The Illusion of Victory (46 page)

A worried Wilson summoned House to Washington for a face-to-face consultation. The president told his alter ego he was determined not to lose this chance for peace no matter what anyone said. Secretary of State Lansing soon arrived, and he and House examined a reply that Wilson had drafted. Both men recoiled from its mild tone and its lack of guarantees against German deception. House was amazed to discover that Wilson was unaware of “the nearly unanimous sentiment in this country against anything but unconditional surrender. He did not seem to realize how war-mad our people had become.” It was a sad commentary on the president’s Philip Dru–ish isolation in the White House, talking to few people besides his wife, Admiral Grayson, his staff and a handful of visitors. Wilson’s reluctance to consult his cabinet contributed to this seclusion. Another factor was his fragile health. Admiral Grayson did his utmost to limit the president’s work week.
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Toiling into the small hours, Wilson and House finally concocted a noncommittal message for Secretary of State Lansing to send to Berlin. Basically it was a series of questions designed to find out whether Prince Max’s government was prepared to prove that it truly wanted peace and represented the German people, rather than the discredited kaiser and his generals. In the tension and turmoil of this history-in-the-making, House’s advice to confer with the Allies was discarded. Not a word of Wilson’s reply was shown to any British, French or Italian diplomat in Washington, or to their superiors in Europe.

If Wilson was trying to steer around America’s frenzy for unconditional surrender, he soon discovered this was a vain hope. Henry Cabot Lodge and a swarm of anti-Wilson Democrats such as Senator James Reed of Missouri excoriated the president for putting victory on the Western Front at risk. On the hustings in the West, Theodore Roosevelt did likewise.
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Republican newspapers published virulent editorials denouncing “the abyss of internationalism” into which Wilson was leading the United States. On the sidelines, Joe Tumulty, although he reluctantly approved the first note, repeatedly warned the president that he was playing with political fire of awesome proportions. If the kaiser stayed in power, the president’s secretary said, it would “result in the election of a Republican House [of representatives] and the weakening . . . of your influence throughout the world.”

In the Senate, as the Germans replied to Wilson’s first note with earnest assurances and he answered them with a demand for specific acts, such as the evacuation of the conquered territories, the debate became frenzied. Republican Senator Poindexter called for a legislative ban on peace talks. He even wanted to make it a crime for the president to answer another note from Berlin:“I . . . think he should be impeached,” the senator shouted.
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Wilson kept negotiating with Prince Max. He told House he was working on the assumption that if Germany was beaten, it would accept any terms. If it was not beaten, he did not want to negotiate. At the same time, the president insisted he did not desire a vengeful peace. He did not want the Allied armies to “ravage” Germany as the kaiser’s army had despoiled France and Belgium. He abhorred such a “stain” on America’s honor. House admired these sentiments, but wondered if he could make them realities “with people clamoring for the undesirable and impossible.”

Wilson’s third note, dispatched on October 14, was aimed at settling things one way or another. He rejected a German request for a separate “mixed commission” to discuss how the occupied territories would be evacuated. Those were details the Allied military leaders would decide. No armistice would be signed that did not provide “absolutely satisfactory safeguards and guarantees of the maintenance of the present military supremacy of the armies of the United States and of the Allies in the field.” Nor would there be an armistice as long as Germany continued to practice unrestricted submarine warfare. Finally, he wanted to see convincing proof that the German government spoke for the German people.
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These tough terms boggled Quartermaster General Ludendorff and Field Marshal von Hindenburg. They were loath to accept “any conditions that would . . . make a resumption of hostilities impossible.” Field Marshal von Hindenburg thought the terms could not be worse “even if we should be beaten.” Clearly, the two generals still hoped to use the armistice to revive the German army. They had not abandoned all hope of a semblance of victory.

But Prince Max and his government were no longer listening to the generals. There was too much evidence all around them on the home front that Germany was on the brink of a Bolshevik revolution. Members of Ludendorff ’s staff covertly informed the new civilian leaders that Foch’s three-pronged offensive threatened the German army with annihilation. On October 20, Prince Max decided to accept Wilson’s conditions. He agreed to send representatives to Paris to discuss the details of the armistice with Allied military leaders, who had been told to make sure the German army would fight no more. Five days later, the kaiser fired General Ludendorff and renounced all executive powers. Henceforth Wilhelm II would be a toothless constitutional monarch like his cousin, George V of Great Britain.
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The president felt triumphant. So did Colonel House, who was en route to Europe to certify the Allies’ support for the Fourteen Points. Neither could imagine that such a victory would soon contribute to a ruinous defeat.

The German concessions satisfied few war-maddened Americans. Most still wanted unconditional surrender, dictated in the wreckage of Berlin. On October 21, Denver’s
Rocky Mountain News
editorialized that the real menace to lasting peace was the “Bolshevists” in the Democratic Party. It was absolutely vital to elect a Republican Congress to prevent these leftist creatures from framing peace terms. In New Hampshire, Theodore Roosevelt begged voters to choose Republicans to win “not a Democratic but an American peace.” Henry Cabot Lodge said: “The thing to do is lick Germany and tell her what arrangements we are going to make.”
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An infuriated Wilson went to work on his portable typewriter and produced a blistering denunciation of the Republicans’ tactics and ideas, including some very uncomplimentary remarks about Senator Lodge. The president saw this statement as his long-planned appeal to American voters at the climax of the congressional election campaign. When he showed it to the leaders of the Democratic National Committee, they were appalled and begged him to tone it down. He spent another day working on a revision, to which they gave their approval. So did a reluctant Tumulty, who had favored a more oblique approach—a letter to a prominent Democrat, which he (the recipient) would release to the papers. On October 25, the statement was issued to the nation’s press as Wilson’s direct appeal to American voters.

The president began by claiming he had “no thought of suggesting any political party was paramount in matters of patriotism.” But the extraordinary times in which they were living made “unified leadership” imperative. He was not asking for his own sake but “for the sake of the Nation itself.” He admitted the Republicans had unquestionably been pro-war,“but they have been anti-administration.” the GOP wanted “not so much to support the president as to control him.” wilson claimed this was unacceptable in wartime. Now, if ever, the U.S. government had to speak as one voice. He also warned the voters that “the return of a Republican majority to either House of Congress would certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.”

Having situated himself on the outermost tip of the worst imaginable political limb, Wilson solemnly concluded: “If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you will express yourselves unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.”
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Almost every cabinet member who read the appeal in the newspapers on the following day reacted with dismay. Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo was “thoroughly mad” because his advice had not been sought.
Secretary of the Navy Daniels labeled it Wilson’s “first great mistake.” Food czar Herbert Hoover was shocked. These reactions were mild compared to the Republicans’ response.

The GOP erupted in stupendous fury.“He is a partisan leader first and president . . . second,” thundered Theodore Roosevelt.“The president has thrown off the mask,” shouted Henry Cabot Lodge.“The only test of loyalty is loyalty to one man no matter what he does.” In a private letter to his family, silenced Senator La Follette wrote:“Politics is adjourned—like Hell.”

Many other GOP stalwarts rushed to remind voters that a Republican victory would remove from power Democrats such as Claude Kitchin, Champ Clark, James Reed and George Chamberlain, all of whom had repeatedly opposed Wilson and, the Republicans claimed, were lukewarm on the war. GOP party chairman Will Hays raised the cry that had worked well in Wisconsin: Wilson had insulted the loyalty of the Republican Party. In the Senate, the rattled Democrats cut off debate for seven consecutive days by adjourning after the opening prayer.
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Tumulty issued a counterblast, noting earlier wartime presidents who had made similar appeals in congressional elections. The combative Irish-American urged the president to make another statement, damming the Republicans for trying to equate the Fourteen Points with a soft peace. The president, intimidated by the negative response of his cabinet, declined, but wrote numerous letters endorsing specific congressmen and senators who needed help.

To make the election an even more unmistakable referendum on Wilson’s leadership, the Democratic National Committee ran huge adds in newspapers across the nation, condemning Roosevelt’s and Lodge’s calls for unconditional surrender. These election-eve broadsides warned that a Republican victory would delay Germany’s capitulation and cost thousands of American lives. The
New York Times
added to the drama by calling the election “momentous and epochal beyond any fight for the control of Congress . . . since the Civil War.”
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Would Wilson pull it off? The president was contending not only against astute, well-financed opponents, but also against war rage and the alienation his administration’s attack on civil rights had evoked in millions of German-Americans and Irish-Americans. Then there was the Prohibition-by-stealth bill and the fury of the Western farmers about the uncontrolled price of cotton. But the news from the battlefront continued to be sensa
tionally good. The German army continued its retreat. The nation and the world watched and wondered—while American voters went to the polls.

Colonel House arrived in the French capital on October 26, a week before the election. He had a commission as “Special Representative of the United States of America” and a letter from Wilson, stating he was the president’s “personal representative.” He knew the election was in doubt. He had heard about Wilson’s appeal shortly after he arrived in Europe and had reversed his previous opinion of the idea; he now considered it a mistake. That made House feel an extra urgency to get the Allies to agree to negotiate peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points as soon as possible. With help from Walter Lippmann and Frank Cobb of the
New York World
, who happened to be in Paris, the colonel prepared detailed interpretations of each point, which he brought to his meetings with the British, French and Italian leaders.

These enlargements by no means eliminated the Allies’ opposition to a Wilsonian peace. Both David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau opened the discussion with bristlingly hostile remarks. The British prime minister had stated his own peace terms months earlier and saw no reason why Wilson’s should have primacy. Premier Clemenceau growled that he had been in politics for fifty years, Wilson for seven. Who should be getting, and who should be giving, instructions?

It was starkly evident that the Wilson-House decision to negotiate unilaterally with the Germans had been a colossal blunder. The president’s solo performance reignited the Europeans’ already substantial hostility to Wilson’s autocratic style and moral arrogance—not to mention their longstanding anger at his thirty-two months of neutrality. With radio and undersea cable communications at his disposal, it would have been a simple matter to bring the leaders of the three major allies into the negotiations. Wilson’s refusal to do so struck all these veteran statesmen as a calculated affront.
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Things grew heated. Prime Minister Lloyd George reiterated that he would never endorse absolute freedom of the seas, which would deprive Britain of the weapon that had won the war, the blockade. Clemenceau insisted that the French and Belgians must have billions in reparations to
pay for the damage the Germans had wreaked in their four-year occupation. British diplomats arrived from London to report the cabinet wanted the Germans to pay for every ship sunk by the U-boats. The Italians—and the French—scoffed at the idea of a league of nations. In a sweeping dismissal, the Italian foreign minister called for informing Wilson that for the time being, there was no agreement whatsoever on endorsing his Fourteen Points.

If this was the Allied position, House said, that left the Americans only one alternative. They would have to discuss peace with Germany and Austria on their own.

“That would amount to a separate peace,” Clemenceau said.

“It might,” House said.

“My statement,” House later cabled the president,“had a very exciting effect on those present.”
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