The Illusion of Victory (38 page)

On July 13, Archie Roosevelt wrote Flora a more realistic letter from his hospital bed:“Quentin blew in yesterday.” although he looked well,“one can’t help being worried. He is in an American squadron and like everything else in our army we have had to take castoff machines from the allies so they have added dangers.” Flora responded to this barrage of news and comment with a plaintive:“Oh how I wish it was all over!”
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On the morning of July 14, Quentin took off with the three other members of his flight. They had orders to shoot down German observation balloons to help conceal the movements of American infantry, who were preparing to block General Ludendorff ’s final offensive. Seven red-nosed Fokkers came roaring down on them, with the sun and altitude in their favor.

One of Quentin’s flightmates described the ensuing melee.“In a few seconds [they] had completely broken up our formation and the fight developed into a general free-for-all. I tried to keep an eye on all our fellows but we were hopelessly separated and outnumbered nearly two to one. About a half mile away I saw one of our planes with three Boche on him and he seemed to be having a pretty hard time with them so I shook the two I was maneuvering with and tried to get over to him but before I could reach them, our machine turned over on its back and plunged down out of control.”
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It was Quentin. He was slumped over his instruments with two machine-gun bullets in his brain. The Nieuport smashed to earth behind the German lines near the village of Chamery. In his pocket Quentin carried two letters from Flora, which helped the Germans identify the body. The last one, written on June 19, was full of her yearning to be with him in Paris:“If you were wounded I could be with you and be of some comfort,” she wrote.
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Quentin’s squadron listed him as missing. In the United States, those who loved him clung to shreds of hope. Eleanor Roosevelt, Ted’s wife, cabled Flora: “EVERY REASON TO BELIEVE REPORT QUENTIN ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE.” Quentin’s friend Hamilton Coolidge wrote a letter voicing a similar opinion. But the next day, the German Red Cross reported Quentin had been buried where he fell, with full military honors, including a guard of 1,000 men.

“How am I going to break the news to Mrs. Roosevelt?” tR said when a reporter on duty at Sagamore Hill told him Quentin was dead. He went into the house and emerged a few minutes later with a statement. “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the front and had a chance to render some service and show the stuff there was in him before fate befell him.” then he telephoned Flora.
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Four days after Quentin died, the American-led attack at Soissons slammed the German war machine into reverse. Soon Quentin’s grave was in Allied territory—and it swiftly became a kind of shrine. Infantrymen hiked miles to see it and decorated it with flowers and mementos. For soldiers fighting to make the world safe for democracy, the death of a president’s son was proof that Americans practiced what they preached.
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For Theodore Roosevelt, his son’s death had a very different meaning. Quentin had died flying a second-rate French plane, because Woodrow Wilson’s administration had refused to prepare for war and after war was declared the president’s appointees had failed to produce a single aircraft, in spite of spending almost a billion dollars. There was only one way to give Quentin’s death meaning. Woodrow Wilson had to die an equivalent political death. His presidency must be—and would be—destroyed.

Back in the United States, the exploits—but not the appalling casualties—of American soldiers dominated the headlines. Politics won almost as much space on the front page. It was an election year, and both parties were girding their financial and ideological loins for the struggle. At stake was control of Congress. Democratic majorities were narrow in the House and shaky in the Senate.

Democratic hopes for continuing control of the Senate had been worsened by some cruel blows of fate. No less than ten senators had died in the course of the Sixty-Fifth Congress, eight of them Democrats. Three were replaced by Republican appointees, thanks to GOP governors in their home states.
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Woodrow Wilson was anxious to keep control of Congress in Democratic hands. He had attempted to wield his presidential influence in two 1917 by-elections: a contest in the Indiana Sixth Congressional District and another House race in New Hampshire. He had declared both elections were a test of public approval of his conduct of the war. In both cases, he had suffered humiliating defeats. Even more egregious was his venture into the murky politics of Massachusetts, where, at Colonel House’s urging, he had endorsed the Democratic candidate for governor—in vain.
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On February 12, 1918, GOP leaders met in Saint Louis and elected a moderate Indiana national committeeman, Will H. Hays, as the new party chairman. He had been vigorously backed by Theodore Roosevelt. Hays’s selection was additional evidence that the Republicans were recovering from their 1912 split between the Progressives and the Old Guard. Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania, a quintessential OG, whose awesome political machine guaranteed him a lifetime job, sounded the theme of the coming months as the meeting broke up. The senator said that Wilson’s muddled war effort was destroying the country’s morale. If the voters wanted to win the war, they had better give the GOP control of Congress. The Democrats fired back, implying the Republicans were disloyal. Since ordinary citizens were being arrested for saying such things about the president, the average voter must have felt confused.
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The dust had barely settled from these partisan blasts when the president and the nation plunged into an election in Wisconsin to replace Paul O. Husting, a Democratic senator who had died in a duck-hunting accident. A Democrat’s only chance in this strongly Republican state was a split in the GOP. Husting had won by only 1,000 votes in 1914, thanks to such a breach. After some jockeying, the election emerged as a contest between the Democratic nominee, an original Wilson backer named Joseph E. Davies, who resigned from the Federal Trade Commission to make the race, and Republican Congressman Irvine L. Lenroot. Also in the race and splitting the progressive Republican vote—or so the Democrats hoped—was a Socialist candidate, Victor Berger, under indictment for openly and repeatedly opposing the war.

Lenroot had supported the 1916 McLemore resolution, which had forbidden Americans to travel into the war zone on ships of the belligerents. The pro-Allied press had castigated this idea and so had Wilson, since it undercut one of his main objections to Germany’s submarine campaign. Lenroot’s candidacy reignited the press’s ire—and the president’s. The congressman had also voted against several preparedness bills, supported an embargo on arms shipments to all the belligerents and opposed Wilson’s armed-ship legislation. It was easy to smear Lenroot as pro-German, and the national newspapers poured scorn on his candidacy. Davies, meanwhile, declared that a vote for him would prove that Wisconsin stood “four square” behind Wilson.

Encouraged by the national press’s abuse of Lenroot, Wilson waded into the fray with a resounding endorsement of Davies and a searing condem
nation of Lenroot as a man who had failed to pass “the acid test” of “true loyalty and genuine Americanism” for his vote on the McLemore resolution and other measures. This was vicious stuff. The president was impugning Lenroot’s patriotism for his opposition to Wilson’s policies before the United States entered the war. He was dismissing the congressman’s support of the administration’s measures since war had been declared.
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Lenroot was by no means the only politician who had differed with the president on these prewar issues. Dozens of Democrats had also committed the same putative sins. The tactic united almost the whole Republican Party behind their candidate. Huge ads endorsing Lenroot, signed by thirty-three of the Senate’s forty-four Republicans, ran in every newspaper in Wisconsin.
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Urged on by Boies Penrose and Theodore Roosevelt, congressional Republicans built a backfire against Davies by attacking Wilson’s mismanagement of the war. They chose a juicy target—the aircraft program. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and others accused the administration of “criminal negligence” for its failure to produce a single plane after spending $840 million. While they orated, the first great German offensive of the spring was tearing the British army apart. GOP speakers portrayed Tommies and doughboys pounded by unchallenged German bombers because of Wilson’s incompetence.

Candidate Lenroot soon joined the attack, abandoning any attempt to defend his prewar “acid test” votes. He also pointed out that his Democratic opponent had been hiding in the government bureaucracy while these acidic issues were being debated. Suddenly Davies was on the defensive. The Democrats sought to rescue him by cranking out lies about the combat readiness of American troops in Europe, most of them told by reporters accompanying Secretary of War Newton Baker, who was visiting the American Expeditionary Force.

It remained a close race until Vice President Thomas Marshall came to Wisconsin on Davies’s behalf. Marshall had favored a moderate approach to the 1918 campaign; he thought attacks on Republicans should be kept to a minimum and the Democrats should try to win on an appeal to national unity. Wilson had sharply disagreed and ordered Marshall to flay the GOP in his native Indiana—and do likewise in Wisconsin.
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In both states, Marshall obeyed orders. An old stump speaker, he knew how to give the opposition hell. In Wisconsin, the vice president went over the top. He accused Lenroot of pandering to “the sewage vote”: pro-Germans, traitors and pacifists. Only a vote for Davies could save Wisconsin’s national reputation.“Your state is under suspicion,” Marshall roared at an immense meeting in Madison.
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That did it. The
Milwaukee Sentinel
declared that “the lash of insult to the loyalty of Republicans in Wisconsin” had united the Republican party “to a degree that has not been seen for twenty years.” In a record turnout, enraged Wisconsinites elected Lenroot by 15,267 votes. Even more troubling, as far as standing foursquare behind Wilson was concerned, the Socialist antiwar candidate, Victor Berger, won 110,187 votes—four times the number his party usually received. Berger might well have won the election if it were not for an oblique endorsement of Lenroot by Senator Robert La Follette in his magazine,
La Follette’s Weekly
, during the primary campaign. It was the only time that the silenced senior senator from Wisconsin participated in the contest.
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Emboldened by this repudiation of the president’s man in Wisconsin, the Republicans and Wilson-hating Democrats pressed their investigation of the failures of the government’s aircraft program. A star performer was Leonard Wood, who testified before Senator George Chamberlain’s Military Affairs Committee just after the general returned from several weeks in France. Wood ridiculed the claims of George Creel’s Committee on Public Information that 22,000 planes would soon be darkening the skies of Europe. There were only 1,000 American pilots in Europe and not a single U.S.-made plane for them to fly, the general said. In early April, Chamberlain’s committee issued a report signed by four Democrats and five Republicans, denouncing the administration’s awful performance.

The White House fired the two top officials of the aircraft program, Howard E. Coffin and Major General George O. Squier. Coffin was the chief villain. A classic high-pressure automobile salesman, he had toured the country describing how thousands of planes would smash the German army into submission, making it unnecessary for American infantry to charge machine guns.

Senator Chamberlain added to the White House’s distress by trotting out another version of a committee on the conduct of the war. Nothing else
could rescue the country from Wilson’s ineptitude, the senator intoned. He also wanted authority for his Military Affairs Committee and sundry subcommittees to send investigators into any and every war industry in the nation.

Wilson was rescued from serious embarrassment by Colonel House and Joe Tumulty. Not without difficulty, they persuaded him to appoint the 1916 Republican presidential candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, as a special prosecutor to investigate the airplane mess. Wilson, displaying the supersensitivity that complicated his political life, had previously opposed any appointment for Hughes, a former Supreme Court justice and one of the nation’s most distinguished lawyers, because he had been “absolutely false” (i.e., he disagreed with Wilson) during the 1916 campaign. But the president was forced to swallow his doubts and offer Hughes the job. Hughes accepted, and the Chamberlain supercommittee demand was derailed.

This rare—even unique—Wilson experiment in bipartisanship had not a little influence on a fateful speech the president made to Congress on May 27. While grappling with the airplane firestorm, he was also trying to persuade Congress to pass another revenue bill, extracting an additional $7 billion from the tax-hating American public. The idea of raising taxes in an election year was still anathema to the legislators, even if the nation was fighting a war. They balked, and balked, and balked again, while inflation kept climbing.

On May 27, Wilson went before Congress and spoke to the politicians—and the public—about the imperative need for new taxes. The address was a superb example of the American presidency’s capacity for wartime leadership. Speaking as commander in chief, Wilson told the legislators he regretted asking them to stay in Washington’s summer heat to hammer out a tax bill. But there was only one consideration now, and it made congressional comfort and political expediency seem “trivial and negligible.” that was “the winning of the war.” they were not only in the war, they were at “the very peak and crisis of it.” In fact, on that very day, the German army was storming across the Chemin des Dames and heading for Paris.

Wilson added words that would give him grief—and the nation not a little turmoil.“Politics is adjourned. The elections will go to those who think least of it; to those who go to their constituents without explanations or excuses, with a plain record of duty faithfully and disinterestedly performed.”
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This was strange stuff from the man who had just injected “the acid test” into the political scene in his attempt to elect a Democrat in Wisconsin. The volte-face illustrated Wilson’s amazing (or dismaying) ability to reverse his political field without even a hint of an apology or an explanation. The politicians confronting him in the chamber of the House of Representatives all but snorted aloud their disbelief. The idea that the elections would be won by those who did not bother to give them any thought would have produced mocking guffaws in any less formal setting.

thought would have produced mocking guffaws in any less formal setting. As with other Wilson rhetorical flourishes (including the acid test), newspapers seized on the phrase. Democratic papers used it to belabor Republicans for their supposedly blatant partisanship. Republican papers told their readers the president was little more than a con artist, trying to intimidate them into passivity. The GOP was particularly annoyed because they had been responsible for rescuing many of Wilson’s war measures when congressional Democrats deserted him. They would have been even more outraged if they had known that within days of the speech, Wilson spent several hours with Joe Tumulty discussing tactics for the fall campaign. The secretary advised the president to remain silent and let Roosevelt and the other Republicans rant. At the climax of the campaign, Wilson would release a public letter to some prominent Democrat, crushing the enemy with the accusation of disloyalty in wartime. Wilson concurred with this strategy, which Colonel House praised as “in every way admirable.”
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Infuriated by General Leonard Wood’s testimony in the airplane uproar, Wilson and Secretary of War Baker allowed personal pique to lure them into a public relations disaster that inflicted immediate damage to the claim that politics was adjourned. General Wood had returned to Kansas to prepare his Eighty-Ninth Division for shipment to Europe. While the 28,000 men were wending their way to New York for embarkation, Wood received a telegram from the War Department, ordering him to surrender command of the division and take up duties in San Francisco, as commander of the Western Department.

Wood headed for Washington, where he demanded interviews with Baker and the president. Republican newspapers such as the
New York Tribune
erupted. So did former presidents Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, both of whom were writing newspaper columns that regularly attacked the administration.
Life
ran a cartoon of the pint-sized Baker handing a towering Wood an order:“STAY HOME.” The
Tribune
ran a cartoon showing Wood and Roosevelt, with Wilson in the background, as they groused,“Well he kept us out of the war.” the Portland
Oregonian
ran a big hand, labeled “Politics,” shoving Wood off the dock while his division vanished over the Atlantic horizon. Even the usually pro-Wilson
New York World
said Wood’s removal would “give every fair minded man a bad taste in the mouth.”
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