SEVEN

War, Peace, and Politics, 1914-1918

THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR THE 1916 UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL election was the incumbent, Woodrow Wilson. The nation was consumed with one central question: Should the United States enter the war? For more than two excruciating years, America had stood by while Europe suffered appalling losses. At the time, the United States was a nation of recent immigrants, and many Americans had strong ties to Europe. A vast number of them were crying out for America to join. Pitted against Wilson was the only person ever to resign a seat on the Supreme Court to run for president of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes.

Woodrow Wilson’s campaign slogan was “He kept us out of war.” Charles Evans Hughes agreed that the United States should remain neutral. Many others believed that the nation’s passivity was shameful.

One who held this opinion with special fervency was a forty-twoyear-old Scot named John James Rickard Macleod. He was the chair of the physiology department of Case Reserve Medical School (now Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine) in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the preeminent medical schools in America. A discipline within biological science, physiology is the study of the normal mechanical, physical, and biochemical processes of the tissues and organs of animals and plants, including nutrition, movement, and reproduction. In Cleveland, Macleod distinguished himself as a medical authority and a favorite teacher. In 1913 he published the monograph Diabetes: Its Pathological Physiology, adding this title to a growing list of journal articles, book chapters, and lectures that bore his byline. But as his professional career was escalating, so were the tensions in Europe, where both his family and his wife’s family lived. Since moving to Ohio, Macleod and his wife had spent every other summer with family in Aberdeen, Scotland, but when Britain went to war in 1914, their trips overseas stopped.

The son of a hardworking, popular reverend with the Free Church of Scotland (Presbyterian), John was the eldest of five, having two brothers and two sisters. His brother Clement had followed him into medicine, and in November of 1914 he enlisted and was sent immediately to France with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). America watched from across the Atlantic, and with increasing agitation, so did the eldest Macleod.

When the Germans sank the British luxury liner Lusitania in May 1915, causing the loss of 128 American civilian lives, Macleod was sure that America would enter the war at last. The tragedy drew a hue and cry from the American people and supported the rising tide of anti- German sentiment. Many Americans of German descent suffered for this. Wilson sent three formal messages to Germany, each more strongly worded than the previous one. Some Americans objected to Wilson’s response for being too mild, others decried it for being too strong. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest over Wilson’s handling of the matter.

On July 1, 1916, as Wilson and Hughes traversed the country giving campaign speeches, the Battle of the Somme began. It was to be the bloodiest day in the history of the British army, resulting in 57,470 British casualties, including 19,240 dead. Macleod was nearly mad with anxiety. How could American leaders continue to defend a position of neutrality in the face of such a devastating toll? In April, the Germans used poison gas for the first time. Meanwhile Americans hummed to songs by Irving Berlin and W. C. Handy as Ford’s one-millionth car rolled off the assembly line and D. W. Griffith’s Civil War epic, Birth of a Nation was released.

Macleod’s vitriolic despair began to poison his relationships. He became increasingly critical of the university president, dean, and trustees, several members of the faculty, and Americans in general. His wife was unwell. His brother Robert, who had gone to sea as an engineer, died mysteriously in the Malay Peninsula. Clement, who had been away at the war for nearly three years, developed tuberculosis. He was awarded the British Military Cross (MC) and eventually returned to Aberdeen to die.

Within months of Woodrow Wilson’s election to a second term as president, he who had campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war” committed to sending American troops across the Atlantic. The American Expeditionary Force began training in the spring of 1918; it would be the largest force ever to leave American shores. But it was too late for Macleod.

After fifteen years at Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Macleod made up his mind to bring an end to what had been a largely successful career as a prolific researcher and teacher. As far as Macleod was concerned, America had abandoned the British Empire, and so he would abandon America. He resigned the professorship of physiology in 1918.

Macleod was a world authority on carbohydrates and metabolism. Any medical school in the United States would have been delighted to add him to its faculty roster. Had he chosen Harvard, he would be near to Joslin. Had he chosen Yale, he would be near to Allen. Macleod transferred to the University of Toronto, deliberately resituating himself within the dominions of the British Empire.

In June 1918, Jake and Mary Macleod moved into a lovely English country-style house, built by an English architect, in the Rosedale section of Toronto. Sir Robert Falconer, president of the University of Toronto, had been courting Macleod since 1916. He knew that he had scored a great victory in signing him to the medical school faculty. What he could not yet know was just how great a victory it was. In this single act, he had committed the university to the pages of history in indelible ink and would secure for Canada its first Nobel Prize.