Other reasons suggest themselves, too. Those the Americans were watching were Frenchmen; it was not unnatural that they should feel more detached than if they were watching fellow countrymen fight and die. The Americans might sympathize with the French cause, but it was not, after all, their own. Nor were the goals France hoped to achieve if she won the war objectives about which Americans were likely to care deeply. And by the time Americans arrived on the battlefield, many Frenchmen had become discouraged and cynical about the causes of the war, and may well have communicated that feeling.
Then, too, a certain indifference to the Allied cause was implicit in the very project of coming to the war in order to use it for literary purposes. In a sense, the ambulance drivers/writers were on the field of battle as voyeurs rather than as participants. One of the characters in the Dos Passos novel 1919 is quoted by Cowley as saying, “This ain’t a war … it’s a goddam Cook’s tour.…” To be there and take part in it in order to write home about it was to be, in a certain way, a tourist.
The spectatorial way—the tourist way—of seeing the fighting, the suffering, and the bloodshed and trying to grasp and feel the tragedy of it, while at the same time remaining indifferent to the causes and goals of the war, led to the conclusion that the war was pointless and wrong: that the Europeans had been wicked to start it and Wilson’s Americans had been fools to join in it. This reinforced the impression brought back by the everyman soldiers, the Harry Trumans, that Americans should go home and not get involved in any more European conflicts.
THROUGH PARIS IN 1918 there passed yet another species of tourist from the United States. It was natural that politicians would want to visit the battlefield and to be able to say that they had seen war firsthand. Of the many in Washington eager to travel to Europe, none can have been more ambitious to make the trip than Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was determined to go overseas. Throughout 1917 and 1918 he kept urging Daniels to let him undertake a mission abroad, but the secretary continued to say no. By the summer of 1918, however, it seemed advisable for either the secretary or the assistant secretary to make an inspection trip to Europe; congressmen were scheduled to go on such trips of their own, and it seemed only prudent to anticipate whatever criticisms Republicans might direct against the Democratic civilian administration of the navy. It was out of the question for Daniels to leave Washington, for he was indispensable; so Roosevelt, whose role at the Navy Department was never vital, was allowed to be the one to go.
The trip began well. Putting out of mind how badly it ended, Roosevelt always was to regard it as a high point in his life. On July 9 he embarked for Europe on a new destroyer, the USS Dyer, making her maiden crossing. A gun drill, a false alarm, the fear of submarines, a brief disablement of the Dyer that called for minor repairs: out of such materials Roosevelt imagined a rich wartime experience for himself upon which he drew deeply in the years to come.
The Dyer landed in England at Portsmouth. Roosevelt was greeted in style and brought to a suite at the Ritz in London as a guest of the admiralty. He was taken to meetings with the civilian and uniformed heads of the Royal Navy, the foreign secretary (Arthur Balfour), the prime minister (David Lloyd George), and even the king. Indeed, so grandly was he received that his private audience at Buckingham Palace with King George V lasted forty-five minutes, Roosevelt noted, rather than the usual fifteen.
After ten days in the British Isles, Roosevelt crossed to France, landing at Dunkerque and proceeding the next day to Paris, where the French government installed him in the Hotel Crillon, once an eighteenth-century palace, on the Place de la Concorde. Again he was received by heads of state and government. He attended a luncheon in honor of Herbert Hoover at the presidential palace, where he met President Raymond Poincaré; he also visited Premier Georges Clemenceau.
At a little house near the Arc de Triomphe, Roosevelt took tea one afternoon with two of TR’s sons, Theodore, Jr. (“Ted”), and Archibald. Both had outstanding war records and been severely wounded in battle; Roosevelt wrote that “Archie was … looking horribly badly.”
Most tragic was the fate of the son who was not there. Quentin, TR’s youngest, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Flying Corps, had been shot down and killed on the western front two weeks earlier. The twenty-year-old had been the best-loved of TR’s children. Nearsightedness should have kept him out of the service, but he fooled the examiners by memorizing the eye charts in advance. Nothing would keep him away from combat when his country was at war. “We boys,” he said, “thought it was up to us to practice what Father preached.”
“But Mrs. Roosevelt, how am I going to break it to her?” TR had said when told about Quentin. To an old friend, he wrote that “… if I had not myself gone to war in my day I don’t think I could have borne to send my sons to face death now.”
After tea with his cousins, Franklin Roosevelt returned to his hotel, where he dined, and then joined traveling members of the House Naval Affairs Committee, who also were staying at the Crillon, in a night on the town. They began at the Folies-Bergères, and then were guided elsewhere, returning raucously at 4 a.m. Roosevelt nightclubbed all the next night, too.
Although Roosevelt spent several days visiting the scenes of some of the fiercest battles and proved to be a tireless tourist who was determined to get as close as possible to the front, he occupied almost all the rest of August and early September in merrymaking. In the words of his companion Livingston Davis: “FD having joy ride.” According to one biographer, in Scotland, where they went fishing, Roosevelt and Davis “drank like undergraduates,” and Roosevelt awakened to find a fox in his bed.
Then there was more partying back in London before Roosevelt crossed to France to embark for home September 12. Through all the carousing, he had been talking about finally becoming a fighting man, as though all the madcap weeks of parties and nightclubs in Europe were one gigantic farewell party before at last he went to war. But in his cabin aboard ship, he collapsed. He had come down with double pneumonia. He was carried off the boat when it docked in New York September 19, and was taken to his mother’s house.
Eleanor came to be with him, but in unpacking his clothes came across letters from Lucy Mercer, from which she learned of the love affair between her husband and her friend and former secretary. “The bottom dropped out of my … world,” Eleanor said later. The crisis engulfed Franklin. Weak, with his health shattered (he no sooner recovered from the pneumonia than he was seized by influenza), he faced the loss of his wife and five children, the destruction of his political career, and his mother’s threat to cut off his income and his inheritance if he disgraced the family by divorcing.
For once he could not make everyone happy by telling each what he or she wanted to hear. Indeed, he could not make anyone happy. To avoid ruin, he would have to break with Lucy, which would hurt her badly and make him miserable. He would deprive himself of the love, support, and companionship of the only woman who fulfilled his needs. He had shattered Eleanor, who would never really recover: “I can forgive,” she said years later, “but I cannot forget.” His marriage, the physical part of which was at an end, from now on would be something more in the nature of a political alliance; and neither Franklin nor Eleanor would be comforted by love or intimacy until the day they could negotiate an agreement to allow one another the freedom to form relationships with others.
Roosevelt’s illness dragged on, and he was in no fit state to make decisions that suddenly had to be made nonetheless. Things had caught up with him. An hour before midnight October 31, he went to see President Wilson to say that he could wait no longer and must join the fighting forces, only to be told that it was too late: he had lost his chance. An armistice seemed to be imminent. In a few weeks or even days, the fighting was likely to end.
For Wilson, too, and in affairs of far more general concern and greater consequence, midnight was about to sound. The war was coming to an end too soon for the AEF to play a major role
in winning it. Yet the President’s hopes for forcing his own kind of peace terms on the reluctant Allies rested on the ability of Pershing’s armies to emerge as the dominating force on the European battlefield. For that to happen, the war would have to last for another year or two. Pershing’s plan was to launch the first big American offensive in the spring and summer of 1919; given the chance to do so, he believed he could win the war on America’s terms.
THROUGHOUT THE WAR, Dwight Eisenhower had bombarded his superiors with requests to be sent overseas for combat duty. He had been too valuable a training officer, and they had kept him in the United States.
But on his twenty-eighth birthday, October 14, 1918, his luck turned. He was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel with orders to embark for France on November 18, 1918. He was directed to take command of an armored unit in Pershing’s long-planned spring offensive of 1919. As such he would be in the forefront of battle as the United States finally made its debut on the European battlefield as an independent great military power.
Eisenhower was shaken when the news came that it was too late, that Pershing would never launch his offensive—and that the orders sending him to Europe were canceled.
“I suppose we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining why we didn’t get into this war,” he said despairingly to a fellow officer.
21
DISILLUSION BEFORE VERSAILLES
DESPITE WHAT Wilson told Franklin Roosevelt the night of October 31, and despite the fact that what Wilson predicted at the time turned out to be true, nobody could have been certain that evening that peace was close at hand. Only months before, Britain’s Imperial War Cabinet in London had been advised by the chief of the General Staff that victory in Europe could not be won before the middle of 1919 and was more likely to be over in the summer of 1920. Although in October 1918 serious armistice proposals were being circulated by Germany and her allies, the war continued, and it was entirely possible that the war would continue for some time.
Wilson was nowhere near as effective a war leader as Lloyd George had been in Great Britain or as TR might have been in the United States. Not until 1919 would he have a chance to show how he could perform in a role that he found congenial: that of peacemaker. But many—even among those who had been his supporters—had come to believe in advance that he was going to fail even at that. A majority of voters in the United States were about to repudiate his leadership without waiting to see whether he could prove more effective in making peace than he had in making war.
What is commonly supposed to have happened only after Wilson went to Europe to negotiate the peace in fact occurred several months earlier, before he had left American shores and while he was still directing the war. The story as handed down is that America’s hopes—and mankind’s—were shattered by the peace conference that assembled in Paris in 1919, and that disillusionment was a product of the Treaty of Versailles. But Americans began losing faith in Woodrow Wilson and his promises well before the peace conference assembled. Indeed, their disillusion played a role in undermining the President’s position in the negotiations.
They were disappointed that in wartime Wilson acted as a party, rather than a national, leader. Historians claim that his last-minute appeal to the voters to elect a Democratic Congress in the autumn of 1918 was a damaging blunder, but perhaps they attach too much weight to the effect of that single plea. His partisanship in deeds, rather than words, proved far more harmful in the end.
When war came, he did not invite leading figures of the Republican party to join his government and provide it with a national character. He did not offer a wartime role to TR, although a leading role for the warrior-statesman would have raised morale at home and abroad; nor did he associate Republican leaders, however capable, with the conduct of the war. The result was that the humiliating shortcomings of the American economy, and the delays in getting the AEF ready to fight, were blamed entirely upon him and his party.
For use in the midterm elections of 1918, TR delivered an indictment of the administration that attacked Wilson for not having adequately prepared for war before April 1917 and for not having effectively mobilized to wage war thereafter. It rang true.
By the spring of 1918, when Ludendorff launched his deadly offensives with troops brought back from Russia—and nearly won the war—he gave Americans and the Allies the scare of their lives. Voters in the United States were shocked into a realization that the AEF was still not ready to fight or equipped to fight.
The United States was a giant of a manufacturing country. It was difficult to understand why it was unable to produce boats, tanks, guns, or airplanes effectively, and why the AEF had to fight with tanks, artillery pieces, and aircraft borrowed from the French. Wilson, by choosing to lead a party rather than a national government, had assumed sole responsibility and therefore blame for it all. And though he fired the administrators who failed, and though his new appointees were making a creditable start at war administration in 1918, he was not forgiven for having lost a year in trial and error.
Wilson’s position in the congressional elections of 1918 would in any event have been a vulnerable one. His Senate supporters who were up for reelection that year were those who had won their seats in the freak election of 1912, the year that the split in the Republican party between TR and Taft had allowed Democrats to slip into office with less than a majority. Now such Democrats faced an uphill fight to retain seats they would not have won in the first place except for a lucky accident.
Indeed, in 1918 luck ran against them; it was a bad year for a northern or western politician to be a Democrat. Since the Civil War, the Democrats had been perceived as the party of the South. Their congressional leadership was disproportionately southern. Southern-born Woodrow Wilson’s undoing in the midterm elections of 1918 was that he made decisions that could be misrepresented convincingly as benefiting the special interests of the South.
It had to do with administered prices. The war brought about an inflation that the government failed to control; consumer prices doubled in the second Wilson administration. Farmers, though they saw the value of their crops rise, saw the costs of farming soar even more. They sought and obtained price supports as protection. But after wheat farmers in 1918 asked that their guaranteed minimum price of $2.20 per bushel be raised to $2.40, the press attacked the proposed legislation. Great Britain protested that the rise would cost her, for current purchases alone, an extra $100 million. So Wilson, who also feared the effects of yet more inflation, rejected the rise in price supports for wheat.
Yet cotton had gotten its minimum price raised. Cotton, of course, was grown in the South, and wheat in the West; thus it looked (or could be made to look) as though Wilson were favoring the South at the expense of the West.
The West, which had given Wilson the presidency in the election of 1916, now turned against him and started him on the road to political ruin. It was in the West that the Republican party wrested control of the Senate and the House of Representatives in the midterm elections of November 1918. The President’s party went down to a defeat made all the more dramatic by contrast with what happened when Great Britain went to the polls a few weeks later—and gave a landslide victory of historic proportions to supporters of Lloyd George.
That the President’s party was defeated meant that Wilson could not really speak for his country at a future peace conference. The leaders of other nations were on notice that they might be wasting their time in dealing with the President: that the Senate might not ratify a treaty that he negotiated. And it was an opinion held widely that Wilson would be defeated if he stood for reelection to a third term in 1920, and that the Republican victor would be TR.
IN 1918 A NUMBER of Americans were unhappy that their country was not yet playing the great role in the war that would be worthy of her. At the same time some of the outstanding young Americans in noncombat positions began to feel that they, too, had not been performing their proper role in the war
. On July 26 John Foster Dulles, an intelligence officer engaged in economic warfare, formally requested a line commission that would allow him to go into combat. Robert Taft wrote to Herbert Hoover, his chief at the Food Administration, on October 18, saying that physical standards for induction into the armed forces had been lowered; there was a chance that he might be accepted for duty despite his poor eyesight, and he strongly requested permission to enlist. It was two weeks later that Franklin Roosevelt went to the President with his own request to join the armed forces.
Willard Straight, former Morgan banker and founder of The New Republic, who had tried always to set an example, was another whose thoughts turned to combat service. He began to feel unease in staying with his army job dealing with war risk insurance when his contemporaries actually were exposing themselves to risk. In Straight’s reflections, many of the growing doubts ran parallel: his doubts about himself, about Wilson, about the Allies, and about America’s role in world affairs.
On October 13 he wrote to his wife that “what I’m afraid of now is that the British and French … may demand their pound of flesh. The jealousy in England of our increasing power is more manifest, I understand, all the time …,” and Britain might join France in blocking America’s plan to offer “a fair deal with Germany.” Woodrow Wilson “is not a leader—not for a minute. He’s no more ready for peace than he was for war. The people have done everything, forced everything that has been done. He has merely made speeches.… He has anticipated nothing and prepared for nothing that I can see. What’s more, he’s refused to let others do it. We stand in a fair way of having fought the war, lost thousands of lives and millions of dollars, upset everything, and of not getting the peace we started for”—and all because Wilson did not bring the Allies to terms when they were down. “The trouble is that it should have been done when our Allies were much less cocky than they are now. They would have agreed to anything then. It will be difficult to line ’em up now.”
In the Time of the Americans Page 25
