The Illusion of Victory (5 page)

Only in the Metropolitan Opera House was there any political drama. That was mostly supplied by the former ambassador to Berlin, James W. Gerard, who was violently anti-German. During intermission, he heard the newsboys shouting on the sidewalk outside. Gerard seized the arm of one of the Metropolitan’s directors and urged him to read the news from the stage and have the orchestra play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “No,” the director said,“the opera company is neutral.”

The enraged former ambassador rushed to his box seat and shouted the news to the startled audience. He urged everyone to cheer President Wilson. Very few of these rich people had voted for the president; the response was halfhearted at first. But patriotism soon inspired a louder hurrah, especially when the orchestra undertook the national anthem.

Satisfied, Gerard sat down to enjoy the rest of the opera. But he and the audience were doomed to disappointment. German-born soprano Margaret Ober, deeply distressed by the news, fainted in the middle of the next act. She had to be carried off the stage, leaving an artistic vacuum through which the other singers floundered to the final curtain.
⁴⁶

In Cincinnati, the city’s symphony, one of the nation’s best, played “The Star-Spangled Banner” in magnificent style when the news arrived. Then the conductor, Ernest Kunwald, turned to his mostly German-American audience with tears streaming down his cheeks and said,“But my heart is on the other side!”
⁴⁷

The next morning, pro-war newspapers and public spokespeople of all stripes made Colonel House’s praise of Wilson’s “communication” seem tame. Frank Cobb’s editorial in the
New York World
declared that the hope of the whole world rested on Wilson’s words. The
New York Tribune
, eating Cass Gilbert’s sneers, proclaimed: “No praise is too high for Wilson.” the
Times
of London, once considered the greatest newspaper on the globe, opined:“We doubt if in all history a great community has ever been summoned to war on grounds so largely ideal.”
⁴⁸

Private letters loaded with equally extravagant praise poured into the White House and the mailboxes of Wilson’s intimates.“The president’s address is magnificent,” wrote twenty-seven-year old Walter Lippmann, already a star liberal spokesperson on the editorial board of the
New Republic,
in a letter to Colonel House. “It puts the whole thing exactly where it needed to be put and does it with real nobility of feeling.”

Other leading liberal intellectuals, such as Columbia University philosopher John Dewey and Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of
The Nation
, were similarly swept away by Wilson’s rhetoric. After years of denouncing Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and anyone else who urged the United States to get into the war, these men suddenly saw the president as the leader of a “stupendous revolution” that would change the world.
⁴⁹

In Missouri, a thirty-three-year-old farmer named Harry S. Truman was amazed to discover that Wilson’s speech had transformed local attitudes toward the war—including his own—from bored indifference to crusading fervor. Although Truman was the chief support of his mother and sister and beyond draft age, he decided to volunteer. “I felt like Galahad after the Grail,” he said later—an example of Wilson’s ability to tap the latent idealism in the soul of many Americans.
⁵⁰

In Washington, D.C., Congress convened at noon on April 3 and spent the first hour noting the avalanche of letters and telegrams its members had received from individuals, mass meetings, impromptu committees of public safety, and state legislatures, most of them endorsing the president’s stance. While this chore was filling twenty-four pages of tiny type in the
Congressional Record,
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was discussing a resolution stating that war had been “thrust upon” the United States by the imperial German government and was now formally declared. The document had been drafted the previous night by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The chairman of the Senate committee, William J. Stone of Missouri, startled everyone by casting a negative vote and declining to submit the resolution to the full Senate. At any other time, this defection would have been major news. Stone had played a vital role in winning Wilson the Democratic nomination in 1912 and had worked closely with him in the Senate to pass important domestic reforms. He had wholeheartedly endorsed the president’s attempts to mediate the conflict as a neutral.

Wilson’s switch to a belligerent posture had dismayed Stone. In February, the senator had issued a statement charging that a “cabal of great newspapers” in the United States was “coercing the government into an attitude of hostility” to Germany. Friends had warned Stone that he was risking political extinction. In deep background, a partner in J.P. Morgan’s bank, which had loaned billions to the British, cabled London that he could supply evidence that Stone was “intimate” with the German government.
⁵¹

In place of Stone, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, once a strenuous opponent of war, undertook the task of presenting the resolution to the Senate. He read the brief document in a matter-of-fact style, obviously assuming that the task was a mere formality. The senator asked his fellow legislators for unanimous consent to consider and approve the resolution. In addition to Wilson’s triumphant speech, this sense of foregone conclusion was bolstered by the morning’s newspapers, which carried a report of the torpedoing of the armed U.S. merchantman
Aztec
, with the loss of twelve lives. In the press gallery, reporters were poised to scribble news flashes that the United States was practically at war.

A lone voice punctured these assumptions:“I object to the request for unanimous consideration!” Senator La Follette was on his feet, defiance personified. Consternation swept the chamber. Those who understood Senate rules knew this meant that a vote would be postponed for at least a full day. The rule had been created to prevent hasty votes on important topics and to add substance to the claim that the Senate was the world’s greatest deliberative body. La Follette asked a startled Vice President Marshall to rule on his request. In a rage, the pro-war senators could do nothing but adjourn. In the cloakroom, they agitatedly conferred, wondering if La Follette would dare to launch a filibuster against the war resolution.
⁵²

A month before, La Follette’s stalling tactics had succeeded when President Wilson had asked Congress for the authority to arm merchant ships as a final attempt to keep the United States out of the war. The Wisconsin liberal and eleven other senators had filibustered until the Sixty-Fourth Congress expired without getting a chance to vote on the proposal.“Fighting Bob” had argued that the proviso would give Wilson the right to declare war—a privilege reserved for Congress—and was a bad idea in the first place. A few guns on a merchant ship were no defense against submarines. The president had denounced the filibusterers as “a little group of willful men” and released the Zimmermann telegram (which he had been sitting on for almost a week) to the press. La Follette and his antiwar colleagues had been roasted in almost every newspaper in the nation. But he stubbornly continued his filibuster, forcing Wilson to arm the merchant ships by executive order.
⁵³

While the Senate fumed impotently, other parts of the U.S. government were preparing for war—sort of. At his desk in the State, War and Navy Building, Army Chief of Staff Major General Hugh L. Scott was confronting a threat he considered far more dangerous than the German army: former president Theodore Roosevelt. The large, slow-moving Scott was deaf and frequently fell asleep in his chair; he had a penchant for answering questions using Native American sign language. But Roosevelt had galvanized him into uncharacteristic action.

After maligning Wilson as everything from a coward to a Byzantine logothete for his refusal to go to war, Roosevelt wanted the president to authorize him to raise a volunteer division that would sail for Europe immediately to show the flag and hearten the Allies. The idea appalled Scott and all the other aging bureaucrats on the general staff. They vividly recalled TR’s performance in the Spanish-American War, in which he not only won fame charging Spanish rifle pits on Kettle and San Juan hills, but also relentlessly criticized the army bureaucracy’s appalling lapses in arming, clothing and feeding the soldiers. The general staff had ordered coldeyed Major Peyton C. March to prepare a paper denouncing the idea of a volunteer division. This document was now in the hands of Secretary of War Baker, making Scott feel that the army was safe from a Roosevelt coup d’état.
⁵⁴

Roosevelt was on his way from Florida to make his request for a volunteer major generalship in person. Further undermining his hopes was a tall, handsome major named Douglas MacArthur, who was serving as Secretary of War Baker’s information officer—the army’s first venture into public relations. MacArthur was ordered to tell reporters that Roosevelt’s volunteerism would mess up the planned draft. The major was already so popular with the fourth estate that a few days later, twenty-nine reporters presented a letter to Baker, praising him as a man who “helped to shape the public mind.” All in all, it looked as if the army would win its first battle without shedding a drop of blood.
⁵⁵

In the same building, another tall, extremely handsome young man was toiling at his desk in the Navy Department. Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt was possibly the happiest civilian in the government. He had been lobbying overtly and covertly for a declaration of war on Germany for well over a year. He even met clandestinely with his wife’s uncle (and his distant cousin), Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson’s most outspoken critic, to discuss how to put pressure on the president.
⁵⁶

The younger Roosevelt hoped that hostilities would oust his lethargic boss, Josephus Daniels, and make the thirty-five-year-old New Yorker secretary of the navy. Through his worshipful right-hand man, gnomelike Louis Howe (who sometimes signed his letters “Your slave and servant”), Roosevelt had sponsored a series of backstairs attacks on Daniels, calling for his replacement by his “virile-minded, hardfisted civilian assistant,” in the words of one complaisant newspaper.
⁵⁷

With war virtually declared, Roosevelt began trying to embarrass Daniels almost openly. When a reporter asked him if the fleet had been mobilized yet, the assistant secretary said he did not know,“but you have a right to know. Come along and we’ll find out.”

He led the reporter into Daniels’s office and said,“Here’s a newsman. He wants to know, and all the rest of us want to know, whether the fleet has been ordered mobilized.”

The portly, mild-mannered Daniels, who maintained an amazing tolerance of Roosevelt’s behavior, replied that an announcement would be made in due course.

Out in the corridor, Roosevelt muttered to the reporter, “You see?” With a shrug and a contemptuous look over his shoulder at Daniels’s closed door, he added,“It was the best I could do.”
⁵⁸

Roosevelt’s impatience with his slow-moving chief was fueled by the widespread assumption that the major U.S. role in the war would be on the ocean. In the April 4
New York Tribune
, Cass W. Gilbert told his readers that the notion of sending a large U.S. army overseas was a “phantasy.” There were simply not enough ships to transport men along with the food that England and France needed to feed their civilians and the munitions that would enable their armies to kill more Germans. Underlying this vision of a more or less bloodless war was the assumption that American infantrymen were not needed. It was evident to everyone who read U.S. newspapers that England, France and Russia were winning the war.
⁵⁹

Elsewhere in the United States, officials and ordinary citizens braced themselves for a wave of German sabotage. In New York, the police commissioner mobilized no less than 12,000 men equipped with machine guns and rifles to deal with an assault by German army reservists who had supposedly been waiting undercover for hostilities to begin. Armed guards patrolled bridges, railroad yards and other likely targets. The National Guard was already protecting the upstate reservoirs, on the apparent assumption that Berlin was not above ecoterrorism.

More worrisome, according to the
New York Tribune
, were reports of a German plot to trigger a huge uprising among the South’s African Americans, a largely disenfranchised group who might wonder about joining a crusade to make the world safe for democracy. (The
Tribune
, of course, did not allude to this somewhat glaring fact—or to the way the Southern-born Wilson had permitted his mostly Southern cabinet to extend racial segregation to all parts of the U.S. government.) The shocking goal of the putative plotters was to seize Texas and turn it into a black republic in which “Mexicans and Japanese were to have equal rights with the Negro.” In San Francisco, gentlemen in the lounges of the exclusive Bohemian Club were discussing an even scarier possibility: A German-led army invading from Mexico, with cadres of “armed Negroes” in their ranks.
⁶⁰

Elsewhere, many people were ignoring Wilson’s claim that Americans would prove their friendship with the German people by being nice to the millions of German-Americans in their midst. Men and women with obviously German names were being harassed by superpatriots, investigated for presumed disloyalty and arrested as probable spies and saboteurs. In a Wichita Falls, Texas, exhibition game, Detroit Tigers outfielder Ty Cobb, arguably the greatest baseball player of the day (or any other day), slid into second base with spikes high and badly slashed Charles Lincoln “Buck” Herzog of the New York Giants. Cobb leaped on top of the bleeding Herzog and pounded him with his fists, screaming,“German!”
⁶¹