The goldbrick war

The goldbrick war names the gap between the war’s public ideals and the bargain as experienced by the people sent to fight or keep its ships moving. In the book, the phrase begins as a sailor’s blunt verdict in Genoa and returns, sharpened into an argument against the war’s political sponsors. Its force grows through nearby episodes of corporate monopoly, dangerous sea traffic, oil rivalry, and vast wartime loans: the men at the exposed end of the system call the deal crooked, while the scale of finance and commerce gives that judgment a material setting.

The phrase in Genoa

During a night ashore in Genoa, Richard Ellsworth Savage and his companions meet an American sailor whose boat has arrived with mules. The sailor shows them silk stockings salvaged from a burning oilship, and the group shares cognac beside an old stone lion. Their talk turns from the war’s hardships to its fairness. The sailor declares, “This whole goddam war’s a gold brick, it ain’t on the level, its crooked from A to Z,” then says that men like them get the worst of it whatever the outcome. His conclusion is not a program or a political theory but a refusal to keep treating the official purpose of the war as a trustworthy account of who benefits.

The scene gives that refusal a physical gesture. Singing “To hell wid ’em,” the sailor hurls the empty bottle at the lion’s head; the stone figure keeps staring ahead. The blow changes nothing, and the men move on when onlookers gather. The episode makes the expression sound at once comic, drunken, and angry: the sailor can strike a monument, but not the distant powers he accuses of arranging the bargain.

From sailors’ talk to a letter home

At Bassano, Richard Ellsworth Savage takes up the sailor’s judgment in a letter to Hilda Thurlow, replying to her enthusiastic account of the war as a cause that would end war. He writes that it is “a dirty goldbrick game put over by governments and politicians for their own selfish interests,” and invokes the Genoa sailor’s verdict that the whole thing is crooked. What had been a rough exchange over cognac becomes a considered challenge to the moral language used to encourage young men to enlist. Savage argues that urging them into war undermines the Christian principles and ideals Edwin Thurlow believes in; he also notes that censorship prevents him from telling the Thurlows what he has witnessed.

The letter does not leave Savage in a settled state of certainty. He later finds himself doubting the usefulness of his own phrases about liberty and civilization, then turns to making rum punch and talking with Steve Warner about books, painting, and architecture. That recoil complicates the expression without cancelling it: the accusation remains, but the language available to articulate it can feel inadequate beside the lived conditions of war.

Commerce, risk, and the exposed end of the bargain

An earlier episode aboard the United Fruit Company vessel Callao places a company-specific version of exploitation beside the broader accusation. While the ship waits outside Roseau for limes to be crated, a local old man tells Joe Williams and a fellow quartermaster that United Fruit is a monopoly: if growers will not accept its prices, he says, the company lets their limes rot on the wharf. He calls the company thieves, while distinguishing the sailors from the owners whose interests they serve. His complaint is not the same as the Genoa sailor’s statement about the war, but it echoes the expression’s central division between decision-makers and workers who have little control over the terms of their labor.

The sea voyage to Genoa supplies another part of that material setting. Camouflaged freighters creep along the coast with lifepreservers on deck and boats swung out, while transports, colliers, and hospital ships return from the Mediterranean. Allied warships patrol offshore, and destroyers board merchant vessels to inspect their papers. The traffic makes the war an immense system of transport and risk, not merely a contest of stated ideals. The sailor’s judgment is voiced by one of the men circulating through that system, among vessels and cargoes exposed to the consequences of decisions made elsewhere.

The postwar echo of the accusation

The book extends the contrast beyond the soldiers’ immediate experience. After the opera in Paris, an engineer with Standard Oil discusses Baku and other Near Eastern oil interests with J. Ward Moorehouse, Eveline Hutchins, and Eleanor Stoddard. He worries that British and Dutch competitors will outmaneuver the United States and says that American public opinion could be roused to protect its position in world oil production. This is not presented as another use of the phrase, but it places the language of national interest beside competition for strategic resources as the peace settlement is still being negotiated.

A separate financial passage gives the contrast a striking scale. It states that by 1917 the Allies had borrowed $1.9 billion through the House of Morgan, immediately setting this beside the declaration that “we went overseas for democracy and the flag.” By the end of the Peace Conference, the phrase “J. P. Morgan suggests” carries power over seventy-four billion dollars. The juxtaposition does not make the sailor’s outburst a complete explanation of the war; it shows why the accusation resonates across the book. The men call the bargain crooked from the exposed end of it, while the later accounting places finance and corporate power beside the public language in whose name the war was fought.