A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (101 page)

But Cannon had not achieved his position of power by meekly acceding to the wishes of others. He let it be known that if the president did not side with him, the tariff bill would be held hostage by his allies. Taft had no choice but to retreat, abandoning the insurgents and acquiescing to Cannon’s reelection as Speaker. This placed Taft in the unpleasant position of supporting a Speaker who despised him while alienating the insurgents, who now distrusted him.

Whether Roosevelt would have handled the insurgent question differently is debatable, but there is little doubt that he would have surmised Cannon would double-cross him at the first opportunity. The naïve Taft did not. Worse, when the House committee assignments came out, the thirty insurgents found themselves stripped of all committee power, and the Republican Party announced that it would support “loyal” candidates in the forthcoming primaries against any insurgents. Taft’s political ineptness had cut the rebel faction off at the knees.

Meanwhile, three defining elements of Taft’s administration took shape. The first was the tariff revision. A topic that is decidedly unexciting to modern Americans, the tariff remained a political hot potato. Even many former supporters had come to see that it had outlived whatever economic usefulness it ever had (and many argued that it had never achieved the gains attributed to it). But getting rid of it was a different matter. For one thing, since Roosevelt had started to set aside large chunks of federal land, government revenues from land sales had dwindled. They were already shrinking, since all but Arizona and New Mexico had achieved statehood and most of the West had been settled by 1910. Ending the tariff meant replacing it with some form of revenue system that had not yet generated much enthusiasm—direct taxation, probably in the form of income taxes (which had been declared unconstitutional).

Nevertheless, the Payne bill was introduced into the House of Representatives in April 1909, passing easily, despite resistance from the insurgents. A Senate version, the Aldrich bill, featured some eight hundred revisions of the low House rates, raising almost all rates. Many Progressive senators, including Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and William Borah of Idaho, resisted the higher rates. These Progressives were remarkably homogeneous: most came to the Senate in 1906; none had attended an eastern university; and they all came from primarily agricultural Midwestern states. Together they “took the floor of the Senate to launch perhaps the most destructive criticism of high tariffs that had been made by the elected representatives of the Republican party.”
⁸⁷
The Senate rebels put Taft in a box just as had the House insurgents, forcing him to choose between the lower tariffs, which he believed in, or supporting the Senate organization under Nelson Aldrich.

Ultimately, the Payne-Aldrich bill passed, reducing rates somewhat, but leaving Taft weaker than ever. Taft had to some degree staked his presidency on the tariff—that, and trust-busting. Nevertheless, in the jumble of rates, the new tariff probably favored the large eastern industrialists at the expense of western raw materials producers.

A second emphasis of the Taft administration, a continuation of trust-busting, actually saw Taft outdo his predecessor. Having bumped Roosevelt’s attorney general, Philander Knox, up to secretary of state, Taft appointed George Wicker-sham as his new chief law enforcement officer charged with prosecuting antitrust violations. Wickersham concluded Roosevelt’s campaign against Standard Oil, finally succeeding in 1911, in getting the Supreme Court to break up the oil giant into several smaller companies. “A bad trust,” Roosevelt had called it, distinguishing from a “good trust.” That statement alone indicated the futility of government determining when a business was succeeding too much. Under subsequent antitrust laws, such as Clayton (1914) and others, a company could be hauled into court for cutting prices too low (predatory pricing), raising prices too high (monopolistic pricing), or having prices the same as all other competitors (collusion)! Undeterred, Taft more than tripled the number of antitrust cases compared to Roosevelt’s.

Now Taft stumbled into the position of attacking the popular Roosevelt when he pursued the U.S. Steel antitrust case, unaware Roosevelt had approved the combination. In the process, TR was summoned before a House committee to explain himself. The matter embarrassed Roosevelt, who had to admit he was aware of the monopolistic tendencies inherent in the acquisition. Teddy had remained subdued in his criticisms until the congressional testimony. Now his remarks about Taft became positively toxic. A third issue, the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, sealed the breach with Roosevelt.

As head of the Forestry Service, Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s friend and eastern-born soul mate, shared his attitudes toward conservation policy. Indeed, he probably exceeded Roosevelt’s zealous approach to preserving the environment. “Sir Galahad of the woodlands,” Harold Ickes later called him.
⁸⁸
In stark contrast stood Richard Ballinger, a westerner from Seattle, who had replaced James Garfield as secretary of the interior. Ballinger brought a different attitude to the Roosevelt/Pinchot “pristine” approach, preferring development and use of government lands.

Ballinger thought setting aside the lands was illegal, reopening the lands to public entry, whereupon Pinchot branded him an enemy of conservation. A further allegation against Ballinger came from an Interior Department employee, Louis Glavis, who asserted that Ballinger had given rights to Alaskan coal lands to Seattle business interests, including some he had done legal work for in the past. Pinchot urged Glavis to take the matter to Taft. The president examined the charges, concluded that Ballinger had acted properly, and fired Glavis as much for disloyalty as any other reason. Afterward, Glavis attempted to destroy Ballinger and Taft, writing an exposé of the land/coal deal in
Collier’s
(1909). Up to that point, Taft had attempted to keep Pinchot out of the controversy, writing a letter to the Forestry chief urging him to stay clear of the Glavis affair. Instead, Pinchot supplied the material for Glavis’s articles from his own office, then, seeking a martyrdom for conservation, he gave Congress evidence that he had been the leaker. Taft had no choice but to sack Pinchot as well.

At no time did Taft want matters to come to that. With Roosevelt out of the country, Pinchot was the face of the administration’s conservation movement. Subsequent investigations proved Ballinger innocent of all charges. He was, in the truest sense, a genuine conservationist seeking to conserve and use public lands and to put as much real estate as possible in the hands of the public. Tremendous damage had been done to Taft, though, especially in the Midwest, accelerating Taft’s “almost unerring penchant for creating powerful enemies.”
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By that time, Ballinger had become such a political liability to Taft that he resigned in March 1911, giving the Pinchot forces a late-inning victory.

Taft’s political ineptness, combined with the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy and his decision to oppose the insurgents left him weakened. Democrats captured the House in 1910, dealing him yet another defeat, and the Senate, although technically controlled by the Republicans, was in the hands of an axis of Republican insurgents and Democrats. By 1912, Republican governors were actively calling for Roosevelt to come out of retirement. Feigning a lack of enthusiasm, Roosevelt nevertheless jumped at the chance to regain the presidency, and entered the primaries. To oppose Taft, TR had to move left, abandoning the conservative elements of his own presidency.
⁹⁰
His entrance into the race doomed Taft, and opened the door to Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the general election. Yet Wilson had more in common with the two Republicans he would succeed than he did with many Democrats of the past, including the thrice-beaten Bryan, just as Roosevelt and Taft had more in common with him than they did with either McKinley or Harrison. The Progressive movement had reached its apex, temporarily eclipsing even party ideology and producing both domestic and international upheavals of mammoth proportions.

The Dawn of Dreams

A
t the turn of the century, the United States had joined much of the industrialized world in expecting that the fantastic progress and wondrous advances in science and technology would produce not only more affluence, but peace and brotherhood. That, after all, had been the dream of the Progressive movement and its myriad reforms under Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Unions continued to press for government support against business, women maintained pressure for the franchise, and blacks examined ways to reclaim the rights guaranteed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments that had been suppressed after 1877. The slow realization of some of these dreams offered a strong lesson to those willing to learn: human nature changes slowly, if at all.

Such was the case in Europe. The euphoria of goodwill brought about by international scientific exchanges in the 1890s, combined with the absence of a European land war involving the major powers since 1871, provided the illusion that conflict had somehow disappeared once and for all. Was peace at hand? Many Europeans thought so, and the ever-optimistic Americans wanted to accept the judgment of their Continental friends in this matter. British writer Norman Angell, in his 1909 book
Europe’s Optical Illusion
—better known by its 1910 reissued title,
The Great Illusion
—contended that the industrialized nations were losing the “psychological impulse to war.”
¹
One diplomat involved in a commission settling a conflict in the Balkans thought the resulting 1913 peace treaty represented the end of warfare. Increased communications, fear of socialist revolutions, resistance of taxpayers, and international market competition all forced the Great Powers to the point where they were manifestly unwilling to make war.
²

A young Winston Churchill, then a member of Parliament, rose for his first speech and agreed with this assessment. “In former days,” he intoned, “when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies…it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other…when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the…commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.”
³
Churchill, who had seen combat at Omdurman as a lieutenant in the 24th Lancers, witnessed firsthand the lethality of modern rapid-fire rifles, Maxim machine guns, and long-range artillery.

Other military experts chimed in, including Ivan S. Bloch, who, even before the Boer War had concluded, predicted that the combination of automatic weapons and trenches would give a decided edge to the defense, so as to increase the bloodshed in a subsequent war to unfathomable levels.
⁴
Is War Impossible?
asked the subtitle of Bloch’s book. Many thought so. Americans knew from the losses in the Spanish-American War that the slightest technological advantage, such as smokeless powder, could translate into massive combat losses.

Two factors obscured the horrendous reality of conflicts. First, although combat that pitted one European power against another, or Americans against each other, resulted in massive bloodletting—more Americans were killed on the third day of Gettysburg than in all the frontier wars put together—all too often American and European papers carried lopsided news of the carnage in the colonies when western forces crushed native armies. Britain, ignoring severe losses in the Boer War, instead pointed to the overwhelming victories at Ulundi (1879) or Omdurman (1898). Americans discounted the losses to Spanish bullets and overemphasized the success at smashing Apache, Nez Percé, and the Sioux.

The idealistic notion that war itself had been banished from human society was even dangerous. Teddy Roosevelt’s success at bringing the Russians and Japanese together with the Portsmouth Treaty, combined with the unprecedented affluence of the United States, fooled many into thinking that a new age had indeed dawned. A certain faith in technology and affluence buttressed these notions. Americans certainly should have realized, and rejected, the pattern: the very same principles—that if only there is enough wealth spread around, people will refuse to fight over ideological or cultural differences—had failed to prevent the Civil War. Or put in the crass terms of Jacksonianism, as long as wallets are fat and bellies are full, ideas do not matter.

At almost the same moment that
Europe’s Optical Illusion
reached the publisher, a former German chief of staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, wrote an article with a vastly different conclusion, suggesting that in the near future four powers—France, Russia, Italy, and Britain—would combine for a “concentrated attack” on Germany. Schlieffen had already prepared a detailed battle plan for such an eventuality, calling for the rapid swing of German troops through neutral Belgium to defeat the alliance before it could coordinate against the empire of Germany. Thus, whereas some in England and America prophesied peace, others were already sharpening the swords of war.

Marvels in the Earth and Skies

The technology that made killing so easy from 1914 to 1918 had offered only hope and promise a few years earlier. Many of the new gizmos and gadgets had come from American inventors. The United States blew past the established European industrial giants largely because of the openness of the system and the innovation that had come from generations of farmers and mechanics who translated their constant tinkering into immense technological breakthroughs. Auto wizard Henry Ford was such a man.
⁵

An electrical mechanic with Edison Electric in Michigan in the 1890s, Henry Ford spent his nights reading manuals about a new internal combustion engine, and by 1896 he had imagined ways to mate it to a carriage. In fact, many others had already done so. At the Chicago Exposition of 1893, no fewer than a half dozen horseless carriages were on display; and four years later Charles Duryea demonstrated the feasibility of cross-country travel when he drove a “car” from Cleveland to New York. Now Ford welded a larger four-cycle engine to a carriage frame and called it a quadricycle. It was scarcely bigger than a child’s red wagon, with a single seat with barely enough room for two adults. Even at that, it was too large to get through the door in the shed where Ford constructed it, and he had to take an ax to the walls to free his creation.

Henry Ford lacked any formal education. He adapted his ideas through trial and error and recruited the best help, combining ideas and developing his own engine and wheels. His closest associates always noted that Ford seemed to have an idea when the experts did not. After testing the car for three years, Ford finally decided he was ready to mass-produce automobiles.

Like other visionaries, Ford looked well beyond the horseless carriage to a mobile society with millions of people using automobiles. Scoffers had their own opinions. Woodrow Wilson called the car the “new symbol of wealth’s arrogance,” and when Ford asked for a loan in 1903 to build his contraption, the president of the Michigan Savings Bank told Ford’s lawyer that “the horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.”
⁶
Like countless other successful entrepreneurs, Ford opened his first car company only to have it fail in 1900; then he opened another, and it, too, collapsed; on the third try, in 1903, the Ford Motor Company finally opened for good.

Unable to read blueprints himself, Ford nevertheless contributed all the major ideas to the automobile, including the use of vanadium steel, the design of the transmission’s planetary gears, and the decision to use a detachable head for the block, even though no one knew how to build a head gasket strong enough to withstand the pressure.
⁷
His plants mass-produced eight different models of cars, but lost money on several, leading Ford to conclude that he should focus on a single variant, the Model T. All other models were eliminated from the Ford production lines. This allowed Ford to emphasize lower cost over speed, which was not needed anyway (Detroit had a speed limit of eight miles an hour and fines of $100—two months’ wages—for a single violation!). “I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” he announced. “It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”
⁸
As the price fell to $850, Ford sold twelve thousand Model Ts in twelve months, continually pressing the prices downward. By the 1920s, he estimated that for every dollar he chopped off the price he sold another thousand cars.
⁹

Ford’s great twist to Eli Whitney’s mass-production techniques came when he applied electric power at his Highland Park facility to move the car from one station to another, reducing work time and wasted effort. Ford also understood that economy was obtained through simplicity, another of Whitney’s lessons. He therefore concentrated entirely on the T, or the Tin Lizzy, as some called it, and made it as simple as possible. It had no starter, no heater, no side windows, and was available only in black. But it was cheap. Ford’s own line workers could purchase one with savings from the remarkably high wages Ford paid. Partly to prevent unionization and partly to attract the best workforce in Michigan, Ford introduced the $5-a-day wage in 1914. This was nearly double what his most generous competitors paid, and it cut the legs out from under the union. Yet even at these wages, Ford drove down the price to $345 in 1916.

The automaker’s personal life was more complex than the design of the Tin Lizzy, however. Famous for saying, “History is bunk,” Ford actually spent millions of dollars collecting and preserving historical artifacts. And he could be a master of the gaffe. While making a speech at Sing Sing prison in New York, Ford opened by saying, “Boys, I’m glad to see you here.”
¹⁰
But as an internationalist/utopian in the mold of Alfred Nobel, Ford put his money where his mouth was, financing a “peace ship” in 1915 to haul himself and other peace activists to Germany to instruct Kaiser Wilhelm to call off the war. His anti-Semitism was well known, and to his great discredit he financed an anti-Jewish newspaper in Detroit, to which he frequently contributed. After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Ford expressed admiration for
der Führer,
who supposedly had a picture of the American on his wall.

At the same time Henry Ford struggled with the automobile, another fantastic machine appeared on the scene when two bicycle manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, sought to use the laws of aerodynamics to produce machine-powered, human-controlled flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Although the Wright Brothers’ maiden voyage on December 17, 1903, lasted just twelve seconds and covered only 120 feet—“you could have thrown a ball farther”—it displayed the possibility of conquering air itself to the world.
¹¹
The flight proved highly embarrassing to the U.S. government, which through the army had given seed money to a similar program under the direction of Samuel P. Langley. But Langley’s government-funded aircraft crashed ignominiously, and after the Wright Brothers’ success, he stood to lose his funding. He therefore claimed that the Wright Brothers’ flight had not been “powered flight” at all, but gliding. The Wrights contributed to the suspicion with their secrecy about the designs, fearing patent infringements of the type that had afflicted Whitney. Already, Glenn Curtiss and others had taken elements of the Wright flyer and applied them to their own craft. Thus the Wrights hesitated to publicly display the aircraft and, for several years, to conduct highly visible trials. President Roosevelt intervened to settle the issue, insisting on a carefully monitored test in which Langley was proven wrong and the Wright Brothers, right.

In a 1908 summer flight at Le Mans, France, Wilbur flew an airplane for an hour and a half, covering more than forty miles.
Le Figaro
, France’s premier newspaper, gushed that it had witnessed “Wilbur Wright and his great white bird, the beautiful mechanical bird…there is no doubt! Wilbur and Orville Wright have well and truly flown.”
¹²
Convinced, in 1909 the army gave the Wright Brothers a contract for $30,000 per machine.