The Illusion of Victory (6 page)

On April 4, the Senate reconvened at 10 A.M. in an angry mood. La Follette was the main target of their wrath, which was reflected in numerous newspapers. During the Wisconsin senator’s filibuster on the armed-ship bill,
New York World
cartoonist Rollin Kirby had portrayed La Follette at the head of his little column of filibusterers, receiving the Iron Cross. The
New York Times
had assembled thirty-three editorials from around the nation, two-thirds of them denunciations. La Follette had been compared to Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot.

Toward the end of the filibuster, Senator Ollie James of Kentucky had rushed at La Follette carrying a gun concealed under his coattails. One of Fighting Bob’s allies, Senator Harry Lane of Oregon, spotted the gun and drew a steel file long enough, he later said, to slip under James’s left collar bone and “reach his heart with one thrust.” Fortunately, several other senators wrestled the berserk Kentuckian back to his seat.
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Outrage over the way La Follette had forced the Senate to adjourn without declaring war was even more intense. Students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology burned him in effigy. At a pro-war lecture by a distinguished sociologist in New York, La Follette’s name was greeted with hisses. The Madison, Wisconsin,
Democrat
declared that the senator’s home state was “disappointed, chagrinned, indignant,” and wondered: “Is La Follette mad?”
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Although his Senate supporters had dwindled from eleven to five, La Follette remained undaunted. He had stayed up most of the night working on a speech. Now he waited expectantly while Senator Hitchcock reintroduced the war resolution with the admission that he had “bitterly opposed” the war but had decided that to cast his vote against the resolution would be “doing a vain and foolish thing.” the aloof, dandyish Hitchcock was revealing an odd passivity that enabled him to do all sorts of things in the name of party loyalty that contradicted the voice of his conscience. An admirer of Germany, Hitchcock had been severely critical of Woodrow Wilson’s supposed neutrality. He and the president had long since arrived at a state of mutual detestation.
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Hitchcock was followed by other senators who called for a yes vote, notably Henry Cabot Lodge. His Van Dyke beard giving him a vaguely Mephistophelian air, Lodge reiterated the opinion that had outraged antiwar critics on Monday—the decision was a choice between war and “national degeneracy” and “cowardice.” Lodge also predicted the war would heal “the division of our people into race groups, striving to direct the course of the United States in the interest of some other country.”
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Here Lodge was joining his friend Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in a long-running attack on what the president called hyphenated Americans. The senator was thinking somewhat nervously of the large number of Irish-Americans in Massachusetts who were opposed to becoming England’s ally. He went on to echo Wilson’s words about a war against barbarism, a war for peace and democracy.

Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi arose to disagree with Lodge and Wilson. A veteran of the Spanish-American War, Vardaman could claim ancestors who had fought in virtually every previous American war. He noted that the president had said on April 2 that if the citizens of the warring countries had been consulted, there would have been no conflict. If the president had consulted the “plain honest people” of America, who would bear the burden of taxation and would fight the battles, the United States would not be trying to declare war on Germany today. Vardaman gravely doubted whether sacrificing millions of American lives and spending billions of dollars made sense to “organize the parliament of man.” He did not think the world would accept Wilson’s “big ideas” by force of arms and “the methods of the brute.”
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Senator Stone said that he would not try to answer Henry Cabot Lodge and other pro-war speakers,“although it seems to me [the] answer would be easy.” The pro-war advocates claimed to be speaking from facts, he said, but they were using “only part of the facts.” Stone was confident that history would eventually tell the whole story. Meanwhile, he would simply say that involving the United States in this war, which Congress clearly intended to do, would be “the greatest national blunder in history.”
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George Norris, the portly Republican senator from Nebraska, now rose. Like La Follette, he was one of the founders of the progressive movement in America, the political upheaval that had split the Republican Party and had made Woodrow Wilson president. Norris assailed Wilson for not telling the whole truth about why the Germans were attacking U.S. ships in the so-called war zone around the British Isles. The creation of this zone was a response to Great Britain’s similar blockade of Germany, by mining the North Sea virtually the day the war started. The Americans had done little or nothing to protest the British blockade. Norris asked why the United States had kept its ships out of the war zone that England had created but refused to recognize the German war zone around the British Isles. Why didn’t the United States keep its ships and citizens out of it?

American neutrality, in short, was a sham. Why had the president and so many other people tolerated this situation? Because American bankers and corporations were reaping enormous profits by selling weapons and munitions to the British, the French and the Russians. Now these profiteers wanted to take this covert alliance a step further, into actual war. Norris read a letter written by a member of the New York Stock Exchange to his customers. The Nebraskan had obtained it from another senator, who lacked the courage to read it—and who planned to vote for the war.“The popular view is that stocks would have a quick clear sharp reaction immediately on the outbreak of hostilities,” the broker wrote.“They then would enjoy an old fashioned bull market such as followed the outbreak of war with Spain in 1898.”

Here, Norris said, was the “coldblooded proposition that war brings prosperity.” The senator denounced this “comfortable opinion,” which was supported by “a servile press” in league with the pro-war bankers and corporate executives. These profit-hungry Americans, he shouted, had created a war madness that was sweeping the country and Congress into a ruinous conflict:“I would like to say to this war god, You shall not coin into gold the lifeblood of my brethren. We are going into this war on the command of gold. I feel we are putting the dollar sign on the American flag.”
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Senator Jim Reed of Missouri leaped up to roar, “If that be not giving aid and comfort to the enemy . . . then I do not know what would bring comfort to the heart of a Hapsburg or a Hohenzollern [the ruling families of Austria-Hungary and Germany]!” John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, among the most vociferous of the pro-war majority, shrilled, “If it be not treason, it grazes the edge of treason!” Senator William Squire Kenyon of Iowa rose to issue a cry that would soon become widespread:“It is no time for criticism of the president, of the cabinet, of Congress. . . . It is time for one hundred percent Americanism!”
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More pro-war speeches followed. They were challenged by Asle Jorgenson Gronna, a Republican from North Dakota, who said that he had received thousands of letters from his constituents begging him to avoid war. He was going to vote against the resolution. Reminding his fellow senators that they were not the government, he was convinced that if the United States truly wanted to do so, the country could maintain an “honorable peace” with every nation on earth.
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Shortly before four o’clock came the moment that the other senators and the packed galleries had been awaiting. Robert La Follette took the floor. He opened with a brief, almost curt attack on the idea that every senator should “stand behind the president.” What kind of doctrine was that? he asked. What if the president were wrong? That was the crucial question every legislator had to ask. In this case, he knew of no course but “to oppose the demands of the chief executive.”

La Follette recalled the filibuster over the armed-ship bill, which had prompted Wilson to call him and his supporters willful men. Yet in his speech on April 2, the president had admitted that the senator and his eleven supporters had been right. Not only was arming merchantmen impractical, it gave the United States none of the rights or the effectiveness of a belligerent. If Wilson was wrong on this issue, might he not also be wrong on this “hotly pressed” decision for war?

The senator said he had received more than 15,000 telegrams and letters, nine out of ten opposing the war. He cited a straw vote in the town of Monroe, Wisconsin, which reported 954 against war, and 95 in favor of it. Introducing a poll conducted by the Emergency Peace Committee in Massachusetts based on 20,000 postal cards, he reported that 66 percent opposed the war and 63 percent opposed conscription. In Minneapolis, a congressman had polled his district and found 8,000 against the war, 800 favoring it. For a half-hour, La Follette put in the record similar communications and asked if these messages did not indicate the American people’s deep-seated conviction against entering the war.
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Had Germany violated a promise not to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, as Woodrow Wilson had claimed? The answer was no. Germany had agreed to suspend the policy on the assumption that the United States would persuade or force England to modify its illegal blockade, which was threatening the German people with starvation. America’s “poor protests” to England had utterly failed to do this. Was it fair to accuse Germany of dishonorable conduct?

Wilson said that Germany’s submarine warfare against commerce was “a warfare against mankind . . . a war against all nations.” If this were the case, La Follette asked, why was the United States the only nation in the world that objected to it? Norway, Sweden, Spain, the nations of South America—not one had protested Germany’s position or felt any compunction to go to war over it. La Follette cited a report in the previous day’s newspapers that the Brazilian government was adopting a cold shoulder to Wilson’s decision for war.

The senator carried his argument further. Wilson’s claim that the U.S. quarrel was with Germany’s government, not its people, was absurd. In his next breath, Wilson talked of “practicable cooperation” with England and its allies to prosecute the war. Such cooperation meant joining the British blockade, which was “starving to death the old men, the women and the children, the sick and the maimed of Germany. ” if the United States cooperated with Great Britain, America would be endorsing London’s “shameful methods of warfare,” against which it had feebly protested—and been ignored.

The idea of a war to make the world safe for democracy was equally absurd, with England as a U.S. ally. Had the British shown the slightest interest in extending democracy to Ireland, to Egypt’s millions, to India’s hundreds of millions? Tens of millions of Great Britain’s own citizens were denied the right to vote by the oligarchy that ran the country. The other countries in the war, Italy and Japan, were monarchies. Only France and newly baptized Russia were democracies—and La Follette challenged anyone to deny that Wilson would have called for war, whether or not the Russians had tossed out the czar.

The president’s denunciations of “Prussian autocracy” made as little sense as the claim that the German people did not support the war. After almost three years of observing Germany’s performance as a belligerent, La Follette opined that far more of the German people backed their government than did Americans who supported Wilson’s decision for war. Moreover, it ill became crusaders for democracy to tell the German people they could only have peace by giving up their government.

As for Wilson’s claim that the war was begun without the consent of the German people—was the U.S. decision for war any different? Could the members of the Senate claim with any certainty that most Americans supported the war? Why didn’t the government put things to the ultimate test, and have a referendum? Let the American people vote on it. Instead, the government was already talking about espionage and censorship bills to suppress popular opinion and a draft to force every man to fight, no matter what he thought.

Point by point, La Follette presented a legal brief against Wilson’s arguments for war. Often it was a dogged, unemotional argument. He emphasized facts, logic, the principles of international law, as enunciated in the Treaty of London in 1909. This international conclave had codified neutral rights in case of war, specifying which goods were contraband and thus liable to seizure and which were entitled to free passage on the high seas. La Follette cited an admission by Lord Salisbury, one of England’s most prominent statesmen, that food for the civilian population was never contraband—a principle that the English were callously ignoring in their blockade of Germany.

As the second hour of La Follette’s speech passed, lights were turned on. Many people in the gallery departed, and others took their places. Among the new arrivals were the capital’s elite: Wilson’s son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo; Secretary of State Robert Lansing; and British ambassador Cecil Spring Rice, whose dislike of Wilson frequently surfaced in his dispatches. In the front row, two of La Follette’s oldest friends—journalist Gilson Gardner and reformer Amos Pinchot, pioneer members of the progressive movement—remained for the entire speech. They had not spoken to the senator in five years, because they had backed Theodore Roosevelt for the Progressive Party’s nomination in 1912. La Follette had regarded that decision as a betrayal. But they had come to hear him, because they too opposed the war.