The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Paul von Hindenburg

  He, not Kaiser Wilhelm, became Germany’s father figure and hero.

  It would not be accurate to describe Ludendorff’s situation as desperate at this point. He and Paul von Hindenburg, the rocklike old Prussian who far more than the kaiser was now a kind of father figure to the German nation, remained confident that sustained offensive action could bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion, and do so soon. After all, Italy was finished, its army able to maintain a line of defense only with British and French support. Romania had been finished since the end of 1916, and now even Russia was definitely finished, having on March 3 accepted peace terms dictated by Germany. The Russian collapse was beautifully timed. It freed Ludendorff to move scores of divisions to the Western Front.

  Britain and France were—like Germany, like Austria-Hungary and Turkey—in a deplorable state. They had sacrificed everything to the war, and their populations went about in a state of perpetual mourning. Ludendorff’s hope was that, if those populations could be shown that victory truly was impossible, they would demand a stop. He was not being foolish. Britain and France would likely have had to agree to negotiations as early as mid-1917 if money and materials of every description had not by then been pouring in from America, along with the first doughboys.

  At the next meeting of the Supreme War Council, at Beauvais on April 3, Clemenceau took another step toward getting Foch established as the Allies’ supreme commander. With his prior encouragement, Foch told the assembled politicians and generals that in order to perform effectively in the role he had been given at Doullens eight days earlier, he was going to need authority not just to coordinate but to initiate, plan, and direct operations. All present agreed, though Pétain and Haig, with the German offensive in a temporary lull, were less enthusiastic than they had been earlier. Haig in fact was trying to revert to his long-standing refusal to subordinate his forces to French command, but Lloyd George was determined not to let him do so. The extent to which he hated Haig, believing him to have squandered the lives of countless British troops, is evident in the urgency with which he set out to put him on a French leash.

  Pershing was present at the Beauvais meeting, and he surprised the others by declaring that he wanted it made clear for the record that Foch’s authority extended not only to the Allied armies but to the AEF as well. Pétain replied, possibly with a note of condescension, that this was not necessary because there was no such thing as an American army, at least in France. There were just scattered American combat divisions and support functions, and the best of them were now operating under Foch’s, not Pershing’s, command.

  Pétain had immense authority. He had saved France twice, first as commander at Verdun in 1916 and then in containing the mutinies of 1917. Now his strength under pressure was proving crucial in keeping the German breakthrough from turning into a terminal catastrophe. Pershing, however, was not intimidated. “There may not be an American army functioning now but there soon will be,” he said, “and I want this resolution to apply to it when it becomes a fact.” He wanted an acknowledgment that the day was going to come when all the elements of the AEF could be pulled together to form a single, distinct and significant fighting force, equal in status to the armies of the Allies. His listeners could hardly object, at least in principle. Their assent was a mere formality, however, and might remain one.

  Back on January 8, in an address to Congress, President Wilson had expressed his darkening view of the global conflict and its meaning. He laid out the most comprehensive statement yet of what the United States wanted to achieve in fighting the war. The specifics, known to history as Wilson’s Fourteen Points (see page 573), were based on the work of the Inquiry, the assortment of experts on global issues that Colonel House had assembled at the president’s direction. The points were loftily Wilsonian and would prove in due course to be largely unachievable: self-determination for all peoples (a fine notion indeed to offer the masters of the French and British Empires), open covenants openly arrived at, freedom of the sea, free trade, and the like. The fact that there were fourteen of them trumped Pope Benedict’s mere seven.

  By stating publicly that Alsace and Lorraine should be returned to France, Wilson gave the German hard-liners, Ludendorff foremost among them, fresh reason to believe that their enemies would never agree to terms that the people of Germany could accept as a sufficient return for their years of suffering. Thereby he contributed, whether inadvertently or intentionally, to ensuring that peace talks would remain impossible. Overall, the president’s words reflected his continuing determination to keep the United States on a plane of moral purity, untainted by vengefulness or any ambition except lasting peace for all peoples. Regarded ever since as possibly the president’s greatest, the speech was the last the world would hear of the prewar Wilson.

  Three months later, speaking in Baltimore at the height of the crisis precipitated by the German offensives, he expressed a still darker view, and the new wartime Wilson came permanently to the fore. The only possible response to German aggression, he said, was “Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.” He was now in the frame of mind that would enable him to respond positively when, a few weeks later, Clemenceau sent him a message saying that if Washington wanted to ensure victory, it was going to have to send a hundred divisions to France. One hundred American-size divisions meant nearly three million troops. Wilson was willing.

  Beyond the frightening success of Operation Michael on the Western Front, the biggest factor in changing the president’s tone was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which crowned the Armistice to which Germany and Russia had agreed back in December. It imposed on the Bolshevik regime some of the most brutally humiliating terms in the history of European diplomacy. On the face of it, the treaty was a military and political triumph for Germany. Signed on March 3, it made Germany master of practically the whole world to her east, from Poland to the Pacific Ocean. It stripped Russia of Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine, and more. The population of what had been the Romanovs’ great empire was cut by a third, as were Russia’s rail system, agricultural land, industrial capacity, and most crucial natural resources.

  The treaty was also a colossal blunder for Germany, with consequences as ruinous as the move to unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram. Strategically it was a recipe for future trouble, destroying any possibility of lasting amity between Germany and Russia. Even in the short term it was folly, burdening Germany with possessions that would prove to be disorderly, rebellious, and in general far more trouble than they were worth. At a time when the outcome of the war was certain to be settled on the Western Front, the Germans had to dispatch a million and a half troops to take control of their new eastern domains. Dreams of feeding the civilians of Germany and Austria-Hungary with the produce of the Ukrainian wheatfields would come to nothing. The only possible justification is that, as useful as a million additional troops could have been in his 1918 offensives, if Ludendorff had moved that many to the west, he probably would have been unable to support them. The four hundred thousand troops sent to Ukraine consumed thirty railcars of food daily. In German-occupied France, those carloads would have been almost impossible to find.

  To whatever extent Ludendorff expected the crushing of Russia to impel the remaining Allies to make peace, he was utterly mistaken. Brest-Litovsk strengthened the position of those in London, Paris, and Rome who saw no possibility of ever getting acceptable terms from Germany and insisted that German power must be radically curtailed. It cut the ground out from under those who were willing to settle for less than complete victory, and it satisfied Woodrow Wilson that he had only two options, victory or humiliation.

  April confronted the president with a multitude of troubles. On March 25, with Operation Michael at its terrifying peak and the news from Europe spreading alarm th
rough Congress, General Leonard Wood caused an uproar by testifying before the Senate Military Affairs Committee about what he had observed on an inspection tour of AEF facilities in Europe. Still resentful at not having been given the great command that Pershing now held, still disdainful of the president, Wood must have found it satisfying to report that in all of Europe there was still not a single American-made airplane. He knew that the matter would be taken up by Congress and the newspapers, which would demand to know how such a thing was possible almost a year after American entry into the war. It seemed scandalous on the face of it, and only the administration could be responsible.

  By the time of Wood’s testimony, the War Department had sharply reduced its aircraft-production forecasts. It was now promising to have only twenty thousand airplanes ready for service by the end of 1920, a sharp retreat from previous objectives, and to be training 7,500 pilots a year by that time. Even these numbers were unachievable, although not as wildly out of touch with reality as those given earlier. Congress had appropriated $840 million for the purpose, and still more was being requested. The Committee on Public Information, meanwhile, was continuing to issue boastful and largely baseless press releases about how much was being achieved, and skepticism was growing in Congress. Wood’s report forced the issue into the open, and the Republicans went on the attack. Many Democrats saw no reason to rise to the administration’s defense, especially as President Wilson was not responding to questions. Secretary Baker became a lightning rod, drawing so much abuse that he considered resigning.

  The president’s proud silence raised questions about what he was hiding and increased pressure for investigations and hearings. Worse soon followed. The aircraft “scandal” became a factor in Wilson’s intervention, with painful consequences for himself and his party, in a special election to fill a vacant Senate seat in Robert La Follette’s home state of Wisconsin.

  The Senate experienced an extraordinary mortality rate between the elections of 1916 and 1918. Ten senators—fully 10 percent of the membership—died in office. Eight of the ten were Democrats, and three of those eight were replaced by Republicans, causing the Democrats’ majority to grow thin. Among the departed was a dependable administration supporter, Democrat Paul Husting of Wisconsin, who had been elected by the thinnest of margins in 1914 when the state’s Republicans split into rival factions. His death in a hunting accident was a blow to the White House, and keeping his seat in Democratic hands became a high priority. But White House intervention in the race to replace him was by no means without risk. Congressional Republicans would be angered, and failure was certain to be interpreted as a repudiation of the president.

  Postmaster General Burleson urged Wilson to plunge into the fray. Popular revulsion at Robert La Follette’s hostility to the war was as strong in Wisconsin as elsewhere, he argued, and the state’s Republicans were divided into anti- and pro-La Follette factions. Conditions seemed right for the election of Democratic nominee Joseph E. Davies, a Wilson loyalist since 1912. A Davies victory would demonstrate the president’s strength, especially if Wilson helped to make it happen.

  The result was the first of a series of blunders that would make 1918 an electoral disaster for the national Democratic Party. And the wound would, like most of those that followed, be almost entirely self-inflicted. Congressman Irvine Lenroot won the Republican nomination for the vacant Wisconsin seat by edging out a rival from the La Follette camp; like most Republicans in the House, he had supported intervention and remained thereafter strongly in favor of a maximum war effort. But in 1917 he had been prominent among the Republicans who led the way in striking a press censorship provision from the Espionage Act, and in 1918 he began charging the president with “exclusiveness, secrecy and intolerance of congressional participation.”

  Wilson could see such a man only as a nuisance or worse. He wanted him expelled from Congress and decided that the surest way to accomplish this was to impugn his patriotism. Such a thing had to be done with some subtlety, of course. And so the president composed and made public a letter to his man Davies, praising him for selflessly resigning his position with the Federal Trade Commission in order to run for the Senate. The letter said that Davies’s position on prewar issues such as the McLemore Resolution (which would have forbidden Americans to travel on the ships of nations at war) and armed neutrality showed that he had passed “the acid test” of “true loyalty and genuine Americanism.” Only by implication did the letter accuse Lenroot of failing the president’s test and therefore of being not really loyal to the nation. The implication was clear enough to Wisconsin’s pro-war Republicans, however, and they were not amused.

  Lenroot, too experienced to let himself be thrown on the defensive in the middle of a hard-fought campaign, struck back quickly. And he used the nearest weapon at hand, the administration’s allegedly failed management of the aircraft-production program. Other Republicans eagerly joined in, pointing fingers of blame at the White House and raising a chorus of complaints. It was a rather arcane issue for voters a thousand miles from Washington, especially in the absence of evidence of actual wrongdoing, and in all likelihood it would have made little difference to the outcome of the election. But then the White House made its next mistake, and this one would be fatal. It dispatched Vice President Thomas Marshall to campaign on Davies’s behalf.

  Irvine Lenroot, U.S. senator from Wisconsin, 1918–1927

  He was targeted for defeat for failing Wilson’s “acid test” of loyalty.

  It seemed a harmless idea. Marshall was himself a midwesterner, an amiable and progressive former governor of Indiana who liked to joke about two brothers, one of whom ran away to sea, the other of whom became vice president of the United States, neither of whom was ever heard of again. But by 1918 he was thoroughly infected with the war fever that had most of Washington in its grip. He went forth not to woo the voters of Wisconsin but to scold them, and to do so in keeping with the president’s instructions. “Your state of Wisconsin is under suspicion,” he told audiences in Milwaukee and elsewhere. “Having purified the stream in the primary”—by rejecting candidates associated with La Follette—“you welcome the sewage vote to help you over the election.” The sewage vote, he did not have to explain, was made up of pacifists, traitors, fools, lovers of the kaiser, and enemies of Woodrow Wilson.

  The vice president did say that Lenroot was “bidding for the votes of the German sympathizer, the traitor, the seditionist, the pacifist.” Such words (for which he would later apologize, telling Lenroot that he had been following orders from “higher up”) melded the feuding Wisconsin Republican Party and many of the state’s uncommitted voters into a single hot mass of indignation. On Election Day, April 2, Davies received more votes than the late Senator Husting had in winning the 1914 election, but Republicans turned out in even greater numbers and gave Lenroot a comfortable margin of victory. It was a repeat of the New York City mayoral race, only worse because this time Wilson had intentionally made the election a test of his own support. He had tried to save a crucial Senate seat for his party and failed. He had tried to show Congress that the people were with him, and again he failed. The extent to which the Wisconsin electorate was not unified is apparent in the hundred thousand votes cast for Victor Berger of Milwaukee, who ran as a socialist on a platform headlined “One Hundred Percent for Peace.” His vote total was four times what socialists commonly received, and it happened in spite of Berger’s having been indicted, just days before the election, on charges of violating the Espionage Act. This was part of a pattern. Across the country, starting in the summer and autumn of 1917, antiwar socialists were doing increasingly well in local and municipal elections.

  There were other, uglier symptoms of discord. One that attracted national attention occurred on April 4 in the coal-mining town of Collinsville, in southern Illinois. A drunken mob seized a thirty-year-old “registered enemy alien,” a German-born baker and miner named Robert Paul Prager. The self-appointed patriots strip
ped him, beat him, and tied him up in an American flag before allowing the police to put him in jail. Those same police stood aside, however, when the mob returned, found Prager cowering in the basement, and carried him away. After allowing him a moment to write to his family in Dresden (“Dear Parents, I must this day, the fourth of April, 1918, die. Please, my dear parents, pray for me.”), they strung him up.

  Prager had been targeted for voicing socialist beliefs and for going so far as to attend Socialist Party meetings. That he was to any degree hostile to American intervention in the war, however, is simply not credible. He had not only filed an application for citizenship shortly after war was declared, but he had attempted to join the navy. (He was ineligible because he was blind in one eye.) Against the odds and the wishes of the good people of Collinsville, eleven alleged leaders of the lynch mob were charged with murder. Their trial was a farce: the defendants draped in red, white, and blue, a band playing patriotic songs loudly outside the courthouse. Although one of the accused had admitted his guilt to reporters and a coroner’s jury, and although the defense focused on establishing their Americanism credentials rather than their noninvolvement in the lynching, jurors needed only minutes to find all of them not guilty. “Well,” one of them cried out, “I guess nobody can say we aren’t loyal now.” His understanding of loyalty, and of what constituted proof of loyalty, was as widespread as it was defective.