by G. J. Meyer
The Senate if not the nation would have been unmoved by La Follette’s speech if he had been permitted to deliver it. Many of his fellow senators were furious with him, and many who were not furious wanted to appear so. Before adjournment, seventy-five of them signed a declaration that they would have voted for the armed-ship bill if given the opportunity. La Follette found himself reviled in the press as little better than a traitor—if better at all. Theodore Roosevelt said he “ought to be hung.” A cartoon in the New York World showed him receiving an iron cross from a huge hand, apparently sheathed in iron and belonging to the kaiser.
War fever rose to new heights. Two and a half years of unrelenting anti-German propaganda and self-censorship by the American press were bearing the fruit for which Britain had always hoped. If it is possible to point to a single reason for its coming to ripeness at just this time, that reason has to be Herr Zimmermann’s telegram. From the morning when it became the talk of the nation, large segments of the American public—the so-called opinion leaders especially—plunged into a frenzy of patriotism that at times resembled a kind of collective madness. That it happened so quickly shows the power of the long-suppressed passions that the Zimmermann headlines released.
The savagery of the attacks on Senator La Follette was one early symptom. Another, even more dramatic and bizarre, was what happened in New York City on March 11, one week exactly after Congress was obliged to adjourn without having passed the armed-ship bill. The New York Federation of Churches held—it would not be an exaggeration to say that it jubilantly celebrated—what was publicized as War Sunday. The stated aim was to “mobilize Christian strength behind President Wilson.” Implicit in this, and obviously so, was the expectation that the United States would soon be at war. As part of the proceedings, 158 congregations voted their support of intervention and conscription. They cheered pastors who told them that intervention was morally imperative, opposition a moral failing, Germany the breeding ground of monsters. Clergy who declined to take part were apologized for by their congregants. All this was echoed in other cities.
By the end of March, the Germans had completed the risky process of evacuating the great bulge in the front known as the Noyon salient and withdrawing to the Hindenburg Line. In withdrawing, they destroyed every building, road, and rail line in the salient, leaving their enemies with no infrastructure from which to launch their planned offensive. The move cost the Germans little of strategic value and put them in a position vastly more defensible than the one they had abandoned. But it was, as Ludendorff had foreseen, acclaimed by the Allies as a glorious advance of their forces. It gave fresh encouragement to the pro-war Americans, seeming to establish the truth of what the British propagandists had been claiming from the start of hostilities: that the Germans were beaten, that victory lay just on the other side of the next great offensive, and that the United States, if it intervened, would be enlisting not only in the cause of justice and civilization but on the winning side as well.
A divide had been crossed. The road to war was now downhill all the way.
Background
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Troublemaker
To grasp just how strong the impulse to reform was in the United States in the years leading up to the Great War, it is necessary to look no further than to the life story of Robert Marion La Follette of Wisconsin.
That his achievements were in large part La Follette’s own doing, the product of his ambition and energy and rare political gifts, cannot be doubted. The proof is in the record: his rise from rural obscurity to become in 1884 the youngest member of the U.S. House of Representatives; three consecutive and eventful terms as governor, won in the face of powerful opposition; and the Senate seat he held to the day of his death and from which he made himself one of the most important public figures in the country.
Robert La Follette, U.S. senator from Wisconsin, 1906–1925
He accused the president of using a double standard in dealing with Britain and Germany.
Nor can it be denied that he was as tireless and effective a champion of the rights of ordinary citizens as the American political system has ever produced. For more than a quarter of a century, first in the Upper Midwest and then on the national stage, he was a leader—more often than not the leader—in what at first seemed a hopeless fight to take power from Big Money and put it in the hands of voters. The list of reforms that bear his mark is as long as it is impressive. It includes antitrust legislation, initiative and referendum, open primaries instead of smoke-filled rooms, election of senators by voters instead of by state legislatures, regulation of utilities and banks, better wages and working conditions, restrictions on child labor, and the progressive taxation of incomes.
And that is not all—not nearly. Thanks in no small measure to the influence of his remarkable wife, Belle, the first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School and saluted by The New York Times when she died as “perhaps the least known, yet the most influential of all American women who have had to do with public affairs in this country,” La Follette was from the start of his career far ahead of his time where almost every question of social justice was concerned.
In a society that took it for granted that blacks were inherently inferior and Jews irreparably alien, La Follette positioned himself front and center in opposition to racial discrimination and anti-Semitism. He championed voting rights for women when to do so was to be ridiculed as a crank, and he protected the woodlands of Wisconsin’s Native Americans from the predations of timber companies. He was ridiculed for opposing discrimination against immigrants from Asia.
He was widely regarded, especially but not only by those whose privileged position in American society he challenged, as a bizarre figure, a threatening if sometimes pathetically amusing nuisance. Even worse, in the eyes of those he targeted for attack, were his demands—his shocking and preposterous demands, as they saw it—for controls on the wielders of economic power and changes in the ways the nation taxed itself and chose its political leaders. His ideas drew enemies like iron filings to a magnet. To many traditionalists, his progressivism seemed a rejection of core American values, a repudiation of individualism in favor of an interfering government.
Word of what he had done as governor of Wisconsin preceded him to Washington, causing him to be shunned even by his new Republican colleagues when he first took his seat in the Senate in 1906. That he was a wild rebel seemed confirmed when, ignoring the tradition that new senators should keep their mouths shut, he took the floor in support of a bill (regarded as outrageous and soon defeated) to protect railroad workers from having to work more than sixteen consecutive hours.
In due course it became clear even in Congress, however, that he was a force that had to be reckoned with, a man with too large a following to be safely ignored. As other Republican progressives won seats in the Senate, they looked to him as their leader. Even Democratic progressives regarded him as an ally. He was so unimpressed with the reform agendas of two successive presidents from his own party, the “trustbuster” Theodore Roosevelt no less than William Howard Taft, that his relations with both became rancorous. Frustrated at failing to win the presidential nomination in 1912, La Follette lent his support to the progressive agenda of the Democrat Wilson. For much of the national elite, the masters of industry and finance especially, he remained a threat to tranquillity and prosperity—so serious a threat that his removal from office came to seem a patriotic objective.
Powerful enemies were not La Follette’s only problem. He had flaws, and they were often on display. He could be self-righteous, disdainful even of well-intended opponents, and unable to conceive that anyone who opposed him could possibly not be stupid or corrupt. His zeal was tinged with paranoia: someone was always spying on him, he thought, or plotting against him. He was not immune to hypocrisy, denouncing his foes as machine politicians while using patronage to build a formidable machine of his own.
Such a man could never have had the ca
reer that La Follette had, could never have accomplished as much as he did, if he had not been in some deep way the right man for his times. Or one of the right men, at any rate, expressing in his person something that voters in great numbers approved, offering with his legislative agenda things that they, too, wanted. In that sense he was like William Jennings Bryan. And also—though not in the same way—like Woodrow Wilson.
La Follette’s similarities to Wilson are striking. Both were morally serious, earnest, courageous, and invincibly certain of their own virtue and wisdom. Both were ferociously ambitious, and in remarkably similar ways: driven to prove themselves worthy of idolized fathers. La Follette’s father was in a strange but very real sense a more daunting figure than Wilson’s, because he was literally as insubstantial as a ghost. He died when Robert was still a small child, so that the boy grew up without memories of him or even a photograph. He was left with nothing except his mother’s tales of what a great and good man he had been, and her insistence that the son must prove himself worthy.
Of course La Follette and Wilson were both crowd-pleasing orators—“of course” because otherwise they could never have risen as they did. Like Bryan, La Follette and Wilson became known early in their careers as speakers who, if you took the trouble to go and hear them, were not going to disappoint. They, too, were men whom audiences would pay to hear.
But their differences were striking, too, and nowhere more conspicuous than in their speaking styles. The lean, cool Wilson’s oratorical gifts were of a quasi-poetic character. The journalist who wrote his 1912 campaign biography said Wilson’s appeal was to the emotions and that he achieved his effects through “vagueness and reiteration, symbolism and incantation.” He summoned his listeners to contemplate grand and abstract ideals, and offered them stirring if vague visions (of “peace without victory” and “making the world safe for democracy”). He would have been brilliant at the advertising game.
The five-foot-five La Follette, as chesty and pugnacious as a bantam rooster, approached speechmaking from an entirely different angle, one rooted in his experience as a courtroom lawyer. His orations could go on for hours, and one can search through pages of them without finding a memorably ringing phrase. They were by no means just blather, however. He laid out facts and constructed arguments, painstakingly building a case for whatever he wanted listeners to believe or do. He was never boring, because the passion with which he spoke had an electrifying effect and because the things he talked about—the greed of the railroads, the unfairness of the tax system, and the exploitation of workers—mattered to the people who came to hear.
Wilson’s penchant for grand generalities, when contrasted with La Follette’s dogged focus on logic and facts, points to the most profound difference between the two. The young Wilson had honed his rhetorical skills because of what he wanted to be: a leader, a great man, a “statesman.” That was also true of the young La Follette, but his ambition had an additional dimension. He grew up among the pioneering people of what was called the Middle Border, people who believed that the fruits of their hard toil were being stolen by the banks and railroads, the packing companies and mill owners, the trusts. He wanted power because he genuinely wanted to do something for these people. From early on he had a mission, a program, one so specific and clear that he was able to distill it into a dozen and a half words. “The supreme issue,” he said, “is the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many.” That was the basis of his entire legislative program. To stop that encroachment, to reverse it, was the purpose of his life.
This made him—ironically, in light of Wilson’s reputation for idealism—the less pragmatic of the two. Though Wilson was nearly incapable of changing his mind once he made it up, before taking a position he was quite capable of considering a wide range of options and choosing the one that would serve his purposes best. He could become a strong progressive when doing so led to the governor’s office in New Jersey, do it again when the goal was the White House, do it a third time when his reelection was at issue. But when there was no particular advantage in being progressive, no need to do so, he could revert quite comfortably to the genteel conservatism in which he had been raised. It was enough—so long as he was recognized as a great man—for him to be the governor, and then to be the president. Nothing in particular absolutely demanded to be done—until the war brought him the opportunity to become the savior of the world.
La Follette was incapable of that kind of flexibility. Only one option was open to him: militant, combative, unrelenting reform. With it came things that demanded to be done. Americans of the twenty-first century might be puzzled that he saw no contradiction between his lifelong campaign for government intervention in the economy and his adherence to the Republican Party, which from the 1860s had been the party of business. In his eyes, there was no contradiction. If the party happened to be dominated, nationally, by men who spoke for the Big Money and opposed democratizing reforms, nevertheless it was the party of Lincoln, the party that had freed the slaves, the party that had been faithful to the Union in its hour of crisis and now stood for the values of small-town and rural America as well as a growing middle class. To people like La Follette, it seemed the natural home, the only rightful home, of true democracy. It would function as such as soon as it was led back to the right path. The Democrats, by contrast, seemed to men of his stamp to offer no real alternative. They were the party of the disloyal South, of its planter plutocracy, and of the worst big-city political machines.
This orientation helps to explain the force and bitterness of La Follette’s opposition to those steps, such as the arming of American merchant ships, by which the United States drew closer to intervention in the European war. He thought the Wilson administration wrong in its stern treatment of the Central Powers and in its indulgence of the Allies. He was convinced that joining the Allies would lead to vastly greater wrongs. But his horror at the drift toward intervention had deeper causes as well. He was early to see what many progressives of both parties would understand only later: that the war and progressivism were fundamentally incompatible, and that the military crusade that Wilson came to adopt as his mission in life was going to send more power flowing to those Americans who already had most of it.
Chapter 8
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Why
WHAT FOR MANY years was probably the best-known story about Woodrow Wilson, a story treasured by his admirers, is set in the White House in the predawn hours of Monday, April 2, 1917. That was the day on which he was to go before Congress and ask it to affirm that, as the result of the crimes of the German Imperial Government, the United States was at war. The speech with which he would do this, pecked out on his portable typewriter over the preceding days and nights, was ready to be sent to the printers.
As the story goes, the president was in deep agony, tortured by thoughts of what the day ahead, and intervention in the Great War, were going to mean for himself, for the Congress, and for the nation. Sleep being out of the question, he had telephoned one of his most loyal supporters in the realm of journalism, Frank Cobb of the New York World, and asked him to get a late train to Washington.
It was one A.M. when Cobb reached the White House. He was ushered into the president’s study, becoming there a receptacle into which Wilson poured a dark vision of what lay ahead, his fears about what intervention was going to do to America, and the desperation with which he wished for some way out.
“He said when a war got going it was just war and there weren’t two kinds of it,” Cobb was reported as having recalled later. “It required illiberalism at home to reinforce the men at the front. We couldn’t fight Germany and maintain the ideals of government that all thinking men shared. He said we would try but it would be too much for us.”
As the night wore on, Wilson’s ruminations became more and more apocalyptic. “Once lead this people into war,” he said, “and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be ruthless
and brutal, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.”
Cobb recalled afterward that the president “thought the Constitution would not survive it. That free speech and the right to assembly would go. He said a nation couldn’t put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it had never been done.”
He had done everything possible to avoid war, Wilson said mournfully, but had been thwarted at every turn by Germany. He asked if he could have done anything different, if there was any way to escape having to deliver the speech he had so painfully composed.
“If there is any alternative,” he exclaimed, “for God’s sake let’s take it!”
Cobb assured him that there was none.
So the story goes. Today it does not carry quite the weight that it did in 1924, when it first appeared. Half a century has passed since historians began to ask if the original telling, in a biography of Frank Cobb by John S. Heaton, ought to be believed. Today it is impossible to know if anything like it ever happened at all.
The story’s problems are manifold. Cobb himself left no written or corroborative oral account of any such visit to the White House or conversation with Wilson, and he and the president were both dead when Heaton’s book appeared. He supposedly told the story to two of his subordinates at the World, Maxwell Anderson and Lawrence Stallings, who later passed it on to Heaton. But records were of course kept of comings and goings at the White House, and they contain no evidence of a visit by Cobb on or around the night in question. Nor is it easy to understand why Wilson, who had spent hours laboring in solitude over his speech and was little inclined to trust even friendly journalists, would abruptly summon from New York a man who was not a close friend for a dark-night-of-the-soul venting of his fears. Not one member of his cabinet knew what he intended to say to Congress that day. Would he have unburdened himself to a newsman?
