White House History Quarterly 51 - Veterans Day and WWI Centennial

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WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

Veterans Day, the White House, and the Centennial of the End of World War I The Journal of T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I A T I O N Number 51

CONTRIBUTORS

the white house historical association Board of Directors

chairman

michael beschloss is an American historian specializing in the U.S. presidency. He has been a longtime member of the White House Historical Association Board of Directors, and is the author of nine books, including the newly released Presidents of War.

Frederick J. Ryan Jr.

vice chairman and treasurer John F. W. Rogers

secretary James I. McDaniel

president Stewart D. McLaurin John T. Behrendt, Jean Case, Henry A. Dudley Jr., Cathy Gorn, Janet A. Howard, Knight Kiplinger, Martha Joynt Kumar, Anita McBride, Mike McCurry, Robert M. McGee, Roger B. Porter, Ann Stock, Ben C. Sutton Jr., Tina Tchen

t h o m as b o g h ar dt is a senior historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History.

Prior to this post, he served as historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and as a Thyssen Fellow at Georgetown University.

ex officio David S. Ferriero, Carla Hayden, Tom Mayes, Earl A. Powell III, David J. Skorton

directors emeriti

John H. Dalton, Nancy M. Folger, Elise K. Kirk, Harry G. Robinson III, Gail Berry West

white house history quarterly editor William Seale

j o h n m i lt o n c o o p e r is an American historian, author, and educator specializing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American diplomatic history. He is professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

vice president of publishing and executive editor Marcia Mallet Anderson

editorial and production director Lauren McGwin

senior editorial and production manager Kristin Skinner

editorial and production manager Elyse Werling

jo nat h an g r o ss is editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family, and Romantic Love.

He is a professor in the Department of English at DePaul University.

editorial assistant Jeanine Marie

consulting editor Ann Hofstra Grogg

editorial advisory Mac Keith Griswold Scott Harris Anthony Pitch Lydia Barker Tederick

consulting design Pentagram

the editor wishes to thank The Office of the Curator, The White House; and the staff of the Woodrow Wilson House

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edwar d j. le n ge l is a former chief historian of the White House Historical Association. st eph en t. m os k e y is an independent scholar specializing in American cultural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Larz and Isabel Anderson: Wealth and Celebrity in the Gilded Age. ly d i a t e d e r i ck is curator in the Office of the Curator, The White House, where she has worked since 1979. She has lectured and published articles on the history of the White House and its fine and decorative arts collections, and she serves on the White House History Quarterly Editorial Advisory. elyse w er li n g is editorial and production manager at the White House Historical Association.

CONTENTS

Flags line veterans’ graves at Arlington National Cemetery.

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Foreword

The Pilgrim’s Passage: President Wilson’s Voyage to France on the USS George Washington, 1918

william seale

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s t e p h e n t. m o s k e y

Woodrow Wilson’s War: A Perilous Fight

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ed ward lengel

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The White House in the Great War: From Diplomacy to Remembrance

ly d i a t e d e r i c k

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November 11, 1918 to November 11, 2018 A Century of Honor and Remembrance

tho mas bo gh ard t

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The Espionage Scene in Washington: Collusion, Secrets, and Spies

elys e w er li ng

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Presidential Site Feature: Monticello, Montpelier, and Oak Hill

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April 6, 1917: War Is Declared Against the German Empire: ALAMY

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Painted at the Paris Peace Conference: A Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson

by William Orpen

jo hn milto n co o p er

jo nat h an g r o ss

Reflections: Declaring War s t ewart d. m claur i n

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FOREWORD

The GREAT WAR

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to France to attend the Peace Conference at Versailles; and Lydia Tederick presents a portrait of Wilson painted at Versailles. Elyse Werling collects images of veterans at the White House and presidential observations of Veterans Day and Jonathan Gross reflects on the Marquis de Lafayette’s “Leaving Calls” during his 1824–25 visit to America.

We think less and less about World War I— the Great War—as a century has passed. Some of us remember the red paper poppies given out on Veterans Day, reminiscent of those that bloomed following the battles on Flanders Field, near what became the Belgian Cemetery at Tyne Cot where 368 American veterans are among 11,965 war dead who lie in peace amid rows of poppies.

william seale editor WHITE HOUSE HISTORY QUARTERLY

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ISTOCK BY GETTY IMAGES

t h e c l o s e o f t h e f i r s t w o r l d wa r on November 11, 1918, ended the first great world war in our history and brought home from the battlefields of Europe more than 2 million veterans. America’s first world encounter had lasted 1 year, 7 months, and 5 days. It was the Americans’ late entry in 1917 that brought the fight that began in 1914 to a close and achieved a dubious peace—felt for the years to come. Twenty years later the Second World War would rise in part from the mistakes in settling the first.

In such a time as a world war the White House claims full attention and a deep hold on Americans. The House of All, Wilson’s house, and, in this later case, seemingly near and yet far, in a war fought on foreign soil. In this issue of White House History Quarterly John Milton Cooper presents a cameo of Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president; Edward Lengel writes about the war and its influences on the White House; Thomas Boghardt examines the Washington, D.C., espionage scene; Stephen T. Moskey describes President Wilson’s grand and colorful convoy

Poppies line rows of graves at Tyne Cot Cemetery near Passendale, West Flanders, Belgium.

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Woodrow Wilson’s WAR A Perilous Fight

SUNTISCIAT ENT APED I

JOHN MILTON COOPER

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SUNTISCIAT ENT APED I

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previous spread

President Wilson is seen addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress to call for a declaration of war against the German Empire in this colorized photograph dated April 2, 1917. War was declared on April 6, 1917. opposite

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / LEF T: WHITE HOUS E HISTORICAL AS SOCIATION

This New York Press headline dated May 8, 1915, announces the potential scope of lives lost on the Lusitania and includes a notice from the Imperial German Embassy that travelers embarking on a trans-Atlantic voyage do so at their own risk.

wa r c a s t s a pa l l over the White House.

During World War I, the pall fell there from the outbreak, long before the United States joined the fighting. The guns of August 1914 began to boom as the first lady, Ellen Axson Wilson, lay dying.

When she breathed her last on the afternoon of August 6 in an upstairs bedroom of the White House, her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, went to an open window and cried out, “Oh, my God, what am I going to do?” The next day, he told a friend, “God has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear.”1 In coming weeks, Wilson stifled his grief as well as he could by driving himself at the manifold tasks of being president. Congress was winding up a marathon session that had begun in April of the preceding year and had produced monumental legislation, including the Federal Reserve Act and the first lasting federal income tax. Armed conflict raged just south of the border in Mexico and had already provoked limited intervention by American forces. Across the Atlantic the biggest international conflict since the war in which the White House had been burned down a century earlier turned into carnage and stalemate on the Western Front.

That war, now known as World War I, soon touched the United States. Both sides meant to use their naval power to squeeze their foes. The Allies’ blockade swept German naval and commercial shipping off the seas and started to crimp American exports, while Germany unveiled a new weapon, the submarine, and began sinking Allied vessels, which carried American goods and citizens, early in 1915.

Moreover, the massive immigration to the United States from Europe since the Civil War had filled the country with people who had ties of kinship to the warring nations. Concern over this situation led President Wilson to issue a public message declaring, “The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls.”2 The real trial began suddenly and without warning. On May 7, 1915, word came that a German submarine had sunk the British liner Lusitania, the largest ship afloat, killing more than a thousand people, including 129 Americans. This catastrophe, so reminiscent of the sinking of the Titanic just three years earlier, hit the country hard. Ten years later observers found that people could remember where they had been and what they had thought and done when they heard about the Lusitania. For

the first time, there was danger of America being sucked into this horrendous conflict. Surprisingly to some, despite outrage at the act, almost no one called for war. This situation created what Wilson called “the double wish of our people, to maintain a firm front in respect of what we demand of Germany and yet do nothing that might by any possibility involve us in the war.”3 It was the age-old quandary of how to maintain peace with honor, and it defined Wilson’s task for the next two years, until he finally took the country into the war.

Fortunately for him and the country, Wilson’s personal pall of grief had lifted. The White House had remained a place of mourning into the early months of 1915. There were no social events or entertaining, and the president limited his public appearances to a bare minimum. His mood gradually began to change, and he was again able to make jokes and play around with his family. He also permitted the first showing at the White House of a feature film, which was D. W. Griffith’s cinematically revolutionary but scurrilously racist The Birth of a Nation. The movie evidently did not lift the spirits of the president, who left halfway through.

What did lift his spirits was falling in love. He had met the socially prominent Washington widow, Edith Bolling Galt, and by the time of the Lusitania sinking he was courting her in earnest. As when he had met and wooed his first wife, Ellen Axson, requited love brought out the best in him, redoubling his energies and stimulating his mind.

Wilson needed that boost to his powers. The year following the Lusitania sinking witnessed a many-sided conflict at home and abroad over how to respond to the world war. Diplomatically, the president continued to push the Germans to rein in their submarines, and he finally issued an implied threat of war, which brought them around and temporarily cooled the confrontation. At home, the threat of war polarized the political scene. One camp, led by former President Theodore Roosevelt, demanded strong action and privately wanted to go to war. Another camp, led by William Jennings Bryan, who resigned as secretary of state rather than seem to threaten war, demanded measures to keep the country out of the conflict. Those camps and their leaders made loud noises and got the attention of the press, but the large majority of the people remained uneasily in the middle, clinging to that “double wish.” It required all of Wilson’s intellectual gifts and political skills to manage

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majorities among the people and in Congress remained uncertain, and so did the president. To several people he voiced deep misgivings about what plunging into this war would mean at home and abroad. “Once lead this people into war,” he told a sympathetic newspaper editor off the record, “and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. . . . If there is any alternative, for God’s sake let’s take it!”5 In the end, Wilson could not find an alternative, and the United States went to war because he decided to take the country in. When he went before Congress on April 2, 1917, no one knew what he would say, and all observers agreed that he could carry majorities in both houses whichever way he chose to go. He delivered another somber address, with strong echoes of President Abraham Lincoln’s darkly beautiful calls for war, and he ended with notes that were both soaring and downbeat: “To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”6 Woodrow Wilson may have been a reluctant war president, but he was never a halfhearted one. Back at the White House riding up in the elevator after giving his war address, he told his young cousin Fitz Woodrow, “Fitz, thank God for Abraham Lincoln.

I won’t make the mistakes that he did.”7 Evidently what he meant was that he would not meddle in military matters the way he believed Lincoln had done. More than any other wartime president, he left the ground war to the generals and the civilian leaders of the War Department. The only order he gave the newly selected leader of the American Expeditionary Force, General John J. Pershing, was to keep his forces intact as a separate command and not be amalgamated with the British and French. Wilson intervened more in naval affairs, which were something of a hobby with him, and he backed his admirals in pressing the British to adopt the convoy system as the long-sought defense against the submarines. He also involved himself in mobilization and economic management, choosing such men as Herbert Hoover and Bernard Baruch to run that side of the war effort and forming a small war cabinet consisting of them and the

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Wilson delivered a somber address during his second inauguration ceremony on March 5, 1917.

He emphasized the need to dispel shadows and find light as war raged in Europe.

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these conflicts, all the while pushing a second big program of domestic legislation through Congress, dealing with more troubles in Mexico, and running for reelection.

Curiously, those tense times saw the pall over the White House lift for a while. The president’s marriage to Edith Galt in December 1915 was not a White House wedding, like those of two of his daughters before the war and Ellen Wilson’s death. Still, 1916 became a happy time in the mansion. The new Mrs. Wilson was more of a socialite than the late first lady had been, and she did lots of entertaining during the spring and early summer. After that, the presidential campaign took the couple to a seaside estate in New Jersey, Wilson’s home state, and on a railroad swing through the Northeast. After he won a narrow victory, the celebration and gaiety were short-lived, because the Germans unleashed their submarines at the beginning of February 1917. Over the next two months, the president and Congress wrestled with how to meet this new threat. Cries for war grew louder, but resistance remained firm, too. Wilson’s second inauguration on March 5, 1917, was a subdued affair, and in his address he dwelled on the “tragical events of the thirty months of vital turmoil” and affirmed, “The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves.”4 The person who most needed to dispel shadows and find light was Wilson himself. Despite the ratcheting up of pro- and antiwar sentiment, big

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Sheep grazed on the White House lawn during World War I. The flock, which numbered forty-eight at its peak, earned $52,823 for the Red Cross through the auction of their wool.

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Woodrow Wilson’s War Council is seen here on the South Portico of the White House, 1918: seated from left, Assistant Secretary of War and Director of Munitions Benedict Crowell, Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo (the husband of Wilson’s daughter Eleanor), President Wilson, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and Chair of the War Industries Board Bernard Baruch; standing from left, head of the U.S. Food Administration Herbert Hoover, Chair of the U.S. Shipping Board Edward M. Hurley, Chair of the War Trade Board Vance McCormick, and James Garfield (son of President James A. Garfield).

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spread out on the floor of his upstairs study. The Fourteen Points, which he supplemented with supporting statements later in 1918, constituted Wilson’s biggest contribution to the Allied victory.

The Fourteen Points held out hope for a reasonable, nonpunitive peace, which the Germans seized upon after their massive offensives on the Western Front failed in the spring and summer of 1918. The negotiations that led to the Armistice of November 11 spared the Allies from having to invade Germany, shortening the war by months and avoiding yet more death and destruction.

Victory and peace should have lifted the pall over the White House, but that did not happen. The home remained mostly empty of residents for nearly seven months. In December 1918, less than a month after the Armistice, Wilson left for Europe with his wife, where he headed the American delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris. With one break for a quick trip back in February and March 1919, the first family remained abroad until early July, after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. In February, when briefly back in the United States, the president had invited the members of the foreign affairs

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A February 1919 illustration by Williams Charles Morris entitled, “Can he produce the harmony?” pokes fun at the great feat that Wilson was trying to accomplish with the League of Nations. right

Edith Wilson volunteered with the Red Cross during the war. The hat from her uniform is preserved in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.

L E F T : T H E O H I O S TA T E U N I V E R S I T Y C A R T O O N R E S E A R C H L I B R A R Y R I G H T : D I V I S I O N O F P O L I T I C A L H I S T O R Y, N A T I O N A L M U S E U M O F A M E R I C A N H I S T O R Y, S M I T H S O N I A N I N S T I T U T I O N

secretaries of war and the navy. Some of them and others, though not the president, did public calisthenics outside the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building); the group included Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Although lacking experience in diplomacy, Wilson made foreign policy his special bailiwick.

The White House received repeated delegations of Allied leaders who wanted to boost American aid and participation. Edith Wilson relished being hostess at the White House to these dignitaries, and she also conspicuously volunteered with the Red Cross and other organizations aiding mobilization.

The most visible symbol of the new wartime regime at the White House was a flock of sheep grazing on the lawn, supplying wool for uniforms.

Wilson preoccupied himself above all with defining war aims for his side in the conflict. At the beginning of 1918, he seized the initiative by promulgating his Fourteen Points. He drew on material supplied by The Inquiry, a group of academics and other experts in foreign areas, and at one point he went over maps of Europe and the Middle East

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from a dying star. Three-quarters of the way through the tour, after speaking in Pueblo, Colorado, the president broke down and could barely get out of his berth on the train. Mrs. Wilson and Admiral Cary Grayson, the president’s physician, canceled the rest of the trip and rushed him back to the White House for seclusion and rest. Three days after his return, Wilson suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed on his left side. Two weeks later, he came down with a urinary blockage and infection that nearly killed him. The combination of the stroke and infection left Wilson almost totally incapacitated for nearly a month. This occasioned the worst crisis of presidential disability in the nation’s history, and it was managed badly. Edith Wilson strenuously denied that she ever assumed any of her husband’s powers or made decisions for him, but she admitted that during the first weeks after his stroke she controlled access to him of people and issues. By isolating him this way, for the best of intentions and following medical advice, she worsened the effects of the stroke on his emotional balance and judgment, rendering it nearly impossible for him to function in his office.

For the last year and a half of Wilson’s presidency, the White House became an infirmary with a single patient. The president could no longer do what he savored most, writing and delivering his own speeches, particularly to Congress. He met

WOODROW WILSON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

During the summer of 1919, President Wilson undertook a cross-country speaking tour to gain support for the League of Nations.

He is seen below greeting crowds from his train and in Los Angeles.

Shortly after these photographs were taken the president was rushed back to Washington, where he suffered a debilitating stroke on October 2, 1919.

committees of both houses of Congress to a meeting in the Blue Room, where he explained and tried to sell them on the Draft Covenant of the League of Nations. In July, when he presented the treaty to the Senate for advice and consent, he met with individual senators at the White House and then invited the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to a meeting at which he again worked to win over skeptics.

Those efforts at presidential persuasion fell flat and added to a miserable summer in Washington and around the country. Besides the capital’s customary heat and humidity, inflation soared, and racial violence broke out in many cities, including Washington. Conflict over the treaty, which included membership in the League of Nations, fed into an already hostile political environment. Partly out of frustration with his opponents, Wilson decided to take his case to the people. He mounted a whirlwind speaking tour that took him to the West Coast and partway back. He made more speeches per day than ever before, even in his presidential campaigns. He treated listeners to his renowned eloquence. At one point, he looked at the children in the audience and declared, “I know, if by chance, we should not win this great fight for the League of Nations, it would be their death warrant.” They would have to fight another, bigger, more terrible world war: “The very existence of civilization would be in the balance.”8 Such heartrending pleas came as final outbursts

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notes 1.

Reported and quoted in Cary T. Grayson, interview with Ray Stannard Baker, February 18–19, 1926, Ray Stannard Baker Papers, box 106, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Woodrow Wilson to Mary Allen Hulbert, [August 7, 1914], in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, 69 vols.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966–94), 30:357, also available online in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Digital Edition, University of Virginia Press, www.upress.virginia.edu/ rotunda/.

2. Woodrow Wilson, An Appeal to the American People, [August 18, 1914], in Papers of Wilson, ed. Link, 30:393.

Following his presidency, Wilson retired to his home on S Street NW, in Washington, where he kept this World War I shell case on the mantel in his bedroom. The shell case, remaining from one of the first shots fired in the war, reminded him of the work he believed the world needed to continue to ensure postwar peace. Wilson died in 1924 and is entombed in a bay off the nave of Washington National Cathedral.

3. Wilson to William Jennings Bryan, June 7, 1915, ibid., 33:349.

4. Wilson, Second Inaugural Address, March 5, 1917, ibid., 41:334, 335.

5. Quoted in Cobb of “The World,” comp. John L. Heaton (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924), 368–70.

6. Wilson, An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 2, 1917, Papers of Wilson, ed. Link, 41:527.

7. Quoted in Arthur Walworth, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Longman’s Green, 1958), 1:101.

8. Wilson, An Address in the San Diego Stadium, September 19, 1919, Papers of Wilson, ed. Link, 63:382.

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ABOVE AND OPPOSITE: B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

only a few times with the cabinet and then only briefly and not to discuss important matters.

Worse than an absentee, Wilson became a roadblock to attempts at constructive dealing with major problems. His warped judgment led him to reject several attempts at compromise that might have led to approval of the peace treaty with reservations and a limited membership in the League of Nations. In all, it was a miserable closing chapter to a presidency that had featured great legislative accomplishments, resourceful and visionary diplomacy, strong war leadership, and powerful speechmaking.

The pall lifted over the White House only with Wilson’s departure. His successor, Warren G. Harding, soon negotiated a separate peace with Germany that replicated the Treaty of Versailles, except that it excised the Covenant of the League of Nations. Wilson lived for almost three years after leaving the White House, retiring to a house in Washington a mile away just off Massachusetts Avenue on S Street. He was able to receive visitors, come out on the balcony of the house on Armistice Day, give one brief radio address, and painfully compose a short magazine essay. He never set foot in the White House again. The closest he came was to pull up in a horse-drawn carriage outside in August 1923 to ride in the funeral procession that accompanied the casket of his seemingly healthy successor. Edith Wilson stayed in the S Street house until her death on December 28, 1961. It was her husband’s birthday and the day of the opening of a bridge over the Potomac River named for him.

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The White House in the GREAT WAR From Diplomacy to Remembrance ed ward lengel

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to do so beyond the war’s end. On several occasions, police arrested the women for “obstructing traffic,” and the suffragists often endured abuse from crowds who cursed them and tore down their signs. Such actions played into their hands, and their subsequent mistreatment in the Occoquan Workhouse would make them martyrs for their cause.2 The government naturally preferred patriotic spectacles over protests.

Rallies were common on or near the White House Grounds, and sometimes these provided more amusement than intended. Hollywood stars Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Marie Dressler attended a Liberty Loan drive in Washington, D.C., on April 6, 1918. At a rally near the White House, Chaplin slipped and fell off the stage, taking Dressler with him and landing on top of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. Later the celebrities visited the White House, where Dressler regaled President Wilson with a story, says her biographer, “that was not exactly risqué, but definitely off-color.”3 Wilson

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previous spread

President Wilson smiles to onlookers after emerging through the hatch of the Britannia, a British tank displayed in front of the West Wing, April 19, 1918. Wilson wore a bandage for weeks after burning his hand on the hot steel during the event. below

Just as the White House was a center for patriotic and diplomatic events during World War I, it was also a magnet for protest. Suffragists calling for the right to vote became a fixture on the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk in front of the White House during World War I. In this photograph dated 1917, the women use a sign to ask the president “HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?”

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world war I marked a transition for the United States of America. Events surrounding the White House sufficed to prove that nothing would ever be the same. The nation’s Executive Mansion became a center for diplomatic activity, a target of protests, the setting for patriotic events, and, at the war’s end, a symbol for remembrance of lives lost.

Security precautions increased even before President Woodrow Wilson signed the declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917, and ramped up further thereafter. A special guard had accompanied him on his way to the Capitol for his second inauguration, March 5, 1917, and as the war progressed measures taken to safeguard the president’s security isolated him from the public.

The crowds more or less permanently assembled near the White House gates caught only brief glimpses of the president as motorcades whisked him to and from the Executive Mansion.1 Protesters were, by contrast, always visible—in particular, the women associated with Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party who began picketing for suffrage in January 1917 and continued

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At rallies on and near the White House Grounds, Hollywood stars brought attention to Liberty Loan drives that encouraged the purchase of war bonds to support the Allied cause during World War I. At one such rally in April 1918, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford stand at center behind the kneeling Marie Dressler and Charlie Chaplin. They are joined by Assistant Secretary of the Navy and future president Franklin D. Roosevelt (standing at left).

was not amused, and his frown deepened two weeks later after he badly burned his hand on a British battle tank as it churned across the White House Grounds.

Equally compelling as public spectacles were visits to the White House from representatives of the countries that American forces would join in battle in Europe (the Wilson adminstration was careful to call them not “Allies” but “Associated Powers” to emphasize that the United States acted from purely altruistic motives). And, of course, these visits were far more important to the outcome of the war than the antics of a popular entertainer like Chaplin. Diplomatic visits were carefully stage-managed for public consumption and to ensure that visitors were treated with the dignity they expected.

Five days after the U.S. declaration of war, British Foreign Secretary and

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High Commissioner to the United States Arthur Balfour left England on a fast cruiser that carried him to the Canadian port of Halifax. From there he traveled by train to Washington, D.C., where he arrived in Union Station on the afternoon of April 22. Balfour met Secretary of State Robert Lansing at the Department of State, and from there the two men and their entourage, cheered by enthusiastic crowds, proceeded to the White House. President Wilson’s military aides greeted the party in the Entrance Hall and led them to the Green Room, where they waited for a few minutes before being escorted to meet the president in the Blue Room.

Wilson and Balfour exchanged formal greetings and a hearty handshake, and then conferred privately in the Blue Room for forty-five minutes.4 On the following evening Balfour attended a dinner for American and British officials in the State Dining

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they returned to the White House that evening for an “extremely informal” dinner party.6 After further discussions with U.S. government officials and more White House visits over the following days, Viviani and Joffre embarked on a speaking tour of the United States. By mid-May they were back in Washington for more meetings before returning to Europe. The French mission accomplished little of substance beyond hurrying the first contingent of American troops overseas, and indeed the evident rivalry between the concurrent British and French delegations astonished Wilson’s government. As propaganda, however, the Viviani-Joffre mission was an undoubted triumph, establishing popular support for the FrancoAmerican military relationship against the backdrop of the White House.7 The following months saw repeated visits to the White House from representatives of France, Britain, and other friendly European powers, including Russia, Italy, Belgium, Romania, and Serbia. Increasingly, though, public displays became military in character as United States forces entered largescale combat on the Western Front in 1918 and casualties began to mount.

In September 1918, shortly before the opening of what would become one of the largest and bloodiest battles in American history in France’s MeuseArgonne region, the White House

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Sir Auckland Geddes and British Foreign Secretary and High Commissioner to the United States Arthur Balfour appear in front of the White House during a visit with President Wilson days after the United States entered World War I, April 1917. opposite

The first official visit of the French Foreign Legion to the United States in September 1918 included a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and stop at the White House as well as visits to several other U.S. cities. The detachment is seen here entering the White House Grounds through the East Gate.

Throughout the war, the suffragists remained at the White House gates ready to greet foreign delegations with messages such as this one to the Russian envoys in June 1917, declaring that as long as 20 million women are denied the right to vote, America is not a really democracy.

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Room, afterward retiring to the Blue Room for a reception. Only two women were present: First Lady Edith Wilson and her secretary Helen Woodrow Bones. The rest were frock-coated civilians and military dignitaries in full dress uniforms. The following day Balfour returned to the White House for tea with Mrs. Wilson. The crowds and the reporters enjoyed all of it, casting wary eyes all the while at the suffragists who continued to picket outside the gates.

The spectacle of foreign visitors ramped up on April 26 when former French Premier René Viviani and Marshal Joseph Joffre appeared at the White House after their arrival in the capital the previous day.5 The Viviani-Joffre mission’s stated purpose was to “determine without delay the main lines of the cooperation of the American forces with Allied armies.”

Primarily, though, the visit served to galvanize the American public into recognizing—“Associated Powers” or not— that the country had made an international commitment and that the honor of the United States depended on its fulfillment. Most Americans knew that the rotund and genial “Papa” Joffre had presided over French military efforts that stopped invading German forces at “The Miracle of the Marne” in September 1914, but had forgotten that he had been sacked in 1915 after expending many thousands of French lives in frontal attacks on enemy positions. The press had no intention of reminding them.

The visit began as the French officials visited the State Department for preliminary talks. Afterward they were driven to the White House through streets teeming with motorcars emblazoned with French tricolors and lined by cheering crowds. Military aides received the dignitaries outside the Executive Mansion and then conducted them to the Blue Room, where they spoke with the president for ten minutes through an interpreter. Viviani held a press conference with American reporters, and

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played host to two unprecedented and somewhat unsettling military displays.

On September 23, the French Foreign Legion made its first-ever official visit to the United States as a contingent paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue behind its original flag and performed a ceremony in Lafayette Square. The legionnaires then marched on the White House, where President Wilson entertained them in person.

On the morning of September 26—the same day the offensive began in Europe—the Italian airman Emilio Resnati symbolically “destroyed” Washington, D.C., in a frightening display of airpower. While First Lady Edith Wilson and other staff watched from the White House roof, Resnati flew his Caproni biplane bomber over the Washington Monument, the Mall, and Pennsylvania Avenue before swooping low over the Executive Mansion and wreathing it in a thick smoke trail suggesting the poison gas saturating the Western Front. Even as it symbolized American strength, then, the White House highlighted the vulnerability of the United States—and indeed all the world—to a new type of warfare.8 The fighting ended with the Armistice of November 11, 1918, but the central role of the White House as a mediator between the American people and the war did not end there.

President Wilson continued to welcome diplomatic representatives as he looked to help build hope in a better future for the United States and the world. He also paid tribute in the White House to a new generation of American heroes. On May 24, 1919, Medal of Honor recipient Alvin C. York visited the White House on a much-publicized visit to Washington, D.C. After touring the historic building, a bedazzled York declared that he had “seen it all”—except for the New York City subway, which he visited before returning to his native Tennessee.9 By the fall of 1921 Warren G. Harding was president and the American people white house history quarterly

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were no longer in a mood to celebrate a war that had cost the lives of more than 53,000 doughboys killed in action. Rather, the White House served as one of many sites that Americans turned to in remembrance. On the morning of November 11, a group of pallbearers led by Medal of Honor recipient Samuel Woodfill entered the Capitol Dome Room where the body of America’s Unknown Soldier lay in state.

They solemnly carried the body outside the Capitol to a waiting caisson, which joined a procession that marched slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. Muffled drums beat, and a band played a funeral dirge. The procession included Harding, General John J. Pershing, Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft, congressmen and senators, and a carriage carrying former President Wilson.

Large crowds solemnly viewed the procession, including many veterans and their family members, some of whom broke down sobbing or fell to their knees.

The procession halted in front of the White House, where President Harding stepped aside to mount a reviewing

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stand. As he did so, a small crowd of generals and politicians broke ranks to surround Woodfill, who stood at the head of the pallbearers. Oblivious to the caisson standing nearby, men in the group began congratulating Woodfill on the honor he had been given to march at the head of the procession as, symbolically, the nation’s greatest military hero. But Woodfill ignored their plaudits. Instead he stood stiffly to attention and silently saluted, waiting until the president had taken his place and the participants in the procession returned to their ranks. Then, led by Woodfill and the Marine Band, the march resumed toward Arlington Cemetery where the Unknown Soldier would be interred.

The assembly in the flower-bedecked amphitheater at Arlington Cemetery included Vice President Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace; military leaders; service men and women; and about 5,000 guests. The Marine Choir sang hymns as the pallbearers placed the coffin on a bier. This done, the Marines performed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and three aircraft circled in tribute. Following a bugle call, the crowd observed two minutes of silence. President Harding, who

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Among the Medal of Honor recipients to visit the White House after World War I were Sergeant Alvin C. York ( far left) in May 1919, and Lieutenant Samuel Woodfill (left) in November 1921. Woodfill led the pallbearers for America’s Unknown Soldier in the procession from the Capitol to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, where President Harding presided over the ceremony, November 11, 1921 (opposite).

to rest in a ceremony that ended with a bonneted western Indian chief conducting a Native American rite of burial, Taps, and a military salute.10 President Harding returned to a White House forever changed by an overseas war, home-front diplomacy, protests, celebrations, and commemorations. The nation had also been transformed. Not since the Civil War of 1861– 65 had the White House served such a vital purpose in wartime. The war that ended in 1918 was a new kind of war, however, one in which the United States acted for the first time—but not the last—in a major conflict on a global stage. In this, the Executive Mansion’s function as a political and diplomatic meeting space gave it a primary role in the war effort, but it also assumed new roles, in both protest and remembrance, that it continues to the present. notes 1.

William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008), 2:71–75.

2. Ibid., 75–76.

3. Betty Lee, Marie Dressler: The Unlikeliest Star (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 129–30.

had meanwhile made his way from the White House by car, then rose to deliver a speech. As he did so, the clouds parted, bathing the amphitheater in sunlight.

Harding’s speech was broadcast on the radio. “This American soldier went forth to battle with no hatred for any people in the world,” he said, “but hating war and hating the purpose of every war for conquest. . . . In advancing toward his objective was somewhere a thought of a world awakened; and we are here to testify undying gratitude and reverence for that thought of a wider freedom.” The president concluded: “It is fitting to say that his sacrifice, and that of the millions dead, shall not be in vain. There must be, there shall be, the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare.” After he finished, the Unknown Soldier was laid

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4. Seale, President’s House, 2:75; Washington Times, April 23, 1917; Washington Evening Star, April 23, 1917.

5. Washington Times, April 24, 1917.

6. Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 27, 1917.

7. Elizabeth Greenhalgh, “The Viviani-Joffre Mission to the United States, April–May 1917: A Reassessment,” French Historical Studies 35, no.

4 (Fall 2012): 627–59.

8. Washington Herald, September 24, 1918; Washington Times, September 26, 1918.

9. New York Times, May 24, 1919.

10. Warren G. Harding, Address at the Burial of an Unknown American Soldier at Arlington Cemetery, November 11, 1921, online at American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, www.presidency, ucsb.edu. The account of the ceremony is from the Washington Post, November 10, 13, 1921.

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Destruction at the U.S. Capitol reception hall following a late-night bombing, July 2, 1915.

Perpetrator and German sympathizer Erich Muenter was soon apprehended in New York after attempting to murder financier J. P. Morgan Jr. Those who heard the detonation were astonished by the noise, and some feared that the Capitol dome had toppled in.

The Espionage Scene in WASHINGTON Collusion, Secrets, and Spies t h o m as b o g h ar dt

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operations in the American capital, while American agencies sought to monitor and contain them.

The Imperial German Embassy located on Massachusetts Avenue played a central role in the covert war on American soil. Just a few weeks after the outbreak of war, the German ambassador, Johann Heinrich Count von Bernstorff, met with a leading representative of the Irish independence movement, Sir Roger Casement. Irish nationalists regarded the war as an opportunity to throw off British rule, and Bernstorff sympathized with their cause. He sent Casement to Berlin, where the Irishman worked for more than a year with German intelligence to prepare a revolt in Ireland.2 While the ambassador worked with the Irish, the German general staff ordered the German military attaché in Washington, Captain Franz von Papen, to recruit and send sabotage teams across the border into the British Dominion of Canada to bomb bridges, attack railways, and destroy canals. While none of the would-be saboteurs reached Canadian

Johann Heinrich Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, is seen entering his automobile at the Imperial German Embassy, 1917.

The Embassy, located at 1435–41 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., was used by the Germans from 1893 to 1941. The Swiss occupied the building until 1945, and it was finally demolished by the U.S. State Department in 1957. Franz von Papen (at front with cane), a German military attaché in Washington, was sent to recruit teams to sabotage bridges, railways, and canals in Canada.

Papen likely had contact with German diplomats working inside this building.

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i n a u g u s t 1 9 14 , Europe plunged into war.

As the forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary clashed with the armies and navies of Great Britain, France, and Russia, President Woodrow Wilson admonished Americans to remain “neutral in fact as well as in name.”1 Yet the United States found it impossible to detach itself entirely from the war.

The country’s sheer size, its vast economy, its large and diverse population, and its military potential prompted the European belligerents to pay close attention to American interests and sensibilities.

Long considered a diplomatic backwater, by 1915 Washington, D.C., had become the capital of the last major neutral power. European embassies increased their staffs and stepped up their efforts to sway American policy makers in their countries’ favor. Along with the diplomats, however, came the spies. Intelligence has always been the natural corollary of war, and the Great War was no exception. As battle raged in Europe, foreign agents conducted espionage, sabotage, and influence

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soil, one of them set off a bomb on the U.S. side of the Saint Croix–Vanceboro international railway bridge, connecting Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The explosion failed to destroy the bridge, but the saboteur, Werner Horn, was arrested, and his very visible trial alerted the public to the machinations of the German Secret Service in the United States.3 In the course of 1915, American neutrality developed a distinctly pro-Allied flavor. President Wilson permitted the Allies to raise loans on Wall Street, enabling them to purchase large quantities of war matériel from American companies. Yet he did not interfere with the British naval blockade that prevented the Germans and their allies from buying goods on the U.S. market. In response, German secret agents sought to stem the flow of matériel from the United States to the Allies. In Hoboken, New Jersey, a German chemist produced bombs in his laboratory, which local operatives were then to smuggle aboard ships bound for Britain or France.

The bombs had a time-delay mechanism designed to set off the explosion on the high seas, sinking the vessel without a trace.4 In July 1916, a powerful explosion obliterated a munitions depot on a spit of land named Black Tom in New York Harbor, killing several people and destroying more than 1,000 tons of TNT destined for Allied forces in Europe.

Investigators suspected German sabotage.5 The ambassador from Austria-Hungary to the United States made plans to instigate labor unrest in factories producing goods for the Allies, and the German naval attaché, Captain Karl Boy-Ed, offered the Irish socialist labor leader “Big Jim” Larkin, who had come to the United States in 1914, a weekly stipend of $200 for the same purpose.6 Before long, Washington, D.C., became embroiled in this underground war. In the summer of 1915, a German army doctor, Anton Dilger, rented a house in the leafy Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, just 6 miles from the White House. Having spent part of his childhood on a farm in Virginia,

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A New York Herald photograph filed with the Enemy Activities Unit of the War Department is attached to a card that describes the image as a “VIEW OF THE DEBRIS OF THE Lehigh Valley pier wrecked by an explosion of munitions on Black Tom Island, N.J., July 1916.”

Investigators suspected German sabotage.

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midnight. Given the late hour, the powerful blast injured no one, but it caused extensive damage. As a Capitol police officer later recalled, “It sounded like several cannon going off, accompanied by a racket of flying glass, and a sound of cracking timber. I thought the Capitol dome had toppled.”8 Having observed the explosion from a nearby bench, Muenter walked to Union Station, just a couple of blocks to the north of the Capitol, and caught the midnight train to New York City. In the morning of July 3, he made his way to Matinecock Point, the palatial summer residence of John Pierpont Morgan Jr. on East Island, Glen Cove. A top financier of the Allies, Morgan had incurred the wrath of many isolationists and German Americans.

Armed with two pistols, Muenter pushed his way past Morgan’s butler, shot the banker twice, but failed to kill him. Morgan, who weighed 220 pounds, lunged at Muenter and wrestled him to the ground. Morgan’s staff then beat the attacker unconscious. When the police arrested Muenter, he confessed, and the officers quickly connected him to the Capitol bombing. In letters he had sent earlier to the Washington Times and the Washington Star, Muenter wrote, “Sorry I . . . had to use explosives. . . . This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for peace! . . . The people financially interested in explosives have done all the talking

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Former Harvard University lecturer Erich Muenter (left) attempted to blow up the U.S. Capitol Building on July 2, 1915. He then fled to New York and attempted to murder John Pierpont Morgan Jr. (right), a top financier of the Allies. Muenter was captured, confessed to both crimes, and committed suicide while awaiting trial in prison.

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Dilger spoke English fluently and fit in easily with local society. He claimed to be working as a medical doctor and listed himself as a physician in the Washington, D.C., directory. In reality, he had been sent by the German general staff to conduct biological warfare. In the basement of his house, Dilger set up a secret laboratory where he cultivated anthrax and glanders germs and sealed them in vials. German-paid local couriers picked up the deadly bacteria and delivered them to Baltimore.

Here, the plan was that German agents would distribute the germs to seaports where cattle and horses awaited shipment to Britain and France.

Then agents would inject the beasts with the virus, and by the time the animals reached Europe, the Germans hoped, many would have succumbed to a deadly disease. “Tony’s lab,” as Dilger’s fellow agents called his laboratory, operated for a year until the Germans ran out of virus cultures.7 It remains unclear how many animals fell ill with the viruses.

Many German Americans believed the U.S. government was not giving Berlin a fair shake in the arms trade, and some individuals took matters into their own hands to adjust the perceived imbalance.

In the afternoon of July 2, 1915, a former Harvard University lecturer named Erich Muenter placed a self-made bomb in the reception hall of the Capitol building. The device exploded half an hour before

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William J. Flynn investigated threats of sabotage as chief of the Secret Service during World War I. He subsequently led the Bureau of Investigation from 1919 to 1921.

so far.” The letters were signed “R. Pearce,” but Muenter acknowledged his authorship while in custody. Mentally unstable, he committed suicide three days later.9 While Muenter had acted on his own, there was some talk of German officials envisaging similar operations in the American capital. A certain Egon von Blankenfeld stated that in December 1915 Franz von Papen had tried to recruit him as an agent with “a plan for blowing up the White House” or possibly the Capitol. “We want to hurry Wilson heavenward,” Papen supposedly said to Blankenfeld, “and if possible some of his senators with him, in order that war may be prevented.”10 Whether Blankenfeld told the truth remains unclear. On the one hand, it is unlikely that Papen would have been so brazen as to organize an attack on the White House or the Capitol. On the other hand, the attaché had a reputation for bragging and shooting off his mouth. In a letter to his wife, for example, he had carelessly referred to his American hosts as “those idiotic Yankees.” Sent through unsecure channels, the letter ended up on the front pages of the American press and became deeply embarrassing to the German Embassy.11 Given his propensity for loose language, Papen may well have talked up a plan to blow up the White House or the Capitol as a way to impress Blankenfeld

and possibly others. If so, the plan backfired, as Blankenfeld turned down the offer and later informed American authorities about Papen’s supposed recruitment pitch. The drumbeat of press revelations, circulating rumors, and public trials involving German covert operations “did considerable harm to the German cause,” Ambassador Bernstorff conceded in his memoirs.12 It also alerted American authorities to the fact that the German Embassy engaged in more than diplomacy.

Several federal agencies dealt with foreign espionage and sabotage. Their headquarters literally ringed the White House in a protective cordon. To the east of the president’s residence, the Treasury Department building housed the U.S. Secret Service, headed by Chief William J. Flynn.

To the northeast, at 1435 K Street NW, lay the Department of Justice, headquarters of the Bureau of Investigation, which became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1924. During the war, the bureau was headed by Special Agent A. Bruce Bielaski.

And to the west, the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) housed three organizations engaged in intelligence and security operations: the State Department’s Bureau of Secret Intelligence under Counselor Frank K. Polk coordinated U.S. intelligence activities abroad; the army’s Military Intelligence Division under Colonel Ralph Van Deman and the navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence under Captain James H. Oliver were responsible for military and naval intelligence matters, respectively.

In what probably amounted to the first phone tap of a foreign representation in Washington, D.C., the Secret Service in late 1914 began recording conversations of German diplomats.13 Apparently the ambassador suspected the eavesdropping and avoided discussing politically sensitive matters.

For the most part, the operation merely confirmed Bernstorff ’s reputation as a lady’s man. On one occasion, the Secret Service overheard a conversation between the ambassador and Eleanor Josephine (“Cissy”) Patterson, who resided at her family’s imposing mansion at 15 Dupont Circle when in town. A Washington socialite, journalist, and future editor-cum-owner of the Washington Times and Washington Herald, Patterson was sympathetic to the German cause, so her contact with the ambassador was not unusual, but the two apparently shared more than political views. Addressing Patterson as “Cissy,” the count asked her: “Are you

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with the Wilson administration, British intelligence sought to influence U.S. policy makers in London’s favor. The station chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Sir William Wiseman, played a key role in this effort. Ingratiating and prone to intrigue, Wiseman struck up relationships with top U.S. officials and charmed his way into the confidence of one of President Wilson’s closest advisers, Edward M. House. The Englishman even rented an apartment in the building where House lived. The impressionable House, in turn, persuaded President Wilson to meet Wiseman because, he contended, “Sir William has been the real ambassador over here for some time.” The president received the British secret service man at an official reception on June 26, 1917, at the Pan American Union Building on Seventeenth Street NW in Washington.

Other guests were reportedly taken aback when the president spent so much time with the unknown and inconspicuous-looking foreigner.18 Within a few months of America’s entry into the war, Britain’s top spy in the United States had become a veritable agent of influence. As Wiseman proudly reported to the British Foreign Office in early 1918, he was “moving entirely in Administration circles,” always subtly pushing London’s point of view.19 Meanwhile, the war boosted the nascent American intelligence and security apparatus. On June 5, 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which provided federal agencies with a legal framework for counterespionage operations. The Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, the Office

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The Patterson mansion at 15 Dupont Circle NW, Washington, D.C., where socialite and German-sympathizer Eleanor Josephine (“Cissy”) Patterson, (opposite, right) reportedly interacted with the German ambassador, Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff (opposite, left), the World War I–era German ambassador to the United States.

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going to New York?” “Yes, I think I shall but I will only be there one day,” she replied. “Well, can I see you today?” Bernstorff inquired. “Oh yes (laughing),” responded Patterson. Emphasizing the urgency of his request, Bernstorff added: “It is very important, you know. The most important part of my visit to Washington.” Playfully, Patterson asked: “Well, how long will you be here?” “That all depends on you,” responded Bernstorff suggestively. “How dare you?” Patterson replied, laughing.14 In their investigations of German covert operations, American officials received a helping hand from British intelligence. Early in the war, British naval intelligence under Captain W. Reginald Hall had broken several German diplomatic codes, and from 1915, Hall’s code breakers regularly intercepted and decrypted communications between the German Foreign Office in Berlin and the Imperial Embassy in Washington. Time and again, Hall shared these intercepts selectively with the Americans in an effort to compromise the Germans.

He launched his most successful operation in early 1917, when the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, submitted a secret alliance proposal to Mexico. In the Zimmermann Telegram, as the missive became known, the foreign secretary exhorted Mexico to attack the United States should the latter join the war against Germany. To make the offer palatable to Mexico, Berlin promised financial aid and political support for Mexico to “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.”15 Since Berlin could not communicate directly with Mexico City, the Foreign Office sent the telegram via the German Embassy in Washington. Even though Bernstorff considered the project foolish, he realized that he “had neither the right, or was it my duty, to hold up” the telegram and forwarded it to his colleague in Mexico.16 Meanwhile, the British intercepted and decrypted the message, and handed it to the American government, which, in turn, leaked it to the Associated Press. On March 1, 1917, virtually every newspaper reported on the “German plot to conquer U.S.,”17 and in early April the United States declared war on Germany.

By that time Ambassador Bernstorff had left Washington, and most German secret agents in the United States quietly slipped across the border into Mexico. Washington’s role as a center of plots and counterplots was by no means over, however.

As the Allies began negotiating the postwar order

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The Zimmermann Telegram, a coded cable dispatched by German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann, encouraged Mexico to attack the United States in exchange for financial aid and political support from Germany. The telegram was first sent to the German Embassy in Washington in January 1917. When the German Ambassador Count Bernstorff (top left) forwarded it to Mexico, it was intercepted and decrypted by the British. It reads: We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the [Mexican] President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves.

Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.

Signed, ZIMMERMANN

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of Naval Intelligence, the Military Intelligence Division, as well as state and local police agencies, greatly increased their personnel and expanded operations.20 Across the nation, secret societies and vigilante groups sprang up to combat suspected foreign espionage, sedition, and sabotage.

The largest of these organizations, the semiofficial American Protective League, boasted 250,000 members nationwide and was headquartered just a couple of blocks north of the White House, in an

old Washington residence at 1537 I Street NW.21 The massive expansion of the American security apparatus occurred after most German agents had left the country, and very few genuine spies were caught during the war. But American spy hunters soon found a new target of their zeal.

In October 1917, Bolsheviks led by Vladimir I. Lenin seized power from Russia’s provisional government, which had been set up following the overthrow of czar in February. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, radical groups organized across Central and Western Europe. At the end of the war, left-wing agitation, race riots, and strikes spread to American industrial centers, and the socalled Red Scare replaced foreign espionage as the greatest domestic threat in the American mind.

Fear of left-wing radicalism skyrocketed in the spring of 1919, when dozens of top U.S. officials and members of American high society received booby-trapped bombs filled with dynamite in the mail. On June 2, an anarchist placed a bomb at the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer at 2132 R Street NW, about three blocks northwest of Dupont Circle. The self-made device detonated prematurely, ripping the body of the would-be assassin apart and killing him instantly.

While the explosion tore into the front facade of Palmer’s house, the attorney general and his family inside survived. The Bureau of Investigation

The home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer at 2132 R Street NW the morning after an anarchist bomb blew out the windows and killed the would-be assassin, June 2, 1919. In response, the Bureau of Investigation, under a young J. Edgar Hoover, seen here in his 1916 George Washington University Law School yearbook, conducted the “Palmer Raids” and apprehended more than three thousand suspected radicals.

responded swiftly and aggressively to the bombing campaign. Under a young official named J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau conducted a series of arrests, the so-called “Palmer Raids,” apprehending more than three thousand suspected radicals, many of them foreign-born. Of these, more than five hundred were deported to Europe and Russia.22 The Red Scare bookended half a decade of espionage, sabotage, and subversion in the United States and its national capital. Americans retreated into a period of isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s, but the First World War left a permanent mark on the history of U.S. intelligence. In response to the various foreign plots and conspiracies on its soil, the government had established and expanded a host of intelligence and security agencies and enacted comprehensive legislation to deal with foreign espionage. In time, the emerging national security apparatus became a permanent fixture in the American bureaucracy, and it continued to grow through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Headquartered in the American capital, the various intelligence and security organizations turned Washington, D.C., into a global center of espionage and intelligence, and it has remained a “city of spies” to the present day.23 notes 1.

Woodrow Wilson, An Appeal to the American People, [August 18, 1914], in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, 69 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966–94), 30:393, also available online in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Digital Edition, University of Virginia Press, www.upress. virginia.edu/rotunda/.

Horseman: One Man’s Mission to Wage the Great War in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 85, 97, 169.

8. Quoted in Daniel E. Russell, “The Day Morgan Was Shot,” Glen Cove History 1 (n.d.): 8.

9. Quoted in Ibid., 9, 12. The police discovered that Muenter had poisoned his first wife years earlier and had a history of mental instability.

10. Report by agent, Office of the Counselor, Department of State, August 1, 1916, folder “Confidential file # 73A, Mexico, Political file,” Office of the Counselor / Under Secretary and the Chief, Special Agent, Classified File of Edward Bell, 1917–1917, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, Md. 11. Jones and Hollister, German Secret Service, 12.

12. Johann Heinrich Count von Bernstorff, My Three Years in America (London: Skeffington, 1920), 101.

13. Doerries, “Die Tätigkeit deutscher Agenten,” 19.

14. W. J. Flynn, memorandum for secretary, June 20, 1915, folder “Telephone conversations tapped by agents, May 30–Sept. 2, 1915, calls of Bernstorff, Boy-Ed, Archibald White, et al.,” Office of the Counselor / Under Secretary and the Chief, Special Agent, Classified Case Files, 1915–1926, Human Espionage Activities, German Activities, Record Group 59, National Archives.

15. Thomas Boghardt, The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America’s Entry into World War I (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2012), 66–67.

16. Bernstorff, My Three Years, 380.

17. “German Plot to Conquer U.S. with Aid of Japan and Mexico Revealed,” Washington Post, March 1, 1917.

18. Quoted and reported in John Milton Cooper Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 416–17.

19. Quoted in Richard B. Spence, “Englishmen in New York: The SIS American Station, 1915–21,” Intelligence and National Security 19, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 522.

20. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 26.

21. Emerson Hough, The Web: The Story of the American Protective League (Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1919), 54.

22. Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955).

23. Molly Ball, “Washington’s Spy Paranoia,” Atlantic, March 13, 2017.

2. Reinhard R. Doerries, Imperial Challenge: Ambassador Count Bernstorff and German-American Relations, 1908–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 156; Reinhard Doerries, “Die Tätigkeit deutscher Agenten in den USA während des Ersten Weltkrieges und ihr Einfluss auf die diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen Washington und Berlin,” in Diplomaten und Agenten: Nachrichtendienste in der Geschichte der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen, ed. Reinhard Doerries (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2001), 22–24.

3. John Price Jones and Paul Merrick Hollister, The German Secret Service in America (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1918), 125–26.

4. Henry Landau, The Enemy Within: The Inside Story of German Sabotage in America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937), 44–46.

5. After World War II, the West German government acknowledged responsibility for the Black Tom explosion and paid an indemnity, but the circumstances of this incident remain shrouded in mystery. Burkhard Jähnicke, Washington und Berlin zwischen den Kriegen: Die Mixed Claims Commission in den transatlantischen Beziehungen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2003), 240.

6. Doerries, Imperial Challenge, 115, 183. Larkin later claimed he turned down the German offer.

7. Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain During the First World War Era (Basingstoke, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 133, 200–93 (listing the address of the house); Robert Koenig, The Fourth

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April 6, 1917: WAR IS DECLARED Against the German Empire MICHAEL BESCHLOSS

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on wednesday, april 4, 1917, the U.S. Senate was first to debate Wilson’s war declaration. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said that “national cowardice” would be worse than joining the struggle “against barbarism.” The Boston Brahmin warned, “This is not, and cannot be, a party war. . . . We must fight for all we are worth. . . . The most merciful war is that which is vigorously waged and which comes

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quickly to an end.” Warren G. Harding, a blackbench Ohio Republican, said that entering the conflict would “at least put a soul into our people.” The Democrat Claude Swanson of Virginia cautioned that unless the United States upheld its rights, “Old Glory will be sunk to new depths of shame and humiliation.”

But James Vardaman, a Mississippi Democrat, said, “Each Senator should remember that he may, by his voice, be signing the death warrant of hundreds of thousands.” He insisted that if Americans were to make the decision themselves, they would, “in thunderous tones, direct the President to find some other way than war.” Nebraska’s isolationist George Norris, a Republican, claimed that behind the “war fever” were “munitions makers, stockbrokers and bond dealers.” He warned, we are about to do the bidding of wealth’s terrible mandate and make millions of countrymen suffer, and untold generations bear burdens and shed their lifeblood, all because we want to preserve our

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President Woodrow Wilson addresses a joint session of Congress, April 2, 1917, to call for a declaration of war against the German Empire. opposite

The Honorable Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist and the first woman elected to Congress, was conflicted when deciding her vote, but ultimately was one of only fifty in the House of Representatives to vote “No.” previous spread

The Joint Resolution, as passed by the SixtyFifth Congress, “authorized and directed” the president “to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of Government to carry on war against the Imperial German Government.”

Wilson approved and signed the resolution on the lower left corner of the document.

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The following is excerpted from Chapter 11, “Salvation of Mankind,” Presidents of War: The Epic Story from 1807 to Modern Times, by Michael Beschloss (Crown, fall 2018). This new book is an intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict, mobilized their country for victory, and made the most difficult decisions that face any president.

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commercial right to deliver munitions to the belligerents. I feel we are about to put the dollar sign on the American flag.”

Leaping to his feet, the Missouri Democrat James A. Reed complained that Norris’s insinuation “grazes the very edge of treason.” The galleries erupted in applause. Vice-President Thomas Marshall threatened expulsion unless the spectators grew quiet. According to Reed, Norris had not only insulted the President but given “aid and comfort” to the enemy. The Nebraskan replied that his “war crazy” colleagues had lost their reason.1 “All except him!” burst out John Sharp Williams, Democrat from Mississippi, evoking a laugh from fellow Senators.

Gesturing wildly, Robert La Follette almost shouted that “poor” Americans, lacking an “organized mouthpiece,” would now be “called to rot in the trenches.” John Williams objected, calling La Follette’s utterance “pro-German and pretty nearly pro-Goth and pro-vandal,” as well as “anti-American, anti-President and anti-Congress.”

Furious at the insult, La Follette stalked out of the chamber. Williams said he could imagine the “groans” of parents and children sent to “watery graves’ by German U-boats: “I am getting tired of this talk that this is a Wall Street war.

That’s a lie! Wall Street did not sink the Lusitania, the Arabic, the Sussex and these other ships.” At 11:11 p.m., after thirteen hours of debate, the Senate passed Wilson’s war resolution in its exact original form by 82 to 6.2 The House took up the matter on Thursday. “Cotton Tom” Heflin and John Burnett, both of Alabama, neared a fistfight when the anti-war Burnett challenged Heflin to resign and enlist.

Heflin said, “My nephew will go into this war,” and Burnett replied, “It’s easy enough to fight through somebody else.”

The House sergeant at arms had to separate them with his mace. By evening, couples in white tie and fancy dresses

had entered the galleries, eager to watch history unfold. The United Press reported that women with “shoulders flashing from décolleté gowns leaned nervously far over the edge, listening to every word being said from the floor beneath.” When the first roll call on the war began, well after midnight, there was a collective gasp in the chamber when Wilson’s House Majority Leader, Claude Kitchin of North Carolina, a Bryanite isolationist, voted no. One of his friends said, “Kitchin is sweating blood.”

All day long, the Honorable Jeannette Rankin, Republican from Montana, who had just become the first woman elected to congress, avoided the House floor, torn by conflicting emotions. Although a pacifist, she had been warned that opposing the war might jeopardize the chances for women’s suffrage. She returned to the chamber to hear her name called for the second time. Taking a breath, she tremulously announced, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.”

“Vote! Vote!” members shouted. Puzzled

by Rankin’s comment, the House clerk asked, “Do you intend to vote no?” She nodded, collapsed into her chair, covered her eyes, thrust back her head, and let out an audible sob.

Outside the Capitol building swirled a nor’easter. The rains pounded the stained-glass skylights above the House chamber. At 3:13 a.m., the House of Representatives had endorsed the President’s bid for war by 373 to 50.3 It was Good Friday. In Pueblo, Colorado’s Chieftain execrated Wilson for his counterfeit and lying campaign slogan of “He kept us out of war.” The paper said, “The pacifists who supported Mr. Wilson last fall must now admit either that he did not deserve the credit they gave him for keeping us out of war, or else that he has betrayed the confidence they placed in him.”

At noon on Friday, a nervous, distracted Wilson lunched with Edith and his cousin, Helen Woodrow Bones, at the White House. Informed that the official parchment had arrived from Capitol Hill, he refused advice to sign it in his formal West Wing office.4 He was in no mood for ceremony or gloating, and wished it known that he had ratified the resolution as soon as possible. Instead he led the ladies into the tiny chamber of the tailcoat-clad Chief Usher Ike Hoover, just inside the mansion’s north door, without official guests or photographers. “Stand by me, Edith,” said the President, before accepting from his wife a gilded fountain pen as he sat down at Hoover’s desk. At 1:18, with the muscles bulging in his lantern jaw, Wilson scrawled, “Approved.” notes 1.

Norris declined to cite the Senate prohibition against accusing a colleague of unworthy motives.

2. All six dissenters were included in the “little group of willful men” that Wilson had earlier denounced. The eight absent Senators made it known that they backed the President.

3. Sensitive to symbolism, Wilson had asked that the Senate and House enact a joint resolution, which—even though Congress has the constitutional power to declare war on its own— would legally require the President’s signature, suggesting that America’s involvement in the world war would be a collaboration between both branches of government.

4. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt had moved the presidential offices from the second floor of the White House to a new West Wing.

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The Pilgrim’s PASSAGE President Woodrow Wilson’s Voyage to France on the USS George Washington, 1918 S T E P H E N T. M O S K E Y

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for her husband.1 The nine days at sea, culminating in a triumphant arrival in Brest, France, would be an opportunity for the president to prepare himself mentally and physically for the rigors of the conference. In addition to the work he would need to do during the ocean crossing he would have ample time to rest, relax, and enjoy himself.

After their marriage three years earlier, the Wilsons quickly established a daily routine in the White House. Each presidential workday started with the couple taking breakfast together and then moving to the president’s private study upstairs, where they worked side-by-side until Mrs. Wilson needed to attend to other duties. They usually lunched together in the White House, alone, or sometimes with a few friends, and then the president turned his

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Believed to have been produced by the ship’s carpentry shop for the president, this wooden trunk, stamped “USS George Washington” on the inner lid and its protective canvas cover are seen (above left) in the trunk room of the Woodrow Wilson House. The fine construction, including unpainted oak wood with brass straps and hardware, distinguishes it from simpler painted trunks used by enlisted sailors.

The president’s second wife, Edith Bolling Wilson, seen above with the president aboard the George Washington, worried about the president’s health and comfort aboard ship. Having witnessed the strain of the war finally lifting from him, she hoped that the nine-day journey across the Atlantic would provide an opportunity for him to rest ahead of the Peace Conference.

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f i r s t l a d y e d i t h w i l s o n was happy that her husband took a threehour nap immediately after lunch on December 4, 1918, their first day aboard the USS George Washington, the troop transport ship that was taking her and her husband to France for the Paris Peace Conference. She always worried about him but had been especially vigilant during the one year, seven months, and five days that the United States had been at war with Germany. She was a firsthand, intimate witness to the strain the war placed on the president personally and officially. Now, as the ship sailed out of the Hoboken shipyard bound for Brest, “the long strain of war was lifting” from him, she would later write in her memoir. The trans-Atlantic journey that began that morning would be “a real holiday, lifegiving”

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The USS George Washington

The crew of the USS George Washington seen here arriving in Brest, France, enjoyed the president’s company and posed for a formal photograph with him on deck. left

The USS George Washington, seen returning to New York Harbor with President Wilson and his delegation, July 8, 1919, was built as German passenger liner in 1908. It was seized by the United States and converted to a troop transport ship during World War I. In the foreground is the USS Leviathan, another German-built passenger ship that had been seized by the U.S. government and used for the American war effort. below

President Wilson’s quarters aboard the George Washington were located in suite 66 on the B deck. Wilson’s desk, a replica of one used in 1789 by George Washington in New York City’s Federal Hall, was equipped with a wireless telephone that allowed the president to speak directly with government officials in Washington during the crossing.

builder: Vulcan Works, Stettin, Germany original name: SS George Washington launched: November 10, 1908 operated by: North Germany Lloyd Line as a passenger ship until 1914 in hoboken shipyard (neutral port): 1914–1917 requisitioned for conversion to a u.s. transport ship: April 6, 1917

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commissioned uss GEORGE WASHINGTON (id #3018): September 6, 1917 began transporting u.s. troops to europe: December 4, 1917 international code signal letters: G.S.T.W. length: 722'5" speed of december 4–13, 1918, voyage: 16 knots displacement: 39,435 tons depth forward on arrival in brest: 28'6" depth aft on arrival in brest: 33'4"

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A photograph album prepared by the U.S. Army Signal Corps and given to the Wilsons to commemorate their voyage contains more than one hundred photos of daily life aboard the George Washington. Included are images of President and Mrs. Wilson, government officials who traveled with them, and the ship’s crew along with scenes of activites on board and in France. Two pages are devoted to portraits of the security detail (below) which Mrs. Wilson considered unnecessary.

Today the scrapbook is preserved in the collection of the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington.D.C., and is seen (opposite) beneath a 1913 portrait of the president’s first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, and their daughters.

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The Voyage Documented

On Board Entertainment The album includes many scenes of life aboard the ship, including an Army Signal Corps photographer at work

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of current films.

The secretary of the navy had authorized an expenditure of $10,000 for “fitting up properly” the passenger quarters of the George Washington, which as recently as a month earlier had been serving as an American troop transport vessel.6 The Wanamaker Department Store of Philadelphia was hired to redecorate and refurnish the VIP suites, and this work had continued right up to the day before departure.7 The Wilsons were assigned to suites 65 and 66 on promenade deck B. Each suite included sitting and dining rooms, a bedroom, and a bath. The New York Times reported in a somewhat contemptuous tone that the president’s “imperial suite” was located across the hall from the “regal suite” (the first lady’s) and that both were “luxuriously fitted in red and gold.”8 This description was clearly meant as a jab to the president. Mrs. Wilson’s own, firsthand account of the furnishings and color scheme of her rooms shows that her dining room was decorated in “English chintz” and her bedroom in “ivory with pink bedspread and curtains and soft cushions.” The president’s bedroom, according to Mrs. Wilson, was made “gloomy” by its dark green curtains. The president’s suite included an office outfitted with communications equipment and what Mrs. Wilson called a “handsome flat-topped mahogany desk,” in fact a reproduction of a desk George Washington used when in New York.9 Other high-ranking VIPs were housed near the presidential couple, facilitating security arrangements.

In her memoir, Edith Wilson wrote disparagingly about the presence of twenty-four-hour-a-day security while they were at sea. She felt that this was “useless” and said “it got on my nerves.”10 Dr. Grayson and Miss Benham were also located close by, so they could be available on short notice.

In addition to newly decorated rooms, special food and catering services were brought on board to serve the president

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attention to official duties awaiting in the Oval Office or his study, often with the first lady again at his side. Evenings were for dinners with family and friends followed by theater outings or other entertainments.2 The president’s White House routine was modified only slightly aboard the George Washington.3 After breakfast, as was his habit in Washington, Wilson worked through the morning in his private quarters with few interruptions.

The only formal morning meetings he held aboard ship did not occur until Tuesday, December 10, as the president began to make final preparations for his arrival in France three days later. That morning, he met with several research specialists from his Peace Conference Commission’s staff. They showed him the data they were preparing to support the American positions he would present at Versailles. The president’s approach was a dialogue not unlike one he might have had years earlier when, as Professor Wilson, he engaged in academic debate with his best students.

Wilson then met Ambassador JeanJules Jusserand in a formal working

session during which the senior French diplomat presented “certain facts” that his government had asked him to share with the American president.4 Each morning’s work session ended with lunch with Mrs. Wilson in his private quarters. Sometimes lunch also included their closest confidants on board, Dr. Cary T. Grayson, the president’s personal physician (who held the rank of admiral in the U.S. Navy), and Edith Wallace Benham, the first lady’s social secretary.

Afternoons aboard the George Washington were for official duties: meetings with VIP guests and the members of his delegation, tours of the ship, press interviews, photo opportunities, and military reviews. Wilson also held meetings with his newly appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, John W. Davis, who was on his way to assume his post in London, and the seasoned diplomat, Henry White, former American ambassador to France and Italy. White, a Republican, had served in those posts under President Theodore Roosevelt. President Wilson had asked White to be one of the five American peace commissioners, though the appointment was controversial because it had been so long since White had served in politics that many Republicans feared he no longer held Republican views.5 Starting on December 5, the second day at sea, Dr. Grayson made sure that the president took daily walks on the glass-enclosed promenade deck.

These were not quick walks. It was not uncommon for the president and first lady, accompanied sometimes by Dr. Grayson or Miss Benham, to walk 2 miles by making several rounds of the promenade. These busy days aboard the George Washington ended with evenings at sea set aside for quiet dinners, entertainment, and relaxation. As in Washington, the Wilsons attended musicals and theatrical performances, only this time they were amateur presentations by the ship’s crew. Wilson, a movie lover, was provided with a library

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and first lady. The New York Times reported that Louis Seres, the chef of New York City’s Hotel Biltmore, had been tasked with overhauling the “saloon galley” on one of the upper decks. “The President and Mrs. Wilson will dine in their private suite,” the paper reported, “and the peace delegates and foreign diplomats will use the small dining room on the ‘B’ deck for their meals.”11 The French-born Seres was something of a celebrity chef who had cooked for King Edward VII of England, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and King Leopold of Belgium.12 In 1916, his recipe for cooking a Thanksgiving turkey appeared in a national magazine.

Seres offered his readers no less than three options for rich dressings with oysters, walnuts, or chestnuts, each liberally infused with milk, cream, butter, and other riches. Another of his popular recipes, “Deliea Salad,” called for a mixture of artichokes, pineapple, grapefruit, pears, green and red peppers, and “cold French dressing with paprika.”13 A typical menu for President and Mrs. Wilson in their private dining room was an elaborate affair with several courses of rich food, such as this dinner served on December 8:14

The president was one who liked simple tastes, and eventually, Seres’s cooking got to him. On December 10, Edith Benham noted in her diary that the president was “suffering terribly under the elaborate French cooking.

Everything, of course, comes with a sauce.” She quoted the president’s final verdict on the food: “[I] can’t see any sense in wrapping up food in pajamas.”15 Wilson had actually been quite put out at the beginning of the voyage when he learned that he would not be dining with the others and eating what they ate. “His disbelief in special privilege was aroused,” Mrs. Wilson later wrote in her memoir, “and on our second trip to the Conference this culinary artist was left behind.”16 Throughout the voyage, the president took great interest in the military capabilities of the fleet of five destroyers that accompanied the George Washington from Hoboken to Brest. On December 9, the president witnessed what the Washington Post called “a

opposite President Wilson is seen with Cary Grayson, his close confidant and physician. Grayson, an astute political observer whose personal diary provides many details of the voyage and the president’s activities, made sure that the president took daily walks on the glass-enclosed promenade deck. below The Wilsons’ suites on the George Washington were redecorated and refurnished for the voyage by Wanamaker Department Store of Philadelphia. The bed from Mrs. Wilson’s suite is preserved in the collection of the Woodrow Wilson House.

The brass plaque affixed to the footboard reads, “From the USS George Washington and the suite occupied in 1918–1919 by the President and Mrs. Wilson on their trips to and from the Peace Conference at Paris. The same suite was occupied in 1919 by the King and Queen of the Belgians on their visit to the United States.”

DINNER

Croustade Beluga [toasts stuffed with caviar] Consomme of Oxtail in Cups Celery, Almonds Terrapin Maryland Breast of Mallard Duck, Bigarrade [orange sauce] Fried Hominy, Salade Lorette [beet salad] Coupe Helene [pears with chocolate sauce] Cakes Coffee

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thrilling demonstration of the work of repulsing a submarine attack.” A ship that had been “lagging far astern suddenly leaped forward, her funnels vomiting smoke, white spray dashing from her bow as she tore through the water at a clip of thirty knots an hour.”

Positioning itself abeam of the president’s ship to provide him a better view of the exercise, the ship dropped depth bombs. “Great geysers were thrown high into air as the warship zigzagged its way through the waters beneath which was supposed to lurk the enemy submarine,” reported the Washington Post.17 The next day, President and Mrs. Wilson, accompanied by Dr. Grayson, went to the bridge of the ship to observe an exhibition of the antiaircraft capabilities of the super dreadnought battleship the USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), which served as the George Washington’s lead escort across the Atlantic. The Pennsylvania released six hot air balloons as aerial practice for the dreadnought’s antiaircraft gun crews.18 For a commander in chief who had been required by the Secret Service to spend the war years virtually sequestered in the White House, viewing these at-sea examples of the power and might of his navy were thrilling moments.

The sailors revered the president and white house history quarterly

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The USS Tudno, seen anchored in Brest Harbor alongside the George Washington, was employed by the U. S. Navy as a ship-to-shore ferry.

loved seeing him as he moved about the ship. “Whenever the President appeared on deck the crew would gather where they could watch him,” Dr. Grayson wrote in his diary, “and he never failed to wave his hand to them, and when they were close enough to give them a friendly greeting.”19 The men’s bond with their commander in chief was complete. He had sent them to a perilous war, and they had won it for him. Now he was among them, under their protection until he would become the first American president to set foot on European soil while in office. The crew had several opportunities to express their admiration and love for the president.

On Sunday, December 8, the Wilsons chose unexpectedly to attend church services in the Old Salt Theatre—the crew’s assembly hall—on the ship’s D deck, rather than go to the Sunday services that were held for officers and passengers in the officers’ mess hall high up on the B deck. Wilson’s unannounced arrival in the Old Salt made the navy chaplain on duty that morning “noticeably nervous.”20 The Old Salt was below the water line, and the stale air was infused with pungent smells emanating from the ship’s galleys nearby, but the president was not deterred. He wanted to worship surrounded by his boys.

The Wilsons made their way down to the Old Salt again on the evening of December 8 to participate in a navy tradition, a “crew-sing” accompanied by “picture songs” (words projected on the movie screen) so that everyone could sing along. Rousing patriotic songs from the war years such as “Keep the Home Fires Burning” and “Over There” were featured in the program.21 The president sang “with great gusto,” Edith Benham would later say, “for he has a good voice.” Mrs. Wilson, too, was “piping along merrily.” After the program, which included a movie, the president asked the captain if he could shake hands with the men. “You never

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saw such a lot of happy faces as those waiting to be greeted,” Edith Benham observed.22 “President Wilson shook hands with the crew. He was covered with smiles all over,” noted yeoman second class Jeremiah A. Walsh, who kept a log of the president’s voyage aboard the George Washington.23 After the men shook hands with the president, they rose spontaneously and gave their commander in chief “three cheers and a tiger.” A “tiger” in this context is a shriek or howl, often incorporating the word “tiger” itself, and ending in a prolonged, enthusiastic cheer.

Originating in early nineteenth-century American military settings, it was used for especially joyous and festive occasions.24 As the president started to leave the hall, the ship’s quartet sang the Princeton University alma mater, “Old Nassau.” The next morning the ship’s newspaper, The Hatchet, reported that this “delighted and thrilled the president,” bringing back “pleasant reminiscences of former days.”25 In Washington, the Wilsons were regulars at the Belasco and Keith Theaters, so a “Musical Gambol” with a vaudevillian flavor presented by the ship’s bluejackets on December 11 was a treat for them.26 The show, written and directed

by Broadway playwright and producer Philip Hart Dunning, who had enlisted in the navy at the start of the war, included songs by the glee club, cabaret “stunts,” and “‘The Belle of Hawaia’. . . a sweet passionate thing, weighing not a pound over 275 and dancing with all the grace of the Pennsylvania on a stormy sea.”27 The Hatchet reported that there had been “unexpected difficulties” in selecting the “female chorus” because their tattoos showed on their arms and shoulders. There were other problems, too. “The rehearsal was delayed . . . by the leading chorus lady who was later found in the barber shop,” the newsletter dryly reported about the show’s star, “Madam C. Sharp Minor.”28 Despite these glitches, the show’s skits and

musical numbers were a great success, and the president enjoyed it “hugely.”29 On the evening of December 12, the final night of the voyage, the president joined the other passengers and officers for a movie night in the Martha Washington Theater. At the conclusion of The Devil-Stone featuring Hollywood starlet Geraldine Farrar, the ship’s choir, accompanied by the orchestra, started singing an old hymn of farewell “in splendidly modulated voices.”30 The audience, including the president, rose to their feet:

On December 13, 1918, at exactly 2:55 p.m., President and Mrs. Wilson disembarked the USS George Washington for the ferry that would take them to the docks of Brest Harbor for the French government’s official welcome of the first sitting U.S. president to set foot on European soil. As the ferry cast off, the ship’s band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” accompanied by a twenty-onegun salute from the ship’s battery that was returned by French guns on shore.

God be with you till we meet again,

By His counsels guide, uphold you, With His sheep securely fold you, God be with you till we meet again.31 “The farewell was inspiring and touching to all of us,” Dr. Grayson later said.32 The president and first lady were up early the next morning, climbing to the ship’s bridge to watch the arrival of the French ships that would escort the George Washington into Brest harbor.

Emotions were high as the president prepared to step onto European soil, the first sitting president to do so in the 142-year history of the American

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Thousands of Parisians lined the city’s streets and window ledges as

with a military parade and a large sign stretching across the Rue Royale Grayson said that the president “had carefully watched the attitude

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opposite President Wilson addressed troops of the American Expeditionary Force at Humes, France, on December 25, 1918.

AEF commander in chief General John J. Pershing presented the troops, saying: “You, Mr. President, by your confidence and by your support, have made the success of our armies possible.” A week earlier, the President and Mrs. Wilson placed a floral wreath on the tomb of General Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette at Picpus Cemetery. They returned to the cemetery on June 7, 1919, with a bronze replica of the wreath, which bore the same sentiment as the original: “To the Great Lafayette from a fellow servant of Liberty.” On Memorial Day 1919, the president laid a wreath in the Suresnes American Cemetery, which today contains the remains of 1,541 Americans who died in World War I and 24 unknown dead of World War II.

republic. “It was a radiant day,” the first lady later wrote, “just cold enough to be exhilarating.”33 President Wilson beamed broad American smiles at everyone, signaling his optimism and enthusiasm for the Peace Conference that lay ahead.

Just ten years earlier, no European power would have considered the American president relevant to issues of war and peace. Then, during the Spanish-American War, the United States asserted its importance to geopolitics and made Washington a capital of diplomatic significance. Now, the American president was on a historic pilgrimage to Paris, a place sacred to the history of democratic ideals. “We are about to give order and organization to this peace not only for ourselves but for the other peoples of the world as well,” the president had told Congress just two weeks earlier. He

had a lofty mission: “It is international justice that we seek, not domestic safety merely.”34 The stakes were high for him politically and personally, both by participating in the peace planning itself and by traveling to Europe to lead the American delegation, as there had been talk of declaring the presidency “vacant” once he sailed for France.35 But for now, none of that was on President Wilson’s mind. He was about to step onto French soil amid all the pomp and circumstance that the Third Republic could muster and give Europe its first handshake from the American president. notes 1.

Edith Bolling Wilson, My Memoir (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939), 172, 174.

2. William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008), 2:59–61.

3. The following characterization of the president’s daily routine during the voyage is drawn from firsthand accounts: the diaries of Edith Wallace Benham and Cary T. Grayson in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, 69 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966–94), 53:336–70 passim, also available online in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Digital Edition, University of Virginia Press, www. upress.virginia.edu/rotunda/; Edith Benham Helm, The Captains and Kings (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1954); [Irwin H. Hoover], “Copy of Diary Kept by Head Usher at the White House, March 4th 1913 to March 4th 1921,” entries for December 4–13, 1918, ser. 1 (Appointment Books 1915–1924), reel 3, Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Jeremiah A. Walsh, “The Historical Trip of the U.S.S. George Washington” n.d., entry 520, box 1124, file 2, Subject Files, 1911–1927: U.S. Naval Vessels, Record Group 45, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.; Edith Wilson, My Memoir.

4. Grayson, diary, December 10, 1918, Papers of Wilson, ed. Link 53:348.

13. Pierre Lafage et al., “How to Select and Cook Your Thanksgiving Turkey,” Gas Logic 20, no. 5 (November 1916): 4; “Some Famous Recipes: Deliea Salad by Louis Seres, Chef Hotel Biltmore,” Table Talk: The National Food Magazine 42, no. 5 (February 1917): 60.

14. Dinner menu, December 8, 1918, “Scrapbook 1918,” ser. 9, vol. 2, reel 504, Wilson Papers.

15. Benham, diary, December 10, 1918, Papers of Wilson, ed. Link, 53:357.

16. Edith Wilson, My Memoir, 172.

17. “Sees Demonstration by Destroyer,” Washington Post, December 11, 1918, 1.

18. Walsh, “Historical Trip,” log entry for December 9, 1918. Walsh was a yeoman second class who during the war had served as a cable censor at the New York Navy Yard.

19. Grayson, diary, December 12, 1918, Papers of Wilson, ed. Link, 53:370.

20. Grayson, diary, December 8, 1918, in ibid., 53:336.

21. “President Spends Sunday Evening in Old Navy Fashion,” The Hatchet 9, no. 5 (December 9, 1918): 1.

22. Benham, Captains and Kings, 63.

23. Walsh, “Historical Trip,” log entry for December 8, 1918.

24. William S. Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1909), 1053.

25. “President Spends Sunday Evening in Old Navy Fashion,” 1.

26. Program for “‘Musical Gambol by the Crew of U.S.S. George Washington,’ December 8, 1918, Scrapbook 1918.”

27. “First Nighters Enjoy Musical Extravaganza,” The Hatchet, 9, no. 7 (December 11, 1911): 1.

28. “Crew Preparing for Show,” The Hatchet, 9, no. 5 (December 9, 1918): 2.

29. Grayson, diary, December 12, 1918, Papers of Wilson, ed. Link, 53:370.

30. Raymond Blaine Fosdick, diary, December 12, 1918, in ibid., 53:371.

31. James E. Rankin, D.D., “God Be With You [Till We Meet Again],” in Gospel Bells: A Choice Collection of New and Popular Songs, ed. J. W. Bischoff et al. (Chicago: Henry A. Sumner, 1883), 51.

32. Grayson, diary, December 12, 1918, Papers of Wilson, ed. Link, 53:278.

33. Edith Wilson, My Memoir, 175.

5. “Wilson Himself Chief of the U.S. Delegates to the Paris Sessions,” Washington Post, November 30, 1918, 1.

34. Woodrow Wilson, An Annual Message on the State of the Union, December 2, 1918, Papers of Wilson, ed. Link, 53:278.

6. Seale, President’s House, 2:84–85. The $10,000 allocated by the navy would have the purchasing power of approximately $150,000 today.

35. “Would Vacate Wilson’s Office, Senator Sherman Prepares Resolution to Unseat President and Install Marshall,” New York Times, December 3, 1918, 1.

7

Helm, Captains and Kings, 62; “Cordon of Guards Awaits President,” New York Times, December 4, 1918, 2.

8. “Nation Awaits Peace Plan,” New York Times, December 1, 1918, 1.

9. All details on color, patterns, fabrics, and other furnishings are from Edith Wilson, My Memoir, 173.

10. Ibid.

11. “Cordon of Guards Awaits President.”

12. “Louis G. Seres, Chef to President Wilson” (obituary), New York Times, November 27, 1948, 17.

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Painted at the Paris PEACE CONFERENCE B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N / W H I T E H O U S E C O L L E C T I O N

A Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson

by William Orpen LYDIA TEDERICK

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right

Colonel Edward M. House posed for Orpen’s Peace Conference painting and was instrumental in convincing a reluctant Wilson to sit for the work as well. Although the president and House continued to correspond, they never saw each other again after the treaty was signed. below

Woodrow Wilson is seen leaving the Palace of Versailles with Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France and Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britian after signing the peace treaty.

that and after this he never failed to let you see all his back teeth.”3 The president initially refused the artist’s request to sit for him. Orpen recalled, “As his time was fully occupied then with Peace Conference work, he regretted that he was unable to give any sittings.” Among the members of the U.S. delegation who agreed to pose was presidential adviser Colonel E. M. House who, when learning of the president’s refusal exclaimed, “Refused? . . . What damned rot! . . . he’s got a damned sight more time than I have. What day would you like him to come to sit?” Orpen named a day and the colonel saw to it that he was there.4 Orpen wrote about the first sitting with the president and his interactions with the security detail: The President arrived, smiling as usual; but he was a good sort, and he laughed hard when I told him the story of the detectives. He was very genial and sat well, but even then he was very nervous and twitchy.

He told endless stories, mostly harmless and some witty.5 On June 10, Colonel House described a visit to see Wilson’s portrait:

TOP: AN ONL OOKER IN FRANCE / BOT TOM: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Orpen was in despair because the President told him he would not

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be able to sit again. He did not tell him this until after the sitting yesterday, therefore Orpen said he had not done some of the things he would have done had he known it was to be the last. I told him not to worry, because I was sure we could get the President to sit for a third time as agreed. I liked the portrait, although it shows up some of the President’s prominent features.6 The colonel was evidently successful for when he arrived for his own last sitting on June 21, he found Wilson with the artist. House later said, “Orpen has got a good portrait of him, though not a flattering one. His hair is seldom as ruffled as Orpen has it. . . . Orpen thanked me for having persuaded the President to sit for him.”7 Orpen’s disdain for the politicians grew as the conference continued. He called them, “frocks,” for the coats worn by the diplomats. He wrote, “The fighting man, alive, and those who fought and died—all the people who made the Peace Conference possible, were being forgotten, the ‘frocks’ reigned supreme.

One was almost forced to think that the ‘frocks’ won the war.”8

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above

The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919

by William Orpen. Colonel House is seated second from the left and President Woodrow Wilson is seated fifth from left.

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opposite

The son of amateur painters, Sir William Orpen was born in Ireland in 1878. A prolific artist and society portraitist in London, Orpen documented World War I in France as well as the Paris Peace Conference. In this self portrait made in 1917 Orpen is seen wearing a helmet and coat as if sketching on the battlefield.

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The signing of the treaty occurred in Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. Using a vertical canvas, Orpen painted the scene to emphasize the room’s magnificent interior and to lessen the significance of the politicians. He placed the treaty signers and diplomats along a table at the bottom of the painting in such a way that they were dwarfed by the room’s architectural detail.9 On the day of the signing, Orpen positioned himself in front of the center window in the Hall of Mirrors and observed:

A B O V E A N D O P P O S I T E : I M P E R I A L WA R M U S E U M

All the “frocks’”did all their tricks to perfection. President Wilson showed his back teeth; Lloyd George waved his Asquithian mane; Clemenceau whirled his grey-gloved hands about like windmills; [Secretary of State Robert] Lansing drew his pictures and Mr. Balfour [British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour] slept. It was all over. The “frocks” had won the war. The “frocks” had signed the Peace! The Army was forgotten. Some dead and forgotten, others maimed and forgotten, others alive and well—equally forgotten.

Yet the sun shone outside my window and the fountains played, and the German Army—what was left of it—was a long, long way from Paris.10 The portrait is thought to have been in the Wilson’s possession prior to ownership by Bernard Baruch.

An image of it was made available for publication during the 1920s. One reproduction found in a 1926 newspaper included a caption that read, “A New Portrait of Woodrow Wilson—By special arrangement, the striking portrait of the War President by the English artist Sir William Orpen is photographed for reproduction. Mrs. Wilson considers it the best of all portraits of her distinguished husband.”11 William Orpen resumed his artistic career after the war. In addition to

publishing An Onlooker in France in 1921, he also wrote Stories of Old Ireland and Myself and edited Outline of Art. His health, however, was compromised by illness sustained during the war and exacerbated by heavy drinking. He died in 1931 at the age of 53.12 notes 1.

Bernard M. Baruch Jr. to Jacqueline Kennedy, April 2, 1962, copy in object folder, Office of the Curator, The White House. Bernard M. Baruch (1870–1965) was a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and served as the chair of the War Industries Board, established during World War I. This painting was discussed in an essay by William Kloss, Art in the White House: A Nation’s Pride (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008) 2nd ed., 253.

2. John Hutchinson, Vera Ryan, and James White.

William Orpen: A Centenary Exhibition (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 1978), 14.

3. William Orpen. An Onlooker in France (London: Williams and Norgate, 1921), 87–88.

4. Ibid, 92. “Colonel” was an honorary title given to Edward M. House (1858–1938) in recognition of his role during an 1892 gubernatorial campaign in Texas.

6. Edward M. House, prefatory note in The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: The Ending of the War, ed. Charles Seymour (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928) 470, 479. Colonel House noted that his first sitting with Orpen occurred on May 24, 1919.

7. House, prefatory note in Intimate Papers of Colonel House, ed. Seymour, 482.

8. Orpen, An Onlooker in France, 89.

9. See entry on The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919 by William Orpen, 1919, oil on canvas, in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, http:// www.iwm.org.uk. In addition to this work, the Imperial War Museum has numerous paintings and drawings executed by Orpen during the war as well as two other commissioned works from the Peace Conference: A Peace Conference at the Quai d’Orsay (1919) and To the Unknown British Soldier in France (c. 1919–27).

10. Orpen, An Onlooker in France, 106–7. See also Hutchinson, Ryan, and White. William Orpen, 9.

11. A microfilmed copy of the illustration was found in the October 8, 1926, edition of the Glendale Daily Press and sent to Office of the Curator with a letter from George Ellison, July 19, 2001.

12. Hutchinson, Ryan, and White. William Orpen, 10, 14.

5. Ibid., 95. The president’s first sitting with Orpen occurred in late May or early June 1919.

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November 11, 1918 to November 11, 2018

A Century of Honor and Remembrance

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

ELYSE M. WERLING

“the war thus comes to an end,” announced President Woodrow Wilson to Congress on November 11, 1918. Throughout that afternoon and into the night, crowds gathered in Lafayette Park and on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House waiting for news and a glimpse of the president—who did at one point, step out to wave to them. Known as Armistice Day until 1954, November 11 is observed today as Veterans Day, the day in which the service and sacrifices of the nation’s veterans, living and dead, are remembered.

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november 11, 1921

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P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S / T O P A P P H O T O / M A N U E L B A L C E C E N E TA / B O T T O M : L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S

HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD

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T O P J O H N F. K E N N E D Y P R E S I D E N T I A L L I B R A R Y A N D M U S E U M / B O T T O M : W H I T E H O U S E P H O T O

may 30, 1963

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery stands atop a hill overlooking Washington, D.C. The remains of the unknown soldier of World War I lay at rest beneath the marble sarcophagus. The crypts of the unknown from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam are marked with white marble slabs flush with the plaza.

On November 11, 1921, President Warren G. Harding (opposite) placed a wreath on the tomb while officiating at the interment ceremony and since that time, U.S. presidents, including John F. Kennedy (above) and Barack Obama (left), have returned to place wreaths on the tomb on such occassions as Memorial Day and Veterans Day.

november 11, 2012

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VETERANS DAY OBSERVED

On the last Armistice Day of his life, President Woodrow Wilson greeted the crowd that gathered in front of his house on S Street NW. For a time in the early 1970s, Veterans Day, like other federal holidays, was observed on Mondays, not necessarily on the eleventh day of the month, but in 1975, President Gerald R. Ford signed a law returning the observance to November 11. He explained, “The commemoration of this day on November 11 is a matter of historic and patriotic significance . . . deeply and firmly rooted in our customs and traditions. . . . I believe. . . the observance of Veterans Day. . . will help preserve in the hearts and lives of all Americans the spirit of patriotism, the love of country and the willingness to serve and sacrifice for the common good symbolized by this very special day.”

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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / BOT TOM: GERALD R. FORD LIBRARY

november 11, 1923

november 11, 1988

A L L P H O T O S T H I S PA G E : A P I M A G E S

november 11, 1989

Presidential observances of Veterans Day often include visits to war memorials. Clockwise from above: President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan observed Veterans Day 1988 with a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and in 1989 President George H. W. Bush placed a wreath at the Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Dallas. In 1995 President President Bill Clinton and Roger Durbin, a World War II veteran from Ohio, unveiled a plaque at a site dedicated to the National World War II Memorial, which would be completed in 2004.

november 11, 1995

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WELCOMING VETERANS OF WORLD WARS

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BOTH IMAGES: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

President Wilson welcomed veterans of World War I to the White House as did his successors. On June 7, 1922, President and Mrs. Warren G. Harding invited veterans to a garden party at the White House (above).

On May 5, 1924, President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge hosted a White House garden party for veterans under the care of Red Cross nurses. During this event Coolidge signed a hospitalization bill for the Veterans Bureau (right).

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BOTH IMAGES: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

President Herbert Hoover welcomed Red Cross workers and wounded veterans to the White House on June 27, 1929 (right). President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt welcomed men and women to the White House for a similar event in 1935 (below).

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TOP: AP IMAGES / BOT TOM: EISENHOWER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM

WELCOMING VETERANS OF THE KOREAN, VIETNAM, AND GULF WARS

The tradition of welcoming veterans to the White House continued throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In a Rose Garden ceremony on April 11, 1952, President Truman awarded the Medal of Honor to Korean War veteran Marine Master Sargent Harold E. Wilson. On May 25, 1955, President and Mrs. Eisenhower welcomed veterans from Washington area hospitals. Vietnam veterans were welcomed to the White House in 1966

by President Lyndon Johnson and in 1970 by President and Mrs. Richard M. Nixon. President George W. Bush invited wounded veterans for a jog on the South Grounds in 2007.

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C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T : LY N D O N B . J O H N S O N L I B R A R Y / R I C H A R D N I X O N L I B R A R Y G E O R G E W. B U S H P R E S I D E N T I A L L I B R A R Y

In 2008, like President Woodrow Wilson before him, President George W. Bush (center) placed a wreath while visiting the American Cemetery in Surenes, France. The cemetery now contains the remains of 1,541 Americans who died during World War I and 24 unknown dead from World War II.

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GETTY IMAGES

RETURN TO FRANCE

TOP: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / BOTTOM: WHITE HOUSE PHOTO

On January 4, 1978, President Jimmy Carter participated in a wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris with French President Giscard d’Estaing, and during a State Visit to France on July 13, 2017, President and Mrs. Donald Trump greeted guests at the U.S. Embassy in Paris while commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I. Two veterans who participated in the D-Day invasion at Normandy, were honored and praised by the president for fighting for “freedom in its hour of need.”

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PRESIDENTIAL SITES Quarterly Feature

Monticello, Montpelier, and Oak Hill General Lafayette Pays His “Leaving Calls” to Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe in Retirement JONATHAN GROSS

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previous spread

This c. 1825 watercolor

by Jane Pitford Braddick Peticolas depicts Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello as the Marquis de Lafayette would likely have known it during his visit in November 1824.

w h e n g e n e r a l l a fay e t t e visited Thomas Jefferson on Thursday, November 4, 1824, he arrived in a long procession that made its way up the steep, hazardous road to Monticello. The guests assembled on the portico witnessed an emotional reunion. The general, age 67, was helped from his carriage, for he was lame. Jefferson, age 81, seemed feeble and unsteady as he made his way across the lawn to greet his visitor. They embraced, and the crowd, standing in silence, heard them exclaim, “Ah, Jefferson,” “Ah, Lafayette.” The two had not seen each other since 1789.1 Present at various times during Lafayette’s visit to Monticello were former President James Madison, whose estate Montpelier was 28 miles away, and current President James Monroe, whose Highland was just 6 miles distant. These three men were political allies and presidents—with George Washington, “The Virginia Dynasty”—but also comrades and old friends who welcomed Lafayette as one of them, a member of the nation’s founding generation. Jefferson was the elder; as minister to France, he had known Lafayette in Paris. Madison, Jefferson’s successor as president, had last seen Lafayette when they traveled together through the Mohawk Valley in 1784. Monroe, Jefferson’s law student and Madison’s successor as president, had served with Lafayette under Washington’s command during the Revolution and, as minister to France, been instrumental in rescuing Lafayette’s wife from imprisonment during the Reign of Terror.2 It was Monroe who had invited “The Hero of Two Worlds” to return to the United States on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary, “to see for himself

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the fruit borne on the tree of liberty.”3 As Lafayette entered the main hallway of Monticello, he would have seen a gallery in tribute to the founding generation. There were busts after Jean-Antoine Houdon of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Lafayette himself, all in plaster. Turgot and Voltaire could also be found in the crowded entrance hall, along with a large marble bust of Jefferson in Roman costume by Giuseppe Ceracchi. Opposite was a bust of Alexander Hamilton, “opposed in death as in life,” Jefferson quipped. In the adjacent parlor Lafayette saw busts of Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia, one in marble and the other in plaster.

John Adams’s bust would complete the scene the next year, and one year before his death and that of Jefferson himself, on the same day. Jefferson’s walls were hung with religious paintings galore, many of which he had acquired in Paris when he visited a much younger Marquis de Lafayette. He also collected likenesses of explorers such as Christopher

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Thomas Jefferson as portrayed in his old age in 1821 by Thomas Sully ( far left) and a full-length portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, c. 1824, a gift from the artist Ary Scheffer to the House of Representatives to mark the occasion of Lafayette’s address to a joint meeting of Congress.The portrait appeared on posters and memorabilia, making this likeness of Lafayette famous during his 1824–25 tour of the United States. Today the portrait hangs to the left of the Speaker’s rostrum, as it has since the opening of the current House Chamber.

L A FA Y E T T E : C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E U. S . H O U S E O F R E P R E S E N TA T I V E S

left

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James Madison’s portrait hangs in this room named for him at Monticello where he slept during Lafayette’s visit and on many other occasions. Madison’s Montpelier estate was 28 miles—a day’s journey—away.

O P E N I N G S P R E A D , O P P O S I T E L E F T, A N D R I G H T : T H O M A S J E F F E R S O N F O U N D AT I O N AT M O N T I C E L L O

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Jefferson filled the entrance hall at Monticello with a collection of busts of his heroes and contemporaries as well as specimens of American natural history, Western civilization, and American Indian cultures. It appears today much as Lafayette would have seen it.

Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Ferdinand Magellan, and Amerigo Vespucci as well as colonizers of Virginia, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, and American patriots, including Washington, Adams, Franklin, Thomas Paine, and, again, Lafayette.4 Jefferson had assembled in the rooms of his mountaintop home art that was symbolic of his long and fruitful life. When he invited Lafayette to Monticello, his outreach was as much with a backward as a forward glance. “What recollections, dear friend, will this call up to you and me,” he had written. “What a history have we to run over from the evening that yourself, Meusnier, Bernau and other patriots settled, in my house in Paris, the outlines of the constitution you wished. And to trace it through all the disastrous chapters of Robespierre, Barras, Bonaparte, and the Bourbons.”5 Lafayette’s pilgrimage to Monticello, like Lord Byron’s journey in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, brought an opportunity to review history in terms of the feeling and sensibility that inspired it, in a setting in which works of art, paintings, and busts represented the Age of Enlightenment and the French philosophes.

Jefferson and Lafayette had much to share in their history in the founding of two nations.6 On the afternoon of Lafayette’s arrival, about twenty special guests of the assembled crowd

followed him into Monticello. One was Jane Blair Cary Smith, a Jefferson relative who recalled that they sat down to dinner “in a lofty vaulted apartment, hung on all sides with large paintings.” “The light of the closing day,” she recollected, “came down softly from the window of the vaulted roof, and in a moment the glory of the setting sun shone from the many tinted mountain behind which it was sinking.” Though she wrote her account forty years later, “the picture rises vividly before me, not a touch is lost—not a hue faded.”7 Evidently James Madison arrived as dessert was being served. He spent the night in the guest room where he always

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stayed when he visited his friend Jefferson; it is still called the Madison Room. Early the next morning he wrote to Dolley Madison, his wife, “My old friend embraced me with much warmth. He is in fine health and spirits but so much increased in bulk and changed in aspect that I should not have known him.”8 For his part, Lafayette observed, “Mr. Jefferson received me with a strong emotion. I found him much aged, without doubt, after a separation of thirty-five years, but bearing marvelously well under his eighty one years of age, in full possession of all the vigor of his mind and heart which he has consecrated to the building of a good and fine university.”9 Old men seeing old friends responded by reflecting on the young men they remembered.

Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette’s secretary who traveled with him, had a different assessment: When it is recollected how much the life of Jefferson has been devoted to mankind, and how useful it has been, one feels penetrated with a kind of veneration for him. But this sentiment is soon combined with that of confidence and friendship, after being a few hours in his company. It is difficult I think to find a man, whose conversation is at once more agreeable and instructive. Endowed with a memory which easily recurs to any event of his life, familiar with all the arts and all the sciences, his conversation easily satisfies all the wishes of a mind desirous of instruction.10 Through the glass doors of Monticello’s main hallway, Lafayette could see the nascent University of Virginia below, in Charlottesville, the establishment of which had much preoccupied Jefferson in his retirement. The next day Lafayette, Jefferson, and Madison journeyed there for a celebration and public banquet in the Rotunda.11 It was the school’s inaugural event and a proud moment for Jefferson, who had been instrumental in its founding. The university was built on land purchased from Monroe, and the cornerstone had been laid with all three presidents in attendance. Both Madison and Monroe would serve the university as regents in the coming years. Following a toast to “Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence—alike identified with the Cause of Liberty,” a friend read some written remarks that Jefferson had prepared: I joy, my friends, in your joy, inspired by the visit of this our ancient and distinguished

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leader and benefactor. His deeds in the war of independence you have heard and read. They are known to you and embalmed in your memories and in the pages of faithful history.

His deeds in the peace which followed that war, are perhaps not known to you; but I can attest them. When I was stationed in his country for the purpose of cementing its friendship with ours and of advancing our mutual interests, this friend of both was my most powerful auxiliary and advocate. He made our cause his own, as in truth it was that of his native country also. His influence and connections there were great. All doors of all departments were open to him at all times. In truth I only held the nail, he drove it. Honor him, then, as your benefactor in peace as well as in war.12 Following his eleven-day visit to Monticello, Lafayette journeyed to Madison’s Montpelier.

“There we found,” wrote Levasseur, “with some slight shades of difference the same habits, the same virtues as at Monticello.” Like Jefferson, Levasseur reflected, Madison, “on leaving the palace of the President of the United States, went into retirement, to cultivate his farm and devote himself to literature.”13 Once again Lafayette entered a “hall of notables,” or saloon, much like the one at Monticello, with portraits and busts of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, Monroe, Baron von Humboldt, as well as of Napoleon and of Lafayette himself, and of his hosts James and Dolley Madison.14 Madison was 74 years old, “but his body, which has been but little impaired, contains a mind still young, and filled with a kind sensibility, which he showed in its full extent, when he expressed to general Lafayette the pleasure he felt at having him in his house. . . . The four days we spent at Mr. Madison’s were agreeably divided between walks about his fine estate, and the still more engaging conversations that we enjoyed in the evenings, on the great interests of America, which are known to be so dear to Lafayette.”15 One interest was the topic of slavery, which Lafayette condemned. The general “never fails to take advantage of an opportunity to defend the right which all men without exception have to liberty,” asserted Levasseur. Evidently Madison agreed. “It seems to me that slavery cannot subsist much longer in Virginia,” the secretary reflected, “for the principle is condemned by all enlightened

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TOP: JENN GLASS, COURTES Y OF THE MONTPELIER FOUNDATION BOT TOM: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Following his stay at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson, General Lafayette spent four days at Montepelier (above), James Madison’s Piedmont Virginia estate and retirement home. Madison, portrayed at right by Chester Harding c. 1829–30, had expanded the original two-story Georgian home built by his father in the early 1760s, adding wings and portico with the advice of his friend Thomas Jefferson.

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At Albemarle we were joined by Mr. Monroe, whom we now found invested with a new public character. Faithful to the doctrine that a citizen should always be entirely at the service of his country, he did not think that his title of late president of the republic withheld him from being useful to his countrymen; and he had therefore accepted the office of justice of the peace, to which he had been elected by the confidence and suffrages of the people of his county. Mr. Madison had also left his retreat and rejoined us on the road to Monticello, whether the general went to take leave of his old friend Jefferson, whose enfeebled health kept him at present in a state of painful inaction.18

The Marquis de Lafayette was accompanied by President John Quincy Adams when he visited former President Monroe at Oak Hill in Loudoun County, Virginia, (opposite) in 1825. Like Madison, Monroe sought Thomas Jefferson’s advice for the design, especially for the grand portico.

The mansion was completed in 1820, and it was to this estate that Monroe, portrayed at left, c. 1828, by Chester Harding, retired after his presidency.

On August 20 there was another celebratory dinner in the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, this time with Monroe in attendance. Jefferson, infirm and in pain, was not able to attend. Levasseur continued: The meeting at Monticello, of these men, who, by their successive elevation to the supreme magistracy of the state, had given to their country twenty-four years of prosperity and glory, and who still offered it the example of private virtues, was a sufficiently strong inducement to make us wish to stay there a longer time; but indispensable duties recalled Lafayette to Washington, and he was obliged to take leave of his friends. I shall not attempt to depict here the sadness which prevailed at this cruel separation, which had none of the

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T O P : N AT I O N A L P O R T R A I T G A L L E R Y OPPOSITE; COURTESY OF LARRY KNUTSON

men; and when public opinion condemns a principle, its consequences cannot long continue.”16 As it turned out, the grand plantations of Monticello, Montpelier, Highland, and Oak Hill, in northern Virginia, which Monroe built during his presidency and retired to at the end of his term, would not long remain in the former presidents’ families. Debt was the reason. The slaves and contents of Monticello were sold by Jefferson’s daughter the year after his death, and a few years later the estate itself.

Montpelier became Dolley Madison’s after James Madison’s death, but within a year she moved to Washington and in 1844 she sold the plantation.

Heavily in debt, Monroe sold Highland in 1825.

Learning of Monroe’s financial troubles, Lafayette had offered half the estate in Florida that Congress had granted him, but the president refused. After his presidency Monroe lived at Oak Hill until his wife died in 1830, and then he moved to New York City to live with his daughter. By 1852 Oak Hill, too, had passed out of the Monroe family. Lafayette was right, that the plantation economy, based on agriculture and the labor of slaves, would not long be tenable in Virginia, but it was what the three presidents had looked forward to and relied on in their retirement. They hoped to live quietly and entertain lavishly, keeping alive romantic notions of the rural ideal.

Toward the end of his American tour, in August 1825 Lafayette returned to Virginia.

“Notwithstanding that General Lafayette was daily preparing to return to Europe, before quitting the American soil, he wished once more to see some of his old Virginia friends,” Levasseur wrote, “and

especially desired again to embrace and thank him, who, as the head of government, had first welcomed him to its capital, and who, at present returned to private life, continued to give his fellow citizens an example of all the virtues, in cultivating his modest patrimony.” With the new president, John Quincy Adams, as his companion, Lafayette visited Monroe at Oak Hill. “We found the ex-president of the United States, pleasantly settled,” wrote Levasseur, “with all his family, in a handsome house near his farm. He was engaged in superintending his agricultural affairs and endeavouring to improve his property, which had long been neglected for public business.”17 Lafayette also wanted to see Jefferson one last time, and on his second visit to Monticello he was again joined by Madison and Monroe:

The Rotunda and Lawn at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as it looked when Lafayette visited with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, in 1824 and 1825. Engraving from Herman Boye’s Map of Virginia, 1827.

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alleviation which is usually left by youth, for in this instance, the individuals who bade farewell, had all passed through a long career, and the immensity of the ocean would still add to the difficulties of a reunion.19 But Lafayette did depict the sadness. “We have just made a tour of Virginia,” he later wrote, “to pay our leaving calls to friends of fifty years standing, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. . . . These partings and many others are very painful.”20 notes 1.

Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s account comes from Sarah N. Randolph, Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, quoted in “Lafayette’s Visit to Monticello (1824),” online at the Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello website, www.monticello.org, where other accounts are also recorded. See also, for Lafayette’s visits in Virginia, Robert D. Ward, comp., General La Fayette in Virginia in 1824 and ’25 (Richmond, Va.: West, Johnston, 1881), esp.

88–97, 103–11.

2. Scott H. Harris, “James’s Monroe’s Ties to France: ‘Republicks Should Approach Near to Each Other,’” White House History, no.

44 (Winter 2017): 10.

3. Quoted in James R. Gaines, For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions (New York: Norton, 2008), 439.

4. Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 361–63.

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA LIBRARIES

5. Jefferson to Lafayette, October 9, 1824, quoted in Malcolm Kelsall, Jefferson and the Iconography of Romanticism: Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 10.

6. Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1005–6.

7. Jane Blair Cary Smith, “The Carysbrook Memoir,” ca. 1864, University of Virginia Library, quoted in “Lafayette’s Visit to Monticello.”

8. Quoted in Ralph Ketcham, The Madisons at Montpelier: Reflections on the Founding Couple (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 106.

9. Quoted in “Marquis de Lafayette,” online at the Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello website, www.monticello.org.

10. Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States (New York: White, Gallaher and White, 1829), 1:212.

11. Some accounts say Monroe was in attendance. See Peter Fossett’s and Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s accounts in “Lafayette’s Visit to Monticello.”

12. Quoted in Randolph, Domestic Life, 390–91, quoted in “Lafayette’s Visit to Monticello.”

13. Levasseur, Lafayette in America, 1:220, 221.

14. Ketcham, Madisons at Montpelier, 7.

15. Levasseur, Lafayette in America, 1:221.

16. Ibid., 1:222.

17. Ibid., 1:243,244.

18. Ibid., 1:245.

19. Ibid., 245–46.

20. Quoted in “Marquis de Lafayette.”

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REFLECTIONS

Declaring War STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

in this issue of White House History Quarterly, we are honored to have an excerpt from a new book by presidential historian Michael Beschloss, Presidents of War. Michael has served for many years on the Board of Directors of the White House Historical Association, offering his counsel on historical matters regarding our mission. A renowned historian and author, the timing of his latest book fits with the theme of this issue as we observe the centennial of the end of World War I. Michael’s description of the actual moment that President Wilson put pen to paper and entered the United States into the First World War brings to mind for me the wealth of historical artifacts on display at the White House Visitor Center.

When, on April 6, 1917, Wilson received word that Congress had passed the declaration of war that he called for in his address to a joint session on August 2, he chose not to return to his office in the West Wing to sign the document. Instead he stepped into Chief Usher Irwin (Ike) Hoover’s office nearby on the State Floor of the Residence, borrowed the first lady’s gold pen, and without comment or fanfare, signed the resolution. Word spread quickly to the American military. It was 1:18 p.m., and the United States was at war with the German Empire.

Chief Usher Ike Hoover’s actual desk, upon which the declaration of war was signed, can be seen today at the White House Visitor Center. The

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extraordinary museum contains an array of interactive exhibits and artifacts from the White House collection dating back to 1800, when John and Abigail Adams moved into the Executive Mansion.

The National Park Service operates this incredible facility in partnership with the White House Historical Association. In 2014 the Visitors Center reopened after a major refurbishment and is now on par with the very best museums and galleries in Washington, D.C. The various unique depictions of life and work at the White House make the Visitor Center a must-see on every visit to Washington.

The Visitor Center at 1450 Pennsylvania Avenue is free and open to the public seven days a week (except major holidays) from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

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WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

white house history quarterly features articles on the historic White House, especially relating to the building itself and life as lived there through the years. The views presented by the authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the White House Historical Association.

front cover During a Memorial Day ceremony, a Marine Band buglar plays “Taps” on the South Portico. [getty images]

back cover The First Division of the US Army parades beneath a replica of the Arc d’ Triomphe at Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenues in Washington, DC, September 17, 1919. [getty images]

the white house historical association was chartered on November 3, 1961, to enhance understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the historic White House. Income from the sale of White House History Quarterly and all the Association’s books and guides is returned to the publications program and is used as well to acquire historical furnishings and memorabilia for the White House.

address inquiries to: White House Historical Association P.O. Box 27624 Washington, D.C. 20038 books@whha.org © Copyright 2018 by the White House Historical Association. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the White House Historical Association.

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