torpedo boats, a light cruiser that had strayed too close to the Danzig strand as part of the forces sent to cut off a Prussian retreat, and three destroyers. The Prussian fleet, the entirety of the Prussian navy that the Kaiser had so obsessively built, was utterly destroyed, sunk to the last vessel, within the span of an hour. It was the Americans’s Trafalgar.
Two days later, First Army Group, resupplied on the run and ready for action, found the Prussians.
All of them, bar an army and three corps engaged against the French elsewhere (and winning handily). It was September 12, 1915. The Battle of Bourges had begun.
On September 18, 1915, as a reminder, a diplomatic shot across whatever bows were in range, HM Government reiterated Britain’s guarantee of the independence of the United States. Given that just such a guarantee to France had been America’s
casus belli for entering the present war, the gesture was a pointed one.
In Bourges, the American First Army Group was battering the once-proud Prussian Army, which held on simply as a cornered rat, hoping for a miracle. The French, with their usual talent for double-dealing, short-term greed, and massive ingratitude, provided one. On September 30, 1915, France – without the courtesy of consultation with her Allies, least of all the American ‘cowboys’ – accepted Prussia’s peace offer in return for recovering Dijon, Arras, Bourges, Troyes, Dunkerque, Châlons, Charleville-Mezières, Rouen, Orleans, Moulins, Cambrai, Le Mans, Blois, Laon, Clermont-Ferrand, Évreux, Chartres, Châteauroux, Melun, Alençon, Amiens, and Caen.
On the one hand, this was a satisfactory result: it diminished Prussian power and erected a French counterweight, without making France again one of the Powers. On the other hand, the French action and its sheer deceitfulness caused a revulsion of feeling in the United States, and especially among the troops and in the Navy, that was awful to behold. General Pershing refused to meet with Marshal Joffre, advising the Frenchman through an aide that his refusal might seem insulting, but it was less likely to lead to an international incident than what would happen if the General were left in the same room with any representative of France.
General Pershing had strategic reasons to damn the French grab for short-terms gains, as well. ‘The Goddamned Prussians don’t know they’re licked. If they’d just given me another
week, I’d have made it to where even they couldn’t deny it.’ It was true enough: before First Army Group made it home to the United States, the Prussians were comforting themselves with the reassuring myth that they hadn’t been fairly beaten, merely ‘stabbed in the back.’
With the peculiarly French capacity for ingratitude and resentment to their rescuers, the French government managed to put Franco-American relations in a deep freeze: by the time Pershing’s men left French soil, the diplomatic situation was close to that prevailing among nations at war with one another. It may be said, however, that, judging from the number of French brides the doughboys brought home, and the size of the crop of Franco-American bastards that arrived nine months after the fighting ended, the two peoples were less estranged than the two governments had become.
Can't blame you. I think you are most likely correct regarding the focus of the political party structure sans the War. A most astute observation. And why is it that so many Governors are called Big Jim, I wonder? I believe Alabama had one also, and another state as well, though the specifics fail me right now. Thanks for keeping the updates coming! Will we perhaps get one more war before it's done? After all, you've got all those big and beautiful ships.
