Sea Control - Sea Control 406-The Making of the Modern Commander-in-Chief with Mark Benbow

Episode Date: January 22, 2023

Links1. "The Seeds of Wilsonianism," Mark Benbow, C-SPAN, October 27, 2006.2. Mark Benbow Marymount University profile.3. "U.S. Participation in the Great War (World War I)," Library of Congress.4. Woodrow Wilson House.5. Woodrow Wilson's Wars: The Making of America's First Modern Commander-in-Chief, by Mark Benbow, Naval Institute Press, 2022.

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, your host, Dr. Ed Salo, speaks with Dr. Mark Benbow. They discuss Benbow's book, Woodrow Wilson's Wars, The Making of America's First Modern Commander-in-Chief. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarvie. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take this opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast

network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome to Sea Control. Today we will be talking to Dr. Ben Bow, author of the book Woodrow Wilson's Wars, the making of America's first modern commander-in-chief that recently has been published by the Naval Institute Press. Dr. Ben Bow is an associate professor of history at Marymount University

From 1987 to 2002, he worked on national security issues for the federal government. And from 2003 to 2006, he was historian at the Woodrow Wilson House Museum in Washington, D.C. He also serves as museum director for the Arlington Historical Society and manages the Arlington Historical Museum. And I saw in your bio that you are also the dad to several rescue dogs and cats. So we have that in common as well. Okay. I think you are a great guy, even before I picked up your book. So welcome.

Thank you. Nice to be here. So first of all, can you tell us a little more about yourself and your current position? Well, I'm an associate professor of American history at Marymount. It's a small, private Catholic university. We're in Arlington, Virginia. in what was for half a century part of Washington, D.C. It's a small school, and it's a small program,

so I'm one of four history professors, and I handle pretty much everything after the Civil War in American history. I've been interested in Woodrow Wilson ever since I was a kid. People have asked if he's my favorite president. I'll say, no, he's not my favorite. He's just the one that I find most interesting. And I've been interested in his period of history, the early 20th century, for a long time as well. I tell my students, you know, every history professor would love to be able to time travel to the era they study. It's just most of us would not want to actually live then, but it would certainly be fun to visit.

So let's hit the book running. You start the book out with a discussion of Wilson as a scholar and his writings about the presidency even before he became president. Can you quickly summarize those for us? um yeah it's categorized wilson as either a political scientist or his historian it really wasn't the difference when he was a young scholar between the two he might have described himself as a political economist he studied administrative history his books that i break down in my book can generally be divided into two groups. You had politics, political theory. He wrote books on congressional government, on constitutional government.

He wrote a state book, a textbook called The State, which is astoundingly dry, even for a late 19th century textbook. And then as a historian, he wrote several public histories. He had three main histories, Division and Reunion, which was about the coming of the Civil War, the Civil War and Reconstruction. He wrote a biography of George Washington, and he wrote a five-volume serialized history of the United States. And the last two of his history books, frankly, are not very good.

The biography of Washington is barely readable. his by his american history is very trite not originally researched at all they were written frankly because he needed money and he got a really good offer from i believe it was harper's magazine to write them and then they put out you know every issue they'd put out another chapter, and then you could buy the entire set. He was raising not only his own family, but two of his wife's younger siblings, and he had an elderly father he was taking care of, and on a professor's hour, even at Princeton, that was quite a stretch. His book, Division and Reunion, Civil War, is not bad for the air. It is very much Dunning School, although it's written

pre-building school, but it's very much the Reconstructionalism estate, we shouldn't have given the vote to the uneducated freedmen, etc., etc., that historiography's been trying to argue against and trying to get people to move past that early interpretation for a long time. But it was an attempt to be neither a pro-Confederate or pro-Union history, but rather

a nonpartisan history. Interestingly, neither Union or Confederate veterans groups were particularly fond of it. They both tended to think he favored the other side a little bit. He tried to cut

down the middle and say basically the South was right in their interpretation of the Constitution allowing secession as it was originally written, But the understanding of the Constitution had evolved, and the North was right that the Constitution, as properly understood in the 1860s, would not have allowed secession. So he tried to basically say, well, both sides had a point. But considering most of the history is written at that time, it was reasonably non-biased, and it did show some actual independent original thought.

And so he's not a great historian. He was a much better political scientist. So what about the Council of Advisors that he surrounded himself with for more? Well, for issues related to war and diplomacy during his administration, how would you describe them? A real mixed bag. Some of them, I mean, Secretary of State was very much a political position. And William Jennings Bryan was a terrible choice for Secretary of State. But on the other hand, there's no way Wilson could have left him out of the cabinet. and the only job that might be equivalent in terms of prestige that you could have appointed

Bryan to as Secretary of the Treasury, and there was no way in hell Woodrow Wilson was letting William Jennings Bryan anywhere near the Treasury Department. That just was not happening. So he's a terrible choice as Secretary of State, but Wilson mostly kept his hands pretty tight on the reins. And then his next Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was certainly capable, but was a poor choice. Simply, his interpretation of foreign policy didn't fit Wilson's, and Lansing was not overburdened with a sense of loyalty to the administration. His Secretary of War, Garrison, was capable and knew what he was doing. and Newton Baker,

his second secretary of the war, was exiled. The secretary of the Navy is Josephus Daniels, who was a political position. Daniels is very much a mixed bag. In some ways, he was not appropriate for the choice. I mean, he's a newspaper editor from North Carolina.

What did he know about the Navy? But he did tend to listen to what his commander said. and took their advice, which is good. And Daniels also did tend to try to break up the old boys club in the Navy. For example, he opened up Annapolis to the common seamen who were able to pass the entry tests. The Navy was very heavily class-based until then.

But Dan Daniels was a prohibitionist and did try to enforce prohibition on Navy ships, which, as you can imagine, the Navy was not particularly fond of. Supposedly, the expression of a cup of coffee being a cup of Joe, according to the legend, and I don't know if it's true or not, that comes from Daniels where Navy crew had to switch to coffee rather than something stronger. It's probably apocryphal, but there was some resentment in the Navy towards his trying to enforce temperance laws on the U.S. Navy. The Navy could have been a little better prepared for World War I than it was. I'm not sure how much of that was Daniel's fault. Basically, if I was giving a grade to the Secretary of the Navy, I'd give him a C plus, B minus. his secretary of war both of them were by far

his better choices so like I said it's a bit of a mixed bag he had some very capable appointees his secretary of the treasury William McAdoo was great an excellent secretary of the treasury and of course that would be important in World War I

his weakest appointment was probably Bryan but that's probably why Wilson kept a pretty firm hand on the reins for State Department when Brian was sitting in that chair. So let's hop into what did the world look like in 1912? So like I said, we'd like to time travel to our period. And one reason I really like the 19-teens is it's familiar enough to be understandable and different enough to be interesting.

And I think that pretty much goes with the international situation. You have powers that are on the wane and trying to maintain their position as a power. You have rising powers that are starting to challenge the status quo. You've got powers that are trying to maintain the status quo because it benefits them. Of course, there's tensions in different parts of the world with war coming close and threats of war. Wilson's unofficial advisor, Colonel House, who went to Europe and came back and reported to Wilson in, I believe it was 1913, that he described Europe as a kennel of snarling dogs. so in that respect it would it would look familiar to today you have the series of alliances as well as unofficial understandings between nations and you had nations that in the past have been rivals but for now their interests aligned with one another that would allow them to cooperate. But you already had

in the Mediterranean and in the Balkans a series of wars which reflected the tensions you'll see in World War I. The Ottoman Empire was on its last legs, and the Balkan states and Italy were all determined to get a chunk of the pie. So there's various small wars with the Ottomans having their territory sliced off bit by bit. And of course, some of that tension is going to play over in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in June of 14th. You had the Mexican Revolution, which is a big deal for Wilson,

increasing instability in parts of the Caribbean. The U.S. is about to open the Panama Canal, which is really going to raise American interests and control in the Caribbean as well. And you had the Chinese on the downslope at that point in the early days, the Chinese Republic and Japan very much on the rise, which is going to draw American attention towards East Asia. Again, it's part of the larger picture in this particular period. That certainly doesn't start with Wilson, but he did pay attention to it. So the first crisis, though, Wilson faces is Veracruz.

And how did Wilson handle it compared to how he handled, let's say, Haiti later on in the administration? Yeah, Veracruz, for context, that's the Mexican Revolution. There had been an elected reform Mexican government that was ousted in a coup literally a couple weeks before Wilson's inaugurated. And to Wilson's horror, he quickly finds out that the American ambassador in Mexico City, a man also named Wilson, no relation, had basically been the organizer of the coup against an elected reform government. And so Wilson refuses to recognize the Mexican government, calls it a government of butchers, and the U.S. starts to turn a blind eye to the Mexican revolutionaries, the constitutionalists, importing arms, smuggling arms, however you want to put it, from the American Southwest and New Orleans into Mexico. So, and Wilson sees himself as the ally of the constitutionalists, thinks that they'll understand he's their friend. So when word comes that a shipment of arms is going to land in the port of Veracruz intended for the Mexican dictator in the spring of 14, Wilson decides that, you know, we have to seize these arms. you know finds out legally he can't do it at sea they're on a german ship

which actually is part of the motivation behind this this is pre-world war one but the u.s was very suspicious of german designs in mexico that they were trying to gain much more influence in mexico and so we thought they were german arms they weren't they're American arms that had been shuffled around between ports to hide their place of origin and then loaded on a German ship that made regular stops. Well, you can't seize the ship, a German ship, at sea. That's not going to fly. But Wilson decides it's perfectly legal to grab them on the dock. Well, what he assumes is because he has been told that by people in Mexico that basically we'll be greeted as liberators. You know, the Mexican people hate the Mexican

dictator. They'll recognize that we're trying to help the revolution. Well, no, of course, That's not what happens. They see Americans landing as foreign invaders. And we end up with a couple of days worth of firefight to take over the city with numerous casualties. Wilson, at that point, really pulls back on the reins in the military. He had not consulted with the military before seizing the port. In fact, they kind of had to do it on the fly. hey you guys go seize that port when the ship lands

because of weather they had to land early and in fact the ship that had the arms turned around and headed back out to sea it did land the arms but so far away from the rest of Mexico that the Mexican

dictator never did get the arm but he didn't really consult with them he just said okay seize the port and the commanders on the scene are quickly shifting ships around and figuring out which sailors and which marines to land

on the boats and how to grab the city and so on they kind of have to do it on the fly and they do a pretty good job of it but at that point the advice he's getting from the army is moving from Veracruz

inland and grabbing Mexico City And the Mexican-American War, the U.S. had landed troops at Veracruz, and they had marched in the Mexico City. So apparently the American military is following, you know, Winfield Scott's battle plans at this point. And Wilson really yanks back on the reins. He does not want a wider war. He basically allows them to set up a perimeter at the edge of the city and says you will go no further than that. and then quickly start sending word through third parties, through other Latin American nations, that he wants to talk about it.

And I think that's important. He did send a message very quickly to the Mexican revolutionaries that he did not intend to go any further. And the revolutionary leaders met amongst themselves, consulted and said, so long as the Americans don't advance in the territory, we control, we won't do anything about it. The dictator of Mexico was really hoping that

the U.S. would advance and he would be able to unite Mexico against the anti-invader. Wilson was able to prevent that. I don't think Wilson ever again truly trusted all of the advice he got from the military taking at face value. He certainly trusted his experts in the military, but I suspect he asked a lot more questions

after that. Which brings us to the border war with Mexico. How did Wilson keep that conflict from growing and spiraling out of control? Because that seemed like it had potential to become real bad real quick.

Yeah, it did. He dodged by the skin of his teeth. He's fortunate that neither Mexican faction in 1917 or late 16, early 17, either Villas or Carranzas, won in a war with the U.S. Because at this point, with Pershing and the American army well inside northern Mexico, it would have been quite easy for the Mexicans to start attacking them and leaving the American army in a very uncomfortable position with a very, very thin supply line back into New Mexico.

Wilson basically avoided it he did pull back on the reins somewhat on Pershing not letting him advance further and basically trying to confine his activities probably not as much as he should have but he did pull back on the reins a bit on Pershing and then when he decided to pull Pershing out I think that finally was the key factor

but he's Wilson in that case was lucky in the timing for his opponents How did Wilson handle World War I and how did the previous conflicts we've been discussing shape his actions

during that war? Well I think in part they helped him learn who was who in the military he had come to like Pershing and to trust Pershing, even though Pershing had pressed against the restrictions being put on him in Mexico to some extent. He didn't outright rebel, and Wilson saw Pershing as a capable commander and as a non-political commander.

the intervention mexico is during the 1916 election and a more political commander than pershing probably could have done a lot of damage to wilson through select leaks to favored newspapers and pershing was in fact a republican but i think the mexican innovation intervention taught him, you know, who do I like in the military? Who do I trust to be able to do what I want without causing me a whole lot of headaches? I think they also taught him to allow the military people to do their job without a lot of intervention

on what Wilson would have seen as purely military matters. Basically, tell me what you need and I'll get it for you, but don't come outside of your own lane. Don't start getting into diplomatic matters because that's my territory as President of the United States. But you need X number of troops to defeat the Kaiser. We'll find a way to get that number of troops for you. You need X amount of weapons and ammunition. We'll try to get that amount of ammunition and weapons for you. You want American troops to have their own section of the front?

Okay, you're the expert. That's what you'll have. So I think he learned who to trust and got a better idea of the division of labor between what was a military matter that he should allow the experts to talk and what shaded into non-military matters where he would maintain control. So, takes us to the Russian intervention, which seems traditionally a little out of Wilson's conventional view of foreign policy. What would you say about that? well you know i combined the two in one chapter but they're really two different interventions

with two very different motivations um the intervention in northwest russia that's political reasons trying to keep the brits from getting too ticked off at the u.s This is the period where we're trying to come up with some sort of agreements to end World War I The Brits are really, really pressing to do something to recreate the Russian front And Wilson was just under a phenomenal amount of political pressure to do something to aid Britain And this is more of a British push than it is the French, although the French certainly wanted a new Russian front, too. And so I think Wilson gave in the bare minimum he thought he had to. If communications with northern Russia and the ability to move troops in and out had been easier, I suspect we would have gotten our troops out a lot earlier than we did.

Once they were in there, though, they were in there. The port was frozen until well into the next spring. No place else to pull the troops. But I think Wilson probably really regretted having given in to politics for the northwestern Russian front of Murmansk. As for the Eastern Siberian intervention, part of that's to keep an eye on the Japanese, and part of it, I think, is due to Wilson's really wanting to help the Czechs. He really had a soft spot for the Czechoslovak cause. and I think the idea you really see in the arguments being made to Wilson a lot of

we can't just abandon the Czechs they're allies, they're trying to get out to fight in France and Wilson saw this as a chance to help them he didn't have any love for the Bolsheviks but I don't think he was deliberately

going in to try to get rid of the Bolsheviks and bring the whites back into power. That just doesn't fit what he would want to try to do. But the idea that, well, if this also weakens the Bolsheviks and the more democratic side takes power, that's fine. Hey, great, nice side effect. But I think the two

basically are due to outside political power from a nation that we're fighting alongside, and the other half to try to support an independence movement, in this case, the Czechoslovak that Wilson himself supported. I don't think without the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia, he would have been convinced about doing anything other than maybe landing some troops in Vladivostok to maintain order and not to do anything more. And if the Brits hadn't pressed him quite so hard on Archangel, I don't think he would have been involved there either. So then you have a whole chapter of looking at the many smaller interventions.

I couldn't think of a better way of describing it, and I'm sure that if you're on the other side, no intervention is small, But how did Wilson use his lessons of how to control to keep the conflicts, the mini conflicts from spreading? I guess we can assume that this is a view of Wilson to control the spread. And you do mention that he was able to control mission creep, unlike a lot of other presidents later on in the century. yeah a lot of the many ones were done while he was incapacitated by his stroke and by that point his secretary of the state after Lansing was just not a big interventionist not going to be able to convince you know state department we need to go in to protect the banana

companies in the last year or so of Wilson's presidency but there are cases of him pulling back on the reins somewhat, particularly with Mexico, when there was an attempt to try to force an intervention and another border battle between the U.S. and the Mexican, in this case, the Mexican Army. And Wilson, fortunately, had enough wits about him still at that point after his stroke to basically put his foot down and say, no, we're not, no, back off and refuse to give the political support needed to actually intervene more.

In these cases, none of them, other than the Mexican case, looked likely to spiral out of control. You know, sending, you know, another ship up the Yangtze to maintain order during the chaos of the warlord period in China was not something Wilson paid a lot of attention to. That's where he would have trusted the Navy to do its job,

and none of those interventions threatened to expand out. Very small in terms of scale interventions. Sending a warship to a Central American harbor is a warning at that point or so common in American policy. that there was no real danger of, okay, now we're about to invade Guatemala or Nicaragua. He did, to some extent, keep an eye when he was capable of it. But I think a lot of those simply that they were small scale, let's restore order because there's an anti-American riot

in a country we consider part of our sphere of influence. and once the marines have control everybody goes home again with that one exception of mexico and he did yank back on the reins on that one fortunately he was mentally aware enough at point to understand what was going on and to be able to do so so in the conclusion you mentioned wilson was a good model for the modern Commander-in-Chief because he picked good commanders, chose civilian leaders in quality for the most part. For the most part, yeah.

He controlled the reins of the military. He kept good relations with the intelligence community that existed at the time and kind of helped along its creation. So is this model still applicable today some parts of it yeah uh i mean the intelligence community part for example um close to my heart but you know he formed the the inquiry which was basically a group of academic experts uh that when he was at versailles you know arguing with clemenceau and Lloyd George, while Orlando was off having a hissy fit somewhere, that, you know, he could actually turn to an expert on the Balkans and say, hey, you know, this new country called Yugoslavia needs a port along here.

You know, some doesn't know anything about the ports along the Adriatic, you know, which one would be Italian and which one would be Yugoslav or Croatian or what have you. but he had experts that had the qualifications and would know the language and the people and all that to be able to say, well, you know, this poor, you know, the area around it is all Slav, but the city itself is about 80% Italian. And he listened to them. What I find interesting is he did not go shopping for conclusions.

uh he didn't go around to experts to find the expert that told him what he wanted to hear at least not that i have found uh so you know i think that's a pretty valuable model as far as handling of the military again he tended to trust the experts in what they were doing but keeping a rein on the diplomatic aspects and he was good i think at preventing mission creep for the most part you did have missions that expanded going in to control porter prince when it had turned utterly chaotic after yet another coup turned into expanding across the whole country. That definitely was mission creep beyond what he had originally intended. But when it came to Vera Cruz, he pulls back on them. The Dominican Republic we occupied,

that could be mission creep but he did keep an eye enough on it that you know okay this is not meant to be permanent it ended up being long term interventions in cuba turned into very very short or to the point let's protect these installations and get out and then there's World War I where he really did trust Admiral Sims and Cyril Pershing

tell me what you need and I will do X and he did a good job I think of protecting them from British and French pressure the Brits and French had a tendency to try to go over the American

commander's head and demand directly from Wilson, you know, we want General Pershing to give us X number of regiments. We need them right now. And I think Wilson was pretty good about going to the military and saying, hey, you know, what do you guys think? Yeah, no. Okay. And we did ask Pershing to move a few units over to the French and the British from here and there on loan. But most of the requests that they were really pushing Pershing for. Pershing said no, Wilson would come back and say no. And I think that's a good model. On the other hand, you also have the other side that I think Pershing and Scott and March and the rest of them had a pretty good idea of when not to push.

Pershing almost went overboard with the Armistice Agreement when he passed around the memo that was taken as being an attack on Wilson's position on the Armistice. In fact, the Allies took it that way. I think it was Lloyd George that thought all this was Pershing announcing he's running for president in 1920. You know, Pershing has just overstepped a little bit. He got called on it by Baker, but Wilson didn't push the matter, because Wilson had come to trust Pershing and realized this was a misstep on Pershing's part, not a deliberate challenge

to Wilson's position. So I think there was a good understanding on the part of the military of what their role was expected to be after Veracruz as well. Well, thank you. You know, it was a very enjoyable book. I'm also a 20th century man and the early 20th century I love. And so this was, you know, turned out to be one of those like a lot of things that I didn't hadn't really put together and looked at it this way. So really good book. So what are you currently working on and how can the listeners follow you on social media or otherwise? Well, I'm working on now that this is my third book. My first one was on Wilson in Mexico.

My second one was on a man named Christian Hyrek, who was D.C.'s biggest brewer. I was tempted to go off into brewery and prohibition movement history for a while. I only got one book and some articles out of it and decided, I want to go back to Wilson. And my next one, I'm still going to stick with Wilson. I'm thinking of a history of Woodrow Wilson and the early Hollywood, because he was a huge film fan. And his secretary of the treasury, McAdoo, who was also his son-in-law, was one of the attorneys that helped form the United Artists. I should note this was not a case of nepotism, that he was Secretary of the Treasury first, and then he met Wilson's daughters, and in fact, offered to resign from the cabinet once he had married Wilson's youngest daughter as a conflict of interest, and Wilson said, no, I need you. Very interesting.

this might say hey appointed son-in-law well there's a great story because this was the day of you know people on the sunday visits you know people your young man going out courting a girl would call on the family on sunday and one sunday night the white house the white house usher comes in and says you know treasury secretary william mcadoo and wilson starts to get up and the usher continues for miss eleanor wilson and everybody kind of stops and looks at her that's great yeah i wonder if wilson thought something really bad was uh about to happen with the economy that he needed to know of he did complain at family dinners that you could complain that he said mac

just won't stop talking shop. This was a family dinner. This was to talk about fun things and family things. And he wants to talk about treasury business. Well, again, thank you for your time and we appreciate it.

And the book is available, of course, at the Naval Institute Press and other bookstores online and brick and mortar. So thank you. And, you know, we'll look forward to maybe having you come back and talk about your next book when you finish it no pressure no pressure thank you very much

thank you okay Thank you. Oh no!