These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Public support for suffrage plummeted as the United States grew closer to entering the war and questioning the president began to look like disloyalty. In January 1917, Wilson released an intercepted telegram from the German minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico in which Zimmermann asked Mexico to enter the war as Germany’s ally, promising to help “regain for Mexico the ‘lost territories’ of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas should the U.S. declare War on Germany.”86 Days after Wilson was inaugurated, German U-boats sank three American ships. Wilson concluded that there was no longer any way to stay out of the war. At the beginning of April, he asked Congress to declare war.

  “The world must be made safe for democracy,” Wilson told Congress. Not everyone was persuaded. “I want especially to say, Mr. President, that I am not voting for war in the name of democracy,” Ohio’s Warren G. Harding said on the Senate floor. “It is my deliberate judgment that it is none of our business what type of government any nation on this earth may choose to have. . . . I voted for war tonight for the maintenance of American rights.”87

  Congress declared war. But Wilson’s claim that the United States was fighting to make the world safe for democracy was hard for many to swallow. Wilson had in fact pledged not to make the world democratic, or even to support the establishment of democratic institutions everywhere, but instead to establish the conditions of stability in which democracy was possible. A war for peace it was not. The war required a massive mobilization: all American men between eighteen and forty-five had to register for the draft; nearly five million were called to serve. How were they to be persuaded of the war’s cause? In a speech to new recruits, Wilson’s new secretary of state, Robert Lansing, ventured an explanation. “Were every people on earth able to express their will, there would be no wars of aggression and, if there were no wars of aggression, then there would be no wars, and lasting peace would come to this earth,” Lansing said, stringing one conditional clause after another. “The only way that a people can express their will is through democratic institutions,” Lansing went on. “Therefore, when the world is made safe for democracy . . . universal peace will be an accomplished fact.”88

  Wilson, the political scientist, tried to earn the support of the American people with an intricate theory of the relationship between democracy and peace. It didn’t work. To recast his war message and shore up popular support, he established a propaganda department, the Committee on Public Information, headed by a baby-faced, forty-one-year-old muckraker from Missouri named George Creel, best-known for an exposé on child labor called Children in Bondage. Creel applied the methods of Progressive Era muckraking to the work of whipping up a frenzy for fighting. His department employed hundreds of staff and thousands of volunteers, spreading pro-war messages by print, radio, and film. Social scientists called the effect produced by wartime propaganda “herd psychology”; the philosopher John Dewey called it the “conscription of thought.”89

  The conscription of thought also threatened the freedom of speech. To suppress dissent, Congress passed a Sedition Act in 1918. Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 had Congress so brazenly defied the First Amendment. Fewer than two dozen people had been arrested under the 1798 Sedition Act. During the First World War, the Justice Department charged more than two thousand Americans with sedition and convicted half of them. Appeals that went to the Supreme Court failed. Pacifists, and feminists went to prison, and so, especially, did socialists. Ninety-six of the convicted were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), including its leader, Bill Haywood, sentenced to twenty years in prison. Eugene Debs was sentenced to a ten-year term for delivering a speech in which he’d told his listeners that they were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”90

  Under this regime, W. E. B. Du Bois, the seemingly uncompromising leader and cofounder of the NAACP, was brought to heel. In 1915, in an Atlantic essay called “The African Roots of War,” Du Bois had located the origins of the conflict in European powers’ colonial rivalries in Africa, indicting the global order itself. “If we want real peace,” Du Bois wrote, “we must extend the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples.” But after the United States entered the war, Creel called thirty-one black editors and publishers to a conference in Washington and warned them about “Negro subversion.” Du Bois wrote a resolution more or less pledging not to complain about race relations for the duration, promising that the African American was “not disposed to catalogue, in this tremendous crisis, all his complaints and disabilities.” He then wrote the first of many editorials for The Crisis, making good on this promise. “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy,” he wrote, in words that might as well have been written by Creel himself. Du Bois asked black men who could not vote in the United States to give their lives to make the world “safe for democracy” and asked black people to hold off on fighting against lynchings, whose numbers kept rising.91

  “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,” Billie Holiday would later sing, in a wrenching eulogy. “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”92

  WALTER LIPPMANN, WRITING for the New Republic, had argued for the United States to enter the war. Once it did, he signed up and was recruited to a secret intelligence organization called the Inquiry, whose objective was to imagine the terms of the peace by redrawing the map of Europe. The Inquiry, needing a peerless stock of maps, took over the New York offices of the American Geographical Society. In that library, Lippmann, twenty-eight, drafted a report called “The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests.” Revised by Wilson, Lippmann’s report became Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which the president submitted to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918, calling for a liberal peace that included free trade, freedom of the seas, arms reduction, the self-determination of colonized peoples, and a League of Nations.93

  But the war had to be won before Wilson could begin to negotiate for that peace. And it had to be paid for. To that end, Wilson signed a tax bill, raising taxes on incomes, doubling a tax on corporate earnings, eliminating an exemption for dividend income, and introducing an estate tax and a tax on excess profits. Rates for the wealthiest Americans rose from 2 percent to 77, but most people paid no tax at all (80 percent of the revenue was drawn from the income of the wealthiest 1 percent of American families). Then, when taxes raised on income and business failed to cover the price of war, the federal government began selling war bonds. Twenty-two million Americans heeded the call to buy Liberty and Victory Bonds, leading to one unanticipated effect of the war: it introduced ordinary Americans to the experience of buying securities. The rhetoric of the war loan program advanced the idea of citizenship as a form of investment. One bulletin promised, “A financial interest in the Government, large or small though it may be, helps to make better citizens.”94

  Wars, as ever, expanded the powers of the state. It rearranged the relationship between the federal government and business, establishing new forms of cooperation, oversight, and regulation that amounted to erecting a welfare state for business owners. The National War Labor Board was charged with averting strikes so as not to impede munitions production, while the War Industries Board oversaw war-related manufacturing. The federal government managed the American economy with efficiency as its watchword. “Industrial history proves that reasonable hours, fair working conditions, and a proper wage scale are essential to high production,” one army order advised. “During the war, every attempt should be made to conserve in every way all our achievements in the way of social betterment.”95

  The government asserted new forms of authority over the bodies of citizens, too. A “social purity” movement campaigned against the spread of venereal disease, which became the subject of military ordinances. “You wouldn’t use another fellow’s toothbrush,” one army film pointed out. “Why use his whore?
” Yet another moral campaign, Prohibition, long a female crusade, also became part of the wartime expansion of the powers of the state. It was approved by Congress in December 1917 as a war measure. “No drunken man was ever efficient in civil or military life,” said Tennessee senator Kenneth McKellar. Outside of Congress, Americans were dubious. “A man would be better off without booze but the same is true of pie,” was the position taken by Clarence Darrow.96

  Lippmann, meanwhile, went to Europe to begin to work toward Wilson’s planned peace. Appointed to the London office of an Inter-Allied Board for propaganda, Lippmann directed writings not at Americans but at Germans and Austrians. Airplanes and unmanned balloons sent behind enemy lines dropped millions of copies of his leaflets. Like everything he wrote, they were as sticky as flypaper. One he wrote as if he were a German prisoner of war: “Do not worry about me. I am out of the war. I am well fed. The American army gives its prisoners the same rations it gives its own soldiers: beef, white bread, potatoes, prunes, coffee, milk, butter.” Copies were found in the rucksacks of a great many deserting German soldiers.97 Lippmann got to wondering: were minds so easily led?

  As the war drew to a close, the reckoning began. American losses were almost trivial compared to the staggering losses in European nations. Against America’s 116,000 casualties, France lost 1.6 million lives, Britain 800,000, and Germany 1.8 million. Cities across Europe lay in ashes; America was untouched. Europe, composed of seventeen countries before the war, had splintered into twenty-six, all of them deeply in debt, and chiefly to Americans. Before the war, Americans owed $3.7 billion to foreigners; after the war, foreigners owed $12.6 billion to Americans. Even the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918, which took 21 million lives worldwide, claimed the lives of only 675,000 Americans. The war left European economies in ruins, America’s thriving. In the United States, steel production rose by a quarter between 1913 and 1920; everywhere else, it fell by a third.98

  The Armistice came on November 11, 1918, when Germany agreed to terms of surrender tied to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which the Allies had not themselves wholeheartedly endorsed. In an extraordinary departure from convention, Wilson decided to head the United States’ 1,300-person delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, in January 1919. This fell within his view of the scope of the presidency; not everyone agreed. Many Americans objected to an American president leaving American soil. And whose interests was he meant to represent? “Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people at this time,” said Theodore Roosevelt.99 Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution stipulates that a president may negotiate a treaty, but ratification requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Notably—fatally—Wilson did not bring along with him to the conference even a single Republican senator.

  Wilson was at first met with outpourings of affection and hope. Crowds lined the streets of Paris to greet him as “the God of Peace.” This welcome did not do much to diminish his sense of mission. Lippmann reported, “The hotels were choked with delegations representing, and pretending to represent, and hoping to represent, every group of people in the world.” Wilson was especially eagerly received by delegates from stateless and colonized societies—Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Kurds. A young Ho Chi Minh, the future leader of North Vietnam, then living in Paris, presented world leaders at Versailles with a petition titled “The Demands of the Vietnamese People”: “All subject peoples are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them.” He tried to meet Wilson, with no success. But Wilson left a lasting legacy: his rhetoric of self-determination contributed to a wave of popular protests in the Middle East and Asia, including a revolution in Egypt in 1919; made the nation-state the goal of stateless societies; and lies behind the emergence and force of anticolonial nationalism.100

  W. E. B. Du Bois made the journey to Paris four days after Wilson set sail, on a boat for members of the press. He was officially traveling on behalf of the NAACP, and as a scholar, aiming to gather material for a history of the war, but he was also there to attend a Pan-African Congress, which was held over three days at the Grand-Hotel, on the Boulevard des Capucines. And he may well have gone to Paris in an attempt to repair his reputation, gravely damaged by his having urged fellow black Americans to forget their grievances and make every sacrifice for the war. Thirty black men were lynched in 1917, twice as many the next year, and in 1919, seventy-six, including ten veterans, some still wearing their uniforms, having fought, some people thought, the wrong war.101

  IN FRANCE, WILSON got much of what he wanted, but he did not get the peace he wanted, or the peace the world needed. Instead, the president fell ill in Paris, likely with the first in a series of strokes. Also, as the negotiations wore on, his presence was much resented.102 “Nearly every experienced critic seems to be of opinion that he should have remained in America,” H. G. Wells remarked. More bitterly resented was Wilson’s wife, Edith, who appeared, to a devastated Europe, to be visiting in the role of tourist. “This may seem a trivial matter to note in a History of Mankind,” Wells allowed, “but it was such small human things as this that threw a miasma of futility over the Peace Conference of 1919.”103

  The treaty makers, chiefly the United States, Britain, France, and Italy, redrew the map of Europe rather differently than it had been redrawn by Walter Lippmann, in the offices of the American Geographical Society. They balkanized Europe by establishing new states, including Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Finland. And they punished Germany. The treaty shackled German industry. It deprived Germany of control over its own affairs. It demanded from Germany $33 billion in reparations. “Looked at from above, below, and every side I can’t see anything in this treaty but endless trouble for Europe,” Lippmann wrote. The New Republic, concluding that “the League is not powerful enough to redeem the treaty,” came out against it, a particularly difficult decision for Lippmann, who wrote the editorials condemning it. The magazine also serialized the publication of a shattering polemic called The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by a young British economist named John Maynard Keynes. Keynes called Wilson a fool, a “blind and deaf Don Quixote”104 and pointed out that the peace treaty merely continued the deprivations of wartime, warning that it would bring misery to Europe—“the rapid depression of the standard of life of the European populations to a point which will mean actual starvation.”

  Wilson believed that any shortcomings of the terms of the peace could be addressed by the establishment of the League of Nations, since any problem created by the treaty, he reasoned, could be solved by the League. Only the League, he thought, could make peace last. Two days after returning to the United States, he delivered the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate and explained its provisions, including for the League of Nations, asking, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”105

  In the Senate, what little support Wilson enjoyed came from fellow Democrats; Republicans proved implacable. The Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge, had the 264-page treaty printed, announced that he would convene hearings on the subject, and then all but tabled the matter, stonewalling for two weeks while he had every word read aloud.106

  Wilson, still ailing, decided to canvass the nation and left Washington on September 3, 1919, for a seventeen-state train tour. “I promised our soldiers, when I asked them to take up arms, that it was a war to end wars,” he told his wife. “If I do not do all in my power to put the Treaty into effect, I will be a slacker and never able to look those boys in the eye.” In Nevada, his face began to twitch; in Utah, he sweated through his suit; by Wyoming he was incoherent. Finally, in Colorado, on October 2, 1919, he stumbled while mounting the stage. “I seem to have gone to pieces,” he said. He lost the use of his left side. For five months, he was hidden in the West Wing of the White House, unseen, even by his cabinet.

  Edith Wilson banned the public from the grounds. Even members of the Senate
did not know the state of Wilson’s condition. When the Senate sought compromise and the president proved unresponsive, the Senate could only conclude that he was uncompromising.107 In March of 1920, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles—and the League of Nations—by seven votes. The chance for a lasting peace came and, silently, went.

  III.

  IN 1922, when Walter Lippmann turned thirty-two, he wrote a book called Public Opinion, in which he concluded that in a modern democracy the masses, asked to make decisions about matters far removed from their direct knowledge, had been asked to do too much. “Decisions in a modern state tend to be made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the executive,” he’d once observed.108 Mass democracy can’t work, Lippmann argued, because the new tools of mass persuasion—especially mass advertising—meant that a tiny minority could very easily persuade the majority to believe whatever it wished them to believe.

  The best hope for mass democracy might have seemed to be the scrupulously and unfailingly honest reporting of news, but this, Lippmann thought, was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth. Reporters chronicle events, offering facts, but “they cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions,” he said.109 To govern, the people need truth, sense out of the whole, but people can’t read enough in the morning paper or hear enough on the evening news to turn facts into truth when they’re driven like dray horses all day.

  The solution Lippmann proposed to this problem was absurd, forged in the mind of a man who greeted the world with eyebrows arched. He suggested that the government open ten Bureaus of Intelligence, one for each department represented in the cabinet, where expert intellectuals, appointed for life (“with sabbatical years set aside for advanced study and training”), would put together all the facts and explain, to the masses, the truth.110 He eventually came around to seeing how silly that was, but what actually happened was a lot worse: by the end of the decade, managing public opinion would become a business, in the form of “public relations.”