Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [283]
Captain Rose of the U-53 obliged on 3 February by sinking the USS Housatonic off the Scillies. At 2 P.M. Count Bernstorff was handed his passports. Wilson went back to Capitol Hill to announce that he had instructed Secretary Lansing to recall Ambassador Gerard from Berlin. He did not mention the attack on the Housatonic, details of which were still coming through to the State Department. But he did significantly say: “If American ships and American lives should in fact be sacrificed … I shall take the liberty of coming again before the Congress to ask that authority be given to me to use any means that may be necessary for the protection of our seamen and our people … on the high seas.”
Even as Wilson’s threat was being released to the press, an awareness that war was coming provoked various acts of vandalism along the Eastern seaboard. The water cocks of an American submarine in Philadelphia were opened in an effort to scuttle her. The crew of an Austrian freighter interned in New York harbor wrecked their own engine room. The Kronzprinzessin Cecilie was disabled in Boston by direct order of the German government.
Overnight, the youngest and least prepossessing member of Wilson’s cabinet became the second most powerful man in Washington. Secretary of War Newton Diehl Baker was short, pale, bookish, and bespectacled, a lawyer whose only previous distinction was a spell as mayor of Cleveland. He was also—ludicrously, in view of his title—a pacifist who had spoken out against militarism within days of the attack on the Lusitania.
Here he was now, deciding as one of his first emergency responsibilities what to do about a letter from a former President of the United States. Roosevelt had not bothered to wait for Wilson’s speech before sending it:
Sir:
I have already on file in your Department, my application to be permitted to raise a Division of Infantry, with a divisional brigade of cavalry in the event of war.… In view of the recent German note, and of the fact that my wife and I are booked to sail next week for a month in Jamaica, I respectfully write as follows.
If you believe that there will be war, and a call for volunteers to go to war, immediately, I respectfully and earnestly request that you notify me at once, so that I may not sail.
Baker’s reply was dismissive. “No situation has arisen which would justify my suggesting a postponement of the trip you propose.” He wrote too late to block another letter from the Colonel, scribbled in extreme haste: “In view of the breaking of relations with Germany I shall of course not go to Jamaica, and will hold myself in readiness for any message from you as to the division. I and my four sons will of course go if volunteers are called for against Germany.”
“SHORT, PALE, BOOKISH, AND BESPECTACLED.”
Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. (photo credit i24.4)
The secretary could see further correspondence looming. In peacetime, his job was one of the laziest sinecures in Washington, involving little more than supervision of a small army spread out thin as pepper grains across the tablecloth of the country. But he had never doubted that should the United States ever mobilize, he would be transformed into a converter of energies sweeping back and forth between Congress and the armed services, the press and secret agencies, commission seekers and their backers, contractors and quartermasters, and dozens of other conduits that were bound to multiply for as long as the war lasted. Over the past eleven months, Baker had prepared himself for such an emergency in ways slightly comic—practicing, for example, a one-stroke zigzag signature. But his main asset was a brain that saw most clearly under stress.
Among his urgent priorities was the securing of all foreign ships held in American harbors from further acts of sabotage, and rapid action to prevent the Panama Canal from being blocked at either end. He had also to prepare for a possible order from Congress to raise, train, and equip a million-man