The Illusion of Victory (68 page)

By the end of August, Tumulty had the trip worked out to the last detail. It would cover 10,000 miles and include some thirty speeches. In memoirs written years later, both Mrs. Wilson and Admiral Cary Grayson claim that they tried to talk Wilson out of going. Grayson has a grimly determined Wilson telling him,“You must remember that I, as commander in chief, was responsible for sending those soldiers to Europe. In that crucial test in the trenches, they did not turn back—and I cannot turn back now. I cannot put my personal safety, my health in the balance against my duty.”
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Wilson may have said something like this. There is no question that he was troubled by guilt for plunging the nation into a war with the naive assumption that there was little likelihood of American soldiers’ dying in France. But there are grounds for doubting that his determination to make the speaking tour was framed in such apocalyptic terms. Another contemporary witness, Secretary of the Navy Daniels, reported a very different reaction when he worried aloud that the trip might strain Wilson’s health. “You are much mistaken,” the president replied. “It will be no strain on me—on the contrary, it will be a relief to meet the people. . . . I am saturated with the subject and am spoiling to tell the people all about the treaty. I will enjoy it.” wilson was basing this optimism on his reaction to previous speaking tours, in particular the highly successful swing through the Midwest he took in 1916 to persuade the Democrats in Congress to vote for a preparedness program—and incidentally demolish the “hyphenates” who opposed it. Daniels added his own observation:“The thought of the trip exhilarated him.”
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On the evening of September 2, Wilson, his wife, Admiral Grayson and Tumulty boarded his private blue railroad car, the “Mayflower,” which had a double bed and a sitting room to give the president a semblance of privacy. Although the crowd was sparse at his first stop, Columbus, Ohio, the numbers built rapidly as the seven-car train rolled into other Midwestern cities. The president’s speeches made headlines. The twenty-one reporters on the train agreed with the
New York Times
man’s observation that Wilson seemed to be “refreshed as he [went] along.”

But the trip soon became a very different experience from previous tours. The opposition to Wilson’s appeals for the League of Nations was vocal and well financed. Leading the assault were the Friends of Irish Freedom, which took out two days’ worth of full-page ads in the newspapers of every city Wilson visited, denouncing him as a fraud and a hypocrite and an enemy of Ireland. In many cities, the group organized mass meetings to refute his speeches.

At least as potent was a Republican senatorial “truth squad” led by liberal Republican Senators Borah and Johnson and conservative Senator Medill McCormick, who held their own rallies. At these gatherings, some of them markedly larger than the president’s, they denounced the League of Nations and the peace treaty with savage sarcasm. Johnson’s favorite theme was the clause in the covenant that gave the British six votes in the league’s assembly to America’s one. In Chicago, where the three senators spoke on the same platform, a huge crowd of mostly German-Americans and Irish-Americans hissed at the mention of Wilson’s name and shouted, “Impeach him! Impeach him!”

Anti-Wilson Democratic Senator James Reed of Missouri spoke to another big crowd in Saint Louis with the Catholic archbishop on the platform beside him. Reed lambasted the league as a British plot to rule the world and keep Ireland enslaved forever.

These brutal assaults took a mounting toll on the president’s nerves. His speeches, most of which were based on notes, rather than the usual carefully wrought texts, contained unexpected gaffes. At one point he described himself as descended from “old Revolutionary stock.” the opposition reminded Wilson that his four grandparents had been born in the British Isles and his mother was born in England. By no stretch could he claim kinship with the Revolutionary generation. The Irish-Americans had a field day with the president’s attempt to disguise his British roots.

In Saint Louis came an even more baffling remark. Wilson said the real cause of the war was the rivalry between Germany and England:“This was, in its inception, a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.” Wilson said this while trying to persuade his audience that U.S. involvement in the league would eliminate such murderous rivalries. He seemed oblivious to the way the admission virtually repudiated his 1917 rhetoric about a war between autocracy and democracy. The words reveal a defensive psychology at work in Wilson’s mind. Seven months in Paris left little room for doubt about British economic fear and loathing of Germany.
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After the first week of the tour, the exhilaration of the early speeches began to fade. The sheer physical effort of the trip, with its repetitive parades and dinners and speeches to large crowds without benefit of amplifiers, undoubtedly played a part in Wilson’s mounting fatigue. The news from Washington played an equally deleterious role. On September 10, the Foreign Relations Committee sent the peace treaty to the full Senate, proposing ratification with forty-five amendments and four reservations—a direct affront to Wilson. Five amendments obliterated the Shantung settlement—hitting Wilson where he was most vulnerable.

Another blow fell on September 12, when newspapers carried blazing headlines about William Bullitt’s testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee. The young diplomat who had fed Wilson-House hopes of overturning the German government with words was no longer loyal to the administration. Bullitt told how he had resigned in disgust from the American staff in Paris when he read the treaty, along with several other young associates. Senator Lodge asked Bullitt if any members of the American delegation had expressed their opinion of the treaty to him.

“It is no secret that Mr. Lansing, General Bliss and Mr. White objected very strongly to . . . numerous provisions,” Bullitt said.

Lodge said it was “public knowledge” that they objected to the Shantung settlement. Was there anything else they disliked?

Bullitt said he had made a “note” of a conversation with Secretary Lansing. He proceeded to read it. Lansing thought “many parts” of the treaty were “thoroughly bad,” especially those dealing with Shantung and the League of Nations. The secretary’s opinion of the league could not have been more negative.“I consider that the League of Nations is at present entirely useless. The great powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves,” the secretary said (according to Bullitt). Worse was another supposed remark: “The League of Nations can do nothing to alter any of the unjust clauses of the treaty.”

Bullitt had asked Lansing what he thought of the treaty’s chances for ratification. Lansing had supposedly replied,“If the Senate could understand what this treaty means, and if the American people could really understand, it would be unquestionably defeated.”

Wilson was aboard his train in California when he read the newspaper accounts of this staggering repudiation of the league and treaty by his own secretary of state.“I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act this way,” Wilson said. It was a sad commentary on his frequent inability to grasp what was happening in personal relationships. The president had treated Lansing with contempt; he had spoken of him with contempt. Yet he was amazed when he discovered the secretary detested him and most of his works.
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These devastating attacks on the treaty added immensely to the strain of Wilson’s tour. In California, he was again thrown on the defensive by a warning letter from the state’s Irish-American senator, James D. Phelan: “The Irish are in a fair way to leave the Democratic Party.” The San Francisco Labor Council followed with a distinctly hostile query about why the president had ignored Ireland at the peace conference. When Wilson tried to speak at a rally that night, Irish demonstrators howled him down for several minutes. Wilson tried to explain how the league would help, not injure, Ireland’s fight for independence. In New York, Ireland’s president, Eamon de Valera, on a speaking tour of his own, said he was completely dissatisfied with the president’s explanation.
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Under these attacks, Wilson’s temper soured and his speeches acquired an ugly cast. In Saint Paul, he denounced the use of “Irish-American” or “German-American” before a man’s name. “It ought not to be there.” In Omaha, he warned against a revival of “pro-Germanism”—a low blow that infuriated German-Americans in the audience, who said they had just as much right to criticize the treaty as anyone else. The pro-treaty
New York Times
encouraged this tack by saying the president was outmaneuvering his ethnic critics and the country would soon “turn in resentment” on any immigrant group that tried to block America’s participation in the league. The
Times
was remembering Wilson’s 1916 triumph over the hyphenates. But 1919 was an entirely new game on a vastly altered playing field.

In Salt Lake City, Wilson said opponents of the treaty came from “exactly the same sources as the pro-German propaganda” of the prewar years. In Cheyenne, he declared the only opposition to the treaty outside the Senate was “the forces of hyphenated Americans.” In Denver, he compared ethnic Americans to knives being stuck into the treaty. In the final speech of the tour, at Pueblo, Colorado, the president descended to the most sunken stretch of the low road:“Any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger which he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.”
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This was appalling stuff from a president for whom ethnic Americans had responded in overwhelming numbers to fight and die in France. (One in five draftees was foreign born.) The president’s obsession with the League of Nations had turned him into a parody of the idealist who had led the United States into World War I. By this time he was a battered man, a punch-drunk political fighter who had taken too many blows to the head and body.
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Wilson combined these descents to the low road with repeated affronts to the senators who wanted reservations. He said their opposition was rooted in “downright ignorance” or some malicious “private purpose.” the ignorant seemed to have a problem understanding English. As for the malicious, they would be “gibbeted” by historians. At times he spoke as if he had never heard the word “reservations” and ordered his opponents to “put up or shut up”—sign the treaty he had negotiated, or face the wrath of the American people, who were unanimously behind him in this fight for world peace.
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How Wilson could say this while the senators who opposed the treaty were addressing huge rallies is a textbook example of a man driven by a compulsion to humiliate his political enemies. A dismayed William Howard Taft, still a supporter of the league, wrote to a friend:“Wilson is playing into their hands [his Senate opponents] by his speeches in the West. It is impossible for him, schoolmaster that he is, to . . . explain the league without framing contemptuous phrases to characterize his opponents. . . . The president’s attitude in not consenting to any reservations at all is an impossible one.”
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Wilson’s all-or-nothing approach to politics was so utterly foreign to the American system, even his opponents could not believe their ears at first. The Senate’s predictable reaction was outrage. One of the mild reserva-tionists, Senator William Squire Kenyon of Iowa, said: “The Senate is not going to be bulldozed. It has its duty to do, and it will do it.”

The more the president talked, the more he convinced a majority of the senators that the treaty needed these reservations to protect the country against a League of Nations run by a leader like Woodrow Wilson—a wild-eyed idealist who would embroil the country in bizarre attempts to perfect the world, without the consent of Congress or the American people.
Wilson was probably correct in his claim that a majority of the people supported the League of Nations. But in his convulsive hatred of Henry Cabot Lodge, and his arrogant condescension toward the “bungalow minds” of the U.S. Senate, he failed to see that this support was encumbered by serious doubts. By this time, it was a treaty with Lodge’s reservations that had the support of the vast majority.
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While Wilson orated on the League of Nations, Congress passed a law that inflicted a serious wound on the American spirit. Called the Volstead Act after the Minnesota congressman who wrote it, the law created a restrictive, totally nonalcoholic regimen that forbade every American from exercising a fundamental freedom. Volstead’s goal was to codify and spell out the implications of the Eighteenth Amendment, which had been ratified by forty-six states in January 1919—well beyond the constitutional two-thirds needed to make it the law of the land.

The amendment had banned the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating beverages.” Most people thought these words meant the abolition of the saloon and assumed the word “intoxicating” meant hard liquor. But Volstead and his dry allies in Congress defined “intoxicating” as any beverage that contained more than 0.5 percent alcohol. This decree eliminated all beers and wines. The country was already dry as of July 1, 1919, thanks to the rider Congress had attached to an earlier appropriations bill. But this was a wartime measure that could and probably would have been repealed by the next Congress, especially if the president had urged it.

The Volstead Act transformed Prohibition from a reform to an oppressive restriction. It empowered the federal government to enforce the restrictions with nightsticks, guns and jail terms. Soon millions of Americans would begin breaking this new law, creating an underlying contempt for the government that spread like a virus into other areas of American life. A group of gangsters, known as the Mafia, which had been close to extinction thanks to the heroic efforts of Italian-American detectives, revived and became a seemingly irreversible cancer in American politics and business.