The Illusion of Victory (73 page)

In the Senate, Lodge shrewdly moved with this popular sentiment. He softened the language of his reservations, dropping, for instance, his original insistence that the Allies would have to cast an affirmative vote for each one. Now he would be satisfied with the tacit acceptance Viscount Grey’s letter virtually guaranteed. Democrats as well as Republicans made speeches and advanced proposals, all drenched in this spirit of compromise.

But Woodrow Wilson was already wedded to his strategy of a great and solemn referendum. Rather than surrender (as he saw it) to the hated Senator Lodge, he was prepared to sabotage any compromise and let the American people decide who was right and who was wrong. This determination became brutally clear on March 8, 1920, when he released a letter to Gilbert Hitchcock, commenting on the Senate’s recent revisions of Lodge’s resolutions.

The long letter was nothing less than a campaign speech. The president focused on Article 10, the heart of the covenant, which committed the United States to defend the territorial integrity of the league’s member states. Wilson declared once more that Lodge’s reservation amounted to nullification of the whole document. The president said he would never be able to look an American soldier in the face if it were approved. It would destroy America’s chance to win a “moral victory” over Germany. In his eagerness to blacken Lodge, Wilson drew on the propaganda rhetoric of the war. He said Lodge’s attempt to nullify Article 10 reminded him of the “militaristic party” he had fought in Paris because they endorsed “the ideals of imperialism.” He cited the dispute with Italy to prove that these sinister forces were still at work. Finally, Wilson said he saw no difference between a nullifier and a mild nullifier. The president called on all Democrats to resist compromising on a single word.
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The almost universal reaction to this letter was disgust and outrage. The
Washington Post
called Wilson “an affirmative irreconcilable.” the
New York Tribune
condemned Wilson’s “unreasonable acerbity.” the
New York Times
threw up its editorial hands and abandoned all hope of ratification. Abroad, the French and British were dismayed to find themselves smeared in this domestic dispute. The French ambassador lodged a protest with the State Department, plaintively asking why Wilson did not communicate such sentiments to him, rather than publish them for the whole world to see. One Paris newspaper opined:“The American nation is directed by an idiot.” the president was turning into a one-man international wrecking crew.
²³

The Irish-Americans also remained in the wrecking game. On March 17, 1920 (Saint Patrick’s Day), Democratic Senator Peter Gerry of Rhode Island proposed a reservation recommending “self-government” for Ireland and its immediate admittance to the League of Nations. Lodge, who still thought he had a chance of detaching enough Democrats from Wilson to win ratification, resisted vehemently, viewing it as a crude device to split the Republicans. But fear of the Irish-American vote induced senators of both parties to ignore him. The proposal won, 38 to 36, with Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, a professed friend of compromise, voting for it. The desperate Democrats were ready to try anything to shift the blame for rejecting the treaty onto the Republicans.
²⁴

March 19 was judgment day. By this time, Hitchcock later admitted, 23 Democratic senators had decided to vote with Lodge. If the minority leader could not hold the rest of his party in line, the treaty would win a two-thirds majority. Throughout the long day, Hitchcock worked on wavering senators. On the floor, several Democrats who had decided to disobey the president urged their confreres to follow their example. The most moving speech came from Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, who had supported Wilson on virtually every issue since 1912. Walsh said he would cast his vote to ratify not because he approved of Lodge’s reservations but because a majority of his fellow senators did, and he accepted their judgment. But the overriding issue was the importance of the United States joining the League of Nations, where it would play a vital role in preserving the peace of the world.
²⁵

The first three Democratic senators to answer the roll call voted yea. Excitement mounted in the packed galleries. Was there going to be a mass defection of the Democrats? The fourth Democrat to respond, gray-haired Senator Charles Culberson of Texas, hesitated for a long moment, his face revealing not a little uncertainty. Then he voted nay. It was the signal the southern Democrats needed. They began adding nays in obedience to their fellow Southerner in the White House.

Another tense moment came when Gilbert Hitchcock voted. A yea from him—which was what he wanted to say—would have been an even stronger signal to waverers. But Hitchcock remained the sort of politician who can sometimes be the noblest of men, and at other times the saddest, a loyal follower. He voted nay with the president. Years later he would confide to a friend that it was the greatest mistake of his life.
²⁶

In the end, 49 senators voted yea, and 35 voted nay. That was 7 votes short of a two-thirds majority. Among the Democrats, 21 had voted their consciences and defied the president. But 23 Democrats had remained obedient to Wilson’s orders and they were joined by 12 irreconcilables, who would have voted nay no matter what Wilson or Lodge said or did not say. There is little doubt that without Wilson’s savage letter of March 8, the treaty and the covenant would have been ratified. But that legislative victory would not have made the treaty a living thing. The deluded man in the White House would have almost certainly have refused to sign it—and still demanded his great and solemn referendum.
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About 16,000 men remained on duty in the American sector of the Rhine bridgehead—a mere ghost of the once stupendous AEF. The Americans continued to get on well with the Germans in their sector. The same could not be said of relations in the British and French sectors. In the British sector, German civilians were required to remove their hats when they met a British officer on the street. The Germans soon stopped wearing hats, no matter how low the temperature dropped. The British also imposed draconian controls on local newspapers and regularly opened personal mail. A curfew required all Germans to be in their homes by 7 P.M. every night. All clocks were set for Greenwich Mean Time—as if the British sector were part of the United Kingdom.

The French were even more unpleasant. They published a list of 180 books that were banned and regularly suspended newspapers for comments regarded as hostile to the occupation or the Treaty of Versailles. French officers frequently lashed Germans in the face with their riding crops when they failed to get off the sidewalks quickly enough to permit them to stride past. Even more infuriating from the German point of view was the composition of the French occupation force. Some 25,000 were colonial troops from Senegal and French Morocco. These black and brown-skinned soldiers were selected, the Germans maintained, to humiliate them and violate their women. In no time, newspapers in the rest of Germany whipped up a frenzy about mass rapes of German women that more than matched Wellington House’s stories about 1914 Belgium.

On February 1920, while the Americans argued over the treaty and the league, the Allies added to the Germans’ rage by abruptly demanding the surrender of the kaiser, his three sons and some eight hundred German generals, admirals and government officials for trial on unspecified charges of war crimes. Articles 227–230 of the treaty entitled them to make this demand. Massive demonstrations swept all parts of Germany. The Netherlands declared it would not surrender the kaiser and his family to anyone. The German army let it be known that it was prepared to fight to the last man to resist this ultimate
Schmachparagraph
. They also hinted strongly that they would seek an alliance with the Russian Red Army to resist an attempt to seize these men by force.

The German government, realizing it would be out of business in twenty-four hours if it surrendered anyone, stalled. Weeks went by without a sign of British or French mobilization. Realizing the Allies had no stomach for an invasion of Germany to enforce their demand, the Weimar government offered to try certain officers on the list in German courts. The Allies lamely accepted this compromise. Sixteen men were eventually tried; six were convicted. They received trivial sentences.

In the midst of this uproar, Adolf Hitler and his supporters reorganized their political movement and gave it a new name, the German National Socialist Workers Party (in German,
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeitpartei
). Focusing their wrath on the Treaty of Versailles and the men who signed it, the party’s slogans became “Down with the November Criminals!” and “Down with the Marxist-Jewish Betrayers of the Fatherland!” the streetcorner pronunciation of the first word in the new name soon had everyone calling these angry power seekers the Nazi Party.
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In the United States, public enthusiasm for the treaty and the league sank rapidly after the second failure to ratify. Popular frustration bred an equally negative attitude toward the entire war. The ongoing chaos in Europe did little to alter this the-hell-with-it mood. The
Los Angeles Times
editors summed up the prevailing atmosphere: “It is quite impossible to tell what the war made the world safe for.”
²⁹

American companies were clamoring for some sort of closure, so they could begin doing business with Germany, once one of America’s most important trading partners. The Republican leadership decided the best answer was a resolution declaring the war was over. The United States had entered the war by a majority vote in Congress. Why not end it the same way? If Wilson vetoed it, he would further antagonize the already alienated voters.

The election of 1920 was already on everyone’s mind. When the peace resolution was introduced in the House on March 19, 1920, the Democrats reacted with raging speeches that denounced the idea as an underhanded attempt to embarrass the president—which was about 50 percent of the truth. One of the war’s chief foes, Congressman Claude Kitchin of North Carolina, went into a denunciatory spasm and suffered a cerebral thrombosis that left him almost as paralyzed as Woodrow Wilson. But the resolution cleared the House by almost 100 votes.

In the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge and Philander Knox added a very senatorial second thought. They resolved that the war was over, but that the United States retained all the advantages accruing to it under the Treaty of Versailles. This triggered a spate of Democratic speeches castigating this idea as dishonorable and cowardly. The antis tried to portray the move as the equivalent of a separate peace that left the Allies in a lurch. In the light of Wilson’s attacks on the French and British as militarists and imperialists, the argument fell flat. The Republicans replied that the only war still in progress was the one Woodrow Wilson was waging “against American citizens and American industry.”
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Wilson vetoed the joint resolution, calling it “an ineffaceable stain upon the gallantry and honor of the United States. ” the Republicans failed to muster a two-thirds majority to override it; the desperate Democrats voted as a bloc in both houses. Without an issue besides the treaty, the Democrats clung to Wilson, even though many feared he was trying to walk on water wearing the political equivalent of concrete shoes. The Republicans ended the day all smiles. They sensed the mounting disillusion of the American people with Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric. The next scene in the drama of the great and solemn referendum now shifted from Congress to the national conventions.

One man who watched this uproar with more than passing interest was newly promoted general of the armies John J. Pershing. The title was largely honorific, but it had a very satisfying ring to it. Soon after the armistice, various VIPs nominated the AEF’s commander for president. When Pershing admitted he was a Republican, the vice president of the National Republican League thought he was a cinch to repeat General Ulysses S. Grant’s performance in 1868. One former senator and old friend urged both political parties to nominate Pershing on a national reconciliation ticket in 1920.

Pershing’s father-in-law, Senator Francis Warren, advised him to deny any ambition to be president. That was the best way to stir a groundswell. Besides, there was another general running hard for the White House: Leonard Wood. He was portraying himself as Theodore Roosevelt’s heir, the man whose bold embrace of preparedness had helped win the war. By this time, Pershing detested Wood as a loudmouth and grandstander and studiously avoided imitating him.
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Pershing’s former aide, George Patton, now a tanker with almost no tanks (the army had dissolved the Tank Corps, in effect telling the tankers to rejoin the infantry or the cavalry) worried about Wood’s candidacy. If he won, Pershing “would command the island of Guam.” Pershing told him not to worry—a Wood victory would produce his instant resignation from the army.

Pershing went to some lengths to deny he was a candidate. He told one lady friend that he would be a “damned fool” to run for president. But Pershing was human. He thought he had won the war and could not resist comparing himself to other generals who had reached the White House. Besides Grant, there was Zachary Taylor, thanks to the Mexican War, and Andrew Jackson, thanks to the War of 1812. Not to mention George Washington, whose victory in the War for Independence made him the inevitable first president.
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Pershing did not object when old friends from Nebraska, which he considered his home state, formed a Pershing for President Club and began touting him as the state’s favorite son. For the first few months of 1920, Pershing acted like a candidate, though he never said a word about running. Secretary of War Baker, anxious to avoid a clash between Pershing and the incumbent chief of staff, acerbic Peyton March, sent the general of the armies on a nationwide inspection tour.