Master of the Senate (13 page)

The proposed treaty was 268 pages long. Lodge began the Foreign Relations Committee hearings by reading the treaty aloud—every page—in a committee room empty except for a single clerk, who took down what he said. That took two weeks. Then the committee called witnesses, scores of witnesses, to testify against the treaty. And while Lodge was thus playing for time, his allies were flooding the country with anti-League advertising and holding anti-League rallies in major cities, rallies at which the speakers were often senators.

The battle was a throwback to the great senatorial debates of the previous century in which long, closely reasoned Senate speeches had been reported fully in the press and discussed, in town meetings and on street corners, across the country. One speech—two hours long, delivered in August in a steaming hot Chamber by Lodge himself—is all but forgotten today, but whatever the validity of its reasoning, it nonetheless expressed that reasoning with the eloquence and power of that earlier age.

For many of the speeches, the galleries were as packed and attentive as they had been for Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. As one historian has written, if Lodge “had wondered whether the campaign to convert the American people to his views was working, on the day he spoke he received ample and gratifying proof from the galleries”—which were packed, not only with representatives of women’s organizations but with a contingent of Marines who had fought at Chateau-Thierry, and who had, in fact, come to the Senate Chamber directly from a parade in which they had passed in review before President Wilson. When Lodge finished, mothers and Marines stood and cheered him before the ushers could quiet them down. And there was another reminder of the Great Triumvirate: hundreds of thousands of copies of Lodge’s speech were printed and distributed across the country.

Although Wilson fumed at the slow pace of Lodge’s hearings, the President couldn’t persuade the senators to speed up. “Mustering,” in Burns’ words, “all his presidential and personal influence,” he used face-to-face persuasion, “talking to senators individually and in small groups,” writing “private letters” to wavering Republicans. But the Founding Fathers, fearing executive power, had armored the Senate against it. The power of the President may have swept across the country, and indeed across part of Capitol Hill. It came to a halt at the door to the Senate Chamber.

When Wilson summoned Senator James Watson of Indiana to the White House and asked him, “Where am I on this fight?” Watson replied, “Mr. President, you are licked. There is only one way you can take the United States into the League of Nations.” “Which way is that?” “Accept it with the Lodge reservations.”
“Lodge
reservations? Never! I’ll never consent to any policy with
which that impossible name is so prominently identified.” The President decided to rally public opinion behind the League by going on a cross-country speaking tour, to, he said, “appeal to Caesar”—the people. But Wilson had evidently forgotten what happened to Caesar—and who did it.

Wilson’s tour of the country was an epic of eloquence. “I have it in my heart that if we do not do this great thing now, every woman ought to weep because of the child in her arms,” he prophesied. “If she has a boy at her breast, she may be sure that when he comes to manhood this terrible task will have to be done once more.” It was an epic of courage and will, as the President fought against mind-numbing headaches that seemed to grow steadily worse until finally he was struck by a premonitory stroke—and even then he tried to fight against returning to Washington, where, after another stroke, he hovered paralyzed and nearly blind for weeks on the edge of death. But eloquence, and the public opinion aroused by it, couldn’t make even a dent in the Senate armor. As Burns summarizes: “By crusading for the League, Wilson had indeed nearly thrown his own life away—yet he had not succeeded in changing a single vote in the Senate.”

Refusing to compromise, the President instructed the Democrats to vote against Lodge’s fourteen amendments, and they were defeated. But Wilson’s proposed treaty was defeated, too. “For decades,” as Burns puts it, “scholars have asked why Wilson allowed the treaty to go down in defeat, why he did not just swallow hard and accept the Lodge reservations as one more necessary concession.” Many have speculated that the reason was physical, that Wilson’s judgment was clouded, his stubbornness increased, by his stroke. But there was a political reason, too—a definitive one in political terms. There was no necessity for the Republican moderates to compromise. Two-thirds plus one of the Senate was required for passage of a treaty, and Wilson didn’t have two-thirds. Wilson’s last hope—his attempt in 1920 to make the upcoming presidential election “a great and solemn referendum” on the issue of the League—was snuffed out by the election of Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that “We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.”

The Senate’s victory over the Treaty of Versailles proved again that the powers given that body by the Founding Fathers were strong enough to stand against the power of the executive and the power of public opinion—strong enough to stand, if necessary, against both at once. “Ultimately,” as Burns has written, “Wilson’s League was not killed by him, by the Senate Democrats who voted as Wilson instructed them, by the irreconcilables, or even by Lodge. It was thwarted by a political system…. Lodge, it is true, manipulated that system brilliantly, but he had only inherited it. In the struggle over the Treaty of Versailles, the American system of checks and balances worked as the Founding Fathers intended that it should.” Woodrow Wilson was defeated by a body he considered both unrepresentative and oligarchical. He was right. The Senate was unrepresentative and oligarchical. But it had the power.

•    •    •

B
UT WHAT
had the Senate done with that power? “If we do not do this great thing now … the terrible task will have to be done once more,” Woodrow Wilson had warned. Was his analysis correct? Would another world war have come—as it came only twenty years later—if the Senate of the United States had ratified the Treaty of Versailles, and the Covenant of Nations?

No one can be certain of the answer. Even if the United States had joined the League, would the country, with an isolationist spirit still heavy on the land, have been willing, when called upon, to meet its obligations? Would the other great powers have been willing? In the event, of course, when they were challenged by aggressor nations, they proved, despite many pledges, to be unwilling. But there is at least a possibility that America’s participation in the League might have heartened the Western democracies when Hitler and Mussolini began to test their will. There is at least a possibility that if
all
the democracies had been united, history might have been different. The Senate, which in the previous century, during its Golden Age, had kept alive for forty years—forty vital years—the possibility of peace for the Union, in the twentieth century had struck a great, perhaps mortal, blow at the possibility of peace for the world. In the nineteenth century, the Senate had played a significant—for a considerable portion of that century, a dominant—role in America’s foreign policy. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, it had played a much more minor role in foreign affairs. It had made a single significant decision—and that decision had been a tragedy.

A
ND IN DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
, the record was—if possible—worse.

With the dawn of the new century, the public’s demand for an end to trusts and to the high protective tariff that was “the mother of trusts,” the tariff that robbed farmers and gouged consumers, and that had now been in place for almost fifty years—the demand, for legislation to ameliorate the injustices of the Industrial Revolution, that had begun to rise during the Gilded Age, only to be thwarted in part by the Senate—began to rise faster, fed by the books of Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens and Theodore Dreiser and a hundred other authors; by the new mass-circulation magazines, which, in the very first years of the twentieth century, educated America about the manipulations of Standard Oil and stirred its conscience to the horrors of sweatshops and child labor (in 1900, almost two million boys and girls were working, often alongside their mothers, all the daylight hours seven days a week in rooms in which there might not be a single window); and by the Populist and Grange movements, which gave farmers insight into the power that railroads and banks had over their lives, and into their helplessness against them. These feelings now crested in a great wave of humanitarian concern, an outraged, impassioned demand for
social justice, that became known as the Progressive Movement. That wave swept over city halls. Long-entrenched boss rule was swept aside by reform mayors in a hundred cities. It swept over statehouses; reform governors pushed through child labor laws and laws increasing protection from, and compensation for, on-the-job injuries. And with McKinley’s assassination, there was suddenly, in Theodore Roosevelt, a President who reformers felt was one of their own—their moral leader, in fact: the very embodiment of the popular will, of the spirit of reform, of Progressivism, was in the White House.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue were the Supreme Court, the House, and the Senate. All were far more conservative than the spirit of the age, but the Court could act only in areas in which it was asked to rule, and while the House was a force against Progressivism during a relatively brief period in which Joseph Cannon reigned as Speaker, the rest of the time that still-growing body—it would reach 435 members in 1910—was in its customary disarray, a force against, or for, nothing.

The Senate was not in disarray. As the Foreign Relations Committee had been its stronghold against the League, against Progressivism the stronghold was the Finance Committee, still dominated by Allison, Aldrich, John Spooner of Wisconsin, and Thomas Platt of New York. The “Senate Four” or the “Big Four,” as they were known, still met in summer at Aldrich’s great castle in Narrangansett, near Newport—four aging men in stiff high white collars and dark suits (Aldrich, being at home, might occasionally unbend to wear a blazer) even on the hottest days, sitting on a colonnaded porch in rockers and wicker chairs deciding Republican policy—a policy that was still based on an unshaken belief in
laissez-faire
and the protective tariff. And, as the
New York Times
reported: “The four bosses of the Senate can and do control that body. This means that these four men can block and defeat anything the president or the House may desire.” Aware of this power, the new President was aware too that senators would play a key role in disposing of the presidential renomination he coveted. And while in certain areas he moved against the “trusts” with unprecedented vigor, ordering his Attorney General to initiate suits to protect miners from the strike-breaking tactics of the big coal operators, and although he continually proclaimed the need for “Government” supervision “over business,” the supervision turned out, during his first term, to be limited to “executive actions” he could take on his own authority, without the need for legislation from Congress. When he ventured toward broader moves he always took the Senate into account. His rhetoric was as dramatic as even the most passionate Progressive could have hoped, but in August, 1902, the Big Four, along with several other senatorial elders, including Mark Hanna, the man who made McKinley, traveled to Roosevelt’s home on Long Island for an all-day conference. A month later, there was another conference—and this time it was the President who came to the senators, sailing across Long Island Sound to Narragansett, where the senators were waiting for him at Aldrich’s castle. And
thereafter TR’s speeches on the tariff and the monetary system were first submitted to Aldrich for approval; on one occasion, the President wrote the Senator that “I want to be sure to get what I say on these two subjects along lines upon which all of us can agree.” Dynamic in delivery though the speeches continued to be, they were somewhat less so in content; abrupt changes in the tariff would be dangerous, he said; any changes that were made should be managed by experts, working “primarily from the standpoint of business interests.” (“Sound and wise” words, Allison and Spooner said.)

In 1904, the American people’s demand for social justice—a demand now in its fourth decade—carried Roosevelt to election in his own right. “The current he rode was … public opinion,” Josephson says. “In 1904 it ran more swiftly, stronger than ever in the direction of popular reform.” Encouraged, the President turned to what he called the “paramount issue”: the regulation of railroads for which farmers had pleaded for thirty years, while for thirty years, discriminatory freighting charges had kept rising. The country rallied behind TR when he called on Congress to give the Interstate Commerce Commission authority over rates and regulations, and the House, by a majority of 346 to 7, passed a strong bill.

At first glance, prospects in the Senate seemed unprecedentedly favorable. Platt was dying, Allison and Spooner were in their last terms; 1905 marked the arrival in the Senate of a group of independent Republicans such as Borah of Idaho, who took their cue from Wisconsin’s “Little Giant,” the reformer Robert La Follette. Progressives felt their time had come.

Dying though the Old Guard may have been, however, it wasn’t surrendering. When Beveridge spoke for railroad regulation, Aldrich, his suave facade cracking for once, snarled at the young senator, “We’ll get you for this.” When La Follette, fresh from his triumphs in the provinces, rose in the Senate to give his maiden speech, a plea for regulation, one by one the Republican elders stood up at their desks and stalked out of the Chamber. By the time the railroad bill finally emerged from the Senate, and then from a Senate-House conference committee, the strong House measure had been drastically watered down.