The Illusion of Victory (49 page)

Minutes after Whiting died, someone rushed in to shout,“Armistice! The staff cars have just passed by the gate on their way to sign an Armistice!”

The shouter did not realize he was in the
salle de mort.
Millard angrily shushed him. One of the dying men began to sob. She talked soothingly to him.“But what could I say, knowing he would die before night?” the chapel bell began ringing wildly. A nurse burst in to tell Millard they were opening champagne in the dining hall. Millard told her to get out. She sat there, thinking,“My heart is heavy as lead.. . . Can’t seem to pull myself together.”
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At Compiègne, the German delegation had finally received permission to sign the armistice agreement on the night of November 10, around the time the kaiser began sipping his tea. While hundreds of Americans were dying along the Meuse, the two sides wrangled about minor details. Finally, at 5:10 A.M., the Germans signed the documents. Matthias Erzberger read a statement denouncing the terms, saying they threatened his nation with anarchy and starvation:“A nation of seventy million suffers but does not die.”
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Generalissimo Foch immediately ordered messages sent to every part of the Western Front, announcing that hostilities would end at 11 A.M. on November 11. At American First and Second Army headquarters, the news had no discernible impact. Pershing’s insistence on continued pressure was still in effect. Attacks planned for that morning went ahead as scheduled. One commander, Brigadier General John H. Sherburne of the black Ninety-Second Division, tried to get an assault canceled. His request was curtly denied, and the black men and their white officers went forward behind the usual barrage. German machine guns chattered and high-explosive shells created familiar carnage.“I cannot express the horror we all felt,” Sherburne said later.
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Pershing still thought the armistice was a mistake.“If they had given us another ten days, we would have rounded up the entire German army, captured it, humiliated it,” he later growled. Haig, Foch and Pétain, commanding armies that had used up their last reserves, did not agree. Nor did the politicians, growing more and more nervous about Germany going Bolshevist.

The AEF commander headed for Paris, where he found himself the toast of a delirious city. In the Place de la Concorde, his car was mobbed. Celebrating doughboys rescued him, fending off the ecstatic Parisians, some of whom tried to get into the back seat to kiss the iron general. Later, celebrating in private with some old friends, Pershing inadvertently summed up the doughboys’ contribution to the victory:“The men were willing to pay the price.”
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What was the price of winning Woodrow Wilson a seat at the peace table? The Americans had been in combat two hundred days—approximately six months. In that time, 50,300 doughboys were killed. Another 198,059 Americans were wounded in action. Another 62,668 died of disease—an appalling 38,815 of these in training camps in the United States. Another 4,503 were killed in accidents. Almost 1,000 committed suicide. Adding in minor causes, the total deaths were 120,139. In 1930, the Veterans Bureau estimated that war-related diseases, wounds and other kinds of trauma inflicted on the Western Front had raised the total cost to 460,000 deaths. Men disabled by gas attacks were particularly prone to die young. More than 41,000 doughboys were shell-shock victims, listed as psychiatrically disabled. Many of these men were hospitalized for the rest of their lives.
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In the 47 months of World War II, U.S. Army and Marine casualties totaled 259,376 dead and 768,207 wounded. In Korea, 37 months of combat cost 53,886 deaths and 103,000 wounded. In eleven years of fighting in Vietnam, American losses were 57,000 dead and 154,000 wounded. Obviously, the price that the doughboys paid in little more than six months on the Western Front was, in the words of one historian,“disproportionately large.” The main reason was the lethal firepower of the German army and the AEF’s primitive tactics, which relied on Belleau Wood–style frontal assaults until the last days of the war.
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In Paris on November 11, 1918, while General Pershing was being mobbed by delirious French citizens in the Place de la Concorde, Colonel House was cabling Woodrow Wilson: “AUTOCRACY IS DEAD. LONG LIVE DEMOCRACY AND ITS IMMORTAL LEADER. IN THIS GREAT HOUR MY HEART GOES OUT TOYOU IN PRIDE, ADMIRATION AND LOVE.”

As celebrations erupted in cities across the United States, President Wilson gave federal employees the day off and released an announcement to the people of the United States:“The armistice was signed this morning. Everything for which America has fought has been accomplished. It will now be our fortunate duty to assist by example, by sober friendly counsel and by material aid in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world.”

The illusion of victory was sweet while it lasted.
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For Woodrow Wilson, sour notes began to appear in the peace process soon after people stopped dancing in the streets. The president assumed that the Allied leaders would welcome his announcement that he was coming to Europe for the peace conference. Instead, they advised Colonel House that they would be much happier if he stayed home. Georges Clemenceau, in his blunt way, told House that Wilson’s presence “seems to be neither desirable nor possible.” The Allied leaders cooked up an argument that was legalistic and ultimately silly. As president of the United States, Wilson was a head of state, on a par with kings and emperors. If one head of state came to the conference, they would also have to invite the kings of England, Italy, Greece, and perhaps Montenegro, as well as President Poincaré of France, whom Clemenceau despised.
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Behind this political hot air was a deep suspicion and not a little dislike of Wilson’s overbearing political style. To the president’s dismay, this negative attitude coalesced with a burgeoning opinion among his liberal American admirers that it would be a mistake for him to mingle in the gritty details of peacemaking. Better for him to stay in Washington, above the battle, and let Colonel House and others do the negotiating.

Even before the armistice, Frank Cobb of the
World
sent a long memorandum to House, elaborating on this argument. Wilson would have only one vote at the peace conference, Cobb warned. His ability to appeal to the conscience of America and the world would be fatally weakened, if not destroyed. It would be far better if Wilson fought on his “home ground,” Washington.“Diplomatic Europe is enemy soil to him.” Cobb said he had come to Europe assuming that Wilson should attend the peace conference. A sojourn in Paris had changed his mind.

Even more dismaying for Wilson was the discovery that Colonel House shared this opinion. In a cable on November 14, House told the president, “Americans here . . . are practically unanimous in the belief that it would be unwise for you to sit in the Peace Conference.” Instead of arguing against this assertion, House reiterated Clemenceau’s opposition and added,“The same feeling prevails in England.” House would only approve Wilson’s coming to Europe to participate in a “preliminary conference,” in which the general terms of the peace treaty would be worked out.
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Wilson was infuriated. He cabled House that this idea “upsets every plan we [have] made.” the “we” was not a reference to House—Wilson was almost certainly referring to Edith Galt Wilson, who not only urged him to go, but had persuaded the president to take her with him. Wilson dismissed the head-of-state argument, calling it “a way of pocketing me.” He suspected the British and French leaders wanted to exclude him from the conference “for fear I might . . . lead the weaker nations against them.” growing more exercised with every word, Wilson stormed,“It is universally expected and generally desired here that I should attend the conference.”
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This was one more example of Wilson’s tendency to ignore political realities. He had just gambled his prestige as America’s political leader in the congressional elections and had lost. The results were a stunning refutation of his claim that American voters “universally expected and generally desired” him to attend the peace conference. In fact, there were grave reservations among many people about his going to Europe at all.

During World War II, Americans grew used to having their presidents fly around the world to summit conferences. In 1918, however, people looked askance on the president’s leaving the country for any reason. William Howard Taft abandoned his habit of vacationing in Canada when he became president. President McKinley had considered a tour of Europe after the Spanish-American War, but dropped the idea. The U.S. Constitution did not (and still does not) provide for any transfer of power to the vice president when the president leaves the country. Many people feared there would be no supreme authority in a national emergency. Lord Bryce, before he became the purveyor of fake atrocities, had concluded from his popular study of the American Constitution that it seemed “impossible for the president to leave the U.S.”
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The day after the armistice, Secretary of State Lansing urged Wilson not to go. The president dismissed the advice with a look that spoke “volumes,” the secretary later glumly noted in his diary. In the White House, Joe Tumulty could muster very little enthusiasm for Wilson’s decision, especially when he was told the president was leaving him behind. In 1918, there was no large White House staff to handle the thousand and one details of the executive office. Almost single-handedly, Tumulty would have to worry about the demoralization of a Democratic Party that had just lost control of both houses of Congress, the hostility of the Republican-controlled Congress, Wilson’s long-deteriorated relations with the press and the oncoming 1920 elections. The secretary’s attitude grew even more negative when he discovered the men Wilson had chosen to take with him in the American delegation.

Tumulty—and many other Wilson men—saw this delegation as crucial to their hopes for an enduring peace. A treaty would have to win the advice and consent of two-thirds of the GOP-controlled Senate. Tumulty urged Wilson to include at least one prominent Republican in the delegation. He proposed Elihu Root. Along with being the grand old man of the GOP, Root had been secretary of war under McKinley and secretary of state under Roosevelt, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize for improving U.S. relations with Latin America and Japan—and a public backer of a league of nations. Wilson dismissed him as too conservative.
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Attorney General Gregory, one of the cabinet members most dismayed by Wilson’s midterm election appeal to the voters, next told the president there was only one way to repair the political damage inflicted by the November disaster. He had to invite not one but two prominent Republicans to join the peace conference delegation. Gregory gave him the names of two senators, one a former secretary of state, and four other prominent members of the GOP, including Root and former president Taft, who was also a supporter of a league of nations. Wilson rejected them all.
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Instead, Wilson chose Colonel House as one of the peace commissioners, a gesture that needlessly elevated his alter ego to official status, ruining the role he played best, backstairs negotiator and adviser. Secretary of State Lansing was included because the British and French were bringing their foreign secretaries. Since Wilson already disliked him, Lansing was worse than useless from the start. As a third commissioner, the president chose General Tasker Bliss, a faceless nonentity to most Americans. Like House, Bliss was already in Paris and could have served just as well as an unofficial adviser. For a Republican spokesman, Wilson selected Henry White, a genial old man with long diplomatic experience—but who had been retired for ten years and had no political power whatsoever inside the GOP.
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White’s choice infuriated the Republicans. William Howard Taft said he was “more of an Englishman than an American.” white had never played a part in the councils of the GOP. Much of his adult life had been spent abroad. In the Senate, the Republicans expressed outrage and opposition in scathing oratory. There was talk of sending a committee of senators to Paris to report on the peace conference independently.

George Harvey, one of Wilson’s earliest backers, was now publishing a weekly devoted almost entirely to criticism of the president. At one point during the war, there was a serious discussion at a Wilson cabinet meeting about suppressing the publication. Harvey contrasted Wilson’s delegation to President McKinley’s choices for negotiating a peace treaty at the end of the Spanish-American War. He had chosen two prominent Republican senators and the leader of the Democratic minority.

Harvey put Wilson’s choices in three columns to underscore their insignificance.

In short, Wilson had appointed himself four times.
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Henry Cabot Lodge praised Harvey’s assault, but urged fellow Republicans not to attack Wilson’s decision to go to Europe. He was sure the trip would add to the president’s political woes. He also did not object to the choice of Henry White, who was a personal friend. Instead, he persuaded White to meet with him and other GOP senators and made sure
the elderly diplomat conferred with Elihu Root and Theodore Roosevelt as well. Lodge gave White a long memorandum on his own peace ideas. He dismissed a league of nations as fuzzy Wilsonian idealism, but favored strong alliances with France and England to prevent another war.
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Lodge did his best to add to Wilson’s woes by building a political backfire against him in England. On November 25, the senator wrote a long letter to fellow conservative Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, telling him that “the overwhelming desire of Americans without distinction of party” favored a harsh peace for Germany. Lodge recommended splitting the country into two or three parts and excluding the Germans from the peace conference until the final terms were settled. There should be “no opportunity for anyone to play . . . the mediator,” he wrote, an obvious dig at Wilson. “If the . . . Allies stand firm,” Lodge insisted, they would win “the general approbation of American public opinion.”
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On December 2, Wilson gave his annual state-of-the-union address to Congress. Seldom did the president reveal how badly he needed Colonel House to discuss and hone a speech before presenting it. The occasion was a great opportunity to win the American people’s support—and even Congress’s support—for his trip to Europe. But the vital words, the strong emotions, were missing. Most of the speech was a perfunctory report on the satisfactory condition of the American economy and the steps being taken to return to a peacetime mode. At the close, Wilson asked the people to support him on his mission to Europe. But he made no attempt to spell out his goals.

Congress’s response was zero. Secretary of the Navy Daniels called it an ice bath. Applause was minimal and confined entirely to Democrats; not a few of them also sat on their hands, a sign that Congress as a whole was affronted by Wilson’s failure to select one of them as a peace commissioner. The nation’s newspapers criticized the president’s failure to communicate. Some complained that he was treating the American people like college freshmen, who were expected to bow low before an all-knowing professor.

Senator Robert La Follette described the speech as “pretty punk—poorly delivered and received.” a few days later, he added an insightful comment. The president “had the appearance of being a whipped man.”
There are good grounds for suspecting that Wilson, in spite of his bluster about fighting back, felt that way, when he found himself face-to-face with the politicians he had tried to trump with his appeal to the people.
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At midnight the following day, Wilson; his wife, Edith; his daughter, Margaret; his physician, Admiral Cary Grayson; and a small White House staff motored to a sleeper car in Washington’s Union Station. The next morning, they arrived in Hoboken, where they boarded the
George Washington
for the trip to Europe. The third biggest passenger liner in the world, it had been seized from Germany when war was declared. As the ship headed down New York Harbor toward the open sea, hundreds of vessels sounded their whistles and sirens. Soon, navy planes and a dirigible appeared overhead. A few miles outside the Narrows, in the open sea, ten destroyers swung in line to port and starboard and the battleship
Pennsylvania
steamed just ahead. America’s commander in chief was on his way to create a peaceful world.
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From a sickbed in New York City’s Roosevelt Hospital, where he was being treated for rheumatism and general exhaustion from his efforts in the congressional election campaign, Theodore Roosevelt issued a statement that did nothing to enhance Wilson’s prospects in Paris:“Our Allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people at this time. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated by them. The newly elected Congress comes far nearer than Mr. Wilson to have a right to speak the purposes of the American people. Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points . . . have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.”
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To handle the publicity side of the American mission, Wilson brought along George Creel. The president was still devoted to the mercurial head of the Committee on Public Information, in spite of the trouble his loose tongue and hyperbolic style had stirred during the war. As the president’s spokesman, Creel adopted many of his attitudes toward Congress. He talked of Senator Hiram Johnson’s “abnormal vanity” and said Senator James Reed deserved “contempt and ridicule” for his character and abilities, which were equally abysmal. He suggested Henry Cabot Lodge’s mind was like the soil of New England,“highly cultivated but naturally sterile.”

In May 1918, Creel journeyed to New York for a speech at the Church of the Ascension. Not a few members of the audience were hostile to the war. Toward the end of a rather acrimonious discussion, someone asked him what he thought of “the heart of Congress.”