The Illusion of Victory (21 page)

On July 27, the president found time to write a letter to his daughter Jessie, who was spending the summer on Nantucket with her two children. Her husband, Francis B. Sayre, had recently left for Europe to work for the YMCA with American troops.

My Precious Daughter
,

I cannot put into words the thoughts, the loving wistful thoughts, I have had of you and the dear little ones since Frank went away; and they have been with me at all sorts of times, amidst all sorts of business and all sorts of public anxieties. Edith and I are on the
Mayflower
today to get away from the madness (it is scarcely less) of Washington for a day or two, not to stop work (that
cannot
stop nowadays) for I had to bring Swem [his private secretary] and my papers along, but to escape people and their intolerable excitements and demands. This is, therefore, the first time in weeks that I have had any chance at all to turn to my private thoughts and to the dear little girl whom I so dearly love in Nantucket and try to say some of the things that are in my heart.

I know Helen [his cousin, Helen Bones] has written to you and I have tried to keep track of you as best I could; but that is not the real thing,—that does not satisfy my heart. I hope that the visit Margaret [Jessie’s older sister] is planning to pay you may come off soon. . . . We try to take things light-heartedly, and with cool minds, but that is not always possible, and I fear I notice little signs of it telling on Edith. As for myself, I am surprisingly well, by all the tests that the doctor can apply, though
very
tired all the time. I am very thankful. I do not see how any but a well man could safely be trusted to decide anything in the present circumstances. . . .

My heart goes out to you, my darling Jessie, with unbounded love and solicitude! Please, when you have time, write how things are going with you, what you hear from Frank, if a real message has had time to get through yet, and all the things, big or little, that you know I want to hear; and I do not know of anything I do
not
want to know about you in your new home.

Edith joins me in warmest love to you all and I send you, for myself, all the love that a father’s heart can give to a dear daughter whom he admires as much as he loves.
²¹

Behind the president’s cold, professorial demeanor lived a deeply caring man. This carefully concealed reality added dangerous intensity to the clashing emotions in Woodrow Wilson’s wartime soul.

Soon after this letter reached Nantucket, the president was engulfed in another congressional brawl, this time over taxes. Republican and Democratic progressives in both houses had joined Wilson’s call for war with great reluctance. They had listened closely to the denunciations of Senators George Norris and Robert La Follette about the millions J.P. Morgan and his friends were making, and the legislators were determined not to let them keep very much of it. Soon a slogan swept the House of Representatives:“the conscription of wealth.”

Squadrons of bankers and other business executives descended on Washington to testify before the Senate Finance Committee, all solemnly avowing that high taxes would be bad for the war effort. The senators clucked sympathetically, but in the House, antiwar Majority Leader Claude Kitchin promoted a tax bill that performed major surgery on corporate profits while farmers paid almost nothing.
²²

The administration, scoured of the illusion that the Allies had the war as good as won, did not help matters by sending Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, to Capitol Hill to ask for another $5 billion as soon as possible. Once more, cries of bad planning and lack of foresight rained on the White House. The business leaders urged Wilson to raise this new mountain of cash through loans. Wilson disagreed, and nothing could budge him on that important point. As much as possible, he wanted to operate on a pay-as-you-go basis. But the progressives in the Senate, no friends of Wilson in the first place, went him and Claude Kitchin one better. They called for a business tax rate of 80 percent. Only such drastic numbers would stop the profiteers from “plundering the public.”
²³

Republican newspapers said this was more than conscription of wealth, it was confiscation. The senators were denounced as demagogues. Business spokesmen such as Senator Warren Harding of Ohio portrayed the nation’s captains of industry as pathetic victims of proto-revolutionaries. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge conjured the frightening prospect that the war might become “unpopular” with the business community. The senator did not elaborate on what might happen next: Collective indiscipline à la French army? Excessive liquor consumption at the Harvard Club?

Theodore Roosevelt shocked Republicans by yielding once more to the progressive siren song. In a Labor Day speech, he said an 80 percent business tax rate seemed just about right to him. But Roosevelt was a mere onlooker. Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo insisted that a 31 percent bite was adequate, and the 80-percenters were defeated by crushing Senate majorities. Unfortunately, the senators were unable to remove the agrarian bias from the House version of the bill. In the final version, farmers, including those unregulated cotton producers in the South, paid practically nothing. Business leaders saw themselves as victims of Democratic prejudices and damned the president. City factory workers, having heard senators denounce “predatory” Eastern capitalists and accuse the government of favoring the Morgan-led cabal that had supposedly gotten the United States into the war, were even more disillusioned. Chickens were being hatched that would come to roost as vultures, eager to devour Woodrow Wilson’s political corpse.
²⁴

While these domestic excitements were swirling through the White House, a daunting new challenge to Wilson’s leadership appeared from abroad. Pope Benedict XV called on the warring governments to make a peace of mutual forgiveness and forbearance. As a starting point, the pontiff proposed the restoration of Belgium, disarmament, arbitration machinery to prevent future wars, and freedom of the seas for all nations.

To the Americans, the timing of the Pope’s message seemed almost devilishly unpropitious. In Stockholm, international socialists had convened a peace conference to appeal over the heads of the warring rulers to the workers of the world. In Petrograd, the Bolshevik wing of the Russian revolution had already called for peace on the basis of no annexations and self-determination for all peoples and had bullied the so-called Provisional Government of Russia into going along with them.

The Germans and the Austro-Hungarians promptly accepted the Pope’s proposal, although Berlin avoided specific commitments. The provisional Russian government also welcomed the papal mediation. The leaders of France and Italy, with largely Catholic, extremely war-weary populations, were transfixed with alarm. Although they wanted a fight to the finish, they hesitated to take issue with the Pope. The English, even more determined to go for what Prime Minister Lloyd George called a knockout blow, decided to let Wilson answer for all of them.

At first the president was inclined to say nothing. He seemed angry at the Pope’s intrusion into the war. However, as the impact of the pontiff ’s appeal grew larger, Wilson decided he had to reply. The Pope was saying many of the same things Wilson had said before he opted for war. Now, as British Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice wryly pointed out, the president was doing “his utmost to kindle a warlike spirit throughout [the] states and to combat pacifists.” No wonder the Pope’s appeal gave Wilson indigestion.
²⁵

Colonel House strongly seconded this presidential decision—and warned Wilson not to dismiss the Pope’s proposals out of hand in his reply. The new Russian ambassador in Washington had informed House that alarming splits were appearing in the revolutionary government, with the call for immediate peace one of the chief issues. A dismissal could lead to the overthrow of Russia’s moderate leader, Alexander Kerensky.

House also revealed that the Pope’s proposal had evoked a sympathetic response in him. The colonel wondered if it would be a good thing in the long run if “Germany was beaten to her knees.” A German rout might leave a vacuum in central Europe, which the Russians would be eager to fill. Before the declaration of war, Wilson had agreed with this balance-of-power viewpoint. It had been the idea behind his appeal for a peace without victory.
²⁶

Secretary of State Robert Lansing sent Wilson an acrid memorandum, in which he opined that the Pope was working with the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians to create a push for peace while they were winning the war on land and the submarine campaign “appears successful.” His Germanophobia becoming more visible with every line, Lansing argued that the Pope’s proposals would depend on “the good faith of the powers” that signed such a peace treaty. But there could not be “two opinions” of the good faith of the German government.“The German rulers cannot be trusted.”
²⁷

The secretary of state reminded Wilson of the invasion of Belgium, the mistreatment of the civilian population, and the way the Germans “broke their word” about submarine warfare. Lansing even saw the Russian call for peace as the product of German intrigue. The Vatican’s—and Berlin’s—goal, Lansing concluded, was to “break up the alliance and avoid paying the penalty for the evil they have wrought.”
²⁸

Wilson toiled long and hard on his reply, conferring repeatedly with Colonel House, at one point sending him a draft. Issued on August 27, the statement began on an affirmative note: “Every heart that has not been blinded and hardened by this terrible war must be touched by this moving appeal of His Holiness the Pope.” But how could any of the pontiff ’s noble goals be reached by agreement with the present German government? Wilson now condensed Lansing’s Germanophobia into one long, raging sentence:

Wilson next shifted to House’s favorite tactic—denying that the German people were responsible for their government.“This power is not the German people. It is the ruthless master of the German people.” then he was back to his new iron-leader mode. “It is no business of ours how that great people came under its control or submitted with temporary zest to the domination of its purpose; but it is our business to see to it that the history of the rest of the world is no longer left to its handling.”

In a gesture to the Russians, Wilson argued that if the Allies accepted peace now, there would be a need for a perpetual military alliance to protect Russia from the “manifold subtle interruptions, and the certain counter-revolution which would be attempted by the malign influence to which the German Government has of late accustomed the world.”
²⁹
When it came to demonizing Germany, Wilson the war leader needed no lessons from Wellington House. Ignoring the president’s apparent determination not merely to beat Germany to its knees but to knock it flat, Colonel House told Wilson that his artful mixture of hate and idealism was a “charter of democratic liberty.” George Foster Peabody, an aide to Secretary of War Baker, said the reply convinced him that God had sent America “the Master Mind of the World in this crisis.”
³⁰

While Wilson was solemnly assuring everyone that he was determined to protect Russian democracy from German autocracy, America’s chief ally, Great Britain, was telling the new commander of the Russian army, General Lavr Kornilov, something else. Kornilov despised Alexander Kerensky only slightly less than he detested the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilych Lenin. London urged the general to march on Petrograd and restore order at the point of a gun. When Kornilov and his men headed for the Russian capital, the British cabinet hailed his move by declaring the would-be dictator “represented all that was sound and hopeful in Russia.”
³¹

The confusion swirling through the alliance against Germany disturbed Wilson. He was also troubled by the somewhat glaring fact that he had rejected the Pope’s offer without proposing an alternative peace plan. Running the war and coming up with a detailed proposal was beyond his—or anyone else’s—capacity. The president asked Colonel House to round up a group of scholars and liberal thinkers such as Walter Lippmann to research a comprehensive settlement that would be just to both the victors and the vanquished.

Financed out of secret White House funds, the group’s first name was the War Data Investigation Bureau. But the staff soon changed this mouthful to “the Inquiry.” By October, the experts were toiling in the bowels of the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street. Their leader was Sidney Mezes, president of City College, who happened to be Colonel House’s brother-in-law. Also prominent was House’s son-in-law, international lawyer Gordon Auchincloss. When it came to staying on top of a political situation, it was hard to match the adroit Texas colonel. Lippmann, also devoted to House, moved to New York to serve as the Inquiry’s general secretary.