The Illusion of Victory (44 page)

Ignoring the general’s orders, they stayed in Revigny and listened to the thunder of American artillery as the Argonne offensive began. A week later, Baldwin, Alice and two other “Y girls” revolted, took their bedding rolls and musette bags and began a search for their regiments. After days of wandering they reached Auzeville, which had been shelled mercilessly by the Germans only the day before. Nearby was the Thirty-Seventh Division’s headquarters, where they received a cordial welcome. Told that their regiment was at the front, the women went to work anyway, standing in the cold mud handing out tobacco and chocolates to “hundreds and hundreds of men”—trivial gifts, they knew, but a way of saying America’s women were with the doughboys in spirit.

At last, the 148th Regiment came out of the lines. “Their faces were lined and their eyes glazed with the fatigue they had seen,” Baldwin wrote. She and Alice rushed to greet them, calling out,“Where’s Joe? How’s Bill?” Too often the answer was a muttered “Gone west.” that night, Baldwin confessed,“Our hearts were pretty heavy as we crept into our blankets.”
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In the United States, another fight to the finish, almost as savage as the one taking place on the battlefield, was raging in the newspapers and on podiums and platforms across the nation. The Republicans, led by an enraged Theodore Roosevelt, were going for Woodrow Wilson’s jugular. Doubling Roosevelt’s ardor was a growing sense that he could capture the Republican nomination for president in 1920. Early in August, he had arranged a public reconciliation with former president William Howard Taft. More and more people saw TR as the man who could unite the Old Guard and progressive wings of the GOP in a landslide victory.

Months before his son Quentin died in his decrepit Nieuport, Roosevelt had made a speech to Maine Republicans that set the general tone of the fall campaign. He had circulated a draft to Old Guarders such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root and progressives such as Senator Hiram Johnson before he spoke. The address was a savage attack on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his plans for a negotiated peace. Riding the rising crest of anti-German war rage, Roosevelt pledged the Republican Party to “war to the hilt.” the only hope of future peace in Europe, he bellowed, was Germany’s “unconditional surrender.”
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If he felt this way in March, it is not hard to imagine Roosevelt’s attitude in August and September, with his youngest son dead, his two older sons badly wounded, and the German army in obvious retreat on the Western Front. An indication was his encounter with Eleanor Roosevelt at a family funeral not long before Franklin returned from his tour of the Western Front. TR took his favorite niece aside and told her, again, that time was running out for her husband. Franklin needed to resign from his desk job and risk sudden death with the rest of the real men of his generation. Eleanor barely concealed her anger as she told Uncle Ted her husband had tried to enlist, but the president had ordered him to stay where he was.
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Senator Lodge, TR’s close friend and ardent supporter, eagerly joined in the attack on Wilson. The death of Lodge’s son-in-law, Congressman Augustus Gardner, added an undertone of bitterness to his politics, not unlike TR’s grief for Quentin. Late in August, Lodge made a Senate speech in which he insisted,“We ought not to discuss anything with the Germans at present.” He decried the idea of leaving Germany “unharmed” while Belgium and France lay ravaged.“No peace that satisfies Germany in any degree can ever satisfy us,” he thundered.
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Three days later, in a speech to 100,000 cheering Republicans at Springfield, Illinois, Theodore Roosevelt gave Wilson more of this no-compromise medicine. He urged Americans to beware of milksop internationalists in the administration and the White House. They were all too eager to play the game of German autocracy.“Professional internationalism stands toward patriotism exactly as free love stands toward a clean and honorable and duty-performing family life,” tR roared. The key idea on which foreign policy should rest was American nationalism, coupled with a strong army and navy. On that basis, the United States could do justice to all nations and make sure they did justice to America.
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From Paris, a
New York Times
correspondent reported that American soldiers agreed with the GOP; like most reporters, he was reflecting what he heard from AEF headquarters. The
Times
of London, German-hating Lord Northcliffe’s creature, applauded in an editorial entitled “Dictated Peace.”

Secretary of State Lansing, the chief Germanophobe in the Wilson administration before the war began, ruefully noted in his diary that the psychological effect of the Allied victories in France had been “peculiar.” It only seemed to produce more bitterness toward the German people. In his Washington, D.C., cocoon, Lansing was apparently unaware of the near psychotic war rage gripping the rest of the country.
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Most other Democrats were equally baffled by the way success on the Western Front was failing to obliterate the Republicans, who had been ranting for eighteen months about Wilson’s inept war effort. The Democrats were caught flatfooted by the Republicans’ switch to attacking Wilson’s peace policy, which coalesced beautifully (from the GOP’s point of view) with their prewar denunciation of Wilson as a secret pacifist and timid soul who did not have the courage to make war. In many minds, this argument was easily converted into suspicion of the president as a peacemaker who would be too soft on the monstrous Germans. With George Creel and his Committee on Public Information inundating the country with German hatred, the Democrats found it hard to escape this political cul-de-sac.

Other worries also disconcerted the Democrats. Votes for women were coming to a boil, and the party Wilson led was a two-headed creature, unequipped to deal with the issue. Overcoming his wife’s prejudices and his own, the president had endorsed woman suffrage in January 1918 and urged the Senate to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, which would then go to the states for ratification.

But the Southern wing of the party, viewing reality through the myopia of segregation, declined to listen. Among the most outspoken was Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, belaborer of Senator Robert La Follette and everyone else opposed to the war. For six months, the Southerners on the Senate Committee for Privileges and Elections refused to permit the suffrage bill to reach the floor for a vote.
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The woman suffrage movement was divided into radical and moderate wings. The radical leader, fiery Alice Paul of New Jersey, saw a Southerner in the White House paying lip service but doing nothing else for her cause. She denounced Wilson repeatedly and called on every woman with a vote to cast it against the entire Democratic Party. The moderate leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, was almost as difficult. She threatened to rally women voters against a number of western Democratic senators, apparently oblivious to their inability to change the minds of their Southern colleagues.
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The Senate’s Republicans, determined to win the election and eager to placate the progressive wing of their party, which supported the suffrage amendment, saw another large chink in the Democrats’ armor. They caucused in late August 1918 and endorsed woman suffrage. The chink rapidly became a wound.

Joe Tumulty was a passionate supporter of woman suffrage. He politicked on the issue day and night, trying to bring it to a floor vote. Letters signed by the president bombarded the Southern naysayers. When conservative Senator Ollie James of Kentucky died, Tumulty went to his funeral and persuaded the state’s governor to appoint a liberal who would support the suffrage amendment. Thanks largely to Tumulty’s efforts, the measure finally got out of committee and came to a vote in late September.

Tumulty warmly seconded Treasury Secretary McAdoo’s plea for a speech by the president to support the suffragists. An uneasy Wilson, still not a passionate advocate, consented and spoke to the Senate on September 30. He went all out, calling the amendment “vital to the winning of the war.” the result was a disastrous humiliation. With Southern Democrats voting in a bloc, the amendment lost by two votes.“When the president says we can’t lick Ludendorff [and] scare Bulgaria . . . because nigger women in Mississippi can’t vote, I decline to agree with him,” Senator Williams said.
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The next day, newspapers reported another presidential humiliation. The New Jersey State Democratic Convention had rejected a woman suffrage plank in its election platform. The Newark
Evening News,
no friend of Wilson’s, chortled: “It will not be overlooked that while the president was pleading at Washington for the adoption of the suffrage amendment, a Democratic convention in his home state declined to include suffrage in its principles.” the implication was all too clear: Wilson was politically impotent or a faker—perhaps both.
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Also lurking in the political wings was the Eighteenth Amendment, better known as Prohibition. The movement was an offshoot of the abolition cru
sade that ignited the Civil War. Having left the freed blacks to the tender mercies of the defeated Southerners, the descendants of these reformers selected the saloon as their next target. They began in a nursery of abolitionism, Oberlin, Ohio, and the weapon they forged was the local option law. By 1900, thirty-seven states had these laws, and the machinery of petitions, letters, telegrams parades and mass meetings was worked out.

By 1914, whole states, especially in the South, had banned alcohol. Oklahoma even entered the Union with a dry constitution. Over 20,000 Anti-Saloon League (ASL) speakers were preaching Prohibition in church halls and other public platforms around the country. World War I gave the ASL and its ally, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the opportunity to go national. They had already penetrated Congress with a 1913 law that banned the shipment of “intoxicating liquor of any kind” into dry states.

In 1914 and 1916, the national elections created a Congress in which drys outnumbered wets 2 to 1. The ASL shrewdly supported preparedness, claiming that an alcohol-free America would be far better able to defend itself. The same month that Wilson declared war, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1913 law banning shipments of alcohol into dry states. The ASL said this coincidence was a sign from God and used it to turn state after state totally dry. In Oklahoma, Catholic priests were even forbidden to use altar wine to celebrate Mass.
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When Wilson declared war, twenty-seven states were bone dry. On May 18, 1917, after Congress forbade the sale of liquor to men in uniform, the drys launched a new slogan,“Shall the many have food or the few drink?” Congress, worried about feeding not only America’s 100 million but the half-starved populations of England and France, responded with a ban on the use of grain to make alcohol. A few months later, Wilson issued a proclamation limiting the alcoholic content of beer to 2.75 percent. Two weeks later, on December 22, 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, turning the whole nation dry—if two-thirds of the states ratified it.
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The ASL now unleashed its 20,000 orators on the German-American community, with its numerous brewers a special target. The drys repeatedly linked liquor to disloyalty and claimed that beer drinking was a sign of sympathy with the kaiser and his Huns. The ploy did not work nearly as well as the ASL hoped. By the fall of 1918, only fourteen states had ratified the amendment. But the drys in Congress, undeterred, tacked a rider on an agricultural appropriation bill, establishing national Prohibition as of July 1, 1919.

In the White House, Tumulty denounced the move, warning Wilson that if he signed it, he would alienate millions of ethnic Democratic voters in the big cities, the heart of the party’s strength outside the South.“So much in a great broad humanitarian way depends upon your winning the next election,” the president’s secretary said, “that I look with dread . . . upon anything that stands in its way.” His anxiety mounting with every word, Tumulty called the dry rider “mob legislation, pure and simple.”
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In Wilson’s first term, Tumulty’s political advice would have been enough to win a presidential veto. But their earlier bond of trust had been damaged if not destroyed by Edith Wilson’s interference. President Wilson turned elsewhere for further advice. Colonel House conferred with Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo and Attorney General Gregory and reported they—and he—recommended signing the bill. Wilson did so. It would soon become apparent that Philip Dru and his creator had blown a big one.
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This was not the end of the Democrats’ woes. In the West, fermenting as rapidly as hops once did in now bankrupt breweries, was a farmer’s revolt over what Republicans called Wilson’s pro-Southern favoritism. To combat wartime inflation, Congress had given the president power to control the price of many commodities, including wheat. With worldwide demand pushing prices up, farmers saw a potential bonanza in their 1918 crop.

Western members of Congress rushed to tack amendments on the agriculture bill, raising the price of wheat per bushel to $3.00. Cooler heads, led by Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, reduced it to $2.50, a thirty-cent rise over the 1917 price of $2.20. This sounds modest, until one realizes the harvest would total a billion bushels of wheat. The price jump would have added $300 million to the nation’s cost of living. To the Westerners’ vast dismay, the president decided to hold the price at $2.20, which was still 109 percent above prewar prices.