The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Erich Ludendorff

  A brilliant military commander whose political and diplomatic blunders showed why war is too important to be left to the generals.

  British General Sir Douglas Haig, French General Joseph Joffre, and future prime minister David Lloyd George

  “Our allies,” an American officer discovered, “seem to hate one another.”

  Though France’s most experienced soldiers and politicians thought his plan had no chance of success, he was allowed to proceed.

  The skeptics were right. Almost from the day it began, in April 1917, the Nivelle Offensive was a disaster. It gained nothing of significance and ended with 270,000 Frenchmen dead or wounded. On April 17 French soldiers no longer willing to have their lives thrown away in reckless offensives began what would develop into a widespread mutiny.

  Something similar was happening on the Eastern Front at this same time. Discipline was crumbling in the Russian armies, too. The troops were refusing to attack when ordered.

  It began to seem possible that the war would be ended not by the politicians or the generals but by ordinary foot soldiers who had decided to say no.

  Chapter 9

  ____

  “A Message of Death”

  MONDAY, APRIL 2, was a wet gray day in Washington and a long one for President Wilson. He rose at sunrise, in spite of having slept briefly and badly, and looked over the speech that he had finished writing late the previous night. Joe Tumulty arrived for work early, too, and at nine A.M. sent the speech off to be printed.

  This was the first day of the special session of Congress that the president had summoned two weeks earlier. It was the day on which, he had advised members, he would be delivering a message “concerning grave matters of national policy.”

  Despite the threatening weather, he and his wife set off after breakfast for their daily round of doctor-prescribed golf (terrible golf in the case of the president, who was known to have taken more than twenty strokes on a single hole). He hoped to go to the Capitol at midday to deliver his speech, but upon returning to the White House he learned that that was not going to be possible. A new House of Representatives, the one elected in November, was trying to elect a speaker and not finding it easy.

  After lunch the president read part of his speech to Colonel House. As was his practice, the colonel declared it the best thing Wilson had ever written. They waited, but Congress was still not ready. The president, restless, walked to the War Department and called on Secretary Newton Baker. Then he went to the Navy Department and sat in on one of Secretary Josephus Daniels’s staff meetings. After a talk with Secretary of State Lansing, he learned that the House of Representatives was in the process of reelecting Democrat Champ Clark of Missouri as speaker because the Republicans, though the majority, were irreparably divided.

  Those dining with the president—his wife Edith, his daughter Margaret, and Colonel House—were careful to limit themselves to small talk. Finally word arrived that the representatives had finished their business, were taking an hour’s break, and would be ready to receive the president at 8:30. Edith, Margaret, and House departed for the Capitol at 8:10, taking seats in the gallery. Ten minutes later Wilson stepped into his Pierce-Arrow limousine and, in company with Tumulty and his physician, rode to Capitol Hill.

  There, in the chamber of the House of Representatives, the members of the Supreme Court, the cabinet, the Washington diplomatic corps, and the Congress awaited him. When he entered the chamber at 8:35, the assembly stood and cheered. No one had any doubt about what was about to happen.

  The president, appearing nervous at first, asked not for a declaration of war but for Congress to “formally accept the status of belligerent” that had been “thrust upon” an unoffending nation by Germany. Most of the things he said in explaining this request were familiar to the assembled dignitaries, a repetition of things he had said, sometimes several times, before.

  Germany was of course the villain, responsible for everything. It had “put aside all restraints of law and humanity” and was waging “a war against mankind.” Its government was a “national foe to liberty,” impelling the United States to do its part in “the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion.”

  And the United States had “no selfish ends to serve,” the president said. “We desire no conquest, no dominion…seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall share with all free peoples.”

  The nation would enter the conflict in such “a high spirit of right and fairness,” in fact, that “we have no quarrel with the German people…no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship.”

  He condemned the U-boat campaign, as before, in lurid terms. It was “a war against all nations,” the dark work of an outlaw regime. But the United States was going to war not only to make the seas safe but to “make the world safe for democracy.” With these words, among the most famous ever spoken by any American, the president raised the task ahead to almost the loftiest level imaginable. He staked out a claim that, if justified, would put intervention beyond the reach of criticism. (It should be noted that Wilson never said the United States was entering “a war to end all wars.” The honor of uttering those foolish words belongs to David Lloyd George.)

  Less familiar today but also loudly applauded was a warning that the president inserted near the end of his speech. If disloyalty showed its ugly head, he assured the Congress, it was going to be met with “a firm hand of stern repression.” Two sentences earlier he had praised the patriotism of German-Americans, diluting the effect by adding that this was true of “most of them.” Time would have to pass before it became clear just how ominous this part of the speech was. First Wilson would have to reveal just how serious he was about “stern repression.”

  What was strikingly new—so new that many of his listeners did not take it seriously—was the president’s determination to go to war not in some limited or tentative way but on a scale commensurate with what was happening in Europe. When he prescribed “the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country,” not many could have grasped what a vast enterprise the nation was about to undertake. Nor could his listeners have understood the significance of Wilson’s promise of “the most liberal financial credits” for the other nations at war with Germany, because almost nobody in Washington knew how close the Allies were to financial collapse. These words, too, were applauded lustily, as was the president’s call for another expansion of the navy and the mustering into the armed forces of half a million men. That was a number almost inconceivable to Americans not old enough to remember the Civil War and therefore easy enough to cheer.

  The president reminded Congress that all this was going to have to be paid for. He said it was his hope that this would be done, to the fullest feasible extent, by “well-conceived taxation” rather than by borrowing, which would pass the burden to future generations. This, too, met with approval. It was applauded—for the time being, and in the spirit of the occasion—even by those who in due course would be trying to block almost every tax measure the president proposed.

  Everything Wilson said was answered with shouts of jubilation. So loud were the shouts, and so often did the shouters leap to their feet, that those who sat in silence went unnoticed. The sole conspicuous exception was Senator La Follette. He was on his feet, off to the side by himself, arms crossed on his chest and something like a sneer on his face. When Wilson finished and prepared to depart, even his old foe Henry Cabot Lodge was among those pushing forward to offer congratulations. The president had “expressed in the loftiest manner the sentiments of the American people,” Lodge told him. Wilson made his way to his limousine and returned to the White House.

  Colonel House had watched it all from above. What he later dictated for his diary is amusing and just a bit pathetic. It shows his expectation that one day many would read his words, as well as his hunger for the credit he was sure he deserved.

  “I
t is needless to say that no address he [Wilson] has yet made pleases me more than this one, for it contains all that I have been urging upon him since the war began,” House wrote. “It would be interesting to know how much of his address the president thinks I suggested. He does not indicate, in any way, that he is conscious that I had any part of it, I think it is quite possible that he forgets from what source he receives ideas as suggestions.”

  Almost as soon as Wilson was gone from the Capitol, and in spite of the lateness of the hour, an energized and exuberant Congress got to work on a number of suddenly urgent war-related bills. First among them was the declaration of war itself. It was a mere formality in the sense that there could be no doubt of its passage, but it had to be put through the mill all the same. Also into the hopper went a bill, largely drafted by the Justice Department, to give the president far-reaching powers to censor the press, prevent the use of the mails for subversive purposes (meaning any purpose of which the administration did not approve), and punish anyone interfering with the armed forces. And of course there were the first appropriations and revenue bills, the start of what would become a stream of increasingly huge outlays and increasingly controversial attempts to fund the war effort.

  Meanwhile back at the White House, Wilson withdrew to the quiet of an empty Cabinet Room. There—according to Joe Tumulty, the only other person present—he played out a scene no less dramatic than the one in which, in the early hours of that same day, he is supposed to have poured out his forebodings to the newsman Frank Cobb.

  A shaken president, Tumulty would write in his postwar memoir, invited his secretary to “think about what it was they were applauding” at the Capitol. “My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.” He spoke of the torture the past two and a half years had been for him. Of how he had long seen the “utter futility” of neutrality. Of having had to endure constant and cruel criticism while waiting for the public to see it, too.

  He read aloud an admiring letter sent five days earlier by a newspaper editor in Springfield, Massachusetts. “That man understood me and sympathized,” Tumulty quotes Wilson as saying. Then, “the president drew his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped away great tears that stood in his eyes, and then laying his head on the Cabinet table, sobbed as if he had been a child.”

  Not all commentators on this story believe it happened. To the extent that it shows a side of Wilson not evident elsewhere—such blatant self-pity is not characteristic, the weeping without precedent—it merits a measure of skepticism. But Wilson’s description of himself as heroically stoic, as seeing from the start things to which the rest of the country would long remain blind but suffering in silence, is entirely in character. There is no way of confirming Tumulty’s story or of disproving it. One must make of it what one will.

  When Congress reassembled on the morning of Tuesday, April 3, ready to get down to work, its top priority was a resolution that had been prepared by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in effect a declaration of war. As soon as it was passed by both chambers and signed by the president, the constitutional niceties would have been served and a state of war would officially exist. Difficulties arose, but at first they were mere annoyances. William Stone of Missouri, the progressive chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a strong Wilson ally back in the days when the administration was focused on domestic reforms, startled his fellow committee members by voting against the resolution. Then, after it received majority approval, he startled them again by declaring that he would not present it to the full Senate, as chairmen customarily did. That task fell to Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, who agreed to perform it in spite of having earlier been opposed to intervention. To continue to oppose it as things now stood, Hitchcock said, would be a “vain and foolish thing.” In making the presentation, he asked his fellow senators for unanimous approval. If no one objected, the way would be cleared for passage that day—miraculously fast action by U.S. Senate standards.

  The danger of a filibuster—assuming that anyone would have dared such a thing in the face of the pressure for swift approval—no longer existed. Almost a month earlier, in indignant response to the filibuster of the armed-ship bill, the Senate had added something new to its bag of parliamentary tricks. This was cloture, a complicated procedure by which three-fifths of the Senate could cut off debate on any measure. No one could have doubted that, if a filibuster of the war resolution were attempted, cloture would immediately be invoked.

  But now came another shock, the biggest yet. Robert La Follette, already the most hated man in Congress and probably the country for leading the armed-ship filibuster, loudly refused Hitchcock’s appeal for unanimous consent. This meant that another arcane rule came into effect, and no further action could be taken that day. As the senators dispersed, some asked if La Follette had gone insane. He was, they were certain, committing political suicide.

  When they assembled again on Wednesday morning, La Follette was more than ever America’s number-one villain. His name was on the front and editorial pages of every morning paper, almost always as the target of vicious and often personal abuse. Even in Madison, Wisconsin, where he had spent six years as a crusading and popular governor, a headline suggested that he had lost his mind. He arrived at the Capitol short of sleep, having spent most of the night preparing a speech, but ready for business and seemingly untroubled. He knew there was no way to stop the war resolution from being passed, but he was determined that first there would be a debate.

  Lodge of Massachusetts was among the first to speak. Amid a buzz of murmured approval, he urged passage. He did so in terms that his friend Theodore Roosevelt would have applauded, saying that this was a war against barbarism, against Germany’s “mad desire to conquer mankind and trample them under foot.” To turn away from the challenge would be to embrace “national degeneracy.”

  Vardaman of Mississippi, on the other hand, said, “I shall vote against this mistake—to prevent which, God helping me, I would gladly lay down my life.” If the country’s ordinary citizens were allowed to decide, he said, there would be no war.

  Stone of Missouri, having been warned by friends that the position he had taken on the previous day was likely to end his career, nevertheless told his colleagues that intervention was going to prove “the greatest national blunder in history.”

  Kenyon of Iowa, one of the “willful men” who had filibustered the armed-ship bill, now reversed course and decried any criticism of the president, his cabinet, or the Congress. He demanded “one hundred percent Americanism” and with it unqualified support of the war.

  Norris of Nebraska, younger than La Follette but already one of the pillars of progressive Republicanism, raised the tension in the chamber with the accusation that his colleagues supported the war because that was what Big Money wanted.

  Reed of Missouri said that if Norris’s words did not give aid and comfort to the enemy, “I do not know what would bring comfort to the heart of a Hapsburg or a Hohenzollern.”

  Williams of Mississippi was the first to use the word treason. He aimed it at Norris.

  And so it went, for nearly six hours, until the clock was almost at four P.M. At last it was La Follette’s turn to take the floor. The gallery was jammed with government officials—even members of the cabinet—along with ladies from the highest levels of Washington society and ordinary anonymous folk. The senator would speak for four hours, moving almost ploddingly from point to careful point, repeating one by one the president’s reasons for going to war and answering each at length. This was La Follette’s approach to oratory, appealing less to emotion than to evidence and to reason. It risked becoming tedious but rarely failed to be powerful in its effects.

  His basic point was that one had to look at America’s rather than Germany’s actions to understand why the country found itself on the threshold of war: “The failure to treat the belligerent nations of Europe alike, the failure to reject the unlawful
‘war zones’ of both Germany and Great Britain, is wholly accountable for our present dilemma.”

  And “we have helped to drive Germany into a corner, her back to the wall to fight with what weapons she can lay her hands on to prevent the starving of her women and children, her old men and babes.”

  And this was the consequence of the administration’s double standard, one that had caused every German offense to be “eagerly seized upon” by the United States while the misdeeds of an equally guilty Britain were “met with extraordinary forbearance.”

  La Follette dealt scornfully with the demand, heard repeatedly in the Senate that day, that it was the duty of every American to stand with the president in this hour of crisis. A citizen’s duty, he said, is to support the president when he is right and to stand with the truth when he is wrong.

  And Woodrow Wilson was not infallible, La Follette said. He himself had admitted, in calling for war, that he had been wrong about armed neutrality. He had demanded it as the answer to the submarine threat, and it had turned out to be no answer at all. And yet the president was now attacking those who had been right from the start—that “little band of willful men.”

  Wilson was also wrong in accusing Germany of breaking a solemn pledge by resuming unrestricted submarine warfare, the senator said. Germany’s acceptance of restrictions on its U-boats after the Sussex sinking had been explicitly conditioned on the United States doing something about the starvation blockade. When the United States did nothing, the acceptance became null.

  The blockade was—here La Follette’s language appears to have been congested by emotion—“the most ruthless and sweeping in its violation of neutral rights that up to that time had ever emanated from a civilized government engaged in prosecuting a war.”