Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [106]
Friday morning in the White House, Woodrow Wilson was up before dawn and at five A.M. took breakfast with his First Lady. Somewhat frail at sixty years of age, the President preferred to rise later and work only three to four hours a day, but the war in Europe and the election had pressed him, he told the First Lady, to rise early and “steal up on them in the dark.”
After breakfast the President retired to his office for an hour of correspondence, dictation, and brief meetings with a few key advisers. At eleven, the President, tall and graying in a tailored black suit, entered a Cabinet meeting to discuss “the shark horror gripping the New Jersey Coast.” The citizens of New Jersey, New York, and other coastal states had sent a torrent of telegrams and letters to the White House beseeching the President of the United States to slay a man-eating sea monster.
On Capitol Hill that morning, New Jersey Congressman Isaac Bacharach of Atlantic City introduced a bill appropriat-
ing $5,000 for the federal Bureaus of Fisheries to cooperate in rounding up sharks for the purpose of “the extermination of man-eating sharks now infesting the waters of the Atlantic Ocean along the coast of New Jersey.”
Joseph P. Tumulty, a Jersey City lawyer and the President's most trusted adviser since 1913, urged Wilson take bold and decisive action against sharks. Earlier that morning, Tumulty had cabled his friend, J. Lyle Kinmonth, editor of the Asbury Park Press, promising Wilson would “do anything in his power to . . . rid the Jersey coast of the shark menace.”
Yet exactly what the President could do about a rogue shark was another matter entirely. William Redfield, secretary of the Department of Commerce, which oversaw lighthouses and fisheries, told the Cabinet that despite Congressman Bacharach's proposal, “the bureau of fisheries had been unable to offer any scientific explanation of the unprecedented attacks upon human beings.” Bureau experts “reluctantly had been compelled to come to the conclusion that no certainly effective preventive measures could be recommended.” Fisheries' only advice was “a shark catching campaign” and to warn bathers to stay in shallow water.
The President turned to his ablest Cabinet member and son-in-law, Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, to lead a “war on sharks.” Shortly after emerging from the Cabinet meeting, McAdoo called a press conference. Surrounded by Washington newspapermen, McAdoo announced that the U.S. Coast Guard and the Bureau of Fisheries would join forces to “rout the sea terrors.” According to McAdoo, the coast guard cutter Mohawk would sail immediately to the Jersey coast to destroy any or all killer sharks, avenge four deaths, and save the bathing season.
On Saturday, July 15, the “U.S. war on sharks” was the biggest news in the Washington Post and front-page headlines across the world—in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and even London. “Wilson and Cabinet Make Plans to Prevent More Tragedies,” the Post headline read. “Coast Guards Turn Hunters . . . Federal Cutters Also Are Ordered to Fish for the Monsters.”
The Coast Guard “would be ordered to do what it could toward clearing the coast of the dangerous fish and preventing further loss of life.” The U.S. lifesaving stations all along the East Coast would be involved, too, by order of the Treasury Department. According to the Washington Post, “no definite plan of action has been worked out, but the idea is to have the service aid in locating and when possible warn resorts of their proximity.” On the front page of the Washington Evening Star was a political cartoon,