15
PASSION
And they spit vpon him, and tooke the reed, and smote him on the head.
And after that they had mocked him, they tooke the robe off from him, and put his owne raiment on him, and led him away to crucifie him.
—MATTHEW, XXVII:30–31
For more than six months, Dr. Grayson had prescribed as much rest as possible, but not until the George Washington transported the President away from the unceasing pressures did a weary and homesick Woodrow Wilson comply. With more than a week of fair skies and calm seas, he slept regularly into the late morning, walked and sunbathed on deck in the afternoon, and dined with guests, watched movies, and joined the sing-alongs at night. He could not abandon himself completely, however, for he knew of the turbulence ahead.
Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution defined the President’s predicament: “He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” Wilson spent hours on the Atlantic trying to compose the speech with which he would present the Treaty of Versailles to Congress. Anxious to measure the opposition that would greet him, he asked Tumulty for a list of Senators inclined to fight the Treaty and of any “particularly virulent” powers in the media. Tumulty named conservative publishing magnates William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick in Chicago, as well as liberals Oswald Villard of The Nation, former member of the Inquiry and Wilson supporter Walter Lippmann of The New Republic, and Wilson’s earliest patron, George Harvey. Sailing into such formidable resistance from the press—and apparently two votes short of the sixty-four he would need in the Senate—Wilson had difficulty finding the right words.
For the first time since Grayson had met him, the President expressed complete dissatisfaction with his work on a speech. He blamed the “false start” on his disdain for his awaiting audience, insisting that if he had greater respect for Congress and its ability to reason, he could do a better job. Grayson wondered if that was all that ailed him. Wilson could collect his thoughts but had trouble organizing them; and his right hand was cramping so badly again that he had to write with his left.
On Tuesday, July 8, 1919, the ship docked in New Jersey. The Presidential party crossed the river to Manhattan. The largest crowd that had ever greeted Wilson in the city filled the sidewalks from the Twenty-third Street ferry to Carnegie Hall. There he delivered a brief address to an enthusiastic crowd—“a few words from the heart.”
“Why, Jerseyman though I am,” he said, “this is the first time I ever thought that Hoboken was beautiful.” Speaking of America’s new stature, Wilson said, “It is a wonderful thing for this nation, hitherto isolated from the large affairs of the world, to win not only the universal confidence of the people of the world, but their universal affection.” He referred to the fight ahead only obliquely, talking about America’s having done “the large thing and the right thing” in spreading freedom around the world. “I am afraid some people,” he added, “. . . do not understand that vision. They do not see it. . . . [But] I have never had a moment’s doubt as to where the heart and purpose of this people lay.”
The Wilsons boarded their train at Pennsylvania Station. Although he had anticipated his return for months, he knew that Washington was about to engage in its most bitter debate since the Civil War. When his train pulled in at midnight, he was happily surprised to discover more than ten thousand people had gathered at Union Station to welcome him home. “It is very touching,” he told Edith and Dr. Grayson. Thousands more waited for him outside the Executive Mansion, including one former resident and ill-wisher—Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who stood in the crowd, crossing her fingers in the sign of the “evil eye” and crying, “A murrain on him!” Even though Wilson had come to regard his current home more as a prison than a palace, he heard only cheers that night. “This house,” he said, “never looked so beautiful.”
By morning, Wilson had made plain his desire to put the Treaty on a fast legislative track. He wanted to keep it as simple as possible—an up or down vote on the Treaty itself, without any Senate tinkering. He intended to make himself immediately available to the Foreign Relations Committee and to postpone presenting the side agreement to defend France. He held in reserve a plan to campaign for the League across the country should the Treaty’s passage ever appear to be in jeopardy. At a press conference that morning, he insisted that Article X of the League Covenant—about collective security—was its very spine; if deleted, the League was “only a debating society.”
The Republicans were in no rush. They believed every delay would contribute to the Treaty’s derailment, which would allow them to fix the peace. They intended to deconstruct every clause of the President’s handiwork, dissecting each word. While the Foreign Relations Committee indicated that it would honor a Presidential request to appear before it, the Republicans chose to postpone his testimony until a time that would serve them better. They suggested that the President had completed his duties in regard to the Treaty in Paris. One Kansas Congressman introduced a bill that day that would make it unlawful for a President to absent himself from the territorial jurisdiction of the United States during his term of office or to perform his duties beyond the District of Columbia. Tumulty’s intelligence notwithstanding, anti-League forces were claiming forty-nine votes in the Senate, which included a few Democrats.
Although Woodrow Wilson’s trips down Pennsylvania Avenue had become routine during the last six and a half years, his visits to the Capitol continued to make history. Not even torrential rains could keep crowds away that Thursday, July 10, 1919. The Senate chamber began filling two hours before he was expected. The President arrived minutes before noon and walked the familiar path to the President’s Room on the second floor. A welcoming committee—which included Vice President Marshall and Henry Cabot Lodge, then the nation’s most senior Senator—escorted him to the chamber. “Mr. President,” Lodge asked, seeing the twenty-by-fourteen-by-six-inch package under Wilson’s arm, “can I carry the Treaty for you?” Wilson smiled and replied, “Not on your life.” Democratic Senator John Sharp Williams from Mississippi said, “Don’t trust him with it, Mr. President.” And everybody laughed about the document . . . for the very last time.
The first President of the United States ever to enter the Senate and physically deliver a treaty, Wilson received a standing ovation, and even a few Rebel yells. But the Republicans withheld their applause. When the room had quieted, the President proceeded to discuss the Treaty, which he said constituted “nothing less than a world settlement.” Reading from typewritten cards, he delivered an unexpectedly lackluster speech, largely an insipid lesson in history and politics, occasionally enlivened by rhetorical flourishes. Wilson explained that it was impossible to accommodate the varied interests of so many nations without what he called “many minor compromises.” As such, he said, the Treaty “is not exactly what we would have written. It is probably not what any one of the national delegations would have written. But results were worked out which on the whole bear test.” He refrained from detailing the compromises, letting the final document speak for itself.
Wilson had never liked reading from prepared texts and did so only when the solemnity of the occasion demanded. In the course of his nearly forty minutes that afternoon, he stumbled several times, going back to reread the sentences he had misread. Steadily he improved, especially as he approached the apex of his speech: “That there should be a league of nations to steady the counsels and maintain the peaceful understanding of the world,” he explained, “. . . had been one of the agreements accepted from the first as the basis of peace with the central powers.” It had “become the first substantive part of the treaty to be worked out and agreed upon.” Now, twenty-one years after the Spanish-American War had thrust the United States into the world arena, the nation had “reached her majority as a world power.” As such, he said, “a
new role and a new responsibility have come to this great nation that we honour and which we would all wish to lift to yet higher levels of service and achievement.” Wilson gathered his strength as he spoke of the “united power of free nations” that “must put a stop to aggression.” The only hope for such peace, he insisted, was the League. “Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty?” he asked the Senate in Wilsonian fashion. “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”
Only in these final seconds did the speech take flight. At last, the President looked up from his manuscript and faced the unresponsive bloc of Republicans and spoke from the heart:
The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God, who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.
Arizona Democrat Henry Ashurst wrote in his diary that day, “I was petrified with surprise.”
Everybody on either side of the aisle had expected a masterpiece, an “accounting of the most momentous cause ever entrusted to an individual.” If nothing else, the Senate would have liked to have been part of the treaty-making, if not as it was happening then at least in hearing about it now. But, the gentleman from Arizona noted, “his audience wanted raw meat, he fed them cold turnips.” Republicans winked at one another. With that, Wilson set the bulky Treaty upon the Vice President’s rostrum and left the chamber, unaware of his failure to deliver.
Ashurst, on the other hand, proved to be unusually observant that day. He seemed to be the only one to have noticed a pronounced “contraction” of the back of the President’s neck during the speech. And—as if prompted by Wilson’s speaking of a war in which masses had been “bled white”—he also detected a strange blanching of his ears. Ashurst lamented that his findings suggested “a man whose vitality is gone.” But in fact, something more serious had apparently transpired, as the tightening in Wilson’s neck surely suggested pain and the pallor an insufficiency of blood flowing to the head. Both, indeed, may very well have been harbingers of a cerebral episode, if not a minor incident itself.
In the President’s Room, Wilson received thirty visitors, all Democrats but one. He issued talking points to get them over the Treaty’s imperfections. He opposed reservations to the Treaty because they would only delay if not destroy the fragile peace. The Monroe Doctrine, which was nothing more than a declaration of a nineteenth-century President, never had any legal standing, but the peacemakers in Paris had agreed to protect its position. Wilson had felt that the Treaty could take no action in the matter of Irish independence because the document disposed of territory taken from the enemy, not possessed by the Allies.
Republicans dismissed the speech as a string of glittering generalities. “Soap bubbles of oratory and souffle of praises,” mocked Brandegee of Connecticut. Senator Borah of Idaho observed that the President had returned from six months in search of peace with little of substance beyond a sidecar arrangement with France that defined a new alliance for war. At a Sinn Féin rally of seventeen thousand Irish Americans at Madison Square Garden that night, the mention of Wilson’s name prompted three minutes of booing.
Wilson continued to believe that popular sentiment supported the League; but he failed to realize that for six months, the most dynamic force within the Democratic Party had been an ocean away, allowing public opinion to drift. Secretary of Agriculture Houston, who was traveling in the West when the President returned, had grown increasingly aware of opposition efforts to denigrate the Treaty, especially the League Covenant. “I had the impression,” he wrote, “that certain Republican leaders were determined, not so much to bring about the rejection of the Treaty, as to destroy the President’s prestige, to pull him down, and to make such modifications of the Treaty, whether necessary or not, as would enable them to say that the final outcome was their accomplishment, and that they had saved the nation from the ills which the Treaty would have brought upon it.” Houston urged Wilson to simplify his rhetoric. But Wilson did not see fit to listen, and in that moment, he began to lose his grip on the national argument.
Houston ascribed Wilson’s hesitancy to overconfidence—less in himself than in his constituents. Wilson, he said, “is a firm believer in the doctrine that truth is mighty and will prevail. Seeing an issue very clearly himself, he trusts the masses of the people too implicitly also to see it clearly and to see it as he does, in the short run as well as in the long run.” But Wilson did not realize that along with isolationist reactionaries, he lacked the support of many disenchanted liberals, several of whom had been with him in Paris. John Maynard Keynes was completing The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a devastating book that upbraided each of the Big Four, not least of all Wilson. Its three-part serialization in The New Republic that year—at the urging of its New York editor, Walter Lippmann—would make an international name for the young economist as well as big problems for Wilson.
But neither Houston nor almost anybody else in Washington knew the full extent of the opposition Wilson was up against. The President himself did not know that the Republicans had been plotting the demise of his treaty for months before it even existed. Only years later did Franklin D. Roosevelt divulge a secret he had kept to himself about Henry Cabot Lodge and a small coven of Republicans, which included party chairman Will Hays. In late January 1919, as the Peace Conference was opening, this handful of Republicans held a clandestine meeting in Washington to discuss means of dismantling whatever accord Wilson brought home. As Roosevelt later imparted only as an unnamed source, “Hays, Lodge and others made up their mind before they knew anything about the Treaty or the League of Nations that they were going to wreck it whether their consciences demanded it or not.”
Having been gone from home for so long, Wilson could not appreciate the tectonic shifts across the national landscape. Just as ramping up for war had rocked the nation, so too did demobilization. While Germany was the epicenter of massive economic inflation, prices in America had practically doubled between 1913 and 1919; in July 1919 alone, they spiked by 4 percent. The press referred so often to this inflation as the “high cost of living,” it earned its own acronym. By the end of the month, the railroad brotherhood unions advised the President that unless they saw some severe action toward reducing the HCL, two million railroad workers would demand wage increases, which would amount to close to a billion dollars. Management, of course, attributed the inflation to such increases and linked these demands to the unions, many of which had foreign-born leaders, some of whom chanted the same slogans that were shouted in Bolshevik Russia.
James Weldon Johnson, field secretary for the NAACP, dubbed those hot months of 1919 the “Red Summer”—though for a different reason that had even graver consequences. Three dozen race riots erupted in America that season, half of them in July, producing the bloodiest rash of interracial violence in American history. Hundreds were killed, and tens of thousands were left homeless. At least five dozen black men died at the end of a rope. Many Negroes—especially those who had fought in the war—had viewed 1919 as the year in which they might advance in the mainstream of American society. The very thought of such gains only threatened whites who wished to restrain them, and not just in the South. No less an authority than Mississippi’s Governor Theodore Bilbo asserted that very month, “This is a white man’s country, with a white man’s civilization, and any dream on the part of the Negro race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end.”
Between Bisbee, Arizona, on July 3 and Syracuse, New York, on the thirty-first, whites ignited racial tensions in black communities, which spontaneously combusted into arson, looting, and gunfire in several Northern cities, including Philadelphia and Baltimore. The mayhem in Chicago lasted
a week. After several days in which the local police could not quell the murderous riots in Washington, D.C., Secretary of War Baker called in two thousand federal troops, including three hundred Marines. But the fighting force that distinguished the bloodbath in the national capital was the Negro community itself, choosing, as Johnson wrote, “not to run, but to fight—fight in defense of their lives and their homes.” Lamentable though these riots were, Johnson believed the Red Summer, especially those pogroms in Washington and Chicago, marked “the turning point in the psychology of the whole nation regarding the Negro problem,” informing the white population as it empowered the black. The President expressed concern over the conflagrations, but considered them local problems at a time when he was concentrating almost exclusively on global issues.
Nationally, the most pressing domestic problem lay in the readjustment of the labor force, as American doughboys flooded the job market. Unemployment at the end of the war was less than 2 percent; two years later, it would be greater than 5 percent; a year after that, it would reach 12 percent. Not all the changes were as easily measured. Millions of Americans yearned for the peaceful normality of old, when the United States had flourished in wholesome isolation; millions more presumed the psyches of America’s returning soldiers must have altered. The catchiest song of the day asked, “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” The steady migration from rural communities to urban centers increased, marking the first moment that a majority of Americans lived in cities. The war had ended just before Second Lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald was supposed to ship overseas. In July 1919, he went home to Minnesota to rewrite his first novel, in which he proclaimed, “Here was a new generation . . . dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”
Wilson Page 77
