Strikes kept interrupting war production. The immediate problem on the President’s desk was a strike being fomented against the Western Union Telegraph Company that threatened a tieup of communications inconceivable in wartime. The President’s remedy for that was a bill being speeded through Congress to take over the telephone and telegraph services as the railroads had been taken over six months before.
Abroad, it was not the military problems that gave Wilson sleepless nights. Though he enjoyed thinking about the navy, he had little taste for the strategy and tactics of land warfare. He left that to the professionals. He recoiled from the thought of mass bloodshed. What few details of combat reached him came strained through the congenial mind of his Secretary of War. The problem that tortured him was politicaclass="underline" whether or not to intervene in the ruined Romanoff empire that lay across the eastern third of the hemisphere, writhing in agony like a snake run over on the road.
Lloyd George’s plausible friend, Lord Reading, the British ambassador, was at Wilson almost daily urging the British point of view, which was that Allied expeditions should be landed at Murmansk on the Arctic coast and at Vladivostok in the Far East to keep the stocks of war materials piled up in these two ports from falling into German hands. The bogy he kept presenting to the President was that the Brest-Litovsk peace, which was resulting in a seemingly friendly exchange of embassies between the Bolsheviks and the Imperial German Government, would produce an alliance from which the Germans could draw men and materials for the war in the West.
Various emissaries from Clemenceau, including the eminent philosopher Henri Bergson, sang to the same tune.
To add to these perplexities was a long dicker with the Japanese, whom the State Department felt were being encouraged by their British friends to invade Siberia on their own. The President’s advisers agreed that the Japanese must be kept from taking advantage of the disintegration of Russia to build up their own empire, but there was difference of opinion as to how that should be done. Newton D. Baker was dead set against intervention of any kind. House pointed out that an invasion by the Japanese alone would throw the Russians into the arms of the Germans. In his opinion, if the Japanese insisted on going in it would be better to have an American force go along with them. In any case intervention should be preceded by largescale economic aid, administered by Herbert Hoover along the lines of Belgian Relief.
From Americans in Russia came conflicting reports. Some saw in the Bolshevik government merely a final phase of the revolutionary upheaval destined to pass away in a few months like the Jacobin terror that ended the French Revolution. Others saw in it the foundation of a new social order.
Woodrow Wilson was a tired man. His desk was stacked with more materials than he could cope with. House was already noting with alarm that he wasn’t getting through as much work as he used to. Dr. Grayson remarked that his memory for names was failing. Ever since the Bolshevik seizure of power had shattered his dream of a democratic Russia he had been allowing the news from that revolutiontorn empire to pile up against some closed door in his mind.
He was becoming more and more reluctant to hear arguments about what action the United States should take in Russia. He balked at listening to the impressions of returned travellers. It was as if he felt that the data he had already absorbed were too difficult to resolve into the only terms his mind knew how to deal with. In early July he described to House, who had taken refuge from the extreme heat at Magnolia on the North Shore, in an intimate and affectionate letter, the desperation of his struggle to find the right words: “I have been sweating blood over the question of what is right and feasible”—“possible” he explained in parenthesis—“to do in Russia. It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch …”
When people arrived fresh from the scene he refused to see them. He had listened distractedly to a few reports from Elihu Root’s mission at the end of the preceding summer, but to the chagrin of that eminent and elderly Republican statesman, had paid no attention to his recommendations.
Returning members of the Red Cross Commission that followed fared no better.
Hard on the heels of the Root mission, transported by the same old worn imperial train rolling up the weary versts from Vladivostok, a fresh aggregation of Americans appeared in Petrograd. The engineers of the Railroad Mission, still loafing in uncomfortable hotels without being given any work to do, immediately dubbed the Red Cross people the Haitian army. Red Cross workers sent abroad were given assimilated military rank. There were colonels, majors, lieutenants, but not a single private.
This particular Red Cross mission differed from all others in that it was financed by a single individual. W. B. Thompson, who went along as business manager with the rank of colonel, paid all the bills.
W.B. was a legendary figure among Baruch’s crowd on Wall Street. Born in Virginia City and raised in Butte, Montana, he struck it rich in copper. Coming east a millionaire, he applied an aptitude for poker and faro acquired in the mining camps of his boyhood, to such good account on the stock exchange that he became one of the country’s wealthiest men.
With a war on, W.B., a big stout boisterous fellow in his late forties, was rearing to perform some patriotic service. His old friend Henry P. Davison of the Morgan bank, who headed the Red Cross, suggested that he go relieve the Russians. An expedition of about forty was collected. Though medical supplies and some doctors were taken along, the real purpose, as Edward N. Hurley of the Shipping Board hastened to explain to W.B. in behalf of the Administration, was to convince the Russians they should keep on fighting for the Allied cause. Copies of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches took up more baggage space than gauze bandages.
W.B. arrived in Russia convinced he was the President’s personal representative. In Petrograd he hired the largest suite in the famous Evropskaya Hotel, bought a wolfhound, had himself driven about in a glittering limousine by a French chauffeur, and with his lavish dinners and his skull cap and his big cigars appeared to the astonished inhabitants as almost a cartoon version of the American capitalist.
He developed a passion for icons and other Russian antiques. Taken to see Catharine Breshkovskaya, an old lady revered for her sufferings in the Czar’s prisons as the “little grandmother of the Revolution,” he became convinced that her friends, the Right Social Revolutionaries, were the people to back. When he found he could get no funds from the State Department he promptly drew a check of his own on the Morgan bank for a million dollars to spend in their behalf. This sudden financing of the Social Revolutionaries by the most flamboyant of Wall Street magnates gave the Bolsheviks an added talking point in their attacks on them. If anything more were needed to put the skids under Kerensky, W.B.’s million turned the trick.
After Kerensky’s flight and the collapse of Kornilov’s rebellion, W.B. made a sudden switch and decided that the Bolsheviks were the faction that had the organization and the ruthlessness to come out on top. In this decision he was much influenced by his second in command, Raymond Robins, who, travelling back and forth across the country buying wheat for relief purposes, had discovered in empirical American fashion that the Bolsheviks were the only people he could trust to get anything done. Leaving Robins in charge of Red Cross activities, which by now included a considerable and highly unreliable secret service, W.B. set out to carry the word to Washington.