The Illusion of Victory (45 page)

In Washington, progressive Gifford Pinchot, close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, had established the Federal Board of Farm Organizations, which sounded official. Pinchot and other Republicans assailed Wilson’s decision as one more example of Democratic favoritism for the South, where the crop that mattered was cotton.

Unfortunately for the president, they were right. Wilson had never been able to persuade the Southerners to agree to a price ceiling on cotton. By 1918, it was 400 percent above prewar levels, and Southern planters were raising so much of it, the market was staggering toward a glut. But Wilson was seldom inclined to change his mind once he had decided he was in the right. Even after the House of Representatives shaved ten cents off Senator Gore’s price of wheat per bushel and the Senate reluctantly yielded, Wilson still vetoed the agriculture bill.

The West exploded with outrage. Progressive Republican icon Senator William Borah of Idaho claimed to be “utterly demoralized.” Senator Gore rushed an article into print, entitled “The Wheat Farmer’s Dilemma.” An Iowa newspaper ranted:“The . . . farmer would be satisfied with the present price of wheat if he did not know that the Georgia cotton farmer is allowed to sell his product on an unregulated market. He thinks there is politics in that situation, and he is right.” a Republican state convention in Nebraska condemned the Democratic administration for “its failure to fix a reasonable price for cotton when it fixed the price for wheat.”
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As if this were not enough trouble in an election year, House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin and Postmaster General Burleson decided to increase the postage on second-class mail. The nation’s newspapers, already irritated by competition with George Creel’s Committee on Public Information and the informal but tight censorship on war news, reacted with predictable fury.

A dismayed Joe Tumulty asked Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo if the money could be found elsewhere. The answer was yes, but neither McAdoo nor anyone else in Washington could stop the imperious Wilson-hating Kitchin. In desperation, Tumulty turned to the man who had tried to knife him in the back in 1916, Colonel House. The president’s secretary wrote an urgently realistic letter, warning that the postal price rise was “very unwise politically.” He never got an answer.
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Colonel House had other things on his mind, more important than domestic politics. As it became apparent that Germany might collapse sooner than anyone expected, the colonel started worrying about Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. On September 3, 1918, he wrote to the president, asking if it were not time “to commit the Allies to some of the things for which we are fighting.” Both men were all too aware that the Allied response to the Fourteen Points speech had been tepid to the edge of negative.

House warned that as the Allies’ military successes on the Western Front mounted, Wilson’s influence would diminish. With startling candor, the colonel described the leaders of the Allied governments as “hostile rather than sympathetic” to Wilson and his goals. When victory came, liberals in the Allied countries would support the United States, but “they will be in the minority and their voices will be heard faintly by the great exultant throng.” this was a long way from the joint crusade to make the world safe for democracy that Wilson and House used as their rationale to get the United States into the war.
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What was the answer? Another speech, declared House, in his Philip Dru mode. A speech in which the president would restate his ideals and stress the importance of a league of nations as part of the peace treaty. Wilson responded by adjourning to his typewriter. On September 24, an excited House told his diary that he was just back from Washington, where he had read the president’s latest oratorical effort. As usual, House thought it was marvelous and when he got to New York, he called Frank Cobb of the
World
to discuss the kind of editorial he should write after the president spoke at the Metropolitan Opera House on September 27, 1918.

The ostensible purpose of Wilson’s appearance was the kickoff of the Fourth Liberty Loan drive. The scene was splendid. The great opera house blazed with Beaux Arts gilt and glitter. Much of the wealth and fashion of the great city were in the audience. The Republican governor of the state, Charles S. Whitman, presided. The president began by sounding as if he agreed with his Republican critics. There would be “no bargain or compromise” with the governments of the Central empires.“We cannot come to terms with them.”

At the same time, the Allies had an obligation to achieve a peace that embodied “impartial justice in every item of the settlement.” the weak as well as the strong would be treated with the same strict standard. The instrument for achieving this lofty goal was a league of nations. The president introduced a list of “Five Particulars” that the league would enforce. These included bans on alliances furthering special interests, selfish
economic combinations, and secret treaties. Wilson ended with an appeal to the Allied leaders to join the United States in an affirmation of these ideals.

In the audience, House grew more and more alarmed at the reaction to the speech.“Most of it seemed somewhat over the[ir] heads,” he later told his diary.“The parts which were unimportant [brought] the most vigorous applause.”
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What got the greatest applause was Wilson’s statement that the United States would not negotiate with the Central Powers. The next day, this was the point that most newspapers featured. House was dismayed by the “lack of discrimination” the nation’s editors displayed. It was grim evidence that Republican denunciations of a negotiated peace had coalesced with war rage to achieve significant influence in the public mind. Beside this hulking hunger for revenge, Wilson’s abstract ideals looked pale and commonplace in a way that evoked the old saw about familiarity breeding contempt.

Even more disturbing, except for a few congratulatory telegrams from individuals, the Allied governments maintained a cold silence. They were unmoved by Wilson’s plea that “unity of purpose” was as “imperatively necessary in this war as was unity of command on the battlefield.” the failure of this speech was a shock that Wilson never entirely absorbed. He thought it had been a sensational success. Back at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, House described him as “flushed with excitement and altogether pleased with the day’s effort.”
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Meanwhile, Theodore Roosevelt was rampaging through the Western states, ostensibly in support of the Fourth Liberty Loan drive. His real purpose was to flagellate Woodrow Wilson. Everywhere, after urging his listeners to buy bonds, TR blasted Wilson as the purveyor of a “quack peace.” He followed this with a denunciation of the league of nations idea, which he dismissed as a scrap of paper that would seduce the United States into disbanding its army and weakening its navy.
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Into this political cauldron hurtled a message from imperial Germany. The government was asking for an immediate armistice and a negotiated peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

Nightmarish things had been happening in the German psyche since the failure of Quartermaster General Ludendorff ’s final offensive in July. After persuading the kaiser and the rest of the civilian government that victory on the Western Front was within Germany’s grasp, Ludendorff suffered a total failure of nerve when the prize eluded him and Allied counterattacks began. The conduct of some units of the German army during the August 8 British offensive had revealed alarming signs that Bolshevik propaganda was infecting many soldiers. Retreating troops had shouted,“Blackleg [strikebreaker], you’re prolonging the war!” at divisions that were replacing them in the lines.

Overall, the August 8 battle was far from a knockout blow. German losses were no worse than the British had suffered in Ludendorff ’s March assault on the Fifth Army. With its usual skill, the German general staff rushed reserves from the north to seal off the breakthrough and knocked out 300 of the 450 British tanks that had led the first day’s assault. But Ludendorff called the setback “the black day of the German army,” and on August 10, the quartermaster general told a stunned kaiser that Germany’s only hope of salvaging anything from the war was an immediate peace.
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When Allied attacks temporarily subsided, Ludendorff got a grip on himself. He decided the German army could stand on the defensive in France, using its superior artillery and local counterattacks to wear the Allies down to the point where both sides would agree to a peace of exhaustion. This was a fatal illusion. Thanks to the British blockade, the German home front was very close to collapse. People were eating four ounces of meat a week. Influenza was killing tens of thousands. Cars, locomotives, tractors, stood idle for want of spare parts. There was no soap, no shoes. Child mortality was soaring. In July the government began confiscating table linens from hotels and restaurants and stripping houses of curtains.
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Inevitably, the demoralization of the home front infected the army. As the British, French and Americans renewed their attacks, unprecedented numbers of deserters and malingerers fled the front lines. One German historian estimated their number as high as 750,000 and called it “a covert strike.” Soon one of Ludendorff ’s staff officers was telling his diary that the quartermaster general “despairs of fighting but does not have the courage to bring it to an end.”

As September drew to a close, a flood of bad news made it impossible for Ludendorff to deceive himself or anyone else. Bulgaria, reeling from a British-French-Serbian offensive surging from Greece, dropped out of the war. Austria-Hungary announced it wanted a separate peace. Turkey, cut off from German ammunition and other war matériel by Bulgaria’s collapse,
was also about to quit. On September 28, Ludendorff told the kaiser and the rest of the civilian government that only an immediate armistice could save the German army from catastrophe.
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For the previous two years, Ludendorff and von Hindenburg had been the real rulers of Germany, with the kaiser’s acquiescence. They had chosen and dismissed chancellors and foreign ministers with unchallenged authority. Now this supremacy was shorn by imminent defeat, and Germany’s civilian leaders erupted in a furious demand for political reforms that would make the kaiser and the military subordinate to the Reichstag. A liberal, Prince Max of Baden, became chancellor with the backing of the Social Democratic Party, the Progressives, and like-minded groups.
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There was a certain amount of calculation in this transformation. The decision to seek peace based on the Fourteen Points required an infusion of democracy into a political structure that tradition had made authoritarian and the war had reinforced to an unparalleled degree. Quartermaster General Ludendorff acquiesced in this metamorphosis, hoping to save as much of the old order as possible. As one historian put it with fine irony, “the father of German democracy was Erich Ludendorff.”
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On October 1, Ludendorff told the new civilian government,“Today the troops are holding their own; what may happen tomorrow cannot be foreseen . . . the line might be broken at any moment and then our proposal would come at the most unfavorable time. . . . [It] must be forwarded immediately . . . to Washington.” Protesting such haste, the new chancellor sent the epochal message via the Swiss government: Germany was ready to negotiate peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Reeling Austria-Hungary added a pathetic footnote, saying it would accept the same terms.
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Woodrow Wilson was as stunned as everyone else by this revelation that Germany was virtually defeated. He immediately telephoned New York to ask Colonel House for advice. It was October 6. The congressional elections were churning to a climax. From that point of view, the timing could not have been worse. There were huge questions that needed to be answered. How could the president make sure the Germans did not use an armistice to rebuild their army? Would the French and the British accept the Fourteen Points? Nine months of silence was not a promising augury.
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In a telegram, House told Wilson he should make no direct reply to the Germans. Better would be a statement that he would confer at once with the Allies. Meanwhile, House would start packing for a trip to Paris. He was convinced that it would be a possibly fatal mistake to let this opportunity for peace slip past. Hopelessness could stiffen German resistance. If that happened, the people of Great Britain and France might launch a peace movement that would win Germany better terms than the Allies could impose on it now.
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Most of the American press, still engulfed by war rage, dismissed the German offer as a maneuver. Absolute surrender, declared the
Baltimore Sun
, was “the sine qua non for peace.” abroad, French and British papers were equally negative. They hoped Wilson would reject the offer with contempt. The reaction in the U.S. Senate was even more hostile. In a two-hour debate on October 8, not a single speaker had a good word to say for Prince Max’s proposal. The
New York Tribune
reported that the solons unanimously demanded its “immediate rejection.” Only after a “crushing military defeat” should there be any talk of peace. In an exchange that today sounds almost surreal, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge asked, “Don’t you think . . . that an armistice now would mean the loss of the war?” Republican Senator Miles Poindexter of Washington replied, “I do not think that is too strong a statement.”
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By this time, Robert La Follette had returned to the Senate. With his case still pending before the Committee on Privileges, his lawyer had ordered him to make no extemporaneous speeches until it was settled. He was forced to sit in silence while the rest of the Senate called for continued war.“It wasn’t very easy to sit it out but I did,” he told his family.
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