At home, however, the Communist movement could not cover up its activities. In April 1919, New York City postal clerks found twenty package bombs addressed to public officials and caught all but two of the saboteurs. The undetected bombs exploded at the attorney general’s house, blowing a deliveryman to pieces, and another exploded at a U.S. senator’s house, shattering the arm of a maid. Outraged citizens supported immediate action, which, with Senate approval, the Justice Department took by launching a series of raids on suspected communists. Authorized by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, the raids, directed by Palmer’s assistant J. Edgar Hoover, smashed the Communist movement in the United States. A team of lawyers claiming that the government’s attacks endangered civil liberties for all citizens resisted the raids and eventually forced Palmer’s resignation but not before he had reduced membership in the American Communist party and its allies by 80 percent.
The remaining Communists might have remained underground and harmless after the war, but for a sensational murder trial of two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were convicted of a Braintree, Massachusetts, robbery and murder in 1921. Both supporters and opponents misidentified the pair as Communists (when in fact they were anarchists), and both sides saw the case as a test of the government’s position on radicals. The two were executed on solid evidence, and attempts to portray the trial as rigged have not stood up. In any event, the prosperity of the 1920s soon combined with the concerns about anarchism to blunt any further spread of communism in the United States. “Sacco and Vanzetti forged an important bond between Communists and their liberal sympathizers,” a bond that resurfaced during the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in the 1930s.54
Versailles and the Fourteen Points
As events in Bolshevik Russia unfolded, they had a direct impact on Wilson’s philosophy of foreign policy. Lenin had already (in December 1917) issued a declaration of his government’s war aims, which was in many ways a formality: he intended to get out of the war as quickly as possible. Partly in response to the Soviet proposals, in January 1918 Wilson offered his own program, known as the Fourteen Points, which in some ways mirrored Lenin’s suggestions. Although the president hoped Russia could be persuaded to stay in the war, he soon “realized that Lenin was now a competitor in the effort to lead the postwar order.”55
In 1918, Wilson the social scientist had convened a panel of 150 academic experts to craft a peace plan under the direction of his close adviser, Colonel Edward House. Some observers, including British diplomatic historian Harold Nicolson, were impressed by this illustrious group, asserting it had produced one of the “wisest documents in history.”56 Others remained skeptical of foreign policy drafted by an academic elite. Attracted to numbers and categories, Wilson outlined five points that related to international relations, including “open covenants” (a concession to Lenin, who had already made public all the treaties Russia had secretly made prior to the revolution), freedom of the seas, free trade, arms reductions, and review of colonial policies with an eye toward justice for the colonized peoples. Then Wilson added eight more points addressing territorial claims after the war, including the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, recovery of Russian and Italian territory from the Central Powers, establishment of a new Polish nation, and modifications in the Ottoman Empire to separate ethnic minorities into their own countries under the rubric of the Wilsonian phrase, “national self-determination.” That made thirteen points, with the fourteenth consisting of a call for an international congress to discuss and deliberate, even to act as an international policeman to prevent future wars.
Before anyone in the international community could absorb even a few of the Fourteen Points, Wilson inundated them with still more. In February, the Four Principles followed, then in September 1918, the Five Particulars. All of this relentless drafting, pontificating, and, above all, numbering came during the bloody final months of the war, when some 9 million Germans still faced the Allied-American armies now without regard to the Eastern Front. The constant stream of points and principles and particulars gave the Germans the impression that the basis of an armistice was constantly in flux and negotiable. Consequently, in early October 1918, German and Austrian diplomats agreed to what they thought Wilson had offered—the Fourteen Points.
More accurately, the Fourteen Points should have been called the American Fourteen Points. Certainly the British and the French did not sign off on them, and no sooner had the Central Powers agreed to the stipulations than a secret meeting occurred between House and Anglo-French leaders where they introduced numerous caveats. The Allies changed or amended many of the most important passages. This “Anglo-French Commentary,” as it was called, left the Allies everything and the Central Powers virtually nothing. It created a “Polish Corridor” that divided Prussia; it broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and stripped Germany of overseas colonies; it changed Wilson’s word “compensation” to a more harsh-sounding “reparations,” opening the door for the hated war-guilt clause.
Perhaps the worst feature of the Fourteen Points (besides deceiving Germany after a deal had been offered and accepted) was that it proffered a phony explanation of the war itself with the Central Powers the sole villains. It excused Britain and France from their own desire for territory and dominance. To be sure, Germany had struck first; the Germans had engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare, which had already been demonized as “inhuman”; Germany had used zeppelins to bomb London civilians, and had introduced the flamethrower; and Germany had smugly thought she could launch a last-minute offensive and smash France as late as 1918. But it would be unrealistic to ignore the British and French (not to mention Russian and Serbian) culpability in starting the war. Indeed, when comparing the relatively mild treatment post-Napoleonic France had received after Waterloo by the Congress of Vienna—which followed a period of constant war that lasted three times longer than World War I—Germany was unfairly punished in 1919.
Wilson set the stage for such international malfeasance by his make-the-world-safe-for-democracy comments in the original war message, indicating he would not be satisfied until he had reshaped the world in the image of America. The Central Powers should have listened then. Instead, having accepted the Fourteen Points as the grounds for the November 1918 Armistice, they now found themselves excluded from the treaty process entirely, to be handed a Carthaginian peace.
Nevertheless, when Wilson sailed for the peace conference in Paris on December 4, 1918, it is safe to say that he took the hopes of much of the world with him. His arrival in Europe was messianic in tone, the cheers of the people echoing a desperate longing that this American leader might end centuries of Continental conflict. The “stiff-necked, humorless, self-righteous, and puritan” Wilson lapped up the adulation.57 European leaders may have privately scoffed at the president—the French Premier Georges Clemenceau dourly said, “The Fourteen Points bore me…God Almighty has only ten!”—but the masses embraced him.58 Wilson’s reception, in part, involved a natural euphoria over the termination of the war, akin to the brief Era of Good Feelings that had surfaced between the North and South in the weeks following Appomattox.
Personally attending the conference, while good for Wilson’s ego, proved a fatal political mistake. Other representatives, by nature of their parliamentary systems, already had the support of their legislatures. The Constitution, however, required the president to obtain Senate ratification of treaties. By participating personally, Wilson lost some of the aura of a deity from a distance that had won him the adoration of the French.
Unfortunately, Wilson’s lofty phrases did not easily translate into genuine policy with teeth. For example, national self-determination, while apparently sensible, was an idea fraught with danger. Carving a new Poland out of parts of Germany and Russia failed to take into account the many decades when an aggressive Poland had waged war to expand her boundaries in the past. Nor did the Ottoman Empire get off easily: Palestine, Mesopotamia (later I
raq), and Syria were sliced off and handed to the League of Nations as trust territories, as was Armenia, though too late to save the half million Armenian civilians slaughtered by the Turkish government. Wilson did not originally insist on establishing completely new states of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro—only “autonomy” within empires—but by October 16, 1918, while the guns still blazed, Wilson had upped the ante to require statehood status. Perversely, the Allies now lobbied for entire Slavic and Slovakian states that would themselves subordinate Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Albanians, and other groups trapped within the new nationalities. Wilson had moved in less than four years from neutral in thought and deed to outright hostility toward Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Other punitive clauses reduced the army to a rump, eliminated Germany’s navy as well as stripped her rich industrial territories, and imposed massive reparations. These included not only direct gold payments, but also the construction of ships and railroad cars that the Germans had to offer to the British and French free of charge. All of these constituted massive (and foolish) economic dislocations that helped send Europe into a depression within a few years.
Where the treaty was not self-contradictory, it was mean, vindictive, and, at the same time, ambiguous. The phrases avoided specifics, falling back on the reformist language of freedom, respect, and observing the rights of nations. Which were? Wilson could not, or at least did not, say. Nations had to be respected, except for Germany, which had to be taught a lesson. In that regard, the French were much more pragmatic, seeking a mutual security pact with the United States and Britain. Instead, Wilson pressed for universal participation in the League of Nations, which, the French knew, would soon include France’s enemies. More damaging (at least in the eyes of U.S. Senate critics of the treaty), the League threatened to draw the United States into colonial conflicts to maintain the Europeans’ grip in Africa and Asia—a concept fundamentally at odds with America’s heritage of revolution and independence.
Satisfied they had emasculated the Central Powers and at the same time made the world safe for democracy, Great Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and other participants signed the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. Within ten years, its provisions would accelerate German economic chaos, European unemployment, and at least indirectly, the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Returning to the United States with the treaty in hand, Wilson faced a skeptical Senate—now in the hands of the Republicans, who had won both houses in the 1918 off-year elections (despite Wilson’s claim that a Republican election would embarrass the nation). Opposition to the treaty in the Senate was led by Henry Cabot Lodge (Massachusetts) and William Borah (Idaho). Lodge, chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, disagreed less with the intent of the treaty or its likelihood to involve the nation in foreign conflicts than he did with the imprecision of its wording, which was, in his opinion, too open ended. The public agreed with the general premise of a worldwide peacekeeping body, but needed to be convinced that the League would be feasible and effective. Attempting to add specificity, Lodge introduced his own reservations to the treaty. Other opponents, however, including the Progressive wing of the party led by Robert La Follette, Hiram Johnson, and Borah, had voted against going to war in the first place, and continued to reject any postwar European involvement.
Many Democrats, including Bryan and Colonel House, as well as members of Wilson’s own cabinet, such as Herbert Hoover, echoed the reservations. Some argued that the League of Nations committed American boys to dying for nebulous and ill-defined international causes. This in itself violated the Constitution, and no American sailor, soldier, or marine had ever taken a vow to defend the League of Nations. Since virtually none of the opponents had been present at Versailles when Wilson had negotiated the final points, they didn’t realize that he had already traded away the substance of any legitimate leverage the United States might have had in return for the shadow of a peace enforced by international means.
Lodge rightly recognized that the notion that every separate ethnic group should have its own nation was hopelessly naïve. Was French Quebec to declare independence from English Canada? Should the Mexican-dominated American Southwest attempt to create Aztlan? Branded an obstructionist, Lodge in fact controlled only 49 votes, some of which could have been swung by reasonable negotiations by Wilson. Instead, the stubborn president sought to go over the heads of the senators, making a whistle-stop tour touting the treaty. Speaking on behalf of the treaty, Wilson covered a remarkable eight thousand miles in three weeks, often from the back of his train at thirty-seven different locations. Occasionally he spoke four times a day, sometimes an hour at a time. Yet even in our age of instantaneous mass communication, such a strategy would involve great risk: presidents are important, but not supreme. Wilson could count on reaching only a small handful of the population, and certainly not with the effect needed to shift entire blocs of votes in the Senate.
Wilson was already in poor health, having suffered a stroke in April 1919 while still in Paris, and concealing it from the public. In September he had another stroke, then, on October second, yet another. After the final stroke, Wilson remained debilitated and bedridden, out of touch with the American voter. Mrs. Edith Wilson thus became, in a manner of speaking, the first female president of the United States, though her role, again, was unknown to the general public. For more than a year she determined who Wilson saw, what he said, and what he wanted through notes that she crafted in a clumsy hand. When he was lucid, Edith arranged for Wilson to meet with staff and members of Congress, but most of the time he looked distant and dull. His speech was slurred, and he remained partly paralyzed, especially on his left side. Whether the stroke accounted for his unwillingness to negotiate any of the Lodge criticisms is uncertain, but whatever the cause, his cadre of supporters in the Senate failed to persuade a single vote to switch, sending the treaty down to defeat. And because Wilson would not entertain any of the Lodge reservations, indeed had ordered his loyal senators to vote against the Lodge version, in March 1920 the amended treaty also failed to pass. The defeated treaty symbolized the high water mark of international Progressivism. Although it would take several years, a new, more realistic foreign policy would set in at the end of the Coolidge administration. If the Progressives had failed in foreign policy, they were just getting started in areas of social reform, especially when it came to public health and women’s suffrage.
Progressive Fervor and the Real Thing
America’s war against alcohol began, oddly enough, with an attack on Coca-Cola. One of the first products challenged under the 1906 Food and Drug Act, Coke had eliminated even the minute portions of cocaine it had once used in the cooking process years before.59 The drink had originated with an Atlanta pharmacist, Dr. John Pemberton, and his Yankee advertiser, Frank Robinson, from a desire to create a cold drink that could be served over ice in the South to compete with hot coffee and tea. Pemberton had concocted the mixture from kola nuts, sugar, caffeine, caramel, citric acid, and a fluid extract of cocaine for a little euphoria. After Pemberton fell ill—one biographer claims of a cocaine addiction—Asa Griggs Candler, another pharmacist who suffered from frequent headaches, took over after discovering that Coke alleviated his pain. By that time, pharmaceutical tests had showed that Coca-Cola contained about one thirtieth of a grain of cocaine, or so little that even the most sensitive person would not feel any effects short of a half dozen drinks. Candler thought it unethical to advertise a product as Coca-Cola without any cocaine in the contents, but he realized that the growing public clamor for drug regulation could destroy the company. He therefore arrived at a secret formula that began with a tiny portion of cocaine that through the process of cooking and distilling was ultimately removed.
Since the late 1890s, Coke had been the subject of attacks by health activists and temperance advocates. Many Progressives, especially Dr. Harvey Wiley, the leader of the government’s case brought by the Food and Drug Administr
ation in 1909–10, recklessly endorsed some products and condemned others. Wiley sought to expand his domain as much as possible and initiated a highly publicized case against Coke that culminated in a 1911 Chattanooga trial. By that time, there were no trace elements of cocaine in the drink at all, and the government’s own tests had proved it.60 This prompted Wiley to switch strategies by claiming that Coke’s advertising was fraudulent because Coca-Cola did not contain cocaine!
The effort to prosecute Coke went flat, but convinced Progressive reformers that government could successfully litigate against products with “proven” health risks. Wiley’s effort to get Coke was a test run for the Eighteenth Amendment, or the “noble experiment” of Prohibition, which involved the direct intervention of government against both social mores and market forces and, more than any other movement, epitomized the reform tradition.61
Temperance had a long history in American politics. Maine passed the first state law banning the sale of alcohol in 1851, based on the studies of Neal Dow, a Portland businessman who claimed to have found a link between booze and family violence, crime, and poverty.62 Abraham Lincoln had run on a platform of temperance. For a while, eliminating alcohol seemed a necessary component of the women’s movement as a means to rescue wives from drunken abuse and to keep the family wages from the saloon keeper. Alcohol, by way of the saloons, was linked to prostitution, and prostitution to the epidemic of venereal disease. “Today,” declared Dr. Prince Morrow, a specialist on sexually transmitted diseases, “we recognize [gonorrhea] not only as the most widespread but also one of the most serious of infective diseases; it has risen to the dignity of a public peril.”63 Convinced that unfaithful husbands were bringing home syphilis, doctors warned of the “syphilis of the innocent”—infected wives and children. Then there was the alcohol-related problem of white slavery, brought before the public eye in the 1913 play Damaged.64 At that point a public clamor arose, and Congress reacted by passing the Mann Act of 1910, which prohibited the transport of women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.
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