The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  In giving this letter to Hitchcock, understanding that he would share it with the other Senate Democrats, Wilson killed any possibility of accommodation with the reservationists. He thought the country was with him, that his opponents would be purged in the next election, and that the treaty as he wanted it would be ratified then if not sooner. (Incredibly, despite his stroke, he continued to harbor ambitions of a third term.) Even Lodge was among the prominent figures—Colonel House, recently back from what had turned out to be almost a year in Paris, was another—who sent appeals to the White House, trying to find ways to save a treaty that now faced certain defeat and urging the president to soften his position. None of these messages were answered or even acknowledged. To this day it is not known whether Mrs. Wilson allowed the president to see them. One of the specialists attending her husband had warned that nothing should be allowed to disturb him. Like the first Mrs. Wilson in the final days at Princeton, she saw it as her responsibility to shield her husband from all possible upset. Physicians today say that even from a therapeutic perspective, this was a mistake—that a return to business as usual, if not overdone, could have made a more nearly complete recovery possible.

  The Hitchcock letter as revised by Wilson was dated November 18. By then the Senate had approved a dozen reservations, all of them originating in the Foreign Relations Committee. Still more would be proposed and put to a vote in the final hours, and three of those would be approved as well. One—another rebuke for the president—stated that the covenant’s labor provisions, the ones that Wilson proudly called his Magna Carta of labor, would not apply to the United States unless approved by a joint resolution of Congress.

  Opposition to the labor provisions had been led, curiously, by probably the Senate’s foremost champion of organized labor, Robert La Follette. He said they had the potential “to subject American labor to a direct attack upon its existing protective statutes.” His success in this matter signaled his reemergence as a political force, and the end of the two and a half years during which even his fellow Republicans had shunned him and threatened him with expulsion from the Senate. His status as an untouchable came to end when, in the aftermath of the 1918 election, the Republicans needed his vote to take control of the almost evenly divided Senate. Now his sins were forgotten, and he was restored to his old place as Capitol Hill’s leading progressive. He joined the irreconcilables, mocking the president for demanding “the crushing of the German Republic and the German people” after having said repeatedly that it was the Hohenzollern rulers, not their subjects, who bore responsibility for Germany’s sins.

  The dynamics of the fight for ratification had by this point changed profoundly. Once the crucial question had been whether the reservationists could be persuaded to accept the president’s arguments and join the Democrats in approving the covenant in undiluted form. Gradually, however, the reservationists had strengthened their position, increasing their public support by approving only those reservations that reflected voters’ concerns and rejecting those that seemed reckless, ill advised, or simply pointless. With Lodge openly on their side, they felt no pressure to move at all. The question now was whether the Democrats were going to come to them, accepting the reservations.

  The unsurprising answer came on the evening of November 19, when a resolution of ratification containing the approved reservations went down to an overwhelming defeat. Thirty-five Republicans voted yes and were joined by four Democrats unwilling to follow the president on this question. The no votes were cast by forty loyal if in many cases regretful Democrats plus the irreconcilables, who now numbered fifteen. (Four senators were absent, not enough to have made a difference.) In a curious move that is worth noting because it suggests how the vote could have gone if Wilson had been less inflexible, forty-five Democrats then voted for a resolution to reconsider—to vote again on—the measure they had just rejected. This was their oblique and rather despairing way of showing what they really thought—of demonstrating support for the treaty without defying the White House. Added to the positive Republican votes, these forty-five senators would have been enough to approve the treaty in a landslide. But when the second vote was taken, the president’s strictures were again effective. Only two Democrats switched to the yes side.

  And so it was over. Republican Warren Harding spoke for many in both parties when he called the vote “a very grave misfortune, and I am sorry about it.” He was speaking for many Democrats when he put the blame on “the towering ambition” of Woodrow Wilson.

  One of the unhappy Democrats, Claude Swanson of Virginia, sought out Lodge. “For God’s sake,” he pleaded, “can’t something be done to save the treaty?”

  “Senator,” Lodge said, “the door is closed. You have done it yourselves.”

  The hour comes round at last, November 11, 1918

  Americans rejoice at news of the Armistice.

  Aftermath

  ____

  “Now It Is All Over”

  CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, famous for describing war as the continuation of politics by other means, defined victory as the achievement of a “better political arrangement.” He said also that the improvement must justify the price, and any war in which this proves impossible should be brought to the earliest possible end.

  When the first anniversary of the Great War’s end came on November 11, 1919, the victors were generally satisfied that the world’s new political arrangements were definitely preferable to what the war had swept away. Nor were many inclined to complain, despite the indescribable devastation, that the price had been too high. The British and French Empires, after all, were significantly bigger than they had been in 1914. Italy had spread her borders, while Germany had been rendered incapable of competing with any of them in any way.

  The United States once again stood apart. She had made victory possible, had paid the smallest price in blood, and alone had gained in wealth. By virtue of the failure of the Senate and President Wilson to come to terms on the peace treaty and the League of Nations—the Senate’s rejection of both came, as we have seen, in this same November—America would be less affected by the new arrangements than any other participant in the war. The doughboys had returned home and, like millions of their fellow citizens, were trying to do the impossible: recover the life that they had lived before the war.

  Colonel Edward House had remained in Paris into the autumn of 1919. He did so at President Wilson’s request and to his own deepening frustration, the only American delegate to do so. He accomplished nothing—the important work was finished, and the Americans still on hand to help finish the peace conference’s business resented his presence—and was unsettled by reports of the president’s belligerent attitude toward the Senate and refusal to compromise. His appeals to the White House for a more conciliatory approach went unacknowledged.

  There was irony in the colonel’s situation. He had never wanted appointment as a delegate and in fact had observed more than two months before the Armistice that unless Wilson decided to remain in Washington “there are many reasons why it would be better for me to be on the outside.” Not the least of those reasons was the danger that, as an official participant in the conference, he would not be able to remain behind the scenes. Thus he would run the risk of attracting the attention of the newspapers and arousing the president’s jealousy—which of course is exactly what happened. By summer’s end it was all too clear that he was not so much needed in Paris as unwanted, by Woodrow Wilson, in Washington.

  Late in September 1919, just as the president’s western tour was coming to its disastrous end, House informed the White House of his decision to return home. Receiving no response and knowing little of Wilson’s condition, he assumed that there were no objections to his leaving Paris. After his arrival in New York, himself so ill that he was taken ashore on a stretcher, his attempts to communicate with the president were answered, when they were answered at all, by the distinctly unfriendly Mrs. Wilson. She made plain her unhappiness that he had
departed France without permission and intimated that the president felt the same. House’s offers to help in any possible way were brushed aside.

  Americans observed their first Armistice Day holiday with picnics and parades and triumphal speeches in every city and town. But like so many things connected with the war, the celebration turned out to be flawed—most notably because of what happened in Centralia, Washington, that day.

  The rough laborers in Centralia’s lumber industry, some of the last remaining members of the shattered Industrial Workers of the World, had long had an uneasy relationship with the rest of the community. When an Armistice Day parade by two local American Legion posts stopped provocatively in front of an IWW meeting hall crowded with members on the lookout for trouble, the result was mayhem. Four legionnaires were shot dead, including a post commander recently home from army service in Siberia. A number of Wobblies were arrested, and one was lynched. Across the country, the next morning’s headlines told readers of what became instantly famous as the Centralia Massacre.

  Accounts of how the trouble started are contradictory, as is commonly true of such incidents. Apparently both sides deserve blame, and misunderstanding and panic made their usual contributions. Ultimately, six union members were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to long prison terms. Again as usual, the tragedy was said to be the work of traitors and Bolsheviks.

  That same month also brought the breaking of strikes by nearly a million steelworkers and coal miners. The courts ruled against the unions—no surprise there—and the trouble was blamed not on hours or wages or working conditions but on subversives. Organized labor went into a defensive crouch from which it would not emerge until the 1930s and the New Deal.

  Four days before Christmas, 249 of the aliens rounded up in Attorney General Palmer’s November 1919 raids were herded aboard a ship bound for Russia. Many were forced to leave behind dependent wives and children. Palmer and his right hand, J. Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation, were at the pier before dawn to see them off. They expected to be deporting many, many more.

  Palmer, feeling the wind at his back as public and press continued to applaud his anti-Red campaign, was at this time lobbying for a peacetime version of the Sedition Act, one that would give his department new tools for suppressing dissent and punishing dissenters. He would fail in this—though the Senate supported him, the House of Representatives refused to go along—but not until after President Wilson endorsed his proposal. Wilson’s intervention in this matter, which if successful would have opened the door to a perpetuation of the government’s attacks on the Bill of Rights, generally receives little attention in the books of his more fervent admirers. Is it unfair to wonder if such writers can find no way to make it fit with their hero’s image as a champion of liberty?

  Twelve days after their first shipload of alleged subversives steamed out of New York harbor, Palmer and Hoover launched a new round of raids. Some five thousand men and women were rounded up in scores of cities and towns. Many were held incommunicado and under appalling conditions—the two sexes crowded together in unventilated rooms without basic sanitation, sleeping on stone floors for days and even weeks. Only aliens with connections to Communist organizations were supposed to be in custody, but the authorities were rarely in a hurry to identify the U.S. citizens and the non-Communist aliens and allow them to go home.

  January 1920 brought the peace conference to an end at last. Only the United States was still officially at war with Germany, because only she had not accepted the treaty imposed at Paris. Europe was settling down, if not altogether comfortably. Lenin’s Bolsheviks were so solidly established in Russia that Britain and France were inching toward trade relations with them. The Near and Middle East were still in turmoil, with endless bloodshed to come.

  President Wilson had by this time recovered to the extent that he was able to take a few steps without assistance. His judgment, however, remained all too obviously impaired. He arranged for a letter bearing his name to be read at Washington’s January 8 Jackson Day dinner, an annual gathering of leading Democrats. In it, he announced his intention to make the 1920 presidential election a referendum on the treaty and the League of Nations. He implied, without stating so explicitly, that he himself would again be his party’s candidate. Though most of the audience cheered lustily, William Jennings Bryan was present and told all within earshot that the president’s plan was ridiculous. The country was too big and diverse, he said, for any national election ever to serve as a referendum on any single issue; he himself had learned this the hard way in 1900, in trying to make that year’s campaign a referendum on imperialism. Nationally, the reaction to the letter was disastrously negative. Large numbers of opinion leaders began to see him as “a petulant and sick man and now the principal obstacle to ratification.”

  Former British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, recently ennobled as Viscount Grey of Fallodon and almost totally blind, was in Washington at the time, sent as a special ambassador by the Lloyd George government to encourage ratification of the treaty. Wilson refused to see Grey, supposedly in part because the young diplomat accompanying him and serving as his eyes was accused of having told an off-color joke about Edith Wilson. (“What did Mrs. Galt do when the president proposed to her?” “She fell out of bed!”) Annoyed at being rebuffed after making such a long and (for a blind man) challenging journey, Grey returned to England and published a letter in which he said (speaking for himself only, but probably with Lloyd George’s approval) that neither Britain nor France had serious objections to the Senate’s reservations about the league covenant. He thereby effectively destroyed Wilson’s argument that passage of the treaty with reservations would require a reopening of the Paris negotiations.

  In February, Edward Lansing resigned as secretary of state. Out of consideration for the president’s piteous condition, he did not issue the letter of resignation with which he had intended to air his grievances. His successor, almost inexplicably, was plucked from the obscurity of the shipping board: a figure of small reputation and little diplomatic experience named Bainbridge Colby. His principal qualifications appear to have been his years as a Democratic Party loyalist and his worshipful admiration of Woodrow Wilson, which he had put on display while serving in a minor role at the peace conference. His appointment reflected the president’s long-standing conviction that, being in personal charge of international relations, he had no need for a strong secretary of state. It is also explained by his demand for absolute and unwavering loyalty. During a year in office, Colby would cause much mischief by encouraging Wilson’s fantasies of winning a third term and taking vengeance on his foes.

  The reservationists now mounted a new attempt to get the peace treaty ratified and the United States into the League of Nations. Senators from both parties joined forces in the hope of making it happen. That Majority Leader Lodge allowed his Republican colleagues to proceed makes nonsense once again of the claim, repeated endlessly down the years, that he was unalterably opposed to league membership, an isolationist seeking to wall off the United States from the rest of the world.

  Democrats who in November had reluctantly done the president’s bidding and rejected a treaty with reservations were eager to vote yes and hopeful that this time the White House would allow them to do so. Most Republicans were equally eager to accommodate them. As in 1919, there were speeches and debates and appeals to the president for compromise, and hopes rose. But Wilson was if anything even more inflexible than at the time of the first vote. Traits that had always been his least attractive—cold hauteur and an ill-concealed sense of personal superiority, contempt for and distrust of others, a readiness to see longtime faithful friends as traitors—had become so dominant as to smother his better qualities. The protective wall thrown up around him by his wife and physician completed his isolation.

  On March 8, following in his own footsteps of the previous year, Wilson issued a statement denouncing the Senate’s proposed reservations
as “in effect a nullification of the terms of the treaty itself.” Again he called upon Democrats to reject what remained, for him, the Republicans’ utterly unacceptable demands. As before he got his way, but his margin of victory exposed the erosion of his authority. Twenty-three Democrats defied him and voted in favor. This was a solid majority of the Democrats who were not irreconcilables. Overall, fifty-seven senators voted for the treaty, thirty-nine against. It thus fell short of the needed two-thirds by seven votes. This result was entirely the president’s doing. Even Democratic newspapers excoriated him.

  Did it matter, really? At the end of the next global war, the creation of the United Nations would be hailed as the belated fulfillment of Wilson’s grand vision. (Its charter, however, echoed the Senate reservations of 1919 and 1920 and contained not even an echo of Article 10.) Opinions of course differ as to how useful the UN has been, but no one would claim that it has come close to ending war. In the twenty-first century, it cannot claim to affect even the frequency of wars to any measurable extent, or to play much of a part in bringing them to an end. Nor is it possible to do more than speculate about what if anything might have turned out differently if the United States had joined the league in 1919 or 1920, with reservations or without.

  Scenting the opportunity of a lifetime, “Fighting Quaker” Mitchell Palmer announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The president he hoped to succeed, meanwhile, remained for the public a mystery, his existence little more than a rumor, never seen in public and rarely receiving visitors. “There never was a moment when he was more than a shadow of his former self,” White House chief usher Ike Hoover would recall. “He had changed from a giant to a pygmy.” Perhaps the most poignant mark of his decline is the way in which, when presidential messages could not be avoided, Joe Tumulty now had to write them. The master wordsmith could no longer produce his own words, the master orator could not deliver anyone’s words. In December 1919, for the first time since taking office in 1913, he had been unable to go to the Capitol to report on the state of the union.