The Illusion of Victory (65 page)

In Boston, Eamon de Valera, the provisional president of the yet unborn Irish republic, called the peace treaty a mockery. It would create “twenty new wars in place of the one nominally ended.” the League of Nations, he sneered, was simply a new “Holy Alliance.” with Great Britain in the driver’s seat, it could not “save democracy.”
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What did Woodrow Wilson really think of the treaty? At a press conference before he headed home, when Lincoln Steffens asked him if it was a good peace, the president said,“I think that we have made a better peace than I should have expected when I came here to Paris.” this reply comes under the category of “What else do you expect a president to say about an enterprise on which he had just spent seven months of his life?” In a private letter written around the same time, Wilson described the results as “much better than at one time I feared.” this is a more accurate description of his emotional ups and downs in Paris, but still rather far from the truth.

A more revealing glimpse of Wilson’s true feelings was a behind-the-scenes contretemps that erupted when he and Mrs. Wilson were invited to a farewell banquet by President Raymond Poincaré of France. Wilson flatly refused to go. In colorful (for him) language, he expressed his intense dislike for the pompous president, who had been the hardest of the French hard-liners in the demand for a punitive peace. Wilson told Colonel House he would “choke” if he sat at the table with Poincaré.
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Only frantic efforts on the part of Colonel House, Henry White and Jules Jusserand, France’s ambassador to the United States, changed Wilson’s mind. The episode suggests that beneath Wilson’s attempts to tell himself and others that the peace treaty was a job well done lay an awareness that it was the betrayal, even the mockery, of the Fourteen Points that the liberals of England and America—and the Germans—said it was.

On June 28, before the president left for Brest, where the
George Washington
was waiting, Wilson had a final conversation with Colonel House. In the last two months of the peace conference, Wilson had shunted House to the periphery of the diplomatic struggle, seldom taking his advice and often not even informing him of what had been decided. The colonel, in a forlorn attempt to regain their old intimacy, again urged him to be conciliatory with the Senate. Wilson’s eyes flashed fire.“House,” he said, “I have found one can never get anything in this life that is worthwhile without fighting for it.”

The colonel murmured that he thought they both understood that “Anglo-Saxon civilization was built up on compromise.”

Wilson turned away in silent disagreement.

The exchange was both a commentary on Wilson’s ordeal of failure in Paris and an omen of future anguish in the United States. It was also the last conversation Woodrow Wilson had with Edward Mandell House. They never saw each other again.
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Philip Dru was on his own.

With battleships and destroyers steaming to port and starboard, the
George Washington
reached New York Harbor on July 8, 1919. The seas had been calm, the voyage refreshing. Woodrow Wilson seemed in fighting trim as he debarked to the cheers of thousands of schoolchildren in Hoboken. Whisked across the river to Manhattan, he enjoyed more acclamation from his fellow Democrats as he rode in an open car to Carnegie Hall, where newly elected Democratic Governor Alfred E. Smith hailed him as the savior of Europe. Wilson responded with a brief speech in which he said he was so glad to be home, even Hoboken had looked beautiful. He paid tribute to the sacrifices of “that army of clean men,” the AEF, who were “devoted to the highest interests of humanity.” Like them, the peacemakers in Paris had tried to “lift [their eyes] to a distant horizon.” But here at home, some people had failed to understand this worldwide vision. They had kept their eyes “too much on the ground.” the great task now was to preserve the peace that had been won in Europe.
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Anyone who knew anything about the brutalities of Belleau Wood and the Argonne must have concluded from Wilson’s description of the AEF that he never had an honest conversation with a doughboy while he was in France. His description of the peacemakers in Paris was even more misleading. Wilson headed for Washington, D.C., where a boisterous crowd cheered him at Union Station. Among them was Alice Roosevelt Long-worth, who gloated that most of the greeters seemed to be run-of-the-mill president gawkers. Proving that she had inherited her father’s penchant for over-the-top politics, Alice crossed her fingers and put an Irish curse on Wilson: “A murrain on him,” she muttered, with her fingers crossed.“A murrain on him.”
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In the White House, Alice’s curse soon seemed to be working. Wilson toiled over the speech he planned to make when he presented the treaty to the Senate. He could not get it right. Almost certainly, the missing ingredient was Colonel House. If he had brought House home with him, they would have blocked out the speech aboard the
George Washington
and Wilson would have completed it in a few hours as the deadline approached. Wilson blamed his trouble on having “so very little respect” for the audience he was going to address.

On July 10, Wilson went to the Senate with the treaty under his arm. The reception was inauspicious. The minority Democrats gave him a standing ovation; most of the Republicans did not make a sound. Several did not even stand. The president began by calling the treaty “nothing less than a world settlement.” But he was strangely uninformative about how the settlement was reached. He claimed there was no need to tell the senators “what was attempted and done at Paris.” Instead he chose a “less ambitious” course. It was odd to hear a man regarded as one of the best orators in American history apologizing in advance for his speech.

Wilson proceeded to recap why the United States had entered the war and the crucial element the AEF had played in changing the course of the struggle on the Western Front. He called the doughboys “the visible embodiment of America.” they had made the nation “a living reality” not only in France but among tens of millions of other people whose freedom was in danger.

The president talked about how the Americans at the peace conference had tried to make the nation’s ideals the basis for a lasting peace. He discussed the new countries they had created from the Austro-Hungarian empire, the need to protect racial and religious minorities. Ultimately, he claimed, it had become apparent to everyone that the League of Nations was vital to the treaty, if any kind of lasting peace was to be achieved.

Not a word about the strenuous efforts of the British and the French to jettison the league until the treaty was completed—or the way Wilson had repeatedly sacrificed the Fourteen Points to keep the league linked to the treaty. It is unreasonable, of course, to expect a president to tell the whole truth about what we now call a summit conference. But Wilson’s departures from reality struck an especially discordant note in the wake of his earlier condemnations of secret diplomacy. They also ignored the way the treaty had already been denounced by liberals and even by some members of the American peace delegation.

The league was also needed, the president continued, to make sure “the monster that had resorted to arms” would remain “in chains that could not be broken.” the League of Nations was the only way to stop future aggression by Germany and other nations. It was the hope of the world. The statesmen of Europe had realized they did not dare disappoint this hope. “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” the president asked.

This was the only memorable line of his speech. But not a single newspaper picked it up and converted it into a slogan, as they had with “the war to end wars” or “making the world safe for democracy.” Equally ignored was a statement of religious faith that was clearly very meaningful to the president. The war, American’s intervention, and now the peace, Wilson said,“[have] come about by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who led us into this way.” Unfortunately, that moving line was followed by rhetoric that was more than a little hackneyed:“We can only go forward with lifted eyes and freshened spirit to follow the vision. . . . America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.”
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The speech was a flop. One Democrat, borrowing a phrase from Lincoln, muttered that it did not “scour.” Senator Brandegee of Connecticut dismissed it as “soap bubbles of oratory.” More to the point was the comment of Senator Medill McCormick of Illinois, whose family owned the
Chicago Daily Tribune
:“soothing, mellifluous and uninformative.” The president had not mentioned a host of topics the senators wanted and needed to understand: why he had given Shantung’s 20 million Chinese to Japan; why he had refused to say a word on behalf of Ireland; why he supported Article 10, which many denounced as an obligation to defend the British empire, from Dublin to Singapore to Hong Kong. Senator Harry Ashurst of New Mexico said Wilson reminded him of the president of a troubled company who, instead of giving facts and figures to his board of directors, read them Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.”
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Is there an explanation for this stunning failure, beyond the absence of Colonel House? Some historians have attributed it—and Wilson’s woes in Paris—to his exhaustion, which worsened his chronic hypertension and triggered small strokes that left him mentally incapacitated. But there are other equally cogent explanations: notably, Wilson’s awareness of the peace treaty’s barbarity, and his all-too-realistic fear that this would poison people’s opinion of the League of Nations. On top of this realization was the knowledge that he had blundered by going to Paris in the first place and blundered again by returning in February to subject himself to endless humiliation and scarifying compromises at the hands of Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Wilson’s confidence in himself as well as in Colonel House had been grievously damaged by these experiences.

In the speech, the man who wanted to bring peace to the world referred to Germany, where hundreds of thousands of people were still living on the edge of starvation, as a monster that must be kept in chains. He did not say a word about British brutality in Ireland. He talked of Europe’s statesmen as converts to the League of Nations, denying Clemenceau’s derision, Lloyd George’s indifference. This was a man with too many compromises on his conscience, too much anger and anxiety in the depths of his soul. Try as he might to lie to himself and others about it, Wilson knew he had produced a treaty that, in words Senator Robert La Follette had written weeks before the president’s invocation of a global longing for peace, “chill[ed] the heart of the world.”
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Another reason for the speech’s failure goes beyond Wilson to the country that the United States had become by mid-1919. It was not the nation that had responded to Wilson’s soaring call to make the world safe for democracy and the lofty idealism of the Fourteen Points. Wilson’s decision to go to Paris had been a mistake that did far more than involve the presidency in the disillusioning game of who gets what. He had also abandoned his leadership of the nation—and the Democratic Party. For seven months, the United States had been adrift, deserted by this stranger president who spent his time taking bows before cheering Europeans while the mediocrities in his cabinet tried to cope with the massive readjust
ments of the shift from a wartime to a peacetime economy and other upheavals that cried out for creative leadership.

The mounting desperation of the man Wilson had left behind in the White House, Joe Tumulty, personified this leadership vacuum. Tumulty’s cables to Wilson in Paris were a litany of woes. “YOU CANNOT UNDER-STAND HOW ACUTE SITUATION IS BROUGHT ABOUT BY RISING PRICES OF EVERY NECESSITY OF LIFE,” tumulty warned on May 12, 1919. But Wilson did nothing to slow the purchases of the wartime Wheat Administration, which kept the price of this crucial staple artificially high. Twenty-six Democrats in the Massachusetts State Legislature cabled Wilson, urging him to come home and do something about the cost of living,“which we consider far more important than the League of Nations.”
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Eight months after the armistice, the government still controlled the nation’s railroads and telephone and telegraph lines, because the United States was, technically, still at war until the peace treaty was ratified. The Republicans in Congress skillfully used this situation to identify the Democrats with socialism, which Americans now considered a first cousin to Bolshevism.“YOU CAN HAVE NO IDEA OF THE INTENSITY OF FEELING OF THE PEOPLE IN THESE MATTERS,” tumulty cabled. “FRANKLY THE PEOPLE ARE SICK OF ALL KINDS OF CONTROL ANDWAR RESTRICTION.”
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The telephone and telegraph companies were run by Postmaster General Alfred Burleson, a walking, talking political disaster. He was hated by management for his provincial Texas hostility to big business and detested by the workers because he discriminated against unions. He gave the back of his hand to telephone workers when they protested their low wages. Burleson topped this performance by raising rates in May, outraging both consumers and workers. Tumulty implored the president to send a message to Congress urging them to return the telephone and telegraph companies to private ownership. Wilson did nothing.
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The aging Socialist Eugene Debs was growing sick and depressed in the Atlanta federal prison. He became a cause célèbre among liberals, who bombarded the White House with pleas for a pardon. Tumulty forwarded the requests to Paris, urging Wilson to do the generous thing. Again, the president did nothing.

When Burleson refused to bargain with telephone operators in New England after he raised rates in May, some 8,000 women walked off the job in Massachusetts. Burleson attributed the strike to “radicals” and tried to break it by importing students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard to keep the system going. Socialites from Newport were also encouraged to volunteer and bring their maids. The unautomated system depended on trained human beings willing to work ten-hour days, and these unlikely scabs soon vanished. The strike grew until it included 20,000 operators in all five New England states, silencing 610,000 telephones. Businesses floundered and profits plunged. When the public learned that starting operators earned only ten dollars a week, sympathy swung to their side.

Through Tumulty’s intervention, the strike was settled after six days by a modest pay raise. But a telephoneless week—and the image of the Democratic Party picking on underpaid women—left voters in an ugly mood. A prominent Massachusetts Democrat told Tumulty that Burleson was “wrecking the party.” the postmaster general was symptomatic of the whole Wilson administration. It badly needed an infusion of younger people with new ideas to handle an America transformed by the war. A disconsolate Tumulty told Wilson,“The president ought to get on the job . . . with both feet.” But Wilson’s feet—and head—remained in Paris.
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Before the year 1919 ended, 2,600 labor disputes would roil the country, and more than 4 million workers—one out of every five wage earners—went on strike. Most of these strikes were won by management. The war had been tremendously profitable for big business. DuPont’s assets had quadrupled. Bethlehem Shipbuilding’s profits had octupled. U.S. Steel, a corporate bellwether, was equally flush. Its chairman, Elbert Gary, arrogantly refused to bargain with the company’s 250,000 workers. Wilson sent Bernard Baruch to plead with him. The former War Industries czar got nowhere.
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The situation cried out for the propaganda magic of George Creel. Why was the Committee on Public Information not churning out features and articles for newspapers and magazines to create a “peace will” to replace the war will that had carried America to victory? Alas, by the time the president returned to the United States, Creel was like a disembodied phantom, wandering forlornly around Washington, looking for a place to store the CPI’s files. With a brutality born of long simmering enmity, the Republican-controlled Congress cut off Creel’s funding on June 30, 1919, leaving him without enough money to pay rent on his offices.

In his final report on the committee’s work, Creel proved that he learned nothing from the experience:“Congress is the one place in the United States where the mouth is above the law; the heavens may fall . . .
but the right of a Congressman to lie and defame remains inviolate.” when it came to nursing (and worsening) grudges, George Creel and Woodrow Wilson were blood brothers.
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