The Illusion of Victory (72 page)

Jails overflowed, and their kitchens soon ran out of food. Many of the prisoners went hungry and slept in crowded cells and hallways, with minimum sanitation. Those who were citizens were turned over to state courts to be prosecuted for violating various laws banning “syndicalist” labor organizations (i.e., those that seek the control of factories by workers). Aliens were held for deportation hearings. Palmer had decided deportation was the only legal solution available to the Justice Department, because the wartime sedition laws passed by Congress were no longer relevant.

Liberals were aghast that their former hero, Woodrow Wilson, apparently countenanced Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover and the operations of the military intelligence agents. An agitated Walter Lippmann told Newton Baker, who was rapidly becoming his political therapist, that “the events of the last few months are too disturbing and the behavior of the administration too revolutionary not to put a severe strain upon men’s patience.” Lippmann accused Wilson’s appointees of doing more to endanger fundamental American liberties than any group of men in a hundred years. The Democrats were operating a “reign of terror in which honest thought is impossible,” Lippmann wailed.
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Not everyone in Wilson’s administration admired Palmer’s tactics. Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson ordered the department’s immigration office to demand strong evidence before approving a deportation order. Soon military intelligence field officers were complaining to Congress that they had to “get a man with a lighted bomb in his hand” before they could deport him. Eventually, Newton Baker reigned in the army’s intelligence branch, with an order to stop investigating civilians.
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President Wilson was a bystander in this drama.

Meanwhile, Eugene Debs remained in jail, along with hundreds of others imprisoned during the days of war rage. Edith Wilson and her fellow instant expert in national politics and international diplomacy, Admiral Cary Grayson, decided such minor problems were not worthy of the president’s limited attention span.

In the White House, Wilson refused to abandon his hunger for a direct appeal to the voters that would crush Senator Lodge and the Republicans. On January 8, 1920, the Democrats convened in Washington, D.C., for their annual Jackson Day dinner, a tribal ritual in which they invoked the populist memory of their founder, Andrew Jackson. Behind the scenes, Tumulty and Hitchcock feverishly concocted a plan for a compromise on the treaty. Hitchcock reported progress in covert negotiations with Lodge. He sent Mrs. Wilson a note warning her that public opinion was virtually demanding some kind of compromise. Tumulty said the same thing in more evasive but equally desperate phrasing.
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Instead, Edith, speaking for her husband, ordered Tumulty to draft a letter to be read at the Jackson Day dinner, reiterating the president’s absolute opposition to any changes in the treaty or the League of Nations. “We cannot rewrite this treaty. We must take it without changes that alter its meaning, or leave it,” wilson aka Tumulty wrote. Then came truly fateful words:“If there is any doubt as to what the people of the country think on this vital matter, the clear and single way out is to . . . give the next election the form of a great and solemn referendum as to the part the United States is to play in completing the settlements of the war.”
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When National Democratic Chairman Homer Cummings read these words at the Jackson Day dinner, the party’s stalwarts received them, according to one newspaper, with “wild enthusiasm.” But a stentorian voice was heard in the tumult, objecting strenuously to the president’s proposal. The stunned stalwarts turned to confront William Jennings Bryan, three times their candidate for the White House. The Great Commoner said the idea of a national referendum on a foreign policy dispute was idiocy. American elections were never referenda on any single issue. Besides, there was nothing much wrong with Senator Lodge’s reservations. The important thing was to get the treaty signed and the League of Nations working. Even if the Democrats won control of the Senate, waiting for a referendum would put everything off for fourteen months—while Europe and the rest of the world reeled into chaos.

It was one of the wisest statements William Jennings Bryan ever made. But it did not go down well with the Democratic Party’s leaders, who saw him as a three-time loser, still jealous of Wilson.“Stand by the President,” someone shouted. The cry was taken up from all sides of the room. Bryan sat down, more than a little angry. Within a few days, the
Chicago Daily News
ran a cartoon of Wilson and Bryan driving a wagon carrying the treaty, pulled by a Democratic donkey. Wilson was shouting,“Back up!” Bryan was yelling,“Giddap!”

Bryan still had millions of loyal followers. His opposition increased the likelihood of an electoral disaster in November 1920. The
New York Times,
the
New York World,
the
Dallas News
and a host of other Democratic papers said Bryan was right. Wilson’s “great and solemn referendum” looked more wrongheaded than ever.
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In the same month of January, two cabinet members, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo and Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane, weary of working for an invisible president, resigned. Over tea in the White House, Edith Wilson undertook negotiations with their possible replacements. If she was not running the government, the First Lady was giving a good imitation of it. Gossip swirled through Washington in which she loomed larger and larger as the “acting president.”

One of the tales that added considerably to Edith’s power-god status concerned a contretemps that inflicted yet another wound on the already bleeding Treaty of Versailles. Former British foreign secretary Viscount Grey of Falladon, had come to America as a special ambassador to see if he could help win ratification. He had arrived in Washington the very day that Wilson had collapsed on his speaking tour. Almost blind, Grey wore blue spectacles and could not travel alone. As equerry, he brought with him Major Charles Crauford-Stuart, who had been caught telling a naughty story about Mrs. Wilson in a previous tour at the British embassy.

“What did Mrs. Galt do when the president proposed to her?”

“She fell out of bed!”

Although Crauford-Stuart denied all, the president had demanded his return to London. Now he was back in the role of attendant to the almost blind special ambassador. Edith Wilson sent word that Grey would never
enter the White House as long as Crauford-Stuart was in the British embassy. Grey, satisfied that the major was innocent, declined to oblige her. Complicating matters, Crauford-Stuart was engaged to an American woman and strenuously resisted departure. So the viscount waited for an invitation that never came.

Edith Wilson had informants eager to tell her the doings of supposed enemies. When she heard that Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife had entertained Viscount Grey for dinner, Edith told the president, who became even more infuriated at the special ambassador for what he considered backstairs intrigue.

In mid-January, Viscount Grey gave up and allowed Crauford-Stuart to lead him back to London. There, no longer conciliatory, Grey published a letter in the
Times
that stirred political waves in Washington, D.C. With the implicit approval of his government (though he claimed to be speaking as a private citizen), Grey said that Great Britain and France had no objections to Lodge’s reservations, except for one minor point that could easily be resolved. In an instant, Wilson’s main argument, that the reservations would require a renegotiation of the treaty, became null and void.

Did it change what was left of Wilson’s mind? Alas, no. Instead, he prepared a statement denouncing Grey, in which he declared that if the viscount had written his dastardly letter in Washington, he would have been kicked out of the country. The White House inner circle managed to suppress this wild-eyed response. But a few days later, the president revealed to the entire world just how shattered his faculties were.

Perhaps because Secretary of State Lansing had tried to arrange a White House meeting with Viscount Grey, or because the president was still brooding over William Bullitt’s testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee, or because he had heard that Lansing praised Grey’s
Times
letter, Wilson suddenly wrote to the secretary, asking him: “Is it true, as I have been told, that during my illness you frequently called the heads of the executive departments of the government into conference?”

The president was admitting that for four months, while Admiral Grayson was issuing soothing syrup about his steady recovery and his unimpaired intellect, Wilson did not know what was happening in the executive wing of the White House, where his cabinet had met upwards of twenty-five times. Lansing considered the letter an unmistakable request to resign and promptly did so. In a bristling letter, he cited the president’s history of ignoring his advice and treating him with disrespect and said he departed “with profound relief.”
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When Lansing released both letters to the press, Democrats, Republicans—everyone who could read a newspaper—were boggled by their implications. Other cabinet members defended Lansing. Even the
New York World,
for whom Wilson could usually do no wrong, was unable to swallow this performance. The
Saint Louis Post-Dispatch
ran a cartoon of Lansing being tossed off the stern of the ship of state, entitled “Dropping the First Mate.”

The
Los Angeles Times
called Lansing’s dismissal “Wilson’s Last Mad Act.” Perhaps impelled to tell the truth by the uproar, one of Wilson’s doctors revealed to a reporter that the president had suffered a cerebral thrombosis. This too made headlines, which underscored the breadth and depth of the lies Admiral Grayson had told at Edith Galt Wilson’s orders.

The Lansing affair triggered new speculation about the condition of Wilson’s brain. Arthur Dean Bevan, former president of the American Medical Association, told a
Philadelphia Press
reporter that Wilson had no hope of a genuine recovery. His brain would always be damaged. Bevan flatly declared that Wilson was “not competent to act as the nation’s chief executive.” the report sparked a flurry of debate in Congress about the possibility of a joint committee pronouncing Wilson unfit. But it came to nothing. The Republican majority, scenting victory in November, preferred the status quo.
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Meanwhile, everyone was reading a book written by John Maynard Keynes, the young British economist who had gone home in disgust when he got a look at the Treaty of Versailles.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
was a devastating attack on the perpetrators of the Paris Peace Conference, with special venom directed at Woodrow Wilson for saying one thing and doing another from the moment he arrived in Europe.

“The President,” Keynes wrote,“was not a hero or a prophet; he was not even a philosopher; but a generously intentioned man” lacking the “intellectual equipment” he needed to deal with David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau. The French premier embodied “that culture of the world” that enabled him to outflank Wilson in every argument. Up against Lloyd
George, who had “six or seven senses not available to ordinary men,” the president was “a blind and deaf Don Quixote entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary.” Summing up, Keynes said “there can seldom have been a statesman of the first rank more incompetent than the President in the council chamber.” wilson was also a hypocrite, with “all the intellectual apparatus of self deception.” the
New Republic
ran excerpts of
Economic Consequences
and praised it extensively.
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With lethally bad timing, Wilson virtually confirmed Keynes’s portrait by suddenly intervening in a European problem that he had bungled while he was in Paris. The French and the British had finally worked out a settlement with Italy on the disposition of embattled Fiume. Wilson fired off a note condemning the new arrangement and threatening to withdraw the United States from the league and the peace treaty. One London newspaper said Wilson sounded like “a European monarch of the eighteenth century.” the French press said “Czar” was the best one-word description. The Italians had trouble finding enough negative adjectives to describe the man they had once cheered in Rome. Italian-Americans were equally frenzied in their denunciations. The uproar helped convince millions of Americans that the treaty needed reservations to enable the United States to deal independently with the double-talking Europeans.
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Wilson’s conduct demoralized the Senate’s Democrats. More and more of them wondered if they should continue to take orders from a man who was mentally incompetent. Since a majority of them wanted to vote for the treaty with reservations, Henry Cabot Lodge began to savor the prospects of victory on his terms. Tumulty and Senator Hitchcock warned Wilson that their prospects looked grimmer with each passing day. They hoped the news might persuade the president to seize the initiative and propose some kind of face-saving compromise.

By now it was clear that a vast majority of the American people wanted to join the League of Nations—but only with the safeguards that Henry Cabot Lodge was proposing. The senator had succeeded in persuading not only the Senate but the American electorate to take the sober second look at the treaty that he insisted was at the heart of his opposition.

Beginning in January, dozens of spokespersons for major organizations, ranging from the American Federation of Labor and the National Council of Churches to the American Federation of Women’s Clubs, came to Washington and called upon the senators, urging consent with some kind of reservations. The League to Enforce Peace, still doggedly in the struggle, was another strong voice with the same message. An estimated 50 million people were involved in this massive campaign to force a compromise. They were joined by a galaxy of famous names, from J.P. Morgan, Jr. to William Howard Taft to James Cardinal Gibbons.
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