In the regions where the Republicans picked up seats, they played heavily on sectional feelings. East of the Mississippi, they harped once more on resentment at Democratic tax policies as raids by the South and West. In the West, they exploited feelings of being neglected and discriminated against in different ways. Government price controls had fanned discontent among wheat farmers, who believed they should have been getting better prices and saw favoritism in the higher prices allotted to southern cotton growers. Also in the West, as several observers reported, Republicans and conservatives were exploiting anti-radical hysteria to defeat progressive and pro-labor Democrats. Elsewhere, targeting in senatorial elections by the woman suffrage organizations helped defeat one Democrat and one Republican. More generally, high prices, wartime shortages, and myriad inconveniences worked against the president’s party.52
Conversely, Democrats could take solace from upset victories in the Northeast, where Al Smith won the governorship in New York and David Walsh won a Senate seat in Massachusetts, defeating Weeks, who was one of the suffragists’ targets. Both of those winners were Irish Americans, and their victories offered signs of a rising tide of ethnic voting power in their party, a development that owed nothing to Wilson. Most of the races outside the South were close, and the president’s appeal may have contributed to the narrowness of the outcomes, saved some Democrats, and kept the party from suffering a worse defeat. If nothing else, Wilson’s action earned him gratitude among his party followers: he had shown that he was willing to stick out his neck for them and suffer the consequences.
Although it was not a foreign policy referendum, this election did have foreign policy consequences. Republican control of the Senate meant that Lodge—perhaps Wilson’s worst enemy in that chamber—would become both majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. In those capacities, particularly as the committee chairman, he would exert great influence over consideration of any peace treaties or other pacts that might come out of post-war conferences. Lodge and his friend Roosevelt—who now looked like a sure bet to be the party’s next presidential nominee—started at once to flex their newfound foreign policy muscles by crowing that the American people had rejected Wilson’s leadership. “[I]n any free country, except the United States,” Roosevelt told Foreign Secretary Balfour, “the result of the Congressional elections on November 5th would have meant Mr. Wilson’s retirement from office and return to private life. He demanded a vote of confidence. The people voted a want of confidence.”53 Still, the Republicans would almost certainly have said the same things if he had not made his appeal.
Roosevelt and Lodge’s public utterances amounted to little more than spiteful after-the-fact campaign talk. What counted for much more were the actions they soon took. Between the election and the end of 1918, they made overtures to foreign leaders. Roosevelt wrote to Lloyd George, Balfour, and Clemenceau, telling them to disregard Wilson and impose a harsh peace on Germany. His party stood, he told Balfour, “for absolute loyalty to France and England in the peace negotiations … to stand with the allies at the Peace Conference and present an undivided front to the world.” Lodge wrote to Balfour in the same vein and warned against making “an almost hopelessly impossible” scheme for a league of nations part of a peace treaty. The senator also visited the British and French embassies to tell the envoys there that their governments should not follow Wilson’s lead in dealing with Germany. These were blatant violations of the principle—albeit more often honored in the breach—that politics should stop at the water’s edge. If the party situation had been reversed, if the Republicans had been in power, particularly if Roosevelt had been president, he and Lodge would have damned such actions as treason. Wisely, the British and French understood that they still had to deal with Wilson and did not respond to those overtures.54
For his part, Wilson put a public brave face on the outcome of the election, but in private he was less sanguine. Right afterward, he had an hour-long meeting with Homer Cummings. “He told me frankly that it made his difficulties enormously greater,” Cummings wrote. It would encourage opposition at home to his foreign policies, and he felt hurt that people had rejected his appeal.55 Wilson’s parliamentary proclivities notwithstanding, he gave no thought to stepping aside, even though he knew his path of leadership was going to get much rougher. Also, it is worth asking what might have happened in the 1918 elections if the war had ended a week earlier. Would public relief and joy have tipped the scales just enough to retain a Democratic majority, at least in the Senate?
As matters transpired, the Armistice did not come until six days after voters had gone to the polls. It took that long to arrange in part because of another exchange with the Germans but more because of arguments with the Allies. As soon as House reached Paris, on October 27, he moved into negotiations with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and the military commanders. A constant flow of cables kept Wilson informed of their discussions, and he did not like what he was hearing about French unwillingness to accept the Fourteen Points and British caviling at freedom of the seas. “It is my solemn duty to authorize you to say that I cannot consent to take part in the negotiation of a peace which does not include freedom of the seas,” he cabled back on October 30, “because we are pledged to fight not only to do away with Prussian militarism but with militarism everywhere. Neither could I participate in a settlement which did not include a league of nations because peace would be without any guarantee except universal armament which would be intolerable. I hope I shall not be obliged to make this decision public.”56
In response to Lloyd George’s and Clemenceau’s objections, House suggested that the president might have to share those differences with Congress. That seemed to have an impact. “Everything is changing for the better since yesterday,” House cabled on October 31, and he asked for a free hand in dealing with these matters.57 Taking Wilson’s silence as assent, he busied himself discussing armistices with Austria-Hungary and Turkey and fending off a last-minute push by Pershing for unconditional surrender. The British continued to balk at freedom of the seas, and Wilson cabled House instructing him to tell them that if they could not accept this principle, the United States would build a bigger navy than theirs. Before House received that cable, he met with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando, and other Allied representatives for a conference that formally accepted the Fourteen Points as the basis for making peace. But their resolution stated that freedom of the seas was open to unacceptable interpretations and they would reserve to themselves complete freedom on this subject at the peace conference. In short, the British had not budged. Yet Wilson thought this was half a loaf worth having, and he planned to take up freedom of the seas later, when he had a chance to bring other countries around to his point of view. He did not cable his acceptance, and again House took his silence as assent.
For his part, the colonel was ecstatic at what he took to be the Allies’ acceptance of the American position. He made light of British dissent on freedom of the seas and said he had straightened out the British on the importance of the League of Nations. This resolution, which would later be known as the Pre-Armistice Agreement, had to remain secret until the Germans heard and accepted the specific provisions that the generals were about to impose on them. November 5 was election day in the United States, which meant that this step toward peace could bring no political profit to the president and his party. The negotiations that led to the Pre-Armistice Agreement exposed major differences between Wilson and House. The colonel favored a softer touch in negotiating, in part because of his personality and in part because he was the one on the scene dealing with the Allied leaders face-to-face. The president was more confrontational. The two men were not polar opposites, however. It was House who originally favored pushing for more liberal peace terms and privately suggested to the British that America might outbuild them in the navy even before Wilson raised that as a possible threat. On his side, Wilson cabled House to stress flexibility and trust over freedom of th
e seas, and he implicitly assured Wiseman that his country had little to fear about the disposition of Germany’s colonies.
Yet their differences went deeper than style and circumstance. House was not only willing to get into the details of the settlement sooner, but he was also steadily becoming more accommodating to the wishes of the Allies. An illustration of how deep those differences were came when House solicited a quick exegesis of the Fourteen Points and their application to the armistice negotiations from Frank Cobb and Walter Lippmann, who were also in Paris. Wilson liked their memorandum but warned that it should be used “as merely illustrative and reserved for [the] peace conference.” The difference in interpreting the Fourteen Points may have spawned what many critics would later identify as the source of a fatal flaw in the peace settlement. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson, despite great admiration for House, described that flaw when he argued that the colonel’s use of Cobb and Lippmann’s memorandum led to a “fundamental misunderstanding”—that is, that the Germans accepted Wilson’s principles as stated, whereas the Allies accepted them as filtered through House’s interpretation.58
The end of the fighting came six days after the Pre-Armistice Agreement. German morale sagged as news of negotiations leaked out. Sailors mutinied when the admirals attempted to mount a final attack in the North Sea. Riots and uprisings broke out in a number of cities, and rumors of Bolshevik-incited revolution were rife. The kaiser abdicated on November 9 and fled to exile in the Netherlands. German envoys met in a railway car in a forest near Compiègne with a delegation headed by Foch and, except for two British liaison officers, composed entirely of French representatives. Foch’s terms called for the Germans to disarm completely on land and sea, surrender much of the rolling stock of their railways, and withdraw their forces to the right bank of the Rhine, ceding the Rhineland to immediate Allied occupation. The harshness of those terms and the uncertain governmental situation in Germany delayed final signing until three o’clock in the morning of November 11. Orders went out from the high commands to cease operations at eleven o’clock, thus lending the symbolic litany of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month to what would afterward be called the Armistice.59
Wilson got the news in a series of cables from House that began to arrive around midnight Washington time. He and Edith had not gone to bed, and, as she recalled, final confirmation of the end of the hostilities came at three in the morning. “Many persons have asked me what we did,” she later wrote, “and all I can say is, we stood mute—unable to grasp the significance of the words.” The president immediately issued a statement to the press: “A supreme moment of history has come. The eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favour, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of His own justice and mercy.” Wilson did not often invoke the name of God, and he did so now to strike a note of humility and caution. His words stood in stark contrast to the reactions of other leaders. “Autocracy is dead,” House cabled from Paris. “Long live democracy and its immortal leader.” In London, Lloyd George told the House of Commons, “I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars”—thereby giving rise to the phrase “war to end all wars,” which Wilson did not coin, although it would later be widely and mistakenly attributed to him.60
Just after noon, the president went to Capitol Hill to address a joint session of Congress. The speech consisted almost entirely of a solemn, half-hour reading of the terms of the Armistice. Despite the drab presentation, when Wilson read the second clause, which mandated evacuation of Alsace and Lorraine, the tension in the House chamber broke and tumultuous applause broke out. He devoted the remainder of the speech to sober reflections on the meaning of victory, urging patience, forbearance, and generosity.61 This circumspect tone brought him back to where he had begun when he took the country into the war. Passion and its control remained his greatest concern. The unleashing of passions at home, as in anti-German and anti-radical hysteria, race rioting, and bloodthirsty cries for war to the finish, was the worst price that the country paid for fighting this war—worse even than the 126,000 men who died in combat, of wounds, and from disease, making this the third deadliest war in all of American history, despite its being the second shortest. Failure to try to control those passions would stand as Wilson’s greatest failure as a war leader.
The Armistice of November 11 would be his cruelest irony of fate in foreign affairs. It was at once his greatest triumph and his greatest tragedy. Without question, his proclamation of the Fourteen Points and subsequent statements of what he called a “healing peace” shortened the war. A quarter century later, roughly the same coalition of Allies—augmented by a more powerful Russia—would fight under the banner of “unconditional surrender,” which itself would be a reaction against alleged flaws in the ending of this war. Then Germany would hold out against that more crushing coalition—in spite of being led by a genocidal Satan—until totally crushed. The Armistice saved hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and untold physical destruction. For such salvation, Wilson deserved honor and gratitude, but he would seldom get much of either in generations to come.
His achievement with the Armistice would go largely unsung because it contained the elements of its own destruction. From many standpoints, World War I ended too soon. If it had gone on longer, it would have taken on a different character at home and abroad. Domestically, a longer war would have afforded Wilson opportunities to rein in the excesses of repression and reconnect with the public, strengthen his hand politically, and make his case for a liberal peace. He might not have succeeded, but his leadership would look better for his having tried. In mobilization, he and his War Cabinet would have had more time to try different techniques of management, which might have led to more efficient procurement and production. Militarily, if World War I had lasted even a few months longer, it would have begun to resemble World War II. The British and American armies were finally perfecting tank warfare, and the future supreme commander in Europe and president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, was still stateside, training with those tanks. The British were also developing aircraft with longer flying ranges and the capacity to carry heavier payloads of explosives, thus opening possibilities for providing tactical support of ground forces and bombing targets behind the battle lines. Above all, the steady weakening of German forces and the ever-mounting number of doughboys meant that the coming months would have featured a war of movement instead of further deadlock in the trenches. Much of the sweep and dash that would make World War II a more satisfying and more fondly remembered war were in the offing at the end of 1918.
The worst consequences of this foreshortened war lay in diplomacy. Some interpreters would criticize Wilson and his supporters for making a soft peace that allowed Germany to rise again and menace the world a final time. Others would criticize him for abetting a hard peace that left Germans embittered and bent on revenge. Those criticisms would miss the point that Wilson was in the worst possible position to go far in either of those directions. The only chances for a peace that might have reconciled the Germans had come when he offered “peace without victory” at the beginning of 1917 and when he proclaimed the Fourteen Points a year later—both of which they spurned in the nastiest possible way. The only chance for a peace that might have tamed the Germans would have come if the war had gone on longer and resulted in a crushing defeat for them. That outcome would have conferred the added benefit of putting the president in the position he most desired. America would have been in the war longer and demonstrably contributed much more to a bigger victory. The Allies would have been utterly dependent on America and Wilson would have been able to dictate the terms of the settlement. Either of those alternatives might have led to lasting peace. Instead, Wilson was going to have to try to make bricks without straw.
20
COVENANT
On December 28, 1918, Woodrow
Wilson celebrated his sixty-second birthday in London, where he and Edith were staying at Buckingham Palace as guests of the king and queen. King George came to the guest suite to congratulate the president and give him a present, and later Wilson went to the American embassy to greet well-wishers. Sentimentally, the next day was an even more momentous day for him. After an overnight train trip, Wilson visited Carlisle, where he was—as he told the pastor of the church where his grandfather had preached—“making a pilgrimage of the heart.” He went to see the Woodrow family’s house and walked through the room where his mother was born. Then he attended Sunday services at the church, where, at the invitation of the congregation, he spoke briefly at the end of the service. He said the memories of his mother that came to him now moved him, and her “quiet character and sense of duty” always remained with him as he strove to do right in the world.1
It was appropriate for Wilson to mix personal feelings with public purpose. He had come to England, after stopping first in France, for a largely ceremonial tour before the opening of the peace conference. He was deeply suspicious about the intentions of the British and French leaders, but his wildly enthusiastic reception by huge crowds in Paris and London had heartened him. Moreover, he had just received sketches along lines similar to his own ideas for a league of nations from Lord Robert Cecil, a minister in the British cabinet, and Jan Christiaan Smuts, a South African delegate to the peace conference. These circumstances, together with Wilson’s own taste for bold action, were about to impel him on the biggest venture of his life, and it would look as if he might bring off the feat of leading the world down new paths of international justice and peace.
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