Ceremony of the Innocent (58 page)

Charles stared somberly at the snow-painted windows of the Senator’s office. “Still,” he said, “we have the Constitution—”

The Senator’s laugh was both derisive and despairing. “The coming attack of the conspirators will be on the Constitution. Jefferson? Yes, he said: ‘In questions of power
then let no more be heard of confidence in man but let us bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution
.’ The trouble is that the Constitution will soon—perhaps even in my own lifetime—become the target of the conspirators. It will be interpreted by wicked men, in the U. S. Supreme Court, to the advantage of the conspirators and the corruption of the American people. And what will the American people do? Whimper a little, then go back to their nickelodeons and their beer. Perhaps, in the long run, slavery is what they deserve. Why kill ourselves desperately trying to inform them? They just don’t want to be disturbed in their animal comforts.”

“That is what such people as Francis Porter believe, too, Senator.”

“That is one thing we patriots and the conspirators have in common, Charles. We understand human nature. We would save it from itself. The conspirators would use it for themselves.”

He looked again at his desk. “I don’t know what good it is to tell you something else, Charles. Russia is now being infiltrated by rich and active American agents of the conspiracy—to overthrow the Czar and bring Communism to Russia. It should succeed in the near future. The Russian Communists are fully financed by our American bankers and financiers. You aren’t surprised? Of course not. We have known about this for a long time. Russia will soon make a separate peace with Germany, and then all hell will be let loose.”

“I think,” said Charles, “that I will go into a monastery.”

“You won’t be safe there, either. No. Teach your children what it is to be an American. Perhaps they will learn. Perhaps, they too will be corrupted. All we can do now is to oppose evil as much as possible, and to pray.”

He groaned. “Do you know what Wilson is now calling men like you and me? ‘Willful.’ In short, we oppose the conspiracy and love our country and would preserve our independence and our liberties.”

“And he is against all that. He wants America to be part of a superstate, as you’ve said yourself, Senator. Men like him hate independence of thought and valor and defense of country. Yes, I think he is mad. He wants an end to nationalism and pride and hegemony.”

“I don’t think he even knows what he wants. There is the deadly Colonel House, his friend and adviser, you know, who is part of the conspiracy. To be innocent is to destroy yourself. Man must always be on guard against his fellow man, and never believe in his avowed ‘love and trust.’ Those are the passwords of the conspirators, who neither love nor have concern, themselves, for their fellow men, but just for their own plots against humanity.”

“We are a very nasty and dangerous species, aren’t we?”

“Christ, and His Church, never denied that, Charles.”

Charles dined with the Senator that night but both men were wretched, knowing what they knew. The Senator raised his wineglass and said with somberness, “‘Eat, drink, and be merry—for tomorrow we die.’”

The impotence Charles felt haunted him the rest of his life. The issue remained with the American people, and the people all over the world. They would not assume their responsibility as men. They wanted comfort only and desired not to be disturbed. The end was inevitable: slavery. But how many wanted freedom, with its arduous demands? Slavery was death in life; it was also peace, as an animal has peace, and with its daily ration of food and servitude and mindlessness and dependence on its masters. As Aristotle had said, “All that walks in the guise of men is not human.” A human being, in the full sense of the word, was very rare in this world, and was also persecuted by the multitudes who “walk in the guise of humanity,” yet are not men.

They were being taught to “love and trust.” Yet Christ Himself had advised mankind to sell its cloak and buy a sword. The ancient Jews had understood that centuries before Christ. They protected themselves and their country and their families—with the sword, against oppressors. They knew that governments were not to be trusted, as Samuel the prophet had told them.

We could take a lesson from them, Charles would think. But no one listened. One heard hardly any truths now; but truth was not accepted. The people listened to the lumpen intelligentsia, the pretenders to intellect, bursting with fury and zeal, and spluttering with saliva.

Charles remembered his early school days when his copybooks were headed by aphorisms and platitudes in script (mostly admonishing), and all polished by time, and all shining with verity. But Rudyard Kipling remembered the “copybook headings,” and only two years ago had published his poem about them. Charles recalled the ominous last stanza:

As sure as water will wet you, as sure as fire will burn,

The gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return.

They were returning, one by one, and the skies were darkening with their looming presence.

Many Senators and Congressmen were aghast when President Wilson asked for authority to arm American merchant ships, which were carrying munitions and other contraband to “the Allies.” Many protested that the American people were in no mood for any war, or overt actions inevitably leading to war. Angry debate began. But, also inevitably, Congress, in the lower house, passed a resolution, 403 to 13, the bill for arming merchant ships. The Senate, however, debated, led by eleven indomitable men, they themselves led by Senator La Follette. Before the end of the session, they filibustered, with the aim of delaying all action on the authority.

This enraged the majority of the Senators, who wanted war. (After all, some of them reasoned together, there was a depression increasing in the country; war would bring prosperity.) Therefore, with adjournment threatening, and with adjournment a long if not permanent postponement of the desired authority to arm merchant ships, eighty-five of the ninety-six members of the Senate, simulating wrath and public virtue, signed a protest against the eleven Senators who stood in the way of war. Mr. Wilson joined in the protest, and so did Mr. Roosevelt—joyfully.

But the Senate was forced to adjourn, on March 4, 1917, for it was the end of the session. The authority had not been given. Mr. Wilson flew into a passion of invective, and cried: “In the immediate presence of a crisis unparalleled in the history of the country, Congress has been unable to act either to safeguard the country or to vindicate the elementary rights of its citizens! More than five hundred of the five hundred thirty-one members of the two Houses were ready and anxious to act. But the Senate was unable to act because a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, had determined that it should not. They have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

He asked the Attorney General if he, the President, had the right to call for the arming of merchant ships without authorization from Congress. The Attorney General, smiling, assured the President that he did, indeed, have the power. On March 9, this was done, to the confused dismay of the majority of the American people, and their dread. German submarines promptly attacked.

Like a man newly rejuvenated, and full of elation and hatred for Germany, Mr. Wilson summoned an extraordinary session of Congress, which would meet on April 17. But before that session three American merchant ships, heavy with contraband for “the Allies,” were destroyed by German U-boats. With gleeful drama, Mr. Wilson, feeling vindicated and advised by Colonel House, called for a special session of Congress “to receive a communication concerning grave matters.”

He was not happy to discover that Washington was suddenly inundated by pacifist armies from all over the country. They surrounded the Capitol, and cried for peace. “This is outrageous, subversive,” said Colonel House. An escort of cavalry swept about the President’s vehicle to protect him from these anxious and frightened crowds of men and women, who might, said Colonel House, “annoy our President.”

The Supreme Court, arrayed, solemnly occupied the seats in front of the rostrum, Chief Justice White in the center. Behind the court crowded the Cabinet. Behind the Cabinet sat the diplomatic corps, among them M. Jusserand of France and Mr. Spring-Rice of Great Britain. They, too, showed countenances of much solemnity, but their eyes radiated their own elation.

Wilson stood before the momentous gathering and said:

“The present German submarine warfare is a warfare against mankind! It is a war against all nations, a challenge to mankind!…There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making—we will not choose the path of submission.”

Chief Justice White leapt to his feet, openly smiling and weeping, and the entire Senate rose with him, applauding like thunder. And the tender spring rain rustled softly outside, remote and impersonal, unconcerned with human madness.

Within a few days the now turbulent country was faced with conscription. The rapture suddenly subsided when it was realized that the approaching war would not be fought solely with Mr Wilson’s grandiloquent phrases and passionate accusations but with arms, and those arms would be carried by young American men, and those young men would die. But long before the actual conscription the machinery for its operation had been built and established, in secret, long before the people had even imagined that this was being done, almost completely without the knowledge of their representatives in Congress. It was a secret known practically only by the President, his Secretary of War, Mr. Baker, and Judge Advocate General, Enoch Crowder. Millions there were who wondered, confusedly, how such a vast system as the draft could come into being almost overnight, without any publicity whatsoever in the newspapers or any rumors. They believed, until the very last, that if there were a war it would be fought by a volunteer army.

Angry questions were raised in the House against conscription. Many exclaimed that they would not vote for the Draft Act. “Autocracy!” some Congressmen cried, and others denounced the draft as “Prussianization, the destruction of democracy, involuntary servitude, slavery.” There were those who said that there would be riots all over the country—and several of those who declared this had been vociferous for war. They were overwhelmed with telegrams and letters from terrified constituents who were against the draft, and they had no answer. At the end they could only use the President’s soothing phrases:

“The necessary men will be secured by volunteering as at present, until a resort to a selective draft is desirable, which possibly will not occur.” He would then murmur, “Let us say that it is a personal obligation to serve your country, which no American will reject.”

But the idea of a draft became increasingly unpopular. It was one thing to “denounce the Hun and his atrocities,” and quite another to take up arms against him, in spite of the fact that America had declared war against Germany. Zeal and excitement and large black headlines in the newspapers, and “extras,” and public shouts and millings in public places, and enthusiasm and denunciations and passionate wavings of the flag, and bands, and banning the German language in the public schools and renaming sauerkraut “liberty cabbage,” and accusing neighbors of German ancestry of being “barbarians” and “subversive,” were one thing. But it was quite another to have one’s sons conscripted and sent to die in European trenches. “Victory gardens” in one’s little meager backyard—accompanied by grinning at neighbors and jovially waving rakes and hoes, and laughter and a beer on the porch afterwards, were splendid and invigorating, and singing patriotic songs in the warm evenings of early summer was exciting and made people jubilant. But to watch a son or a brother or a husband forcibly marched off to war—probably to be slaughtered—was a bewildering and outrageous violation of traditional American independence and choice.

The President took counsel with Colonel House, that quiet and ambiguous man. He issued a public statement:

“I am exceedingly anxious to have the registration and selection by draft conducted under such circumstances as to create a strong patriotic feeling and relieve, as far as possible, the prejudice which remains to some extent in the popular mind against the draft. With this end in view I am using a vast number of agencies throughout the country to make the day of registration a festival and patriotic occasion. Several Governors and some mayors of cities are entering already heartily into this plan, and the Chamber of Commerce of the United States is taking it up with their affiliated bodies.”

For the first time in their history the American people were subjected to a strictly foreign blandishment: propaganda by government. But millions of wives and mothers protested angrily, and in public. The Subversive Act was hastily passed. Those who objected to the draft, and foreign entanglements, were called “enemies of America, traitors, malcontents, cowards, and secret German sympathizers.” The moving-picture industry almost overnight produced films depicting American wives and girl children being forcibly raped by monstrous German soldiers in the tender peace of their own households, in the cities of America, while their menfolk wallowed in their blood in the streets. Many were the newspapers who raised angry ridicule at all this—but, strangely, they were soon silenced. A Chicago newspaper did mention, in an editorial: “The day of freedom of the press is over. The press is now the creature of the government, to be used at will. Who is behind this real atrocity, this violation of American liberty, is known, but we dare not name them any longer.” The newspaper soon went into bankruptcy.

The President, speaking of the draft, proclaimed: “Carried in our hearts as a great day of patriotic devotion and obligation, when the duty shall lie upon every man to see to it that the name of every male person of the designated ages is written on these lists of honor.

This proclamation was signed and sealed by the President on May 18, 1917. As “honor” had always been the pride of Americans, very few were not bedazzled by words unctuously spoken and delivered with fervor. Those were threatened—and many arrested.