The Illusion of Victory (71 page)

In Dublin, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Viscount General John French, denounced the Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s parliament, as a “dangerous association” and disbanded it. Swarms of soldiers in helmets, rifles at the ready, stormed Sinn Féin headquarters and swept up supposedly incriminating documents. They arrested two Sinn Féin members of the British Parliament who were still boycotting that no-longer-respected body. In retaliation, Irish Republican Army gunmen killed a detective that night not far from a Dublin police station.

This mounting violence made headlines in the United States, where President Eamon de Valera’s speaking tour was winning him audiences frequently larger than the president’s. Calling Lloyd George’s Irish policy “the very bankruptcy of statesmanship,” the
Times
of London glumly added that the government’s tactics seemed designed to play into the hands of the “anti-British element” in America. That was an understate
ment. The Friends of Irish Freedom used Ireland’s struggle to raise vast sums to fund their ongoing fight to destroy Wilson and the League of Nations.
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In Italy, as Wilson orated his way across the United States, another brand of violence erupted, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles. The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had been among the leading denouncers of Woodrow Wilson when the president appealed to the Italian people to give up Fiume and the Dalmatian coast in the name of justice and truth. By September 1919, Fiume was occupied by French and Italian troops who were on the brink of open warfare. When an Allied commission blamed the Italians and ordered them out of the city, the fifty-five-year-old D’Annunzio leaped on a motorbike, raced to the scene and persuaded the ousted Italians to join him in a military takeover.

Accumulating supporters along the way, including not a few followers of Benito Mussolini, the poet soon had an army of 4,000 men. He faced down the Italian general guarding the border and marched into Fiume, where he was greeted as a hero by the Italian residents, while thousands of Yugoslavs fled. In a hysterical speech, D’Annunzio proclaimed Fiume part of Italy and called on “Victor Hugo’s France, Milton’s England and Lincoln’s America” to approve his conquest.

In Rome, Premier Francesco Nitti, Vittorio Orlando’s successor, denounced the poet and his soldiers as “lunatics and traitors.” he was ignored by virtually every Italian in the country. Sailors jumped ship to join the army of Fiume. Hundreds of soldiers deserted their regiments to do likewise. D’Annunzio grandly demanded Nitti’s resignation, saying he was “tired of dealing with the dog.” The government was paralyzed. When Nitti sought backing from the Chamber of Deputies, a brawl soon had socialists and nationalists kicking and gouging each other on the parliamentary floor. The distraught premier dissolved the government and called new elections.

In Milan, Benito Mussolini took notes on how quickly a few thousand armed and determined men, backed by poetic eloquence, could terminate that stupid idea called democracy.
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In Germany, a sullen hatred of the Treaty of Versailles pervaded the nation. Politics oscillated violently between socialism and reaction. Judges, many of them holdovers from the old regime, expressed kaiser-like opinions from the bench whenever they could intrude them into a decision. One of the few Socialist judges remarked that there was “a state of war between the people and the judiciary.” meanwhile, the Majority Socialist Party was self-destructing. A plan to socialize all of Germany’s factories by continuing wartime controls collapsed in August 1919, when the middle-class parties in the Reichstag united to reject it.
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One liberal analyst of the situation, Count Henry Kessler, concluded that “the revolution is provisionally over. Counter-revolution is on the march.” When reaction triumphed, Kessler predicted, “that will be Germany’s real defeat.” The former leaders of the Free Corps, having crushed worker revolts in various parts of Germany, were forming a group called the National Union, which aimed at a military takeover.

In Munich, where martial law reigned and machine guns and barbed wire guarded the entrances of government buildings and hotels, former corporal Adolf Hitler was working as a political officer for the Second Infantry Regiment of the Reichswehr, the new Germany army. In the closing weeks of the war, he had been gassed and shipped to a hospital, where for a while he lay blind. As his sight slowly returned, he had learned of the kaiser’s abdication. Overwhelmed with grief, Hitler had listened to the pastor of the hospital tell him and the other patients to accept the armistice “with confidence in the magnanimity of our former enemies.” How hollow those words must have seemed now, face-to-face with the Treaty of Versailles.
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Hitler was under orders to detect symptoms of communism and socialism in the ranks of the Second Infantry Regiment and to talk the enlisted men out of these disloyal doctrines. For someone with minimal education, and that mostly as an artist, Hitler was a surprisingly effective speaker. Throughout the war, he had spent his spare time reading books.“Even at his battle station,” recalled a comrade in his wartime regiment,“he sat in a corner, ammunition bag around his middle, rifle in his arms, and read.” His favorite book was Arthur Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Idea
, which convinced him that the human will could triumph over any adversity.
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The officers of the Second Infantry Regiment also employed Hitler as a spy. On September 12, 1919, while Woodrow Wilson was orating his way across the Midwest, Hitler dropped in on a meeting of the minuscule German Workers Party in the back room of a Munich beer hall. About twenty-five forlorn Socialists listened to a professor lecture them on how to create a worker’s paradise. Hitler was about to leave when someone suggested Bavaria should secede from Germany and join Austria. The Austrian-born Hitler fiercely denounced the idea. He declared a “greater Germany” was the nation’s only hope.

The secretary of the Workers Party congratulated Hitler on his impromptu speech and gave him a forty-page book he had written:
My Political Awakening: From the Diary of a German Socialist Worker
. Back in his room, Hitler threw the book aside and wrote a report dismissing the German Workers Party as a trivial splinter group that would soon crumble. Later in the night, insomnia prompted him to take a look at the book. He was entranced to discover the gist of an idea that had also been taking shape in his own mind—a socialism that was devoted to the German nation, rather than to the mythic international brotherhood of the working class, an idea the war had rendered ridiculous. Also in the tract was another idea that already obsessed Hitler: the Jew as an alien menace to Germany’s redemption.
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In Washington, D.C., the fight over the treaty was moving toward a climax. In mid-November, Wilson had recovered sufficiently from his stroke to be able to see a few visitors. By far the most crucial was Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, the acting minority leader of the Senate. Not a Wilson enthusiast—he had opposed the president many times on legislative matters during the war—Hitchcock was trapped between his personal desire to ratify the treaty with reservations and Wilson’s intransigence. Most of the time, the Nebraskan performed his role as the Democratic Party’s spokesman with a minimum of enthusiasm.

William Gibbs McAdoo urged Wilson to compromise with Henry Cabot Lodge. So did Herbert Hoover, in a three-page telegram. Many other prominent men, including numerous Democrats, offered the same advice, but Mrs. Wilson chose not to trouble the president with such disturbing mail. The solicitor of the State Department issued a formal opinion that Lodge’s reservations would not require a renegotiation of the treaty with America’s allies. Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa urged ratification. Rejection would “blast the hopes of the world.”
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Colonel House, back in the United States, sent an emissary to Lodge to explore the possibility of a compromise. The senator jotted some notes on a copy of the covenant, indicating certain changes that would be acceptable to him and—he hoped—to Wilson. An excited House rushed the document to the White House, urging the president to give it serious consideration. Mrs. Wilson, by now the colonel’s archenemy, filed it in the wastebasket.
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On November 17, Gilbert Hitchcock conferred for a second time with Wilson. Propped up in bed, the president mixed defiance with megalomania. He wanted the votes for and against the treaty “recorded” because when the naysayers came up for reelection he would “get their political scalps.” He said the Lodge reservations represented a “nullification” of the treaty. If the Senate approved it with the reservations, he would refuse to sign it.

The discouraged Hitchcock urged compromise. The Democrats simply did not have the votes to ratify the treaty without reservations. Wilson spurned the idea. Rather than bear the odium of rejection alone, Hitchcock drafted a letter for the president’s signature. He also needed it to keep wavering Democrats in line. Edith made some minor alterations and stamped the president’s signature on it. (His actual signature would have been an instant giveaway of his condition.) She then released it to the press.

Meanwhile, the reasonable and the unreasonable on both sides were in strenuous battle. The League to Enforce Peace issued a statement urging compromise and ratification. The Friends of Irish Freedom dispatched no less than a million telegrams from their members, urging defeat. They had been working closely with the irreconcilables, in particular Senator Borah.

On November 19, 1919, when the Senate convened, Wilson’s letter was in the headlines. Lodge read the text to the Senate, adding that he did not think it needed any commentary. All hope of a compromise vanished. After more hours of oratory, the senators voted for the treaty with the Lodge reservations. It lost 55 to 39, 7 votes short of the needed two-thirds. All but 4 Democrats followed Wilson’s orders. They were joined by the 13 mostly Republican irreconcilables who were opposed to the treaty in any form. A Democratic senator called for a vote on the treaty without reservations. It lost 53 to 38, most of the irreconcilables voting with the Republicans this time.

Belying their desperation, the Democratic National Committee issued a bulletin, accusing Senator La Follette of being the evil genius behind this second defeat, because he called for a vote, rather than referring the treaty to a committee on conciliation. In a heavy-handed attempt to revive the disloyalty smears that had silenced the Wisconsin senator, the press release sneered:“A few months ago, hardly a senator, Republican or Democrat, would speak to La Follette.” Now, the Democrats claimed, he was the “general” of the “Battalion of Death” that had doomed the treaty.
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The only scrap of truth in this diatribe was La Follette’s opposition to the treaty, which he had denounced in several searing speeches during October and November. During one speech, the senator hung huge maps on the walls of the Senate chamber and used them to illustrate the way the treaty enlarged the British empire. He argued that the League of Nations would also obligate the United States to police the petty states created by the breakup of Austria-Hungary and guarantee unjust territorial rearrangements elsewhere in the world that benefited France, Italy and Japan. It amounted to a promise of American troops to help the Allies “stand guard over the swag.”
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Two weeks after the Senate rejection, a discouraged Lodge, who had hoped against hope that the treaty would win with the reservations, wrote to Elihu Root, who had clung to the same hope:

Those last words were a forecast of Woodrow Wilson’s final illusion—and its ultimate defeat.

Was the treaty dead? Not in the opinion of the
Washington Post
and many other newspapers.

The
Post
said the president had waged a “gallant fight,” but had been beaten “openly and fairly.” Reminding Wilson that the American people and Congress had accepted his reelection by only a few thousand votes in 1916, the editors urged the president to “accept the reservations made by the majority” and sign the treaty when it was resubmitted to the Senate. Numerous other papers, including the staunchly pro-Wilson
Baltimore American
and the
New York Times
, said the same or similar things.
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None of this well-intentioned advice had the slightest impact on the sick man on the second floor of the White House. Neither did letters from Gilbert Hitchcock and other leading Democratic senators, from General Bliss, from the new ambassador to England, John W. Davis—even William Jennings Bryan got into the act—all urging the president to compromise. Wilson probably never saw these pleas. Edith Galt Wilson remained the guardian of her husband’s sickroom, determined to keep disturbing messages to a minimum. Eventually, Joe Tumulty overcame his compulsive loyalty to his chieftain and joined the ranks of the pleaders for compromise—to no avail. He too was denied access to the sickroom and had to couch his messages in evasive terms that did not offend Mrs. Wilson.
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In New York, Colonel House watched with mounting dismay as the situation deteriorated. His old friend, Sir Edward Grey, the former British foreign secretary, now Viscount Grey of Falladon, had assured House that Great Britain and France would accept the treaty with Lodge’s reservations. House wrote the president two long letters, urging on him a policy that would rescue the treaty and the league but would enable Wilson to escape most of the humiliation of a defeat.

House suggested the president return the treaty to Congress after it reconvened on December 1, with a message to Hitchcock, giving him permission to negotiate a compromise with Lodge that would win a two-thirds majority. Wilson would then forward the treaty to the Allies with a statement that he had “done his duty” and tried to win ratification of the document they had approved in Paris. If they agreed to accept the Senate’s changes, he would do the same thing.“Your conscience will be clear,” House wrote. With desperate, almost forlorn flattery, the colonel added that Wilson’s willingness to accept reservations rather than have the treaty killed “will be regarded as the act of a great man.”
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Woodrow Wilson saw neither of House’s sensible letters. Mrs. Wilson deemed both unworthy of the president’s attention. She ignored an accompanying note, in which the colonel warned Edith that her husband’s place in history “hung in the balance.” From Edith’s point of view, House was as persona non grata as Senator Lodge. When former attorney general Thomas Gregory handed her one of the letters, she made it clear that it was thoroughly unwelcome.
⁴

Meanwhile, the
New York Times
and other papers grew uneasy when they learned Wilson had refused to see Senator Hitchcock, the key to any possible movement toward a compromise. To quiet rumors that the president was non compos mentis, Edith Wilson and Admiral Grayson arranged a visit by Hitchcock and Republican Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico on December 5, 1919. With the sick room’s lighting reduced to one feeble lamp beside the bed, Wilson was propped up on pillows, concealing his inability to sit up. The covers were drawn to his chin to hide his useless left arm.

In his memoir, Chief Usher Ike Hoover, who was present, called this stage setting “the Great Camouflage.” The two senators talked to the president for three-quarters of an hour. As they left the White House, Hitchcock told reporters Wilson was mentally alert and Fall admitted that for a man who had been in bed for ten weeks, the president seemed to be “in fighting trim.” The
New York Times
hailed these remarks as “silencing for good the many wild and often unfriendly rumors of Presidential disability.”

The senators discussed problems with Mexico, and at the end of the meeting, Hitchcock asked Wilson what he planned to do about the treaty. Wilson replied that it was up to the Senate to figure out what to do. Several days later, when Hitchcock saw Wilson again, the president was even more defiant. When Hitchcock suggested the Democrats might hold out an olive branch, Wilson snarled,“Let Lodge hold out the olive branch!”

On December 14, Wilson went public with his intransigence, releasing a megalomania-tinged statement “from the highest authority in the executive branch” that declared the president had “no compromise or concession of any kind in mind.” Philip Dru’s ultimate repudiation of House’s philosophy of intelligent compromise left the colonel flabbergasted. At the end of a three-hour conference in his New York residence, House asked Thomas Gregory if he was doing the right thing, remaining “quiescent.” Gregory told him he did not see how he could do anything else.

Secretary of State Lansing also journeyed to New York to pour out his woes to the colonel. Lansing told House that Wilson was much sicker than Admiral Grayson purported him to be. All Lansing’s queries about State Department matters were answered by Mrs. Wilson. When Lansing wrote a Thanksgiving Proclamation for the president, it was returned with Wilson’s signature at the top, instead of at the bottom—and it was virtually illegible.

A British diplomat en route home from Washington told House that Vice President Thomas Marshall was growing more and more exasperated by his inability to see the president. He quoted Marshall as saying people “who should be in jail” were seeing Wilson every day. Marshall was supposedly ready to do something drastic, if the treaty was not ratified within thirty days.
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A few weeks later, Wilson demonstrated how irrational he had become behind his facade of mental alertness. The president ordered Tumulty to draft a public challenge to the fifty-five senators who opposed the treaty. Let all of them resign and run for immediate reelection to see if the people supported their stand. If a majority of them won in this “great and solemn referendum,” Wilson would resign and so would Vice President Marshall. Before this extra-constitutional madness took place, Wilson would name a prominent Republican as secretary of state, making him next in line for the presidency. The Republicans could then do what they pleased with the treaty.

Wilson even conferred with Attorney General Palmer about how the senatorial seats could be legally vacated, before his White House keepers talked him out of this bizarre fantasy. The president’s draft of the proposal included dark accusations that the Germans were the secret force behind the failure to ratify the treaty.
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In Europe, all the major powers had ratified the Treaty of Versailles and were waiting for the Americans. Paralysis was creeping through the initiatives and ideas launched by the peace conference. Nowhere was this more visible than in the thirty-five “commissions of control” set up by the conference to supervise such delicate situations as France’s temporary government of the Saar basin, the creation of the free port of Danzig and the corridor connecting it to Poland, as well as plebiscites in Silesia and other disputed territories. Most vital was the reparations commission, whose final judgment hung like a sword of Damocles over the German republic. American participation—even American leadership—had been assumed on these international bodies. Instead, there was only a pathetic remnant of the American delegation still in Paris, without orders or directions from the president or the State Department.

The man most deeply perturbed by the growing vacuum was Georges Clemenceau. His enemies in the Chamber of Deputies were making capital out of Wilson’s failed promises. Totally preoccupied by the brawl over the League of Nations, the president had never said a word in support of the treaty he had agreed to sign with France to guarantee the country against a German attack. The treaty was gathering dust in the files of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The Tiger sent a frantic dispatch to Ambassador Jusserand in Washington, begging him to persuade Wilson to allow some American delegates and staffers to remain in Paris to participate in the commissions of control. A withdrawal now would jeopardize “the fruits of victory.”

Withdrawal was what the semifunctioning president ordered. Clemenceau rushed to the Hôtel Crillon to ask Assistant Secretary of State Frank Polk if any Americans would remain. Polk grimly replied,“No one.” the Tiger was devastated. He knew, among other things, that his political career was over. His enemies, led by Raymond Poincaré, would now crucify him for being too soft on Germany, an irony almost beyond belief. Never an admirer of Wilson, the old man exclaimed to the British ambassador,“What on earth is the Lord Almighty doing that he does not take [Wilson] to his bosom?
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In England, the Amritsar massacre was stirring some of the least lovely emotions in the British psyche. A report on the ugly event had reached England in June 1919, but the story did not appear in a British newspaper until December. The British secretary of state for India, Lord Edwin Montagu, professed shock and claimed to have heard about it only when he picked up the newspaper. This was, of course, a blatant lie, which was almost instantly exposed. General Dyer’s commander in the Punjab, General Michael O’Dwyer, announced to all and sundry that he had made a full report to Montagu in June.

O’Dwyer and his supporters swiftly mounted a savage attack on the staggered Montagu, claiming that the foreign office and its civil servants were responsible for the unrest in India because they tied the army’s hands. Dyer, who had been relieved and placed on “unemployment pay,” swiftly joined this assault, claiming that he had made the only possible decision to quell a riot-in-the-making against his outnumbered soldiers.

The British Army Council confirmed the wisdom of Dyer’s removal and informed him that there was no longer a job for him in the Indian army. This was the lightest possible punishment. There was no mention of stripping the murderous brigadier of his star or bringing criminal charges against him. The conservative
Morning Post
maintained that even this slap on the wrist was outrageous. It accused the government of sacrificing Dyer to “the susceptibilities of native agitators.” the paper announced a fund to ease General Dyer’s retirement and swiftly raised 26,000 pounds; among the contributors was Rudyard Kipling.

In Parliament, Edward Carson, the Unionist leader of Ulster, made a motion to reduce Montagu’s salary by one hundred pounds to express the House of Commons’ disapproval of his treatment of Dyer. An ugly subtext in the affair was Montagu’s Jewish blood. Adolf Hitler was not the only person who noted the number of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution. When Montagu argued in the House debate that only a liberal approach could keep India in the empire, one member bellowed,“Bolshevism!” Carson roared that Montagu was blind to the fact that liberalism and Bolshevism had “the same object—to destroy our sea power and drive us out of Asia.”

Underscoring the growing ugliness, the
Morning Post
reprinted the scurrilous slander against the Jews,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
which described a global revolution triggered by the overthrow of the British empire by Jewish conspirators. The document had been concocted by Russian anti-Semites in the 1890s. In an editorial, the
Morning Post
wondered about the wisdom of letting a Jew [Montagu] rule India. “The course of events” all looked tinged with “Bolshevik purpose,” in their not-so-humble opinion. In a classically British understatement, one liberal member told the
Times
the debate in Parliament was “not free” from ethnic prejudice.

Carson’s motion to dock Montagu’s salary was defeated. But a few weeks later, the House of Lords voted 129 to 86 to approve a motion deploring the treatment of General Dyer as “unjust to that officer and as establishing a dangerous precedent to the preservation of order in [the] face of rebellion.”
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In the United States, paranoia about Soviet Russia had similarly replaced paranoia about Germany. The Bolsheviks were blamed for terrorist bombs and the ongoing epidemic of strikes. The U.S. Army patrolled the streets of IWW strongholds, such as Bisbee, Arizona, and Butte, Montana. When workers went on strike in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and other cities, army military intelligence agents worked closely with local police to arrest hundreds of suspected Bolsheviks. On October 16, 1919, the
Pittsburgh Post
wrote that the intelligence men were hunting seven hundred local suspects, and “every third man on the streets . . . seems to be a Government official.”
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During the fall of 1919, Bureau of Investigation agents under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover arrested hundreds of members of the Union of Russian Workers. In late December, 249 aliens seized in this and similar roundups were marched onto the aging troopship
Buford
and deported to Russia. Newspapers dubbed the ship “the Soviet ark” and gave the story reams of publicity. As the ship got under way, one of the most outspoken radicals, Emma Goldman, shouted,“This is the beginning of the end of the United States!” Hoover, backed by 250 armed soldiers, personally supervised the departure. The State Department said the deportees were “obnoxious” and a “menace to law and order” as well as to “decency and justice.” they were therefore being “sent whence they came.”
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On January 2, 1920, Attorney General Palmer, now certain that he personified the popular will, sent swarms of federal agents into thirty-three U.S. cities in a campaign to break the back of the supposed Bolshevik conspiracy. The BI agents, again led by young J. Edgar Hoover, arrested more than 4,000 people on charges of plotting to overthrow the government. Cooperating with the dragnet were thousands of volunteers from the American Protective League and the other organizations that had kept tabs on German-Americans and dissenters during the war.
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