The Illusion of Victory

ALSO BY THOMAS FLEMING

Nonfiction

The New Dealers’War: F.D.R. and the War Within World War II

Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America

Liberty! The American Revolution

The Man Who Dared the Lightning

The Man From Monticello

West Point: The Men and Times of the U.S. Military Academy

One Small Candle

Beat the Last Drum

Now We Are Enemies

Fiction

Conquerors of the Sky

When This Cruel War Is Over

Remember the Morning

Over There

Loyalties: A Novel of World War II

Time and Tide

The Officers’Wives

Promises to Keep

Liberty Tavern

Copyright © 2003 by Thomas Fleming

Published by Basic Books
A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Hardback first published in 2003 by Basic Books
Paperback first published in 2004 by Basic Books

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016.

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    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fleming, Thomas J.

The illusion of victory: America in World War I / Thomas Fleming.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13 978-0-465-02467-4 (hc.); ISBN-10 0-465-02467-X (hc.)

eBook ISBN: 9780786724987

1.World War, 1914-1918—United States. 2. United States—

History—1913-1921. I.Title.

D570.A456 2003

940.3'73—dc21

2003002616

ISBN-13 978-0-465-02469-8 (pbk.); ISBN-10 0-465-02469-6

To Eugene D. Fleming, brother and friend

There is but one response possible for us: Force,
Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit,
the righteous and triumphant Force which shall
make Right the law of the world.
WOOD ROW WILSON

We have got all we want in territory, and our claim
to be left unmolested in the enjoyment of our vast
and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by
violence, largely maintained by force, often seems
less reasonable to others than to us.
WINSTON CHURCHILL

If the war didn’t happen to kill you, it
was bound to start you thinking.
GEORGE ORWELL

A great many people have spurred and sustained my lifelong interest in World War I. Not the least is my father, Thomas J. Fleming, Sr., who was a sergeant in the Seventy-Eighth Division and was commissioned in the field when all the officers in his company were killed or wounded. I must also thank the editors of American Heritage, who sent me to Europe in 1968 to write an article on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of the Argonne. That marked the beginning of my determination to write about the war as a historian. I am equally grateful to the staffs of Yale University’s libraries, where I conducted my first in-depth research in 1990, for my novel
Over There
. It was at Yale that I first encountered the women’s side of the war.

Since that time, many other people have helped me fill my file drawers. Not least has been my son, Richard Fleming, whose computer expertise and knowledge of Russian and European history have been invaluable. Also in the front rank of my researchers is Steven Bernstein, who helped explore numerous sources in Washington, D.C., and F. Kennon Moody, whose knowledge of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park has been a frequent resource. I am in debt to many other libraries and librarians, from the staff of the New York Society Library, who tolerated my endless requests for interlibrary loans, to the staff of the Westbrook Public Library at my Connecticut summer home, who were equally cooperative in this department.

My wife, Alice Fleming, has been a vital supporter throughout the many drafts of the manuscript, as well as a superb in-house editor. I must also add my agent, Ted Chichak, to this list of colleagues. His advice, both from the editorial and business points of view, has been a constant resource. My gratitude also extends to my previous editor at Basic Books, Don Fehr, who encouraged me to tackle this daunting task, and my current editor, Elizabeth Maguire, whose enthusiasm for the project has been an equally sustaining force.

It was time.

At 8:20 P.M. on Monday, April 2, 1917, a grim-faced Woodrow Wilson strode down the main corridor of the White House onto the North Portico. There a black Pierce-Arrow limousine waited in the rain, its motor purring. With the president was his secretary, Joseph Tumulty, his doctor, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, and an army aide, Colonel William J. Harts. The president’s second wife, Edith Galt Wilson, his oldest daughter, Margaret, and his closest friend and adviser, diminutive Colonel Edward M. House (his title was an honorary one, bestowed by a Texas governor), had departed in another car at 8:10. Their joint destination was the U.S. Capitol, where Wilson was to give the most important speech of his life.
¹

It had been a long, irritating day of clouds and rain, waiting for the 65th Congress to convene “to receive a communication concerning grave matters of national policy” from the president. Every American who read a newspaper assumed Wilson’s communication would contain a request that Congress declare a state of war existed between the United States and Germany. It was a stunning reversal of course for a president who had been reelected five months before on the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

Soon after his victory at the polls, Wilson had made an electrifying speech, calling on the warring European powers to let him mediate a “peace without victory.” He had been ferociously denounced by former president Theodore Roosevelt and other leading Republicans as something close to a traitor. The warring nations had all rejected Wilson’s entreaty, and Germany had added injury to this insult by announcing that on February 1, 1917, it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare in barred zones around the British Isles and the ports of its enemies in the Mediterranean.

Wilson had broken diplomatic relations with Germany, sending its suave ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, back to Berlin on February 3. On March 1, alienation between the two nations had deepened drastically when Wilson authorized the State Department to release a telegram from the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to the government of Mexico, proposing an alliance if war should break out between Germany and the United States. The message had been intercepted by British cryptanalysts and discreetly leaked to the American government.

Most diplomats would have dismissed the dispatch as a forgery. But the Germans, imbued with the righteousness of their cause and profoundly disenchanted with the Americans for selling their enemies hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of high explosives and weaponry, admitted every word was true, down to the proposal that a successful war would restore Mexico’s “lost territories” of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
²

Outrage simmered from sea to shining sea. The United States had been on the brink of war with Mexico since Wilson took office, thanks largely to his interference in their ongoing revolution. But Americans regarded the matter as a private quarrel shielded by the Monroe Doctrine.

In mid-March, German submarines sank four American ships in the barred zone, drowning fifteen sailors. A chorus of mostly Republican senators and congressmen called for war. Wilson’s cabinet told him they unanimously favored it. Reflecting this widespread anger, the
New York Tribune
’s April 2 headline virtually shouted: “Congress Ready to Declare State of War Now Exists, Country in a Militant Mood.”

On the front page of the same edition,
Tribune
Washington correspondent Cass W. Gilbert enlivened his readers with a snide assault that underscored the paper’s long-running disenchantment with Woodrow Wilson. Gilbert bluntly questioned whether the president could inspire the nation to fight a war: “Making war is a great act of the emotions and will. Mr. Wilson is an intellectual. [Can he summon] a great burst of righteous feeling [in] the hearts of men?” As for Congress, Gilbert virtually dismissed it as hopeless. “Let Germany do it” (that is, let Germany push the United States into the war) had been Congress’s policy for too long. But Berlin’s transgressions were quickly forgotten by the fickle American public. Gilbert feared that Wilson, whose “almost physical revulsion” against war had been starkly visible to red-blooded Americans, would do little but present a “legal brief ” against Germany.
³

The
Tribune
story was evidence of the Republican Party’s hostility toward Wilson—and something deeper: a mixture of bafflement and amazement to find this man president of the United States. In 1910, a mere seven years earlier, Woodrow Wilson had been president of a minor-league New Jersey college called Princeton. He had left that presidency in a cloud of acrimony, having alienated almost everyone on the faculty and the board of trustees.
⁴

Former president Grover Cleveland, a member of the board of trustees, had called Wilson a dishonorable man who was careless about facts and had a volatile, vindictive temper. Other Princetonians called Wilson a liar and a demagogue. The one talent Wilson displayed in complicated disputes about a building for the graduate school and reorganizing the college around a “Quad Plan” was a gift for denouncing his opponents as traitors to America’s ideals. He accused them of defending privilege against democracy. This got him numerous headlines. Scholars who have investigated the details of these long-forgotten quarrels have dismissed Wilson’s charges as sheer fiction.
⁵

A man without a future in academe, Wilson accepted the offer of wealthy conservative Democrats to back him for governor of New Jersey. The man behind the offer was an ebullient journalist named George Harvey, editor of
Harper’s
magazine, whose contacts included J.P. Morgan, Jr.—like his late father, the undisputed titan of American finance. The conservatives’ game plan was to publicize Wilson’s gubernatorial performance and use him as a foil to take the Democratic Party away from the Nebraska orator William Jennings Bryan. The so-called Great Commoner had been giving the money men nervous tremors since 1896, when he made the first of his three runs for the presidency on the demagogic cry “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”

Harvey’s offer stirred long-suppressed yearnings in Wilson’s soul. From his early manhood, he had daydreamed about winning political power. “This is what I was meant for, the rough and tumble of the political arena,” he told one of his favorite correspondents.“My instinct all turns that way.”

What drove this instinct? Essentially, it was an appetite for fame; deeper in Wilson’s psyche was a desire to transcend a frequently critical minister father and his own self-doubts. While courting his first wife, Ellen Axson, the future president confessed “a passion for interpreting great events to the world.” He yearned to “inspire a great movement of opinion.” Not long after this confession, at the age of thirty-three, he had confided to his diary the outsize hope that his era’s political autobiography would be written through his life.
⁶

Wilson won the governorship of New Jersey in 1910. During the campaign, he confounded his conservative backers by becoming a fiery progressive. Jettisoned were his publicly stated views that labor unions were bad, that big business monopolies called trusts were legitimate enterprises, and that political bosses were necessary to make parties run smoothly. Wilson’s liberal program as governor of New Jersey won him headlines and the Democratic nomination for president in 1912. Ordinarily, this honor would have led straight to the same sort of humiliation William Jennings Bryan had repeatedly suffered at the hands of the well-financed Republican Party. The only Democrat elected president since the Civil War had been Grover Cleveland (1884 and 1892), who talked and acted more like a Republican.

But the United States had been in ferment for the previous decade; progressive ideas about limiting the power of big business and restoring a more equal liberty to American life had been espoused by liberals in both parties. When former president Theodore Roosevelt sought the 1912 Republican nomination as an all-out progressive, the GOP’s (Grand Old Party’s) conservatives balked and stayed with the current occupant of the White House, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party and split the Republican majority. Woodrow Wilson became president with a mere 42 percent of the vote, leaving the Republicans in a state of shock and disarray from which they had yet to recover.

Among the other stories in the
Tribune
and sister newspapers on April 2 were reports on the latest carnage from Europe’s battlefronts. As usual, the papers gave readers the impression that the Germans were losing the war. The headline in the
New York Times
read: “Haig Beats Back Foe Three Miles from St. Quentin: British Drive Foe Out of Savy, Three Miles West of the City After Heavy Fighting.” Sir Douglas Haig was the commander in chief of the British army in France. Today this dour Scot is high on any list of the worst generals in history. In his 1916 offensive along the Somme River in northern France, Haig lost 527,000 men to gain a few miles of muddy, shell-pocked earth. The British had declared a victory and promoted Sir Douglas to field marshal.

Americans knew even less about what the Germans were thinking and doing on their side of no-man’s-land. More than the traditional fog of war enveloped the battlefields. The murk was compounded by rigid censorship and massive propaganda—and compounded again by a widespread conviction that the untrustworthy Germans were trying to manipulate American public opinion.

Another news story of burgeoning importance was the revolution in Russia. On March 15, 1917, a liberal majority in the Russian parliament had deposed Czar Nicholas Romanoff and announced their intention to create a democratic government. Pro-war newspapers and magazines in the United States had hailed this event as a godsend to the Allied cause. Now the war could be described as a clear-cut contest between despotism and democracy. On April 2 the
Washington Evening Post
carried a vivid story about the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, who reported the revolution was being acclaimed with wild enthusiasm in Siberia.
The Nation
, one of the leaders of U.S. liberal opinion, excitedly declared: “With a single gesture the Russian people has won its own freedom and lifted a heavy burden from the shoulders of the . . . democratic nations of western Europe.”
⁷

On April 2, President Wilson, who had been sleeping poorly, was up at dawn to take a last look at his “communication.” He had written most of the speech on his portable Hammond typewriter during the morning of March 30 and the afternoon of March 31. He did not finish it until about 10 P.M. on April 1. While working on it, his mood had been vile; he had snapped and snarled at the White House servants, demanding quiet. As usual, the president had delayed writing until the last possible moment; he thought this gave him better command of the intellectual and emotional content of a speech.
⁸

There are other versions of how Wilson wrote his speech and what he felt about it. Edith Galt Wilson later told of waking up a night or two before April 2 and finding her husband gone from their bedroom. She searched the darkened White House and finally discovered him on the South Portico, writing the speech on his portable typewriter by the light of an electric lantern. Edith went to the kitchen, got a glass of milk and a cookie, and left them beside his chair. The story is unlikely, not only because it contradicts the diary of a White House staffer, who recalled the president’s bad mood and demands for quiet. The South Portico was not the place a president would be likely to go in the middle of the night, when he had a second-floor office only a few steps from his bedroom. But it reveals Edith’s view of herself as Wilson’s humble helpmate and silent coadjutor—an image she needed to project in later years because she had been neither silent nor humble in her White House days.
⁹

Even more intriguing in some ways—and a far more quoted part of the Wilson legend—is a story that appeared in a biography of Frank I. Cobb, editor in chief of the
New York World
. According to the author of the book, two of Cobb’s former colleagues on the
World
, Laurence Stallings and playwright Maxwell Anderson, recalled that Cobb told them he had been summoned to the White House on the night of April 1–2 to discuss Wilson’s decision for war. He did not get there until 1 A.M., and they talked into the dawn. Wilson told Cobb he had “considered every loophole” to escape going to war, but each time, Germany deliberately blocked the path of peace with some “new outrage.”

Then Wilson began to talk about the impact the war would have on the United States: “He said when a war got going it was just war and there weren’t two kinds of it,” Cobb said.“It required illiberalism at home to reinforce the men at the front. We couldn’t fight Germany and maintain the ideals of government that all thinking men shared. He said we would try but it would be too much for us.”

“‘Once lead this people into war,’Wilson continued,‘and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be ruthless and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter the very fibre of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street’ . . .

“He thought the Constitution would not survive it,” Cobb said.“That free speech and the right of assembly would go. He said a nation couldn’t put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it had never been done.

“‘If there’s any alternative, for God’s sake let’s take it,’ he (Wilson) exclaimed. Well I couldn’t see any, and I told him so,” Cobb concluded.
¹⁰