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sidewalk outside. Gerard seized the arm of one of the Metropolitan’s directors and urged him to read the news from the stage and have the orchestra play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “No,” the director said,“the opera company is neutral.”
    The enraged former ambassador rushed to his box seat and shouted the news to the startled audience. He urged everyone to cheer President Wilson. Very few of these rich people had voted for the president; the response was halfhearted at first. But patriotism soon inspired a louder hurrah, especially when the orchestra undertook the national anthem.
    Satisfied, Gerard sat down to enjoy the rest of the opera. But he and the audience were doomed to disappointment. German-born soprano Margaret Ober, deeply distressed by the news, fainted in the middle of the next act. She had to be carried off the stage, leaving an artistic vacuum through which the other singers floundered to the final curtain. 46
    In Cincinnati, the city’s symphony, one of the nation’s best, played “The Star-Spangled Banner” in magnificent style when the news arrived. Then the conductor, Ernest Kunwald, turned to his mostly German-American audience with tears streaming down his cheeks and said,“But my heart is on the other side!” 47

XIV
    The next morning, pro-war newspapers and public spokespeople of all stripes made Colonel House’s praise of Wilson’s “communication” seem tame. Frank Cobb’s editorial in the New York World declared that the hope of the whole world rested on Wilson’s words. The New York Tribune , eating Cass Gilbert’s sneers, proclaimed: “No praise is too high for Wilson.” the Times of London, once considered the greatest newspaper on the globe, opined:“We doubt if in all history a great community has ever been summoned to war on grounds so largely ideal.” 48
    Private letters loaded with equally extravagant praise poured into the White House and the mailboxes of Wilson’s intimates.“The president’s address is magnificent,” wrote twenty-seven-year old Walter Lippmann, already a star liberal spokesperson on the editorial board of the New Republic, in a letter to Colonel House. “It puts the whole thing exactly where it needed to be put and does it with real nobility of feeling.”
    Other leading liberal intellectuals, such as Columbia University philosopher John Dewey and Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation , were similarly swept away by Wilson’s rhetoric. After years of denouncing Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and anyone else who urged the United States to get into the war, these men suddenly saw the president as the leader of a “stupendous revolution” that would change the world. 49
    In Missouri, a thirty-three-year-old farmer named Harry S. Truman was amazed to discover that Wilson’s speech had transformed local attitudes toward the war—including his own—from bored indifference to crusading fervor. Although Truman was the chief support of his mother and sister and beyond draft age, he decided to volunteer. “I felt like Galahad after the Grail,” he said later—an example of Wilson’s ability to tap the latent idealism in the soul of many Americans. 50

XV
    In Washington, D.C., Congress convened at noon on April 3 and spent the first hour noting the avalanche of letters and telegrams its members had received from individuals, mass meetings, impromptu committees of public safety, and state legislatures, most of them endorsing the president’s stance. While this chore was filling twenty-four pages of tiny type in the Congressional Record, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was discussing a resolution stating that war had been “thrust upon” the United States by the imperial German government and was now formally declared. The document had been drafted the previous night by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
    The chairman of the Senate committee, William J. Stone of Missouri, startled everyone by casting a negative