The Moralist by Patricia O'Toole

Author:Patricia O'Toole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

28

So Many Problems Per Diem

Wilson spent his Fourth of July as the leading man in a patriotic extravaganza staged by George Creel. Meant to show off the unity of a country whose citizens hailed from every slice of the globe, the day began at the Navy Yard, where the president and first lady welcomed an assortment of diplomats and leaders of ethnic communities aboard the Mayflower for a cruise to Mount Vernon. Once ashore, the honored guests filed past Washington’s tomb, laying wreaths as the Irish-born tenor John McCormack pumped out verse after verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The immigrants’ designated speaker, a Belgian by birth, mentioned that he and his companions hailed from thirty-three nations but were “Americans all.” Behind them, he said, were millions more, “pledging themselves to the cause of this country and of the free nations with which she is joined.” For proof, he said, one had only to acknowledge the variety of names on the casualty lists.

In a speech that contained not a word about immigrants, Wilson spoke of the war as the global equivalent of the American Revolution, and voiced the hope that the United States and its friends in other nations would secure for all peoples what Washington and his compatriots had won for Americans: the right to govern themselves.

The only overpowered and suffering people Wilson mentioned at Mount Vernon were the Russians, who had gone from the miseries of living under Czar Nicholas II to the tyranny of Lenin and Bolshevism. Lenin’s decision to leave the war had thrown the Allies into a panic, and for months they had been begging the United States for troops to be used in two small military interventions in Russia—one in the northwest, near Archangel and Murmansk, the other in Siberia, six thousand miles to the east. At first the Allies aimed to block the Germans’ transfer of troops and matériel to the West, but when Ludendorff’s spring offensives inflicted hundreds of thousands of fresh casualties on French and British forces on the Western Front, Russia grew ever more alluring. Rationales multiplied, hopes waxed fantastical. With a few thousand well-placed troops, the Allies imagined that they could rally the Russian people to rise up against the Bolsheviks, reconstitute the Eastern Front, stave off the kaiser’s subjugation of Russia, and win the world war in the East if it could not be won in the West.

While they were at it, the Allies planned to connect with the so-called Czech Legion, some seventy thousand Czechs and Slovaks who had fought for Russia in hopes of defeating the Austro-Hungarian Empire and establishing a state of their own. On some days the Allies hoped to help the legionnaires move to Russian ports for transfer to the Western Front; on others they wanted to use the legion to keep Russian railways out of German hands. And then there was Japan, a short cruise away from the Siberian port of Vladivostok, where thousands of tons of weapons, munitions, and strategic raw materials were stockpiled.

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