A larger problem blossomed in the State Department when it became the Secretary’s duty to leave. “Mr. Lansing should have retired long before,” Edith would note. Like his predecessor, William Jennings Bryan, Robert Lansing realized that Wilson dictated his own foreign policy, which reduced the Secretary to little more than a facilitator. Even more humiliating, during the most challenging months in the Department’s history, Wilson had always positioned Lansing behind Colonel House, often ignoring him. For his part, the President found Lansing devoid of imagination, a man of some insight but no vision. His evident displeasure with the final Treaty had demoralized Wilson at a time when he was “expending the last ounces of his strength” on its behalf. Once Wilson was confined to his bed, Lansing worked quietly but steadily to get the President to step down. As Wilson’s health returned, he began to engage, at last, with the Secretary of State, but not in the way Lansing had expected.
In his series of memoranda to himself, Lansing steadily built a case against Wilson’s continuance in office, and ultimately against his own. “I don’t know how I am going to stand the present state of affairs much longer,” he wrote on December 10, 1919. “It has become almost intolerable.” Lansing believed Wilson was well enough to choose a successor at State and to invalidate anything Lansing did in the interim; but he felt beholden enough to the office not to resign until the President offered strong cause to do so. He was correct in assuming that the President distrusted and disliked him. “I don’t care a rap about his good will,” Lansing told himself, “but I do care about his preventing me from properly conducting our foreign affairs.”
Lansing never realized that his continued disappointments without confrontation were among the reasons for Wilson’s misgivings about him. “I must continue,” he recorded, “. . . though the irrascibility [sic] and tyranny of the President, whose worst qualities have come to the surface during his sickness, cannot be borne much longer.” Lansing believed nobody dared cross Wilson for fear of triggering another stroke. In the meantime, he noted, “his violent passions and exaggerated ego have free rein.” Unable even to schedule an audience with him, Lansing went to the White House at the turn of the new year to meet with Mrs. Wilson to stress the importance of taking action on several matters that he had already brought to the President’s attention. “The President,” Edith snapped, “does not like being told a thing twice.” On January 7, 1920, Lansing told himself, “It is only a question as to when I should send in my letter of resignation. I cannot wait much longer.” He did not have to.
One month later—amid a volley of correspondence regarding Japanese interests in Siberia and the conversion of Fiume into a free city under the League’s protection—Wilson sent Lansing a startling letter. “Is it true, as I have been told,” the President asked, “that during my illness you have frequently called the heads of the executive departments of the Government into conference?” If that were the case, Wilson said, he felt it his duty to remind the Secretary that under constitutional law and practice, only the President had the right to summon the heads of the executive departments into conference, and only he and the Congress had the right to ask their views on public questions. The letter was the first that Lansing had seen in months that bore the President’s signature.
He felt the President’s irritability had progressed to irrationality, which he charitably assigned to his medical condition. He considered the brief missive “brutal and offensive,” especially as he considered the question “entirely superfluous.” He had no doubt that the President had known for months that he had called regular Cabinet meetings—unless, indeed, the President had become mentally imbalanced and completely forgetful. He replied that he had frequently assembled the Cabinet “to meet for informal conference,” the result of the Secretaries’ need to confer on interdepartmental matters. He insisted he never intended to overstep any constitutional boundaries, but if the President believed that Lansing had failed in his loyalty, he was prepared to resign. In fact, Lansing looked forward to the reprieve. “Woodrow Wilson is a tyrant,” he wrote on February 9, “who even goes so far as to demand that all men shall think as he does or else be branded as traitors or ingrates. . . . Thank God I shall soon be a free man!”
The President’s memory had not failed him. To the contrary, Wilson recalled every one of Lansing’s infractions. He resented the Secretary’s lack of enthusiasm for the Treaty and, even more, his expressing his opinion both privately and publicly—which had enabled Bullitt to quote Lansing before the Senate committee. These petty betrayals formed just the tip of the iceberg, as Wilson gradually realized that he had selected the wrong man for the position in the first place, a man who did not share his worldview. As Daniels observed, “Lansing was a Big Stick diplomat who believed in Dollar Diplomacy and in Force and had no part in Wilson’s idealism and faith in real democracy.” The last straw for Wilson came with Lansing’s handling of the Jenkins affair, in which he seemed to encourage war with Mexico. Wilson’s questioning Lansing about the Cabinet meetings was merely the pretext he offered for four years of untrustworthiness and attempts to steer foreign affairs from the President’s path.
When Tumulty learned of the President’s intention to discharge Lansing, he sat with him on the South Portico and argued that public opinion would say “it was the wrong time to do the right thing.” Although still physically weak, Wilson in his “invalid chair” grabbed hold of his adviser’s phrase and said, “Tumulty, it is never the wrong time to spike disloyalty. When Lansing sought to oust me, I was upon my back. I am on my feet now and I will not have disloyalty about me.”
Edith implored her husband to state that his reasons for accepting the resignation went beyond the calling of meetings, that there had been “an accumulation of disloyalty.” To cite only Lansing’s last and most minor offense, she said, looked petty. Woodrow laughed. “Well, if I’m as big as you think me,” he said, “I can well afford to do a generous thing. If not I must take the blame.” On February 11, 1920, Wilson wrote Lansing that he wished to take advantage of his “kind suggestion” to relinquish his office.
“Thank God,” the Secretary of State wrote in his desk diary that day, “an intolerable situation is ended.” For Lansing, perhaps; but he did not intend to let the President’s letter go unanswered. The next day, instead of a one-line resignation, he sent a long letter justifying all his behavior in the last year—starting in Paris, where he had found his advice unwelcome, and proceeding to the calling of Cabinet meetings, which he believed were in the best interests of the Administration and the Republic. He insisted he had never sought to “usurp” Presidential authority. On Friday the thirteenth, Wilson accepted the resignation, effective immediately. Lansing’s last act of business at the State Department was to mimeograph the final correspondence between him and the President, which he disseminated at 7:30 that evening.
“The President delivered himself into my hands and of course I took advantage of his stupidity,” Lansing noted in his latest private memorandum, “for it surely was nothing less than stupidity on his part.” So manifest were Wilson’s “irritation and jealousy” in his letters and “so peevish” his tone, Lansing believed the President was not in his right mind. “I imagine that a pretty good-sized bomb has been exploded, which will cause a tremendous racket in this country and find an echo abroad.” Lansing was right. Every newspaper in the country questioned the White House’s decision.
Making matters worse was that just a few days earlier, urologist Hugh H. Young of Johns Hopkins—who was part of Wilson’s medical team—had divulged details of his cerebral thrombosis. Although the doctor was quick to state that neither the vigor nor the lucidity of the President’s mental processes was affected, these first details of his condition to reach the press cast suspicion over the White House. Coupled with Lansing’s dismissal, the story assumed a life of its own. Appearing to be covering up, the White House had to produce other doctors to control the dam
age. Tumulty met with the President on Sunday, where he found the valet cutting his hair in the bathroom. “Well, Tumulty,” Wilson said with a twinkle, “have I any friends left?” And Tumulty replied, “Very few.” Wilson said that in a few days “what the country considers an indiscretion on my part in getting rid of Lansing will be forgotten, but when the sober, second thought of the country begins to assert itself, what will stand out will be the disloyalty of Lansing to me.”
Wilson was partially correct. The Lansing dismissal was quickly forgotten, but only because it ignited a more incendiary discussion about the President’s overall competence. Newspapers invited physicians to offer their professional opinions. Dr. Arthur Dean Bevan, ex-president of the American Medical Association, took the White House to task for suggesting that the President had suffered from exhaustion when, in fact, he had suffered a paralyzing stroke. “He is evidently slowly recovering from the paralysis of his arm and leg and may recover fairly well, although never completely, the use of his limbs,” said Bevan. “But the diseased arteries, which were responsible for the stroke and the damaged brain, remain and will not be recovered from.” That being the case, he added, “A patient who is suffering as the President is . . . should under no circumstances be permitted to resume the work of such a strenuous position as that of President of the United States.” Technically, Bevan reminded the press, the United States was still at war; and if Wilson as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy were called before a nonpartisan medical board, “he would be at once retired as physically incapacitated to perform the duties of the position.” Lansing heard that word on Capitol Hill was that the “President is crazy.”
And then, in a Cabinet not known for grandstanding, one department head took advantage of the President’s absence in a most aggressive, if not egregious, manner. Forty-eight-year-old Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was not only the youngest member of the Cabinet but also the most ambitious. With a national election less than a year away, he had his eye on the Oval Office and his hands on the issue on which he could run for election—national security.
The country had been rife with protests and growing hysteria all year. In early February 1919, the Mayor of Seattle had called for federal troops to prevent a massive workers’ shutdown from becoming a subversive uprising. Later that month, while the President had been Stateside between sessions of the Peace Conference, the Secret Service had thwarted the attempts of a band of Spanish anarchists to assassinate him. In April a mail bomb arrived at the Atlanta home of Georgia’s junior Senator, Thomas Hardwick, which maimed a housemaid. Identically wrapped packages, each containing a similar bomb, had been addressed to another five Senators, four Cabinet members, captains of capitalism John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had just ruled in the back-to-back cases that resulted in a definition of “clear and present danger” and the start of Eugene Debs’s ten-year prison sentence. May Day 1919 saw protests from coast to coast that turned violent. Seeing the political havoc in Russia, some Americans became paranoid. Because there appeared to be outside agitators everywhere, xenophobia grew and “true Americans” sought to secure their borders. Anarchists, Communists, Socialists, striking union members, recent immigrants, people of color or with accents were all tarred with the same brush.
On the night of June 2, 1919—while his wife and daughter slept—Attorney General Palmer heard a car stop outside his townhouse on R Street. Carrying a suitcase, a man sprang from the car but tripped in the garden, and his bag exploded. Neighbor Franklin Roosevelt rushed across the street and learned that physical harm had come to nobody except the perpetrator, who died. At the same hour that same night, bombs at the homes of eight anti-radical judges and legislators—in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland—also detonated. In all but one of those bombings, lives were spared. But back on R Street, one life got changed.
In his first days as Attorney General that spring, Palmer had been quick to recommend commutations of sentences for political prisoners, and he secured the release of five thousand enemy aliens on parole. Now he intended to vanquish “the Red Menace”—an international cabal of terrorists without borders that threatened to overthrow the American government. This war on terror was not just a political issue for the ambitious Quaker; it had become a personal vendetta.
In August 1919, Palmer enlisted a recent law graduate, J. Edgar Hoover, who was exactly half his age, to head the General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. His orders were to collect enough information about radical aliens to deport them. Taking advantage of wartime sedition laws, Palmer authorized a series of pre-emptive attacks on a virtually invisible—and possibly imagined—enemy.
On November 6, 1919—the second anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution—he and the zealous Hoover unleashed an army of agents and local police forces into action in several cities. They busted into homes and meetinghouses with warrants for the arrest of more than six hundred suspected radicals. They found no bombs, but they did seize several tons of political literature. Before the end of the year, the Labor Department deported 249 anarchists back to Russia, Emma Goldman among them. The raids were so well organized, most civilians had to admire the thoroughness of Palmer and Hoover’s work. The nation’s press—in which the raids were not even the lead story—generally applauded the restoration of law and order, and encouraged more such vigilance.
On January 2, 1920, Palmer delivered just that. Federal and local agents raided “centers of Red activities” in more than forty cities and towns, from Nashua, New Hampshire, to Los Angeles. For the most part, Palmer had warrants for the arrests of the suspects, largely immigrants who had sworn allegiance to the United States but then seemed bent upon overthrowing its government. He issued instructions for the conduct of the agents during the raids, which included that “violence to those apprehended should be scrupulously avoided” and that any citizen arrested as a Communist must be present while officers searched his home. Because so many different police departments were involved in the raids, it was impossible to supervise every arresting officer’s behavior; and one cannot measure how much illegal behavior the federal agents overlooked as they trampled across the civil rights of many American citizens. It did become immediately apparent, however, that the local constabularies were far more severe in their arrest procedures than instructed. When Palmer tried to stop Illinois’s chief law officer from conducting his own raids, the State’s Attorney refused, accusing Palmer of “pussyfoot politics.” Palmer and Hoover’s plan had inflamed the Red Scare immeasurably, essentially encouraging fanaticism and fearmongering.
Only when the exhilaration surrounding the raids had died down did people realize the great Communist plot to usurp the United States was not as evolved as the Justice Department had suggested. The Communist Party had no great arsenal of guns and explosives; most of those arrested were not seditious, merely discontent; and their literature was not as dangerous as feared. The people realized that Palmer had ignored at least three constitutional rights—the freedom of speech, the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, and citizen protection against being deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. An absence of leadership created this blatant abrogation of civil rights, surely the nadir of the Wilson Administration.
A few hundred more citizens were deported. And just as the segregation of Washington had given license to other states to maintain Jim Crow laws, so did the Palmer raids empower states and cities to impose their own standards of good citizenship, complete with loyalty oaths and witch hunts. Legionnaires and Klansmen became local vigilantes. And while the raids themselves ceased, their effects would linger through the century. Palmer, once known as a Progressive Congressman who supported labor and women’s suffrage, would forever be remembered for the three months in which he abused the power of his office to an unprecedented extent. He gear
ed up his Presidential campaign, running on a theme of “Americanism.”
No evidence exists that the President had any prior knowledge of the raids, as Edith and Dr. Grayson continued to shield him from news outside the White House. Grayson said, “He is perfectly calm about everything that comes up except the treaty. That stirs him: makes him restless.” In mid-December 1919, Wilson took his first halting steps since his collapse. A treeless Christmas and the President’s sixty-third birthday passed quietly. “It has been the hardest year of your life and one that will live in history,” the ever-faithful Tumulty wrote Wilson on December 28. “It may take time but you will be vindicated.” Alas, Wilson strove not for vindication, but for victory.
Obsessed with the Treaty, he continued to dream up strategies to enable its passage. That month he concocted a harebrained scheme, which he asked Tumulty to draft into an open letter to the nation. He had long asserted that an overwhelming majority of the people desired its ratification, as he believed his seventeen-state tour had confirmed. Thus, with the Senate standing in the way of the people’s will, the President wanted a national referendum. The Constitution providing no machinery for such a vote, he devised one. He intended to challenge more than half the nation’s Senators to resign their seats and “take immediate steps to seek re-election . . . on the issue of their several records with regard to the ratification of the Treaty.” If a majority of those gentlemen was reelected, Wilson promised to resign from office, as would the Vice President. Wilson had Edith ask the Attorney General to provide the legal ramifications of these mass resignations. Palmer’s reply suggested the impossibility of such a phenomenon, to say nothing of the implausibility of any such mass compliance.
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