Read The Illusion of Victory Online
Authors: Thomas Fleming
This boast was alarming evidence that Philip Dru was at work again, solving tangled political dilemmas that had resisted decades of diplomacy with a naive belief in the power of pronouncements from on high. Convinced that Wilson’s prestige as a preacher of international ideals was in the ascendancy, House was serenely confident in his alter ego’s power to transform the globe.
A rude shock from not-so-merrie England punched a hole in this optimism. In London, Prime Minister Lloyd George made a speech to the British Trades Union Congress. The British leader said many, even most, of the same idealistic things the president was planning to say. British intelligence chief Sir William Wiseman told Colonel House that the speech was written by Lord David Cecil, a leading British liberal. It was the first but by no means the last glimpse of Lloyd George’s fondness for working both sides of the political street.
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An infuriated Wilson told House there was no longer any point in making his speech. The agitated colonel had to work very hard to persuade Wilson that Lloyd George had “cleared the air”—and that made it “more necessary” for Wilson to speak. A semiapologetic cable from Foreign Secretary Balfour helped House persuade Wilson to go ahead. Balfour claimed that Lloyd George had been forced to appease the trade unions without delay. Surly over the government’s boycott of the Stockholm Conference, they were in a state of collective indiscipline that almost matched the mood of the French army.
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Wilson remained unmollified for another two days. On January 8, he finally decided to go ahead. Giving Congress only a half hour’s notice, the president went before the legislature again to deliver what many consider his most famous speech. In it he proclaimed “Fourteen Points” that were fundamental to America’s war aims. He spent the first several minutes expressing sympathy with the Russian attempt to negotiate peace with the Germans. He even went so far as to imply that the Bolsheviks were the authentic voice of the Russian people. In a flight of moving eloquence, he portrayed the Russian masses negotiating with the “grim power” of Germany with “a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit” that was bound to win “the admiration of mankind.” He reported that German terms of “conquest and domination” were so greedy, the Russians had broken off the negotiations, refusing to abandon their “humane and honorable” ideals or “desert others that they themselves may be safe.”
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Unfortunately, this was rhetoric from never-never land, like Wilson’s previous pronouncements about the Mexican revolution. The Bolsheviks were not the authentic voice of the Russian people. They were a splinter party, at best. In elections held six weeks earlier, a huge majority of the Russian people had repudiated them. Contrary to a January 3
New York Times
headline, Lenin had not broken off negotiations with the Germans. He and Trotsky were doing exactly what Wilson praised them for not doing—deserting the Allies to preserve their grip on power. As for humane and honorable ideals, the Bolsheviks regarded such notions as leftovers from the era of “rotten liberalism.”
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Next Wilson tried to deal with German peace initiatives. He said no one could tell whether they came from “liberal leaders and parties” or those who “insist upon conquest and subjugation.” he wondered if the two sides were not in “hopeless contradiction.” On the other hand, there was no “confusion of counsel” among the Allies—“no uncertainty of principle, no vagueness of detail.” Only the Germans clung to “secrecy of counsel” and “lack of fearless frankness.”
These claims were so far from the truth as we now know it, one can only take it as a measure of Wilson’s desperation. The president was finessing British, French and Italian intransigence on the secret treaties and Clemenceau confronting left wing peace proponents with firing squads. The president tried to manage this verbal prestidigitation by proclaiming a new era.“The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by, so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments. ” the processes of peace would involve “no secret understandings of any kind.”
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Wilson now outlined his “program of the world’s peace”:
The next seven clauses dealt with rearranging the map of Europe, from restoring Belgian independence and returning Alsace-Lorraine to France to creating an independent Polish state. Several dealt with such particular questions as giving Serbia “free and secure access to the sea”—not exactly an issue that would inspire Americans to fight to the death. In the fourteenth point, Wilson returned to a supremely idealistic goal: “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants” to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity “to great and small states alike” around the world.
These were the purposes for which Americans were prepared to do battle against “the Imperialists.” Again, one is almost boggled by the way Wilson fastened this term of opprobrium on Germany, while England and France between them had several hundred million people in their colonial grip. Wilson’s goal became clearer in his closing words, in which he insisted that “we have no jealousy of German greatness and there is nothing in our program that impairs it.” He praised Germany’s achievements in science and culture. He only wanted to see it accept a place of “equality” among the peoples of the world—“instead of a place of mastery.”
Next came an even more startling statement.“Neither do we presume to suggest to her [Germany] any alteration or modification of her institutions.” He only wanted to know whether Germany’s spokesmen “speak . . . for the Reichstag majority or for the military party and the men whose creed is imperial domination.” Wilson was appealing over the heads of Germany’s rulers to this liberal group, whose existence he had hitherto denied.
The president ended in a soaring tribute to the basic tenet of his program: “Justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.” On this principle,“the culminating and final war for human liberty” would be fought.
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The Fourteen Points speech received extravagant praise in the United States. Even Theodore Roosevelt approved of it, at least in public. The
New York Tribune,
long a harsh Wilson critic, called it “one of the great documents of American history” and compared it to the Gettysburg Address. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge grudgingly admitted the speech met with “general approbation,” but too much of it was “general bleat about virtue being better than vice.”
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In Europe praise was lukewarm, at best. The British made it clear that they had no intention of surrendering their best imperial weapon, the blockade, to absolute freedom of the seas. Lord Northcliffe’s
Times
muttered that Wilson assumed “the reign of righteousness on earth is already within our reach.” The French were even more skeptical. In private, Premier Clemenceau, who already disliked Wilson, remarked that God was satisfied with ten commandments but Wilson wanted fourteen. All concerned were miffed by Wilson’s omission of a very important term: reparations.
Neither England nor France nor Italy said an official word about the speech. As far as changing anyone’s mind about the secret treaties was concerned, the Fourteen Points were a flop. The speech also accomplished zero minus with the Bolsheviks. Leon Trotsky dismissed it as capitalist hot air and said the Allies, including Wilson, secretly backed the tough German negotiating stance at Brest-Litovsk. The Bolshevik newspaper,
Pravda,
sneered that “the American President Wilson, in the tones of a Quaker preacher, proclaims to the peoples of the world the teaching of highest government morality.”
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Buoyed by a deluge of domestic praise, the president turned his attention to the attacks on the administration still erupting on Capitol Hill. He grew visibly irritated when Senator George Chamberlain of Oregon sponsored a bill calling for a secretary of munitions who would take over all the procurement functions of the War and Navy Departments. Chamberlain had been a staunch Wilson supporter since the war began, frequently defending the administration against Republican attacks. The Oregon solon and another Democratic backer of the bill, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, went to the White House to discuss the defects of the war effort with the president.
After the meeting, Chamberlain felt they had gotten nowhere. The president “seemed impatient with us,” he later said. Visible evidence of Wilson’s opinion came in the form of a letter, curtly dismissing the idea of a munitions secretary. The letter was simultaneously released to the press. Such public humiliation was not likely to warm Senator Chamberlain’s heart.
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Next came a shock that threatened to become a political earthquake. With no warning, Fuel Administrator Garfield shut down all the factories in the country east of the Mississippi River for a week. Thereafter, factories not directly related to the war effort were to be limited to a five-day (instead of a six-day) week until March 25.Wild-eyed reporters called presidential secretary Joe Tumulty at midnight on January 17, 1918, to ask for an explanation. The flabbergasted Tumulty could only stammer that it was the first he had heard about it—which meant Woodrow Wilson knew even less. Here was visible evidence that the administration’s right hand did not now what its left hand was doing.
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Labor unions roared protests over lost wages. Business leaders bombarded Congress and the White House with squawks over diminished profits. A staggering 30,000 plants were closed in New York City alone. Garfield tried to explain that he was trying to funnel enough coal to East Coast ports to supply dozens of ships with fuel to get war matériel to Europe. Even the
New York World
gave up on Wilson’s old friend and urged the president to jettison him. The paper called “Garfield’s blunder” the first American defeat of the war. The Senate voted 50 to 19 to delay the order, with dozens of Democrats defecting. Wilson stonily defended the order and Garfield. In a letter to Bernard Baruch, he dismissed people who “wince and cry when they are a little bit hurt.”
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The contretemps inspired Senator Chamberlain to present yet another bill, proposing to take even more power away from the president. This one called for the creation of a War Council of “three distinguished citizens” who would work with the president on the prosecution of the war and largely supersede the existing cabinet. Most newspapers hailed the idea as a stroke of legislative genius. Even the usually pro-Wilson
New York Times
liked it.
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On January 19, the same day that his new bill was introduced in the Senate, Chamberlain spoke to a joint meeting of the National Security League and the American Defense Society at New York’s Manhattan Club. No fewer than 1,900 of these patriots had gathered to hear him. At the head table were Theodore Roosevelt, who was an old Chamberlain friend, and Elihu Root, former secretary of war under McKinley and Roosevelt and the grand old man of the GOP.
Root set the stage when he introduced Chamberlain. He pointed out that England, France and Italy had been forced to change governments and governmental structures in the course of the war. He hailed Chamberlain as a “wise and patriotic” leader who was trying to persuade the United States to do the same thing. Chamberlain proceeded to fulfill Root’s fondest Republican hopes. He painted a portrait of a war effort in near-total disarray:“The military establishment of America has fallen down. . . . It has almost stopped functioning. Why? Because of inefficiency in every bureau and in every department of the Government of the United States.”
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These words made headlines coast to coast. Woodrow Wilson fired off a furious letter to Chamberlain, demanding an explanation or a retraction. The senator replied that he did not intend his blast as a personal attack. It was the system that was at fault. He was only trying to correct it for the sake of the Democratic Party as well as the country. Wilson responded with a public letter aimed at nothing less than Chamberlain’s dismemberment.
The president called the senator’s speech “an astonishing and absolutely mystifying distortion of the truth.” the charge of inefficiency in every department of the government “show[ed] such an ignorance of the actual conditions as to make it impossible to attach any importance to his statement. ” wilson defended Secretary of War Newton Baker on all points, calling him “one of the ablest public officials I have ever known,” and dismissed the Senate investigations as a waste of time. Also dismissed with breathtaking contempt were Chamberlain’s War Council and Munitions Secretary bills. The president said he could only draw one conclusion: Chamberlain was opposed to “the administration’s whole policy”—in a word, he was a traitor the Democratic Party.
The Portland
Oregonian
accused Wilson of trying to politically assassinate the senator “to prevent the overthrow of his entire military administration by Congress.” the newspaper may have somewhat exaggerated the president’s intention, but its appraisal of what was at stake in this brawl was definitely on target. Theodore Roosevelt made this clear by rushing to Washington to rally Republicans for a final assault that would force Wilson to accept the War Council and Munitions Secretary bills. If he did so, the president would be all but forced to appoint prominent Republicans to some of these jobs. In a moment of overconfidence, Roosevelt told reporters he was “going after the man in the White House.”
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