The Illusion of Victory (14 page)

With some help from German Foreign Minister Zimmerman and his telegram, the task proved to be almost absurdly simple. Lloyd George sent a message through Ambassador Page that if Wilson wanted to participate with an equal voice at the peace conference after the Allies won the war, the United States would have to become a belligerent. The prime minister claimed that, like America, Great Britain wanted neither territorial nor any other kind of gains from the war, but the other belligerents would almost certainly insist on a vengeful peace unless Wilson joined the struggle.
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It was the perfect political bait. Just how totally Wilson swallowed it was visible in a conversation he had with Jane Addams, a pioneer social worker, and a group of fellow peace activists who visited him in the White House in February 1917. The Germans had just launched unrestricted submarine warfare, and Wilson had severed diplomatic relations with Berlin. Wilson told the activists that “as head of a nation participating in the war, the president of the United States would have a seat at the peace table, but that if he remained the representative of a neutral country, he could at best only ‘call through a crack in the door.’”
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On a PBS documentary about Woodrow Wilson’s life, one historian commentator called his April 2 speech the greatest American state paper since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. This comment is typical of the extravagant praise Wilson receives from some historians. Unquestionably, the speech was a rhetorical masterpiece. It was perfectly attuned to stir the emotions of a Congress and a country that had been soaked in British hate propaganda against Germany for the previous thirty-two months. Wilson was a masterful orator; one historian has called him the last of the oratorical statesmen in the tradition of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
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But from a factual point of view, time has not been kind to many aspects of this speech. The president’s claim that German submarine warfare was “a war against all mankind” is not substantiated by America’s experience in later wars. The submarine has been accepted as a legitimate naval weapon. There is no moral onus for using it in the only way that gives submariners a decent chance for survival against their surface enemies—torpedoing enemy ships without warning. This surprise-attack approach was the policy adopted by the U.S. Navy during World War II. No one, including America’s Japanese or German enemies, called the practice a war against mankind.

Wilson’s view of the submarine did not even survive the immediate aftermath of World War I. In 1923, Rear Admiral William Sims, wartime commander of U.S. naval forces in the European Theater, wrote in a magazine article that the “vast majority” of German submarine commanders were “decent seamen” who did not fire on defenseless men in open boats and generally acted humanely toward the survivors of sunken ships. Out of the thousands of sinkings during the war, Sims pointed out, only eighteen U-boat commanders were tried for a total of fifty-seven criminal acts after the war, and some of these were acquitted. A submarine commander who sank a hospital ship and then fired on the lifeboats was tried in Germany after the war and convicted.
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Wilson’s argument becomes even weaker when we examine the statistics (which also confirm Sims’s contention.) A total of 66 Americans died when four U.S. ships were sunk by submarines before war was declared. Another 131 were killed while sailing on British ships that were torpedoed, with the
Lusitania’
s 128 deaths accounting for most of these losses. Another thirteen American ships were sunk with no casualties. Even after war was declared, most of the ships sunk had no casualties. This hardly amounts to barbarism, much less a war against mankind.
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Equally invalidated by time and experience is Wilson’s insistence that American citizens had a right to travel on British ships in the war zone, ignoring repeated warnings by Germany that this was a very dangerous thing to do. No such right exists or ever has existed in the history of naval warfare. Nor did U.S. merchant ships have an absolute right to sail into the war zone declared by Germany around the British Isles. If maritime access to a war zone were a right on a par with free speech and other clauses in the Bill of Rights, William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and other idealistic antiwar leaders would never have urged the president to abrogate such traffic. President Thomas Jefferson, a fervent proponent of the Bill of Rights, banned such commerce in 1807 to keep the United States out of the world war then raging between France and England. Congress, overhauling the neutrality laws in the mid-1930s, passed by huge majorities laws forbidding both practices—laws that were signed without a word of criticism by Wilson’s supposed political heir, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Wilson not only insisted on the right of Americans to travel on belligerent ships, he did not hesitate to call anyone who challenged him on this assertion a traitor to the country. When a Texas congressman named Jeff McLemore sponsored a resolution forbidding Americans to travel on such ships, Wilson fought the measure as if it had originated with Kaiser Wilhelm. A hefty majority of the Democrats in Congress backed McLemore; Speaker of the House Champ Clark told the president the resolution would pass by 2 to 1. But Wilson, using threats of patronage cutoffs and desperate appeals to party loyalty, managed to defeat the proposal. Later he claimed that those who voted for it had failed the “acid test” of true patriotism.
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Even more dubious was Wilson’s call for “a war without hate.” He had watched the British and French tell thousands of lies to make the German army, the German people, and their leader, Kaiser Wilhelm, more hateful than any other nation in recorded history, give or take a few villains like the Mongols under Ghengis Khan. This tidal wave of hate had washed over Americans for almost three years. Did Wilson think he could make it disappear with a rhetorical flourish? Apparently he did.

A corollary to this sad illusion is Wilson’s claim that the United States had no quarrel with the German people, only with their government. As Senator La Follette pointed out at the time, this idea came close to an absurdity. It would return to haunt Wilson in his conduct of the war on the home front and in his attempt to make peace abroad. The idea of distinguishing the people from their government came from Colonel House, who got it from Sir Edward Grey. House wanted Wilson to build a “backfire” against the German government in the minds of its own people. The don’t-take-this-personally idea was also supposed to placate the German Americans—something it signally failed to do.
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No one seemed aware—or to care—that many other Wilson phrases, such as a war to make the world safe for democracy, were already clichés in the speeches of British politicians and the propaganda of Wellington House. Wilson and America would eventually pay a price for this secondhand rhetoric and the naive idealism that lay behind it: British and French disdain.

Wilson’s long resistance to joining the war that had already consumed so many hundreds of thousands of French and British lives had alienated the leadership of America’s putative allies. In 1917 and early 1918, the president had repeatedly declared that he saw no difference between the warring powers from a moral or ethical point of view. The culmination of these statements was his “peace without victory” speech. These assertions infuriated the British and French, whose hate campaigns against Germany were predicated on their claim to moral superiority. Andrew Bonar Law, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, snarled, “What Mr. Wilson is longing for we are fighting for.” In Paris, the novelist Anatole France sneered,“Peace without victory is bread without yeast, jugged hare without wine, brill without capers, mushrooms without garlic . . . in brief, an insipid thing.”
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In Washington, an exasperated Cecil Spring Rice ranted denunciations of Wilson’s peace-without-victory policy at Secretary of State Lansing until the shocked secretary was forced to order the British ambassador to desist. When both sides spurned the president’s proposal, Spring Rice told his superiors in London that it now seemed likely that the United States would finally “drift into the war.” Not exactly a compliment to the president’s decisiveness and leadership.

In the same letter, the British ambassador revealed a significant perception of the American public’s state of mind.“All I can record for certain is that the vast majority of the country desire peace and would do a great deal to secure peace.” The ambassador blamed this lack of enthusiasm for the war on Wilson’s failure to wholeheartedly embrace the Allied cause.
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In March 1917, Colonel House and Sir William Wiseman, who was in the process of taking charge of British intelligence in the United States, prepared a memorandum for Prime Minister Lloyd George and his cabinet, aimed at giving them a realistic grasp of the U.S. political situation. Before Wiseman sent the statement to London, House persuaded President Wilson to read it and give it his covert approval. The memorandum amply confirmed Spring Rice’s estimate of America’s lack of enthusiasm for the war. It admitted that sympathy for the Allied cause was largely confined to what Wiseman and House called “broader-minded” Americans. The “mass of the people” were not ardent backers of the Allies. In fact, a substantial number were hostile to Great Britain because of its blockade of Germany, its blacklisting of U.S. firms, and its censorship of war news. Summing up, the memorandum declared: “The people of the United States wish to be entirely neutral as far as the European war is concerned. The Administration, however, have always understood the cause of the war and have been entirely sympathetic to the Allies.”
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Did this mean that Wellington House’s thirty-two months of hate propaganda had failed? By no means. The “broader-minded” Anglophile Americans were Germanophobes to a man—and woman. They controlled most of the press, the universities, the banks, the corporations and the levers of government. But the Spring Rice letter and the House-Wiseman memorandum confirmed the claims of La Follette and his followers in the Senate and House that many people, especially in the Midwest, had profound doubts about the declaration of war.

Ambivalence and barely concealed hostility abroad as well as substantial lack of enthusiasm at home lay just beneath the surface of America’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy—along with a visceral hatred of all things German. An even more visceral hatred of Woodrow Wilson emanated from Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and their fellow Republicans. They were convinced, in Roosevelt’s words, that “the contrast between Wilson’s conduct down to the declaration of war and his subsequent utterances cannot be overcome.” As Lodge put it acidly to Roosevelt, if Wilson’s speech declaring war was right, “everything he has done for two and a half years is fundamentally wrong.”
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For the moment, Wilson’s oratorical skills had obscured these harsh realities. But they were still there, not unlike the thousands of British mines in the North Sea blockading Germany that the president had ignored throughout the thirty-two months of America’s neutrality. These hazards would soon produce a degree of instability in the ship of state beyond the imagination—or talents—of Philip Dru, administrator.

The ink was scarcely dry on the declaration of war when Woodrow Wilson found out how little impression his soaring rhetoric and noble phrases had made on the leaders of the Republican Party. Still seething over the president’s hairbreadth victory in November on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” the GOP was in no mood to let Wilson use his somersault into the global struggle to increase his power and popularity.

On Monday, April 9, Senator John W. Weeks of Massachusetts rose to urge Congress to create a Joint Committee for the Conduct of the War to make sure that Wilson and his fellow Democrats were up to the job of winning victory. The committee, composed of five Democrats and five Republicans, would have the power to subpoena witnesses, from generals to cabinet secretaries to underlings, and inquire into every aspect of the war, from the battlefields to the boardrooms of the arms companies.

Wilson was horrified. As a historian, he had read about a similar committee that had operated during the Civil War, headed by two Radical Republican enemies of Abraham Lincoln, Senators Benjamin Wade and Zachariah Chandler. They had terrorized Lincoln’s administration and tormented the army, often accusing defeated Union generals of being secret Confederate sympathizers and pushing their favorite officers, radical abolitionists like themselves, for promotions. Wilson had no doubt that Weeks planned to select anti-Wilson Democrats such as Nebraska’s Senator Gilbert Hitchcock for his committee. They would not be hard to find. The president’s abrupt switch from neutrality to war had left many members of his party discomfited, even though most had voted for the war resolution.

Wilson rushed from the White House to the Capitol and personally sought out members of the Senate Rules Committee, who controlled the process of bringing legislation to the floor for a vote. He persuaded the Democratic majority on the committee to bury the Weeks proposal. The agitated president preferred this covert suppression to letting the idea come before the full Senate, which almost certainly would have voted for it.

Only seven days after his oratorical triumph, Wilson was forced to admit he had less than wholehearted support in the national legislature. He also had to worry about the near certainty that Weeks would revive his proposal if the war effort floundered.
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This minicrisis was only a symptom of Wilson’s legislative woes. An even more vivid glimpse of trouble ahead had come three days earlier, on April 6, when a war department aide, Major Palmer S. Pierce, testified before the Senate Finance Committee about the army’s request for $3 billion to fight the war. The chairman of the committee, Senator Thomas S. Martin of Virginia, was also the Senate majority leader. Martin scowled at Pierce and asked him to explain how the army was going to spend this stupendous sum, the equivalent of at least $50 billion in 2002 dollars. Pierce began listing how much it cost to build training camps and to buy rifles, artillery, airplanes—then added nervously, “And we may have to have an army in France.”

“Good Lord!” Martin said.“You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?”
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Few comments better exemplify the almost incredible naïveté that underlay the U.S. decision to declare war on Germany. Were the Americans going to send an army to France? No one in the War Department seemed to have a clue. Nor did President Wilson, the supposed prophet who purportedly told Cobb of the
World
how much anguish and turmoil the war would cause America. Wilson added to this overall impression by insisting
that the United States had not joined the Triple Entente as an ally, but as “an associated power.”

On April 6, 1917, the U.S. Army numbered 127,588 men, roughly the same size as the army of Chile. On paper, there were also 80,446 men in the National Guard. When these men were summoned to the Rio Grande in 1916 to protect the border against Mexican guerrillas, appalling numbers of them flunked army physical examinations—and a great many failed to show up. Senator Weeks told Congress on April 23, 1917:“A very considerable percentage—probably as many as one half—had never fired a rifle and nearly as [many] had never had an hour’s drill.”
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As late as February 1917, both Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker had issued statements in favor of voluntary enlistment. Wilson had made only a passing reference in his April 2 speech to his switch to conscription. He obviously failed to convince Congress that such a move was wise or necessary. On April 18, the House Military Affairs Committee reported out a bill that repudiated the president’s plan. By a 13 to 8 vote, the committee recommended a volunteer system. The bill was supported by Speaker Champ Clark, who delivered a fiery denunciation of a draft: “I protest with all my heart and mind and soul against having the slur of being a conscript placed upon the men of Missouri.”
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House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin, who had voted against the war resolution, was even more vehemently opposed to a draft. The chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, S. Hubert Dent, Jr., of Alabama had made his opinion clear by refusing to bring the bill to the floor, handing the task to the ranking Republican on the committee. Dent insisted the government should try to raise an army of volunteers before resorting to the draft. Senator Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia introduced a bill that barred draftees from serving overseas. Throughout the South, the idea of drafting Negroes and putting guns in their hands caused widespread hysteria. One North Carolina congressman told Wilson there was no hope of passing the bill unless a volunteer system was tried first.

In the Senate, Jim Reed of Missouri predicted the streets would “run red with blood” if Congress voted for conscription. Senator Robert La Follette warned that the power, once granted, would be attached to the office of the president,“no matter how ambitious or bloody-minded he may be.” the Senate Armed Services Committee voted out their version of a conscription bill 8 to 7, with five of the ten Democrats against it, enabling the Republicans to claim credit for rescuing the measure. An alarmed Joe Tumulty told the president,“There is almost panic in our ranks.” He meant the ranks of the Democratic Party.
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Adding immensely to the furor was the voice of former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was not in the least discouraged by the U.S. Army’s attempt to stifle his plan to raise a volunteer division. On April 10, Roosevelt went to the White House to ask Wilson’s approval. The two men, by this time ingrained political enemies, managed a surface cordiality. According to Roosevelt, he told Wilson that he only wanted to make the president’s war message “good.” It had to be translated into “fact” before it would rank as a great state paper. Roosevelt wanted to persuade the nation “to live up to the speech.”
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It would be hard to imagine a more disastrous approach to a man who regarded his oratory as the very essence of his presidency. Wilson did not think his speech needed any help from Roosevelt, and he was not about to let the hero of San Juan Hill tell the country and the world that TR had been assigned this task by the man he had called a Byzantine logothete.

Nevertheless, Wilson listened patiently to Roosevelt’s plan. The volunteer division would be composed of the cream of American manhood. TR had already persuaded Major General Leonard Wood, former army chief of staff and a leading prewar spokesman for preparedness, to add his professional expertise. There would be a German-American regiment to demonstrate that group’s patriotism, and a black regiment, with white officers. Descendants of Civil War and Revolutionary War heroes had already volunteered—a Lee, a Jackson, a Sheridan. French nobility, in memory of the services of the Marquis de Lafayette, would serve on the staff. Dozens of young regular army officers were offering to whip these amateurs into fighting soldiers. They would be ready for the trenches of the Western Front by September 1, 1917.

Afterward, according to Joe Tumulty’s memoir, Wilson said that Roosevelt was “a great big boy” and claimed he was charmed by his personality. Tumulty added that the president was inclined to overrule the general staff and let Roosevelt have his division. This comment was another attempt to put in Wilson’s mouth emotions and ideas that Tumulty wished Wilson shared. The historical record indicates that Roosevelt’s push for his volunteer division played a crucial role in Wilson’s decision to back conscription.
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This much is certain—there was no hint of reciprocal charm in the way Wilson handled Roosevelt’s proposal. He used a technique that the British Foreign Office had perfected on American protests against the blockade of Germany: the silent stall.

Meanwhile, Congress began debating the conscription bill. Roosevelt, getting the message from Wilson’s silence, was soon telling reporters that he found “great confusion” in the president’s mind. He had been forced to explain in almost embarrassing detail why the division was important and how it would work. The implication was all too clear: Wilson, the logothete, the man of words, could not grasp the thinking of Roosevelt, the man of action.
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In Congress, the anti-drafters turned to Roosevelt’s volunteer division as a perfect excuse to oppose conscription.“If Roosevelt or any other Pied Piper can whistle 25,000 fanatics after him, for Heaven’s sake give him a chance,” cried Representative Augustus Peabody Gardner of Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge’s son-in-law. The remark again revealed the naive assurance that there was no compelling need to send a large number of American soldiers to fight on the Western Front.
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TR’s voter appeal was still tremendous. Soon, an alarmed Secretary of War Baker was forced to write to Roosevelt, publicly rejecting his volunteer division and urging him to desist. Congress’s refusal to pass the conscription bill was brewing a national crisis. Baker might have added that enlistments, which were by no means barred during this uproar, were negligible—a mere 73,000 men had volunteered for the army out of a potential pool of 10 million. Only the U.S. Navy was getting all the men it wanted. This was further evidence of the widespread assumption that there would be no U.S. Army in Europe and that the navy was the only place where a man was likely to see action.
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Roosevelt’s response was a ferocious public letter to Baker, denying his plan interfered with the draft, which he favored. He lectured the secretary on the “moral effect” of sending his volunteers to France and sneered at Baker’s argument that it would be wiser to train an American army at home, while the Allies did all the fighting with U.S. money and munitions. Roosevelt was intimating that this was more of the gutless cowardice endemic in the White House and the rest of the Wilson administration. In a final blast, the former president denounced the entire Army general staff as a bunch of red-tape-entangled numskulls, who would not recognize a good idea if it ran over them.
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Neither Baker nor Wilson could have been consoled by the rain of criticism that descended on them from around the country and abroad. Roosevelt was enormously popular in France and England, thanks to his long-running call for U.S. participation in the war. Numerous prominent figures in both countries bombarded the White House with protesting telegrams. Roosevelt, encouraged by this praise of his brainchild, expanded his proposal from a division to an army corps of 200,000 volunteers. General Wood would be in command, and Teddy would be satisfied to lead a division. Roosevelt’s four sons proclaimed their readiness to fight beside their warrior father.
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For a while, it looked as if Roosevelt would get his way. On April 28, Republican Senator Warren Harding of Ohio added an amendment to the conscription bill, directing Wilson to let Roosevelt raise 100,000 volunteers. The proposal passed, 56 to 31, with Democrats deserting the president in droves. A delighted Roosevelt sent a telegram to Harding, congratulating him for his “patriotic work.” But TR’s celebration was premature. In the House of Representatives, many conservative Republicans had never forgiven Roosevelt for bolting the party in 1912 to run for president on the Progressive ticket, handing the election to Wilson. Added to these recalcitrants was the bloc of antiwar representatives around Congressman James R. Mann. This group was disinclined to forgive Roosevelt for calling them traitors when they supported Wilson in his peace-without-victory phase. When the Roosevelt amendment came to a vote, it lost by a decisive 170 to 106.

The congressmen, in one of those about-faces that frequently surprise outsiders, now voted overwhelmingly in favor of the administration’s conscription bill, 313 to 109. This inspired the Senate to do a similar 180degree turn and approve the measure 81 to 8. But when the two houses tried to harmonize the bills in a conference, another huge wrangle erupted over Roosevelt’s continued pursuit of his volunteer corps. His persistence won him not a little criticism in the press and a public rebuke by the Army League of the United States, a clone of the pro-war Navy League. Roosevelt blasted the Army League for playing petty politics on Wilson’s behalf. Anyone else who said he was interfering with the president’s wishes was guilty of “hysteria.” In the conference, three Republican senators deserted Teddy, and the Harding amendment was dropped from the bill.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, by this time alarmed over growing criticism in the newspapers, urged Roosevelt to give up. The former president grudgingly agreed. Whereupon the House of Representatives, obviously hoping to placate Roosevelt’s supporters in the electorate, did another about-face and voted 215 to 178 to give Roosevelt some sort of independent command. This reversal produced another week of wrangling in the conference committee, which finally solved the matter by passing the conscription bill and giving Wilson the authority to commission TR and his volunteers if he so desired—something every man, woman and child over the age of six knew was never going to happen.
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