Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Holmes wrote the opinion in the Debs case as well, which was also unanimous.

  Woodrow Wilson felt Debs had violated every tenet of unity and loyalty that he held dear. The President was quick to note that Debs had every right to exercise his freedom of speech before the war. But, Wilson maintained, “once the Congress of the United States declared war, silence on his part would have been the proper course to pursue.” It galled Wilson that while “the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines, sniping, attacking, and denouncing them.”

  America entered a period of repression as egregious as any in American history. Members of the Cabinet manipulated the offensive laws, but Woodrow Wilson’s fingerprints were all over them. “The new espionage act,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “gives the Postmaster General almost absolute power to censor American magazines. He may deny the mails to any one that he doesn’t like, for any reason or no reason. No crime is defined; no hearing is allowed; no notice is necessary; there is no appeal.” Wilson periodically asked Postmaster Burleson to show leniency toward some potential scofflaws, especially left-wingers he knew to be intellectually sincere; but the government arrested 1,500 citizens in 1918 for little more than criticizing it; and close to 2,500 “enemy aliens” were interned during the war.

  Worse than the actual suppression of written material was the atmosphere of suspicion the Administration created, one so noxious that it coerced most “law-abiding” citizens into censoring themselves, inhibiting one of the very freedoms for which America was fighting overseas. Only later did Mencken write, “Between Wilson and his brigades of informers, spies, volunteer detectives, perjurers and complaisant judges, and the Prohibitionists and their messianic delusion, the liberty of the citizen has pretty well vanished in America. In two or three years, if the thing goes on, every third American will be a spy upon his fellow citizens.”

  Wilson was not blind to the injustices his administration had imposed. But at a moment when many American soldiers were marching off to their deaths, he considered temporary restraints on civil liberties minor infringements. He conceded his own uncertainty about finding the right balance in his policies but not about erring on the side of precaution. As he wrote liberal activist Max Eastman: “I think that a time of war must be regarded as wholly exceptional and that it is legitimate to regard things which would in ordinary circumstances be innocent as very dangerous to the public welfare, but the line is manifestly exceedingly hard to draw and I cannot say that I have any confidence that I know how to draw it. I can only say that a line must be drawn and that we are trying, it may be clumsily but genuinely, to draw it without fear or favor or prejudice.”

  In the beastly hot summer of 1918, Wilson could no longer avoid another problem that had long troubled him. “I have been sweating blood over the question what it is right and feasible (possible) to do in Russia,” he wrote Colonel House on July 8, months after that empire had collapsed and surrendered, leaving its problems for the Allies to solve. France and Britain abhorred the thought of Bolshevism spreading to their countries; and they realized that the German armies at the Eastern Front would now be reassigned to the Western Front, increasing their threat. Allied supplies were stockpiled in the northwesternmost cities of Murmansk and Archangel, which Russia could no longer defend. For months, the Allies relentlessly pressured the United States to join them in an invasion.

  Wilson wanted no part of the plans. His recent forays into Mexico (where he had been ensnared his entire first term) and the Dominican Republic and Haiti (where American troops would remain mired until 1924 and 1934, respectively) had proved certain limitations of foreign policy: not even boundless military might offered a guarantee of stabilizing a foreign government. Although averse to Bolshevism, Wilson was not adverse. He believed armed resistance could easily backfire and that trying to stop a revolutionary movement with ordinary armies was “like using a broom to sweep back a great sea.” Wilson continued to resist the Allies’ pleas.

  Lord Reading—a justice rendering temporary ambassadorial service in Washington—gathered that the President feared that once American troops were in Russia, some action by the French or British would interfere with Russian domestic affairs and suck America in even deeper. Reading reported to Prime Minister David Lloyd George that “the President is apprehensive lest any intervention should be converted into an anti-Soviet movement and an interference with the right of Russians to choose their own form of government.” In their efforts to enlist American support, the French went so far as to send Henri Bergson to Washington, but the renowned philosopher failed in his efforts. Wilson had just read a report from an explorer named George Kennan—well versed in Russia (and a cousin of a teenager of the same name, who would later become an influential diplomat in the same region). He wrote the Administration of the need to eschew the Bolshevik government—as they were “usurpers,” criminals, and enemies of the Allies, with nothing to offer them, not even the ability to restore order across Russia’s vast geography. A massive Siberian intervention—involving as many as a million men—was then being staged to help White Russian forces overtake the Reds.

  In the extreme opposite corner of Russia, seventy thousand interned Czech freedom fighters found themselves stranded in Vladivostok. They had been plotting to return to the front by journeying across the Pacific, where they would go by ship to America and on to France; but the Bolsheviks detained them. The Allies could only benefit from the addition to their ranks; and the Czechs’ freedom-loving spirit appealed greatly to America. Philosopher and politician Tomáš Masaryk met with Wilson in Washington, and the President proved susceptible to the cause. On August 5, 1918, he agreed to commit military aid in the Siberian expedition—five thousand American troops to help protect the Allied stockpiles in the northwest and seven thousand more to help the Czech legions in the southeast. If nothing else, an American presence in Russia could keep a closer eye on imperialistic Japan, which saw an opportunity to harpoon Russian territory for itself. Masaryk thanked Wilson for his action. “Your name,” he wrote him, “. . . is openly cheered in the streets of Prague,—our nation will forever be grateful to you and to the people of the United States.”

  Unfortunately, by the time American and Allied troops reached the northern military stores, winter had put any defensive operations on ice, and the war on the Eastern Front had shut down. The United States asked Japan to match its troops, but they sent twelve thousand men instead. Within months, seventy thousand Japanese troops had arrived, with more on the way; and they had seized the Chinese Eastern Railway. “The presence of our troops in Siberia is being used by the Japanese as a cloak for their own presence and operations there,” Secretary Baker wrote the President, “and the Czecho-Slovak people are quite lost sight of in any of the operations now taking place.” Baker suggested that the longer America stayed, the more Japanese would arrive; but it seemed just as dangerous to leave the Japanese unchecked as they increased their presence. The United States would remain for several more years, seeing once again that military interventions—like the memories of invaded nations—are never short. While the American Expeditionary Force Siberia was not the actual start of the subsequent Cold War, it planted the seeds of distrust that Russians would recall decades later.

  As the war in Europe expanded, the President’s life contracted. He continued to delegate the running of specific operations to his Generals, Cabinet Secretaries, and Commissioners, leaving him to focus on the panoramic vision of the war’s aims. While others sorted out details, he treasured his time alone with Edith, and socialized with few people beyond his family. He obeyed Dr. Grayson’s advice to the letter, allowing for as much daily exercise and leisure as possible. He played golf every morning—at least nine holes, knowing he could play eighteen on weekends. In the winter, the White House staff painted his golf balls red, so that he could spot them more easily on the sno
w-covered links. Nothing eased his worries more than visits to the theater. He especially enjoyed the vaudeville offerings at B. F. Keith’s Theatre just across Fifteenth Street from the White House grounds. He tended to enjoy these shows more than dramatic plays, because even a bad variety act was sure to be followed by something amusing. The family delighted in hearing him laugh.

  Beyond the diversion, an evening at Keith’s offered the President a microcosm of America, a mixture of ethnicities presenting all-American entertainment. Any given night featured a variety of animal acts, circus acrobatics, classical and popular music, and comedy. A Hungarian-born Jew named Erik Weisz performed feats of magic and “escapology” as Harry Houdini; and English-born Vernon Castle and his wife, Irene, introduced American audiences to the tango and fox-trot. Countless Italian-, Irish-, and Jewish-American comedians became headliners, as lacing their monologues with hearty ethnic humor, and laughing at themselves before others could, proved an effective means of integrating their people into white, Protestant America. Negro storytelling was a popular feature as well—usually mocking the colored man’s laziness or ignorance. The sketches were good-natured, no more derogatory in content than those of any other ethnicity; the only difference, of course, was that white people in black makeup delivered the anecdotes. These “darkey stories” and minstrel songs carried Wilson back to his childhood in Dixie. He was a devoted fan of George Primrose, a tap-dancing fireball in blackface; and in the privacy of the Oval Room upstairs at the White House, Woodrow would frequently slip a record on the Victrola and break into a spirited jig solely for Edith’s entertainment. She marveled at how light on his feet he was, and he often said he envied Primrose and “wished he could exchange jobs” with him.

  Nobody dominated the current stage more than George M. Cohan, who came from a family of Irish Catholic vaudevillians and wrote dozens of plays and revues and hundreds of songs. During the war they turned unusually patriotic, and his song “Over There” became America’s wartime anthem. It was a rousing call to arms whose lyrics announced that “the Yanks are coming.” Wilson could not get the number out of his head; and at a time when he anguished over dead and wounded soldiers, he often sang it to himself. Stockton Axson noticed that his voice invariably broke whenever he reached the last line—“And we won’t come back till it’s over over there.”

  Remarkable for someone whose health had been so fragile all his life, the President maintained his strength through the war. Apart from the occasional cold that kept him in bed, he did suffer two medical incidents, neither neurological. On April 19, 1918, while taking part in a campaign to promote Liberty Bonds, Wilson dismounted from a British tank and set his left hand down upon a red-hot exhaust pipe. He suffered serious burns, which required dressing his hand for months. “Now I am going about like a hotel waiter with a white glove over the bandages,” Wilson wrote his daughter Jessie, “. . . feeling as if I ought to be handing something to somebody!” (The President’s insurance company refused to pay indemnity on the grounds that he was ambidextrous and, therefore, not incapacitated.) And in the early fall, Wilson’s nasal passages became so congested that he went weeks without breathing properly or sleeping well. Dr. Grayson discovered polyps and determined that they should be removed. Wilson agreed to a polypectomy but insisted the procedure be kept secret. Without telling anybody but their respective wives, Wilson and Grayson sneaked out of the White House on September 7 and went to a local doctor, who removed the growths. The operation proved to be more complicated than anybody had anticipated, but neither the press nor the public ever had an inkling their President had been ill. It would not be the last time Dr. Grayson and the Wilsons would keep a medical matter from not only the public but even the innermost circles of the White House. For the moment, Grayson believed the President could live another ten years, even endure a third term—“if nothing untoward happened.”

  From the moment America entered the war, Woodrow Wilson proved to be a formidable Commander in Chief, directing the conversion of a peacetime nation into the globe’s mightiest military-industrial complex, one in which every citizen played a role. He ruled mostly with his rhetoric, which remained as sharp as a bayonet. On September 27, he kicked off the Fourth Liberty Loan drive saying, “The common will of mankind has been substituted for the particular purposes of individual states.” While the doughboys continued to lead the Allies to one victory after another, the nations of Europe—the Allied and Central Powers alike—could already envision the future. “Individual statesmen may have started the conflict,” Wilson said that night, “but neither they nor their opponents can stop it as they please. It has become a peoples’ war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved in its sweeping processes of change and settlement.”

  Wilson presented truths he now considered axiomatic: a nation’s military power should not determine the fortunes of its people; strong nations should not be free to wrong weak nations; people should be ruled by their own will and choice, not by arbitrary and irresponsible force; there should be certain common standards of right and privilege; and the assertion of right should not be haphazard but the result of “common concert to oblige the observance of common rights.” The audience stood and cheered, and the government raised $7 billion with this bond.

  Two days later, Bulgaria became the first of the Central Powers to surrender; and independence spread across the region. Within eight days, Poland declared itself an independent state; the following week a provisional government of Czechoslovakia formed; and eleven days later a council established itself in Budapest preparing to create a Hungarian nation separate from Austria. The Germans, recognizing the inevitable, realized that their best hope for rational terms of surrender was with the opponent they had fought for the shortest time. On October 6, 1918, Prince Max von Baden, the German Imperial Chancellor, formally requested the President of the United States “to take steps for the restoration of peace, to notify all belligerents of this request, and to invite them to delegate Plenipotentiaries for the purpose of taking up negotiations.” Prince Max accepted as a basis of those negotiations Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his pronouncements in his address of September 27.

  Wilson requested explication. He presumed Max’s letter meant that Germany accepted his terms, that further discussion was warranted only to sort out the practical details, and that German withdrawal of all her armies to German territory was implicit in this acceptance. Another volley of notes discussed the American demand that the process of evacuation and the conditions of an armistice all be matters left to the judgment of the American and Allied governments and that no arrangement could be accepted by the United States “which does not provide absolutely satisfactory safeguards and guarantees of the maintenance of the present military supremacy of the armies of the United States and of the Allies in the field.” On October 12, the Germans accepted Wilson’s demands, but their army kept fighting. Days later, Germany agreed to cease submarine warfare; and by the end of the month, the Allied commanders met to discuss means of rendering Germany militarily impotent. While the Kaiser went into seclusion in Belgium, refusing to abdicate, Sultan Mehmed VI of the Ottoman Empire requested terms of capitulation, as did the Emperor of Austria. At the end of the first week of November, Prince Max sent a delegation of diplomats to France to negotiate specifics of his nation’s surrender and then announced his resignation.

  Before Wilson could claim victory in the Great War, he had to engage in one last battle—the midterm Congressional elections of 1918. Although politicians had to some degree abided since January by Wilson’s decree of adjourning politics, each party longed to blame the other for the nation’s woes and to claim its successes. The Republicans were powerless so long as they remained mute, as the successful culmination of the war put the Democrats at an advantage. By the end of that summer, the Republicans realized they could bite their tongues no longer. Republican National Committee chairman Wi
ll Hays toured the country repudiating the Administration’s policies; in August, Senator Lodge spoke out against the Fourteen Points; in September, Republican Congressmen urged the election of a Republican Congress; on October 24, Colonel Roosevelt wired three influential Republican Senators, encouraging them to reject the Fourteen Points. While Germany had already consented to those terms, Roosevelt said, “such a peace would represent not the unconditional surrender of Germany but the conditional surrender of the United States.”

  Wilson intended to refrain from campaigning, and he instructed his Cabinet not to embark on political tours. Roosevelt’s comments, however, warranted a Presidential response. In stressing the critical nature of the times, he boiled his argument down to a peculiarly political point:

  If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you will express yourself unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives. I am your servant and will accept your judgment without cavil, but my power to administer the great trust assigned me by the Constitution would be seriously impaired should your judgment be adverse, and I must frankly tell you so because so many critical issues depend upon your verdict.

  He emphasized the need for “unified leadership” in the nation, which a Republican Congress would divide. Adding to this strangely inappropriate statement, Wilson said, “The return of a Republican majority to either House of the Congress would, moreover, certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.” In ordinary times, he said, he would not feel at liberty to make such a public appeal. “But these are not ordinary times.”