“Criticism and ridicule,” to use Tumulty’s terms, were hurled at Wilson, justifiably. In politicizing the war, he had committed a serious gaffe. He had not only “lowered himself,” as Secretary Lane noted privately, but he had also diminished his constituents. Outside the capital, Republicans had joined the war effort as much as Democrats; and the President’s message seemed to ignore their contributions, to say nothing of the Republican support he had received within the Capitol. Democrats offered numerous examples of Presidents from Washington to TR who had made similar electoral appeals. Even Lincoln midwar had campaigned by cautioning the electorate against “swapping horses in midstream.” By Election Day, however, some simply made Wilson the whipping boy for the staggering confusion in the world.
Western Civilization lay prostrate from the most convulsive four years it had ever known. Four dynasties that had long dominated much of the world had fallen; and the combat itself produced stunning statistics: 885,000 British soldiers died, as had 1,400,000 French (more than 4 percent of their population) and 1,811,000 Russians; the Central Powers lost over 4,000,000 soldiers. All together, close to 10,000,000 soldiers died in the Great War, and more than 21,000,000 were wounded; counting civilian deaths, as the result of disease, famine, massacres, and collateral damage, somewhere between 16,500,000 and 65,000,000 people died—1.75 percent of the population of the participating nations. Wilson could already sense that the men in the trenches on both sides were undergoing an emotional change, that they would “return to their homes with a new view and an impatience of all mere political phrases, and will demand real thinking and sincere action.” With American soldiers still in harm’s way, Wilson resented that the Republicans—especially Roosevelt and Lodge—used the final weeks of the campaign to clamor for “the undesirable and impossible,” namely “a vengeful peace.” Wilson would not engage in that argument. “So far as my being destroyed is concerned,” he wrote Senator Henry F. Ashurst, “I am willing if I can serve the country to go into a cellar and read poetry the remainder of my life. I am thinking now only of putting the US into a position of strength and justice. I am now playing for 100 years hence.”
The United States had undergone profound changes of its own, arguably more in the last two years than at any other time in its history. Such paroxysms offered voters countless reasons to ignore Wilson’s appeal for a Democratic Congress. Conscription and governmental restrictions—especially of gasoline and coal—persisted; tax rates remained at unprecedented highs; race relations dipped to historic lows; and hatred of foreigners and contention over labor prevailed.
Despite the impending victory in Europe, America was suffering. Naïveté and idealism had soured into skepticism and disillusionment; and influenza spiked in the United States that fall, killing in a single week almost five thousand people in Philadelphia, to name but one city. The disease sent more than a quarter of the nation to bed, killing more than a half million Americans. Many public events and venues—including political rallies and even Keith’s Theatre in Washington—shut down. Many voters were either too ill or too afraid of getting ill to go to the polls. Those who took their chances found many of their fellow citizens wearing face masks.
While Republican candidates vociferously challenged the President’s request for political support, Wilson fell silent, right up to Election Day. On November 5, turnout was light, but the message was emphatic. Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress. In the House, they picked up twenty-five seats, which marked more than a one-hundred-seat gain since Wilson had entered the White House, giving them the majority and the speakership that went with it. In the Senate, Republicans gained seven seats—reclaiming, at last, their pre-Wilson majority. Despite his joy that the war was ending, Wilson privately revealed that he was “of course disturbed by the result of Tuesday’s elections, because they create obstacles to the settlement of the many difficult questions which throng so on every side.”
No longer the peacetime nation that long disavowed foreign entanglements, America had become a mighty fortress, the first industrial superpower of the twentieth century. The country boasted a towering infrastructure for a massive system of defense, replete with the machinery for further expansion. Its heavy industries had demonstrated their ability to work in concert with the government and one another, becoming proficient if not expert in mass production. Because of its vast natural resources, the United States could feed not only itself but the rest of the world as well.
America had become an extroverted nation, a force of morality for all humanity. It was prepared to unleash its power whenever necessary—to protect its citizens and their globalizing interests and to stand vigil over the rest of mankind. Colonel House believed the war had given Wilson “a commanding opportunity for unselfish service.” He told the President that the great figures in history—from Alexander to Napoleon—“had used their power for personal and national aggrandizement”; but Wilson now had the rare opportunity to “use it for the general good of mankind.”
While it was Woodrow Wilson’s intention to lead his nation into a millennium, he now faced a hostile incoming Congress. Notwithstanding, he remained confident that “by one means or another the great thing we have to do will work itself out.” After all, he reminded one junior member of the Administration, “I have an implicit faith in Divine providence. . . .”
13
ISAIAH
The Spirit of the Lord God is vpon me, because the Lord hath anointed me, to preach good tidings vnto the meek, hee hath sent me to binde vp the broken hearted, to proclaime libertie to the captiues . . .
—ISAIAH, LXI:1
At noon on Thursday, November 7, 1918, the United Press Association’s office in Paris cabled its headquarters in New York that Germany and the Allies had signed the Armistice. Within three minutes, the national censors had approved its dissemination; and within half an hour, word had spread nationwide.
By one o’clock, all of New York City’s bells and sirens had sounded, and similar demonstrations across the country followed. People in Manhattan poured into the streets—in what The New York Times called “a delirious carnival of joy which was beyond comparison with anything ever seen in the history of New York.” Factories in Boston closed, and parades spontaneously erupted through the town. Chicago’s stores, offices, munitions plants, and City Hall shut down, while its opera company interrupted rehearsal and broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In Columbus, Ohio, the massive crowds surrounding the State House demanded remarks from Governor James M. Cox. And in Washington, D.C., people gravitated to the South Lawn of the White House, where the euphoric crowd, dancing and tossing their hats in the air, waited for the President to appear. Nell McAdoo was leaving the Treasury Building, only to have a total stranger throw his arms around her and kiss her. Edith Wilson bustled to her husband’s study, urging him to the portico, where he might address the gathering below, but he refused. He was one of the few men in the world who knew for a fact that this national hysteria was based on a false report.
Correspondents in Europe soon got their stories straight, and the next day the New York Globe characterized the misinformation as “the greatest and most cruel hoax in the history of journalism.” The source of the falsehood was never discovered, but many suspected a German agent had perpetrated the deception “to create popular desire and demand among the Allied people for the German-sought armistice.” Wrote Arthur Hornblow, Jr., a young intelligence officer, “From a psychological point of view the best possible way of making the public want an armistice would be to tell them that there was an armistice, and let them taste of the joy that would naturally await upon the news.” That very day, in fact, German delegates were on their way to surrender at a secret site.
Marshal Foch spent the night on the outskirts of the village of Rethondes in the forest of Compiègne. At dawn, a train carried him, his staff, and British officers to an obscured railroad siding. Around seve
n, another train—including a carriage still marked with Napoleon III’s coat of arms—shuttled the German plenipotentiaries to another siding in the woods. At nine, the German representatives walked the heavily guarded hundred yards that separated the trains and entered the Wagon Lits Company car 2419D. After formal salutations, the teams sat across from each other at a long wooden table. Foch told his interpreter to ask the Germans what they wanted. Matthias Erzberger, the civilian head of the German delegation, said, “We have come to receive the Allied Powers’ proposals for an armistice.” An offended Foch interrupted to say, “Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make to them.” The Frenchman made motions to leave, when another member of the German team interceded, asking Foch to put semantics aside. Count Alfred von Oberndorff said they had come—after receiving a note from President Wilson—to accept Foch’s terms.
The parley proceeded, but not without hiccups. For more than a week, Germany had been in the middle of a revolution. Sailors had mutinied; Bolsheviks were seizing power across the country; and Kaiser Wilhelm clung to his throne. And so, while Foch had given his enemies seventy-two hours in which to sign the terms of surrender, Erzberger questioned his legal ability to do so. The Kaiser did not abdicate until November 9—when he retreated to Holland, where he would spend the rest of his days in what he considered temporary exile. As the clock was running out, a second team of German diplomats arrived, announcing that a Republic had been proclaimed under a Socialist Chancellor. Several hours later, they received the requisite authorization.
Wilson spent the morning of Sunday the tenth with Edith at services in the Presbyterian Church. They lunched alone and took a long drive in the afternoon. Several Bollings joined them for an anxious dinner, after which Edith’s mother said to her son-in-law, “I do wish you would go right to bed; you look so tired.” Woodrow said he wished he could—“but I fear The Drawer; it always circumvents me; wait just a moment until I look.” He returned with four or five long encrypted cables, which he handed to Edith. Her brother Randolph stayed until one o’clock, helping her decode the important messages, though none contained the news the world awaited. Back in the train car outside Rethondes, the delegates ironed out minor wrinkles; and shortly after five o’clock in the morning Paris time, they signed the documents. It was agreed that the Armistice would officially begin on the eleventh hour of that eleventh day of the eleventh month. Around three o’clock Washington time, word reached the White House in a series of telegrams from Colonel House, who was in France. Together Edith and Woodrow decoded his cable: “Autocracy is dead. [Long live] democracy and its immortal leader. In this great hour my heart goes out to you in pride, admiration and love.” Edith would later recount that stunning moment in which they simply stood mute, “unable to grasp the full significance of the words.”
The President caught a few hours of sleep before he issued a simple announcement that the Armistice had been signed and that work was suspended that day for all government employees. “A supreme moment of history has come,” he handwrote. “The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favour, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of His own justice and mercy.” Pandemonium broke out once again across the country and in the major capitals of the world. Wilson spent the rest of the morning in his study writing the speech he would deliver at one o’clock that afternoon.
Wearing a black tailcoat and light gray pants, he strode before the Congress. A standing ovation welcomed him, the audience’s cheers extending to the gallery as the presiding officers permitted the spectators to join in the demonstration. Wilson quieted the chamber and launched into defining the terms to which the Germans had agreed in “these anxious times of rapid and stupendous change.” Eleven military clauses pertained to the Western Front, from the cessation of operations to the immediate evacuation of invaded countries; five clauses dictated Germany’s actions on the eastern frontier, including its abandonment of territory that had belonged to Russia, Romania, or Turkey before August 1, 1914. Germany had one month in which to capitulate unconditionally in East Africa; and similar terms applied to all hostilities at sea, including the surrender of submarines and surface warships, as well as the Allied freedom of access to and from the Baltic and Black Seas and the evacuation of seized Russian war vessels. The existing Allied blockade would continue. Repatriation of all civilians from the Allied or Associated nations must occur within a month. Applause interrupted several of these points, its intensity commensurate with the severity of the terms against the Germans. The mention of the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, for example, brought the spectators to their feet. Any suggestions of leniency toward the enemy met silence. After modestly reciting all thirty-five terms of the Armistice, the President of the United States declaimed one last sentence. “The war,” he said, “thus comes to an end.”
America had won a decisive victory. Even Senator La Follette, who had sat silent until then, broke into applause. Arizona Senator Henry F. Ashurst dined with French Ambassador Jusserand in the Senate restaurant, only to see the diplomat burst into tears of joy. Cheering throngs lined the streets as Wilson returned to the White House, and for weeks praise was heaped upon him wherever he went. King George V sent a “message of congratulation and deep thanks in my own name and that of the people of this empire.” The next day, The New York Times lauded the nation and, even more, Woodrow Wilson, whose “clear vision of the moral objects for which the nations took up arms against Germany . . . won for him very early acknowledged pre-eminence as the spokesman of the allied cause.” As most of the world agreed, “He has been a great leader.”
Washington celebrated all day, sweeping even Wilson into the festivities. November 11 happened to be the birthday of the King of Italy, and the Italian Ambassador was celebrating the occasion that night with a ball. A little before eleven o’clock, the President proposed to Edith that they crash the party. The Ambassador was only too happy to welcome a giddy Wilson, who toasted the King and lingered for another hour. Back at the White House, Woodrow and Edith sat on a couch by her bedroom fireplace, where he read a chapter from the Bible before retiring.
The next morning the President felt the first undertow of politics amid the waves of congratulation. The mere possibility that Wilson himself would attend the Peace Conference caused considerable controversy, at home and abroad, as its location and leadership could alter the outcome. Two neutral nations, Switzerland and the Netherlands, offered to host the meeting, which meant Wilson might preside; but the great blood-soaked battleground, France, felt entitled to hold the event. Colonel House reported from Paris that the French thought Wilson should not even appear for the negotiations. A ceremonial visit would be welcome, but even Americans in France, he said, “are practically unanimous in the belief that it would be unwise for you to sit in,” for fear “that it would involve a loss of dignity and your commanding position.” It would certainly overshadow House’s own presumed position there. Premier Clemenceau got word to Wilson that “he hoped you will not sit in the Congress because no head of a State should sit there. The same feeling prevails in England.”
Wilson understood the situation but considered his presence nonnegotiable. He maintained that he played the same role in the United States that Prime Ministers played in their countries. “The fact that I am head of the state,” he wrote House, “is of no practical consequence.” As journalist David Lawrence observed, “To have stayed in America and sent a member of his Cabinet as head of the delegation would have permitted the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the Premiers of the other countries to outrank the chairman of the American delegation.” The President would never accept such an arrangement, as it would belittle both the role of the United States in the peace talks and the influence America had exerted in defining the aims of the war. Wilson already inferred that the French and English leaders wished to exclude him for fear he might lead the weaker nations against them. Beyond that, the more Wil
son saw of the Allies’ postwar posturing, the more convinced he became that they would insist upon “a peace of force and vengeance.” The President, on the other hand, contended that only on “a peace of justice could a stabilized Europe be rebuilt.”
More than ever, Wilson believed his League of Nations was essential to the new world order. An organization in which every sovereign member state had pledged to discuss disputes before going to war, he insisted, was the only way to prevent future local disagreements from turning global. Wilson also believed this league had to be an integral part of the Peace Treaty, not an afterthought. “Such was his faith,” observed Dr. Grayson, “and he was fully aware that he himself must be the chief apostle of that faith . . . in the face of many who called themselves ‘realists’ and would demand that the business of the day be dealt with rather than future contingencies.” Wilson’s decision to head the American Peace Commission was less a matter of convention than of conscience. In the words of Cary Grayson, “He must go.”
Not everybody shared Wilson’s vision, of either America or the world. Less than two weeks after the Armistice, Theodore Roosevelt was building opposition to Wilson’s plans and support for his own possible Presidential run in 1920. In a letter to fellow imperialist Rudyard Kipling, he called the League of Nations a “product of men who want everyone to float to heaven on a sloppy sea of universal mush.” Even though he had recently been bedridden with lumbago, arthritis, and the symptoms of what would prove to be an embolism of the lung, TR continued to write world leaders and dictate newspaper editorials denouncing Wilson and his Fourteen Points. Meanwhile, Wilson quickly assembled his team of four Peace Commissioners.
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