The point of such statements soon became clear. Defeated in the Senate, Wilson had decided that he would win his campaign for American membership in the League of Nations by going to the people in a vast national referendum. The referendum would be the presidential elections of 1920. From his sickbed, the President had decided to run for an unprecedented third term.
FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR ROOSEVELT were on what a later generation would call the White House enemies list. Their offense was that they had invited Viscount Grey of Fallodon, among others, to their home for Christmas dinner in 1919. The almost blind retired British foreign secretary (1905–16) had been a friend of TR’s, so Eleanor had asked him to join them along with TR’s daughter Alice and other members of the family. But Grey had brought upon himself the wrath of the Wilsons by refusing to send back to England a staff aide who at a party a year before had repeated a slanderous joke about Mrs. Wilson: to the question of what she had done when Wilson proposed marriage, the joke’s answer was that “she fell out of bed.”
Grey had brought word from England that Lodge’s Reservations mostly were acceptable to the British government. From the President’s point of view, that made Grey doubly an enemy, and Roosevelt doubly a traitor for having entertained him.
In Washington the first half of 1920 was in any event a time of partings of the way. Long-standing alliances and allegiances were coming apart. Members of the cabinet were leaving, including the secretaries of state, treasury, interior, commerce, and agriculture.
Roosevelt found himself entangled in two potentially damaging matters in which naval officers charged that the Navy Department had been badly, and indeed scandalously, mismanaged during the war. One set of accusations was leveled against Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, the other against Secretary Daniels. Seeking a way out, Roosevelt apparently tried to buy himself immunity by going over to the side of the naval officers. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music on February 1, he made a public attack on his chief’s record as secretary of the navy.
Daniels went to the White House intending to ask Wilson to fire Roosevelt. But as he became aware of how much the President hated the young politician, some of his old feeling for Roosevelt returned, and he relented.
If he felt free to sever his ties with Daniels, Roosevelt certainly felt free to cut those with Wilson. Along with others of his generation, he no longer looked to the failing President for leadership. TR, the first idol of Roosevelt’s generation, had fallen; Wilson, the second, was now a fallen idol. To Roosevelt and others in his circle, the new hero who had emerged from the war and the peace as an outstanding American statesman was the food administrator, Herbert Hoover.
Louis Wehle, a Kentucky lawyer and a friend of Roosevelt’s from Harvard days, came to see him on January 10 to propose a 1920 Democratic ticket of Hoover for President and Roosevelt for Vice President. Wehle told Roosevelt that the people with whom he had already discussed the ticket were enthusiastic about it. Roosevelt said: “You can go to it so far as I am concerned. Good luck!”
To a friend, Roosevelt wrote of Hoover that “he is certainly a wonder, and I wish we could make him President of the United States. There could not be a better one.”
The day after talking to Roosevelt, Wehle went to see Colonel House. House said that running Hoover for President was “a wonderful idea and the only chance the Democrats have in November.” But Hoover was not a party man—indeed, much of his appeal to Americans was his nonpolitical orientation—and nobody knew whether he would choose (if he had to) to be a Democrat or a Republican.
Wehle put the proposition to Hoover. He reported that Hoover remarked, “I don’t believe that I want to get into a situation where I have to deal with a lot of political bosses.” Wehle, as he remembered, replied: “Let me tell you if you expect ever to get into American political life, you’ll have to take it as you find it. You can’t make it over first from the outside.”
Wehle’s reply went to the heart not only of the problem of the Hoover candidacy, but also of the problem faced by the generation of young Americans who had gone to Paris in 1919 without being willing to deal with the existing system of world politics—and who had returned disillusioned.
Hoover promised Wehle that he would discuss matters with House. When he did so, he told House he was not a Democrat, but a Progressive Republican in the TR tradition. In March he announced publicly that he was a Republican—which was not astute of him, because it meant that the Republicans got him without having to offer him anything.
Lewis Strauss resigned as Hoover’s secretary that month to join the banking firm of Kuhn Loeb, and Christian Herter left the State Department to replace him. Hoover was too taken up with his humanitarian activities to campaign for himself, so Herter joined Robert Taft and other young staff members in pushing Hoover forward for the Republican nomination for President. Herter turned to Massachusetts friends; at his urging, Archibald MacLeish, whose closest friends were Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett, became head of the Hoover League at Harvard.
The New Republic promoted the Hoover candidacy, but Walter Lippmann, though an enthusiast, soon detected the political amateurishness that would doom the cause. Lippmann wrote to Felix Frankfurter on April 7 that at Hoover’s phoned request, he had gone to see him; he had found Hoover “in a bewildered state of mind at the political snarl in which he finds himself. He really wants to take only a liberal line, but he does not know how.…” According to Lippmann, Hoover knew how to draw up a long and detailed technical program, but not how to paint in broad strokes a picture of his political vision. Thus, he was unable to rally support. Lippmann reported some advice that House had given: if Hoover were to walk out of the Republican party in protest if and when the National convention nominated a reactionary as President, he then could have the Democratic nomination, for the Democratic convention met later.
But such political maneuvers were not for Hoover, who remained too proud to fight for the nomination, and whose candidacy therefore petered out.
33
THE UNITED STATES SIGNS ITS SEPARATE PEACE
MEETING IN CHICAGO in mid-June, the Republican convention deadlocked on the choice of a presidential nominee. A compromise candidate, Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, was selected on the tenth ballot after middle-of-the-night discussions that were commonly supposed to have taken place in a “smoke-filled room.” Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts, popular because of his handling of the Boston police strike, won the vice-presidential nomination on the first ballot. It was a traditionally balanced Ohio/East Coast ticket.
The Republican platform denounced certain unspecified provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations as signed by the President in Paris, but pledged support for “agreements among the nations to preserve the peace of the world.…”
Wilson continued to imagine that he would run for reelection on the Democratic ticket. Both his wife and his physician knew that it was out of the question: that the exertion of standing for election almost certainly would bring on another stroke. But neither they nor anybody else told him the truth.
The Democrats convened two weeks later in San Francisco. As there was no sentiment at all in favor of nominating Wilson for a third term, nobody made a nomination speech for him—which disposed of that issue without embarrassment. But there the consensus stopped. The convention soon deadlocked. There were twenty-four candidates for the presidency, and though this soon narrowed to four, ballot after ballot proved inconclusive. On the evening of the third straight day of voting, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio was chosen on the forty-fourth ballot. Cox picked Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York as his vice-presidential running mate—another traditionally balanced ticket, Ohio/New York.
The Democratic platform pledged support for the League of Nations, but explicitly did not oppose the Reservations to the Covenant.
In the general elections in the autumn, Harding and Coolidge won with 60 percent of the popular vote and 75 percent of the vote in the electoral college, th
e greatest landslide victory in a century.
Roosevelt sportingly described his run at high office as “a darned fine sail.” His smile had won hearts everywhere, but a friend reported, “I’ve been getting around in the crowds. They’ll vote for you, but they won’t vote for Cox and the League.” The experience had been good for him, though. He had learned to become a popular speaker—too much so for some tastes; Joseph Grew, refusing to meet him after the elections, wrote to a friend that “Frank Roosevelt got right down in the gutter and trotted out all the usual catch phrases, mudslinging and campaign slogans that one associates with the lowest form of ward politics.”
Cox and Roosevelt had campaigned openly for American entry into the League of Nations. Harding, moving away from his anti-League position, had done his best to straddle the issue so as not to alienate voters on either side. Once elected, however, he came out into the open. In his inaugural address March 4, 1921, he proclaimed that “America … can be party to no permanent military alliance.… [A] world supergovernment is contrary to everything we cherish.”
Voicing a sentiment for which he would be remembered, he told the nation that “we must strive for normalcy to reach stability.” “Normalcy” became the catchword of his administration.
NOTHING COULD HAVE BEEN less normal than the state of relations between the United States and its former enemy in the late war. Having failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, America had not ended its state of war with Germany. Congress attempted to address this situation by a joint resolution signed by President Harding July 2, 1921, declaring the state of war at an end (without prejudice to any rights accruing to the United States from various accords).
The resolution, however, was unilateral. In order to obtain Germany’s agreement, it was arranged that Ellis Loring Dresel, who had served as the principal U.S. State Department expert on Germany at the Paris Peace Conference, should sign, and have Germany also sign, a treaty embodying the terms of the congressional resolution. Dresel’s title was U.S. commissioner to Germany, and he was designated the plenipotentiary to execute the document on America’s behalf. The ceremony of signing the agreement was scheduled for August 24 at the German Foreign Office in Berlin, but at the last minute it was postponed by Dresel to obtain clarification from Washington of what journalists were told was a minor technicality.
THE 53,513 BATTLE DEATHS suffered by the U.S. armed forces in the war were few in comparison with those of France or Germany, but were no less painful to the relatives of those killed. The living were at a loss for words to say over the graves of the American dead. Henry James, in a 1915 interview published in The New York Times, had said: “The war has used up words,… they have deteriorated … and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms.…” To the same effect, Ernest Hemingway had his hero in A Farewell to Arms say: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.… There were many words that you could not stand to hear.”
Not only was it trite to offer the consolation that the dead “had not died in vain”; in large part it was untrue. Open-faced earnest boys from the West who had barely heard of Europe and cared nothing for its quarrels had been brought over the ocean to a foreign battlefield in order, so their President had told them, to make the world different: to make it safe for democracy. From Idaho and Oklahoma and Kansas, they had come a long way to do that. Now it turned out that the world, including the democracies of Europe, did not want to be made different. To the extent that the Americans buried in the military cemeteries on French soil had believed that it was in that cause that they were laying down their lives, their sacrifice was in vain.
On the strong advice of General Pershing, the War Department decided not to move the American war dead from France. Pershing’s view was that their bodies should remain in the fields they had died to defend. Public opinion in the United States, or at least a part of it, was of the contrary view:* that even in death, the boys should be brought home.
DETAILS OF THE SIGNING of the Treaty of Berlin—the treaty ending the 1917 war between the United States and Germany—are little remembered today. They form one of the more obscure episodes in the history of American diplomacy.
At five minutes before 5 p.m. on Thursday, August 25, Commissioner Dresel and four officials of the American mission in Berlin emerged from the U.S. embassy building on the Wilhelmstrasse. In the street they posed for the lone American press photographer who was there. Then they entered a khaki-colored U.S. Army vehicle and were driven a hundred yards to the German Foreign Office at 75–76 Wilhelmstrasse, followed by a few American correspondents. There were no Germans in the street, no curious crowds, no staring children, no local journalists.
Entering the German Foreign Office, Dresel and his colleagues were led into a reception room on the second floor promptly on the stroke of the appointed hour of five. A few seconds later the German foreign minister, Dr. Friedrich Rosen, entered the room, followed a bit later by his own official party. Because the Germans, not liking to be reminded of their humiliating surrender, had especially requested the United States to play down the importance of the occasion, Dresel and his companions were in loose-fitting business suits and had worn straw hats. The German diplomats, not having intended the Americans to depart quite so far from decorum, had dressed formally in black cutaways and gray-striped trousers. Even in trifles, the United States and Europe seemed bent on misunderstanding one another to the end.
Despite efforts by the Germans to sidetrack them, six journalists, five of them American and one English, managed to gain entrance to the ceremony (“through rough reportorial technique and luck,” according to New York Times correspondent Cyril Brown). The English newspaperman was struck by the lack of pomp; he remarked that it was the first time in history that a treaty had been signed in lounge suits. (The next day The New York Times, though it put the story of the signing on its front page, stated that “it was a cut-and-dried formality of the utmost unpicturesque simplicity.”)
While the others stood, Dresel sat down at a desk and signed both copies of the treaty on behalf of the United States; whereupon Rosen sat down at the opposite side of the desk and signed on behalf of “the German Empire.” It was 5:10 p.m.
Rosen then said he hoped the treaty would lead to friendship between the peoples of their two countries, and Dresel said he hoped so, too. There was no speechmaking and no lingering. Dresel and his party left the Foreign Office building less than twenty minutes after entering it.
So the war was over. It had been wasteful of life but was brought to an end without wasting time; it was not yet 5:30, and there were hours to kill before cocktail time and dinner.
* According to an editorial reprinted by the International Herald Tribune August 1, 1994, p. 4, from its pages fifty years earlier.
34
THE EDUCATION OF THE ROOSEVELT GENERATION: FIRST LESSONS
IF ONLY FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Henry Adams, which so many of them had read, the Franklin Roosevelts and others their age were familiar with the thought that life is an education. But in the 1920s they did not know how enormously valuable their recent experience in making war and peace would prove to be. Because they did not expect the United States to repeat the experiment of sending an army overseas, they could not fully appreciate the worth of the preparation they had undergone. Wilson’s young men supposed that history would put them down as the only Americans to involve themselves in Europe’s wars and politics; as it turned out, they were not the only ones, merely the first.
The cost of their learning experience had been low. Casualties had been few; most American troops had not been exposed to any danger or fighting, and many of those who had gone overseas had enjoyed it. Moreover, the war had paid off America’s foreign debt and made the country rich. If indeed it had been a mistake for the United States to enter the war—and increasingly a consensus was developing that it had been—then at least it had not been a terrible one, and the country wa
s lucky enough to have gotten off lightly.
Wilson himself remained unrepentant. He never wavered in his faith that he had led the nation and the world in the right direction, and that he had been betrayed and abandoned. But the crippled ex-President commanded little support. On ceremonial occasions he could count on the attendance of only such die-hard loyalists as Congressmen James F. Byrnes of South Carolina and Cordell Hull of Tennessee. Others who wrote and came by to see him did so only out of sympathy: he could not walk, his eyes were failing, he would forget the words of the speeches he had rehearsed, his voice would break down, and often he would burst into tears.
Felix Frankfurter later claimed that he had always known how the Wilsonians would excuse themselves in recounting the story of what happened at the Paris Peace Conference. They would tell it, he said, as a tale of American innocence, in which Wilson and his followers acted in good faith and were frustrated only because the Europeans did not. The appearance in 1923 of a detailed account by Ray Stannard Baker, incorporating documents made available by Wilson, fulfilled Frankfurter’s prediction.
The contrast drawn by Baker between the virtue of the Wilsonians and the sordidness of the Europeans did indeed belong to the long tradition of American loss-of-innocence literature. Though written by an internationalist, it could however be read as an argument for the isolationists who had opposed Wilson on the war issue: if the Allies were so lacking in virtue, why had the United States fought on their side? Would it not have been wiser for America to remain uninvolved in Europe’s debasing feuds and politics?
In the Time of the Americans Page 37
