W CHAPTER 1 WAR THE LIBERTY LOANS AR, the scourge and the lash of nations, the destroyer of men's bodies and the quickener of men's souls, beat its drums of doom and sounded its bugles of glory to the United States on the night of the sixth of April, 1917, when the House of Representatives passed and the President signed the Senate Resolution declaring the existence of a state of war with Germany. From the Capitol, glistening in white splendor beneath the deluge of an April rain, with the beacon in its dome signaling to the world the portent of the sessions in its historic halls, ran the waves of message to the land at large. Over the hills of Maryland and Virginia, past Gettysburg, across valleys awakening to the urge of springtime, beyond dark mountains, to north, to south, to east, to west flashed the awaited moment of knowledge that the American people had entered the greatest of all wars. As mankind has and will, men met the moment, each with his own reaction to its portent. To the great majority of the American people the declaration came with the fortification of inevitability. With Germany's proclamation of January 31st, closing the seas to neutral vessels, the general mind of the United States had realized that national selfrespect, demanding defense of rights upon which the nation had always insisted, made the war impossible of further postponement. In his pronouncement to Congress on April 2nd, when he had declared, "We will not choose the path of submission and suffer the sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored and violated," the President had spoken for the mass of his countrymen to whom, as he insisted, "the right is more precious than peace." It is not beyond the fact to say that McAdoo, as Secretary of the Treasury, helped tremendously to translate the war to the intelligence and emotion of the American people. The Liberty Loan tours, bringing him into direct contact with hundreds of thousands of men and women, laid the main tracks upon which ran the gospel train of his patriotism. To hundreds of little communities on horizon-bounded prairies, in shadowed mountain passes, on desolate seacoasts the tall, thin, hollow-cheeked, blazing-eyed man on the rear platform of a railway train symbolized the Government of the United States. In the gray of dawn, in the blaze of noontide, in the flare of torchlight he stood before them, exhorting, explaining, pleading, leading, flinging out sparks of that fire which lighted his own altar. Without the classic magnificence of Wilson or the romantic effulgence of Bryan, his oratory had a persuasiveness and a power which brought him vitally close to the average man. He had, too, more than adequate reason for consciousness of kinship with the crowd. Not only did his family background root him deep in the national soil, but his immediate family gave hostage to the conflict overseas. His three sons, Francis Huger, William Gibbs, Junior, and Robert, had joined the Navy upon the country's entrance into war. "I would not confess that I had three sons," their father declared with Spartan self-abnegation, "if they did not have the spirit of America in them"; and it was in speak |