by G. J. Meyer
The president had not called the cabinet together in the seven months since his stroke. On April 14, when cabinet members were finally invited to meet with him, they found themselves spectators at a brief and carefully staged affair under the watchful eyes of the first lady and Admiral Grayson. It took place not in the Cabinet Room but in a study adjacent to the president’s bedroom on the second floor of the White House. Wilson was propped in a chair at the head of a conference table before the secretaries were admitted. He greeted them by attempting a joke that made little sense but drew forced and scattered chuckles.
Attorney General Palmer, basking in his status as the man of the hour, appears to have dominated the gathering. He gave an expansive, cheerily self-satisfied account of how the wildcat railroad strikes that had begun breaking out across the country after the failure of the big strike were the work of Wobblies and their Bolshevik masters, with the disruption of public order their true aim. When he had talked himself out, the president uttered almost his only words of the meeting: he “told Palmer not to let the country see red,” according to an account left by Navy Secretary Daniels. No one present appears to have known what he meant, and no one knows today. Perhaps it was another attempted witticism. Mrs. Wilson and Grayson reminded the cabinet members that the meeting was an experiment and declared it at an end.
The rail strikes petered out, public fear of sedition ebbed, and enthusiasm for Palmer’s candidacy subsided with it. He had a powerful rival, Treasury Secretary and presidential son-in-law McAdoo, who had not declared but was known to be planning a run. Wilson’s failure to endorse either of them (he was not close to McAdoo, who had married one of the Wilson daughters after his appointment to head the Treasury Department), or take himself out of the running, spread a cloud of uncertainty. As Palmer continued his alarms about terrorists and no fresh violence broke out, people began to complain that he had an inclination to cry wolf. Newspaper stories began to appear about how his raiders often acted without warrants and about his use of agents who were neither government employees nor properly deputized.
Perhaps to rekindle public enthusiasm, perhaps because he was coming to be touched with paranoia, Palmer issued his most sensational warning yet. He said that May 1—May Day, “workers’ day” for leftists around the world—was going to bring disturbances of unprecedented violence. Riots were being planned, he said—even assassinations. Police departments and National Guard units were put on alert as the date drew near, often at considerable expense and inconvenience. When May Day came and went without anything happening, Palmer was ridiculed. The Fighting Quaker became the Quaking Quitter. A final blow came on May 28, when twelve lawyers issued a report detailing ways in which Palmer’s Justice Department had acted unlawfully in its pursuit and prosecution of aliens. What hurt was the eminence of the accusers: among them were two law school deans including Harvard’s Roscoe Pound, seven professors of law including future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, a former judge, and a former U.S. attorney for Philadelphia. Palmer was not finished as a candidate, but he was a damaged one.
Nothing, meanwhile, shook President Wilson’s conviction that the American people wanted what he wanted, and that when this became clear the peace treaty would be accepted on his terms and his enemies routed. He became convinced that the way to bring all this to pass was to consent to serve a third term. He would not seek it but looked forward to receiving it by acclamation at the Democratic National Convention, to be held in San Francisco that summer. He was furious when he learned that a worried Joe Tumulty had asked Mrs. Wilson to persuade the president to announce, for his own good, that he would not be a candidate. Admiral Grayson quotes Wilson as saying at about this time that “the [Democratic] convention may feel that I am the logical one to lead—perhaps the only one to champion this cause. In such circumstance I would feel obliged to accept the nomination even if I thought it would cost me my life.” In his own eyes, he was still the indispensable man. In Grayson’s, he was risking suicide.
When the convention met in June, Wilson volunteers led by Secretary of State Colby were on the scene, attempting to round up support. The president waited at the White House for news of a stampede in his favor, not knowing that Tumulty, Grayson, Navy Secretary Daniels, and others were explaining to everyone who would listen why his name must not be entered in nomination. They succeeded. When balloting began, McAdoo and Palmer were first and second respectively, but neither had even half the number of votes needed. Forty-four ballots were taken in the next four days. The end did not come until Palmer, his support melting away, released his remaining delegates to do as they wished. The convention was by this time swinging not to McAdoo but to Governor James Cox of Ohio, who won after a few more ballots. He chose the assistant secretary of the navy, the dashing young Franklin Roosevelt of New York, as his running mate.
Upon returning to the East, Cox and Roosevelt paid a visit to the White House—and ended whatever slim chance of being elected they might have had by proclaiming their allegiance to Woodrow Wilson. Repeating the president’s proposal of the start of the year, they said they wanted the election to be a referendum on the treaty and the league. The Republicans, with Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge heading their ticket, declined to take a definitive position on the treaty or the league and paid no price for doing so.
Seven weeks before the election, as if to keep the nation from supposing that domestic tranquillity had been altogether restored, a wagonload of dynamite was set off outside the Wall Street headquarters of J. P. Morgan and Company. The explosion was of Western Front proportions, killing twenty-nine persons (not financial magnates but messengers and clerks and the like), injuring more than two hundred, and breaking windows a quarter of a mile away. If something of the kind had happened a few months earlier, it might have delivered the nomination to Mitchell Palmer. Even coming as late as it did, it probably saved him from being impeached by a Congress that had begun hearings to explore the extent of his excesses. It did not save him from being ridiculed when the Justice Department was unable to come up with a single suspect. It was, to be sure, a difficult case. The wagon and the mule that pulled it had been virtually vaporized in the explosion. The only clues were four iron horseshoes. They were checked against the work of farriers up and down the eastern seaboard, without result.
Harding and Coolidge won the election in an epic landslide: sixteen million votes to Cox’s and Roosevelt’s nine million.
Eugene V. Debs, 1921
“A traitor!” Woodrow Wilson called him, but President Harding finally set him free.
Eugene Debs, still in prison, received 915,000 votes as the Socialist Party candidate.
Mitchell Palmer remained in Washington after leaving office and tried to establish a law practice. But he found himself a nonperson, a lawyer no one wanted to see, much less hire.
Edith and Woodrow Wilson moved in to a stately three-story mansion on S Street in a fashionable section of Washington. There the former president spent the last three years of his life in proud isolation, physically a ruin. He lived to see the start of his enshrinement as one of America’s liberal icons, a champion of liberty and peace and lofty ideals. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation was established and handsomely endowed, and Woodrow Wilson clubs were started at colleges around the country. Crowds of admirers would gather outside his door, and sometimes he would show himself. World leaders called on him when in Washington. They were sometimes shocked by the wild bitterness with which he spoke of the many people he regarded as his enemies. Otherwise he saw few people except his family and his wife’s.
He must have snorted with contempt when the Senate ratified a separate treaty of peace with Germany, one that departed from the treaty approved at Versailles in no important respects aside from its exclusion of the league and its covenant.
And must have snorted again when he learned that his successor was releasing Debs from prison. Many people had asked him to do the same before leaving office, pointing out that Deb
s was in his midsixties now, in deteriorating health, showing signs of depression, and no possible danger to anyone or anything. Even Palmer, wanting to end his time in office on a magnanimous note, urged that Debs be set free. Wilson would not hear of it. “This man was a traitor to his country,” he said, “and he will never be pardoned during my administration.”
One thinks of the closing days of the American Civil War, when the victors were faced with the question of how to deal with citizens who had taken up arms against the United States and killed hundreds of thousands of her soldiers. And of what Abraham Lincoln said about binding up the nation’s wounds, “with malice towards none and charity for all.” But Lincoln was never what Ray Stannard Baker called Wilson: “a good hater.”
From the time of House’s return to the United States late in 1919, he and Wilson had no connection, not even an exchange of notes or the briefest of meetings. The colonel survived the president by fifteen years, living quietly except when called upon to voice yet again his support for the League of Nations. “My separation from Woodrow Wilson was and is to me a tragic mystery,” he would say, “a mystery that now can never be dispelled, for its explanation lies buried with him. Theories I have, and theories they must remain.”
To the end of his days, Wilson remained convinced that the people would see to American entry into the league on his terms. He believed that this could happen with the election of 1924—and really did think that he might be the Democratic nominee that year. But in fact President Harding had put the league question to rest on April 12, 1921, at the end of his first appearance before Congress. Earlier he had promised that the United States would join in “any seemly program to lessen the probability of war.” Now he declared that the league could be not such a program, that it was fatally flawed because it had been created to perform the incompatible “dual functions of a political instrument for the conquerors and an agency of peace.” He said his position was in accord with the will of the people as expressed in the 1920 election, but that it would also be consistent with public opinion for the United States to “play our fullest part in joining the peoples of the world in pursuits of peace once more.”
As Harding’s words suggest, it cannot responsibly be argued—though it has been argued with ridiculous frequency—that the Republican electoral victories of the 1920s and the end of “Wilsonism” ushered in a period of American isolation. To the contrary, two exceptionally active and effective secretaries of state, Charles Evans Hughes and Henry L. Stimson, directed the nation’s foreign policy during the Republican ascendancy. Their achievements included treaties reducing naval shipbuilding, Japanese withdrawal from the Shantung Peninsula, and extensive though ultimately unsuccessful efforts to reduce German reparations, assist German recovery through trade, and thereby avert Europe’s and the world’s descent into economic depression.
That notorious isolationist Henry Cabot Lodge was actively engaged in negotiating arms reduction treaties up to the time of his death in November 1924. In that same month his fellow Republican and longtime antagonist Robert La Follette ran for president as a third-party candidate in a last-ditch effort to rally the forces of progressivism. He received a mere 17 percent of the vote, carrying only his home state of Wisconsin, and seven months later he, too, was dead. A month after that, five days after securing a conviction in the Scopes Monkey Trial and getting himself branded a clown by doing so, William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep. The decks were being cleared for a new political era, and a new generation of leaders.
President Wilson, before his death, had repeated an old pattern by banishing almost his last friend from the start of his political career, the devoted Joe Tumulty. When Warren Harding became president, Tumulty had gone home to New Jersey, opening a law practice and again becoming active in the local Democratic Party. In 1922 he wrote to Wilson, asking him for a message that could be read at that year’s Jackson Day dinner in New York. Even something quite simple, Tumulty said, would cheer the assembled pols. Wilson refused. Tumulty asked Mrs. Wilson for help, and she, too, refused. Tumulty managed to get an appointment with Wilson but saw how inflexible and unnaturally aged his longtime chief had become and did not repeat his request. In the end, foolishly, he himself wrote a brief and innocuous (he thought) message and passed it to the dinner’s organizers as being from Wilson. Unfortunately, when the message was read aloud, it was interpreted as an endorsement of the evening’s main speaker, James Cox, who was known to be planning a second run for the White House in 1924. This was news, and so it appeared in the papers. When Wilson learned of it, he had The New York Times informed that the message was a fraud, thereby subjecting Tumulty to public humiliation.
Tumulty left no explanation of why he faked the message. He and his wife had a large family. After a decade in Wilson’s service, he needed to reestablish himself professionally. His long association with Governor and then President Wilson made him suspect in the eyes of New Jersey’s (and, to a lesser extent, New York’s) Democratic Party bosses. Perhaps he hoped to impress such men with a demonstration of his status as an insider, still well connected. Failure to deliver a promised message from Wilson would have been embarrassing. Covering it up with a short counterfeit message must have seemed safe enough. How would the reclusive Wilson ever find out?
Why did Wilson refuse such a trivial favor to a man who had served him so long and so loyally? Why did he then protest in such a hurtful way when he learned what had been done? For the protest there is an explanation, one heavy with pathos. Only a tiny number of people knew (former secretary of state Colby was, inevitably, one) that even in 1922 Wilson dreamed of returning to the White House in triumph. He knew of Cox’s hopes of being nominated again. This made Cox a rival. Any suggestion that Wilson might be endorsing him could not be allowed to stand.
The refusal of Tumulty’s original request is harder to understand. Wilson might have regarded himself as owing nothing to anyone, and the disdain with which he viewed most people might have extended even to the one man who had served him day and night for a decade. He showed something close to contempt when he told his wife that “Tumulty will sulk for a few days, then come like a spanked child to say that he is sorry and wants to be forgiven.”
The prediction was wrong. Tumulty would never again be seen in the house on S Street. Whether he tried, we do not know.
Admiral Grayson, who remained in Wilson’s good graces to the end, once raised the subject of the Tumulty rift and was sharply rebuked for doing so. He was neither offended nor surprised. He knew Wilson well. He knew that he “has to hate someone.”
One comes at last to the question of legacy, of what was won and what lost, of what it all means or once meant. Where the Great War and the United States are concerned, it comes down to what Clausewitz said about victory, to the question of whether this victory ended in a better arrangement, and if so, whether the betterment justified the cost.
By the time of Woodrow Wilson’s death in 1923, there was already much doubt, even among those who had originally supported intervention. The reasons for doubt would multiply as the years rolled on.
The war destroyed the tsarist empire but made possible its replacement by Communist Russia and the reign of Stalin, one of history’s great mass murderers.
A better arrangement?
It ended the Hohenzollern regime in Germany. In its place came disorder and a feeble republican government that many Germans saw as the creature of the victors and therefore unworthy of trust. And though it would be outrageous to blame American intervention for Nazism, the peace that intervention produced did put Germany on a path that led to Hitler.
A better arrangement?
The war created a Britain that by the 1930s could see so little justice in the peace imposed on Germany that she was almost fatally slow to stand up to Hitler’s aggression—and barely had the resources to do so.
If it did not turn France, which had fought so long and valiantly, into a nation capable first of collapsing when face
d with a Nazi invasion and then of collaborating on a shameful scale, it also did not keep such a thing from happening.
It is hardly necessary to mention the Middle East that victory brought into existence. Or Japan’s resentment over her experiences at Paris and its effect on her behavior in the following two decades. Or the instability of the settlement that the peace conference imposed upon eastern Europe.
Were these things better?
The United States, for her part, was changed profoundly by the simple fact of being in the war. That years of deadlock culminated in victory barely six months after the doughboys first went into action, that Germany’s final collapse followed by only two months the first offensive by an American army under American command—these things had a incalculable effect on the nation’s image of itself and of the outside world, and not in entirely positive ways. They aggravated Americans’ susceptibility to hubris, to believing that they are inherently superior to all other nations, her warriors inherently superior (and uniquely benign) as well.
But the things that changed the country most profoundly happened at home, and they happened mainly before the war ended:
The government’s unprecedented assault on the Bill of Rights, on freedom of speech and assembly, on due process of law, on simple fairness.
The widespread public approval of that assault.
The official telling of lies, and the eager embrace of those lies.
The use of the war as an excuse to attack people guilty of nothing except failing to say only what the government wanted them to say.
