In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  The President replied on October 23, pushing for more changes in the German political system and referring consideration of the terms of a future armistice to a newly created Supreme War Council of the United States and the Allies at Versailles.

  Hindenburg and Ludendorff issued a public statement saying that Wilson’s October 23 note was unacceptable and that the war must go on. Disobeying orders from the chancellor, they journeyed to Berlin to make their point. Prince Max forced a showdown in front of the kaiser, on whose orders Ludendorff resigned (October 26) and Hindenburg did not. It now was Hindenburg’s job to ensure that the military obeyed Germany’s civilian chancellor, who replied to Wilson October 27 in an effort to meet America’s terms.

  IN SOME WAYS what Wilson was doing in the year 1918–19 was rather like what a chess master does in playing a number of games at once. He found himself engaged on one playing board in a contest against domestic political opponents; on a second, against international rivals for the affection of the European Left, Lloyd George and Lenin; on a third, for the United States against the Allies on the issue of peace terms; on a fourth, for America and the Allies against Germany—and all at the same time.

  General Pershing, whose advice on armistice terms Wilson had solicited, reported to the President that he had told the Supreme War Council the military prospects were favorable and that the United States and the Allies should demand an unconditional surrender from Germany. In demanding unconditional surrender a quarter century later, in the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt may have remembered this advice; for in years to come, the virtues of Pershing’s proposal would become more evident. Such a surrender, swiftly followed by an end of the Allied blockade, would have saved the German people much suffering in the months to come; while the unconditionality of it—frank and stark—would have kept them from believing that promises were made to them that later were broken.

  From the point of view of Wilson’s desire to remake world politics, a demand for unconditional surrender, followed by German refusal, followed by a continuation of the war into 1919 or 1920, would have been a scenario that—albeit at the cost of much additional bloodshed—might have brought success. The Allies and Germans both would have become too exhausted to fight on, and the fresh and ever-growing AEF, having just begun to fight, would have been in a position to impose its will on all sides. That was to be the situation in Western Europe in 1945, and for now it was the way in which Wilson’s program could be realized of not only remaking the German, Austrian, Turkish, and Russian empires, but also reforming and purifying the politics of the Allies.

  But far from appreciating the suitability of Pershing’s strategy for achieving his objectives, Wilson saw the general’s unauthorized proposal as the gesture of a political rival. The American people were hostile to Germany and feared that their President was weak and too accommodating to the enemy; so Pershing’s initiative, were it to become known to the public, might set up a bid for the presidency. Wilson suspected that Pershing harbored such ambitions, and Mrs. Wilson was sure of it.

  Wilson neglected to tell the Allies his own ideas about the military terms of an armistice, so they took what they could get, pushing the Germans down a slope—and the President saw his own position slipping away, too. “It is certain,” he told House October 28, “that too much success … on the part of the Allies will make a genuine peace settlement exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.” His strategy for getting what he wanted had been to play off the Germans and Allies against one another, but the disintegration of Germany undercut it; he no longer could threaten the Allies with a Germany that might fight on if they overreached. And if they overreached in setting peace terms, the peace settlement, as Wilson rightly saw, would not endure.

  Wilson and House asked the Allies to tie an armistice with Germany to the Fourteen Points. They were loath to do so. Point 2, freedom of the seas, had never been accepted by the Allies, and Britain saw in it a threat to her world position. As to the rest: when it was asked at a meeting of the British War Cabinet on October 22, 1918, whether the Allies were committed to granting Germany an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points, “it was generally agreed that this was not the case.”

  House, whose brief it was in Europe to persuade the Allies otherwise, had the inspired notion of supplying an official interpretation of the Points that might narrow their meaning and applicability sufficiently to make them acceptable. At his request, Walter Lippmann provided the gloss, assisted by Frank Cobb, editor of the New York World, and Wilson approved it. On November 4 the Allies—with reservations—approved, too.

  Lippmann imagined this to be a triumph of American diplomacy. “I must write you,” he told House in a letter, “because I couldn’t possibly tell you to your face how great a thing you have achieved.… I did not believe it was humanly possible under conditions as they seemed to be in Europe to win so glorious a victory. This is the climax of a course that has been as wise as it was brilliant, and as shrewd as it was prophetic. The President and you have more than justified the faith of those who insisted that your leadership was a turning point in modern history.”

  Lippmann at this point had been taken onto House’s informal staff. So had his friend and sometime employer Major Willard Straight. They joined Grew and Auchincloss.

  Now that the United States and the Allies had papered over their differences, they were prepared to negotiate an armistice. On November 7 the Allied command ordered a local cease-fire at Compiègne, a town some fifty miles northeast of Paris, so that a German envoy could pass through in order to discuss terms. A local correspondent of the United Press wire service mistakenly understood the order as calling for a cease-fire everywhere in Europe, and cabled the news at once. There was hysterical rejoicing at the news the war was over, until the story was retracted. It was, according to The New York Times, “the most colossal news fake ever perpetrated upon the American people.”

  The real Armistice was signed November 11, and it appeared to promise the generous peace that Wilson had outlined to the world. There were many who later would believe that the November 11 Armistice therefore was an even greater hoax than the one of November 7.

  THE SIGNING OF THE ARMISTICE took place in a French railroad car near the town of Rethondes in the forest outside Compiègne. In great confusion the German delegates had been waiting there for some sort of authorization from whatever government functioned in Germany to affix their signatures.

  In due course the authorization had arrived. Meanwhile the Allies had granted their one and only concession to objections raised by the waiting German delegates. The Allies had demanded that the German army surrender 30,000 machine guns upon signing the Armistice. The delegation spoke for the army in protesting that “there would not be enough left to fire on the German people, should this become necessary.” Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied generalissimo,* thereupon relented and allowed the Germans to keep 5,000 of the 30,000 machine guns—so that their army could indeed use them against their civilian population.

  Only a year and a half before, the President of the United States had told the Congress that America was going to war not against the German people, but against their military regime. Times had changed. The President never had been in a position to speak for the Allies on the German question; but now they were in a position to speak for him.

  Shortly after 5:30 a.m. on November 11, Willard Straight had phoned in the news that the Armistice had been signed, to take effect (as House’s relative Sidney Mezes later put it) “on the stroke of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918.

  Unnoticed in the excitement was a fact that should have been disturbing: the Germans and the Allies had not accepted the same armistice terms. The Germans had agreed on the basis of Wilson’s publicly stated Fourteen Points, Four Principles, and Five Particulars. The Allies had accepted, with reservations, only on the basis of Walter Lippmann’s secret gloss that narrowed and to some extent explained away th
e Fourteen Points—a gloss of which the Germans knew nothing. So trouble lay ahead.

  Meanwhile November 11, according to Joseph Grew’s later account, “was the greatest day I have seen or ever shall see.” The streets of Paris overflowed with singing, cheering crowds, while women danced down the boulevards kissing every man in uniform. The celebrations went on, wrote Grew; for three days.

  Straight came up to Paris, to the Hotel Crillon, the day the Armistice was signed. Grew now appointed him general executive officer of the secretariat. Grew and Straight drew up a detailed chart organizing the work of the American delegation, which they submitted to House. Although a chart earlier had been prepared by the Inquiry, House (according to Grew) said of the Grew-Straight plan that it was “the best and in fact the only practical one he had yet seen.”

  Grew, Straight, and Lippmann set out to put the plan into operation. On the night of November 17, they dined together. The next morning, all of them woke up with the chills, aches, pains, and headaches of the influenza that was then reaching epidemic proportions. Within a week Grew and Lippmann had recovered, but Straight never did; he passed away December 1. Willard Straight had embodied the idealism of his generation of Americans, and it was an ill omen that he should die at the start of the peace conference in which he and his fellows had invested all their hopes for remaking the world. He was buried on a small hill overlooking the Seine.

  BETWEEN THE END OF OCTOBER 1918 and the middle of November, the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire disintegrated and then disappeared. In its place were newly proclaimed independent states: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. All that remained was German Austria, which awaited such terms as the Allies might impose. The last of the Hapsburg emperors, Charles, fled into exile.

  In November Germany broke apart under the strain of the Armistice negotiations. In the port of Kiel, admirals who feared an ignominious surrender planned to order the fleet to steam out into the high seas to attack the British navy; but rumors of the plan led to a mutiny in which a sailors’ council took charge. Then a similar council took power in Wilhelmshaven, Germany’s largest naval base. Inspired by these successes, sailors, soldiers, and workers took control of cities throughout northern Germany in the first week of November.

  In the south, Bavaria, threatened with invasion through Austria by Franchet d’Esperey and fearful that Prince Max might not surrender in time, seceded under Left Socialist leadership, proclaiming itself an independent republic.

  This led Kaiser Wilhelm to abdicate on behalf of himself and his dynasty, and to flee the country. Prince Max resigned on November 9 in favor of the Socialist leader Friedrich Ebert as authority disintegrated. Spearheaded by the Spartacists—the communists—the Left blocked Ebert’s formation of a government, and Ebert turned for support to the army’s Supreme Command. But even the army was disintegrating. To prop up Ebert, the Supreme Command called on individual officers to recruit volunteer forces of their own. These “free corps” armies then waged and won a bloody civil war against Bavarian secessionists, and against communists and their allies, that was not concluded until June 1919.

  So two of Woodrow Wilson’s objectives in Germany, the overthrow of the kaiser’s government and the defeat of the communist revolt, were achieved; but they were accomplished by the very military clique that Wilson believed made Germany a threat to the world’s peace—and left that clique, albeit behind the scenes, in a position to exert power.

  IN A SPEECH IN NEW YORK CITY in the autumn of 1918, Wilson had said that he would never come to terms with people as dishonorable as Germany’s rulers. In a similar vein his young State Department adviser William Bullitt counseled (in a memorandum dated October 4, 1918) that no offer of armistice or peace, however reasonable, be entertained unless it were offered by a “government controlled by the German people.” Wilson himself, in his notes to Prince Max in October 1918 leading to the Armistice, made it clear that he would not accept an armistice or peace proposal if the offer came from a government headed by Kaiser Wilhelm.

  Unlike the leaders of Britain and France—who thought in traditional terms of national security, vital interests, and balance of power, and to whom “the German problem” was that Germany was much too powerful as compared with her neighbors—Wilson was a spokesman for a new and American doctrine of politics, according to which the German problem was that Germany had the wrong kind of government. In this view, Germany could be infinitely powerful and yet not disturb the peace if she became a democracy. History provided examples of democracies that were imperialist and war-loving, but Wilson ignored them. In his speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war, and in his reply (aided by Walter Lippmann) to the 1917 peace plea of the pope, the President had outlined his view that it was the militarism pervading German society and the German government that had caused the outbreak of the war.

  The President’s program therefore was to change Germany. To do that—to persuade the German people to alter their social and political system—he would have had to show them that their existing system, their militarist system, did not bring them what they wanted—happy, secure, prosperous lives—while democracy could and would. That meant being brutal to Germany when she was militarist, and kind to her when she was not. It meant offering her harsh peace terms so long as she continued to follow the kaiser and his generals, but easy and generous terms if she overthrew them.

  Once Wilson had decided on stiff peace terms in any event, it should have been clear to him what road he had to follow. Instead of denying Kaiser Wilhelm and the Ludendorff military regime a chance to surrender, the President should have insisted that they do the surrendering—and in public. The German people should have been obliged to see their military leaders—not their civilian ones—humbled. Wilson then should have seen to it that a military regime stayed in place during Germany’s months of collapse, disorder, and bitter hardship.

  Only if and when he could persuade the Allies to treat Germany generously should Wilson have encouraged Germany to change to a democratic regime. That would have shown the German people that a civilian government, a democratic society, and a peaceful foreign policy bring rewards.

  Instead Wilson allowed the kaiser to run away, Ludendorff to resign, and both of them to avoid the odium of defeat. It was kept secret from the public that the generals were the ones who had asked for an armistice. All responsibility for the disgrace of surrender and for the horrors that followed it were shifted onto the shoulders of democrats, socialists, and civilians.

  It was Wilson’s muddled approach to armistice-making, including his decision to end the war before the U.S. and Allied armies had a chance to invade Germany, that made it possible for German text writers, inspired by Ludendorff and the military, to teach their young that the German army had not been defeated in the war; that Germany’s generals had wanted to continue the fight; that unpatriotic Leftists had allowed themselves to be fooled into signing an armistice by fraudulent Allied promises of generous terms; and that it was only a collapse on the home front engineered by socialists, Jews, and other civilians—“a stab in the back”—that had brought down the German army. It was on the basis of this false history that young Adolf Hitler and his colleagues were to start in 1919 along the path that would lead to power, world war, and mass murder.

  The real stab in the back at the end of 1918 was the one administered to the hopes for German democracy. The knife was wielded by the German army’s Supreme Command, and in particular by Ludendorff, who was to become the godfather of Hitler’s Nazi party. But the deed was made possible only by Wilson’s failure to grasp the basic principle of behavioral psychology: you reward conduct that you want to encourage and punish conduct that you want to discourage.

  Wilson rewarded militarism by insisting that the kaiser and his generals not assume the responsibility for surrendering. When Germany adopted a democratic form of government, he then punished her by stiffening his peace terms—and continuing a blockade that brought hardship to the Ger
man people. He should have done it the other way around.

  * In March 1918, under pressure from Lloyd George, Wilson had agreed to the appointment of an overall military chief in Europe, while maintaining the integrity and independence of the American army. Looking forward to mid-1919, when most of the troops on the western front would finally be American, Pershing assumed that he would then replace Foch as generalissimo.

  PART FIVE

  A SEPARATE PEACE

  23

  THE GEORGE WASHINGTON GOES TO EUROPE

  EVEN BEFORE PRESIDENT WILSON and his men brought the United States into the war, they had been thinking about the peace. In a diary entry dated September 29, 1917, Colonel House noted that “in speaking of the peace conference, I told Howard [Roy Howard, head of the United Press] of my suggestion to the President of more than a year ago that he should go in person. Howard thought it an admirable suggestion.”

  It would be unprecedented. Theodore Roosevelt had traveled to Panama, but no President had ever gone overseas during his term of office. On the other hand, the peace conference was going to be the biggest event since the Congress of Vienna. Wilson aspired to change the world and bring about perpetual peace; if that could be accomplished at the conference, it would be the biggest moment in history. The President could play the leading role in it: thus, the temptation to go proved irresistible.

  Even the postmaster general, House told Wilson in October 1917, “desired to be a peace commissioner, in fact, everybody I knew desired to be one. The President replied, ‘Do you think the American people would sustain me in being the only representative from the United States at the conference?’ I did not know.…” House recalled that he had suggested the idea two years earlier but that conditions had changed; now there would be committees at the peace conference, so at least three American representatives would be needed.