The Illusion of Victory (3 page)

Thanks to the disunited GOP, the gleeful House Democrats reelected their candidate for speaker, Champ Clark of Missouri, who had held the job since 1911. But the Republicans, trying to salvage something from their intraparty contretemps, called for voice votes on the selection of the other officers of the House—a process that took most of the afternoon.
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At about half past four, the restless president walked across the street to the ornate State, War and Navy Building and spent some time with Secretary of War Newton Baker. There is a better-than-even chance that they discussed a controversial topic: conscription. Wilson had opposed it publicly in his reelection campaign. Now he was about to endorse it. This reversal seemed to confirm an adage often used by the president’s critics: Anyone who followed Wilson down a political path was almost certain to meet him coming in the opposite direction. Theodore Roosevelt maintained that Wilson had taken contradictory stands on almost every political issue under the sun.

Next, Wilson joined Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels at a meeting of the navy’s general board. The deeply religious Daniels had found the lurch to war a “Gethsemane,” but he had reluctantly concurred in Wilson’s decision. Cooperation with the British navy was now assumed to be imminent. Rear Admiral William S. Sims had sailed for England on March 31 to work out the details.

The president also paused to discuss with Secretary of State Robert Lansing some minor changes in the proclamation of war that would be issued after his speech. The secretary, who had been urging Wilson to get into the war on England’s side for a year, expressed concern for the president’s safety on his way to the Capitol. Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory, who happened to be visiting Lansing, earnestly concurred. Wilson dismissed their fears. But the moment the president departed, Lansing called Secretary of War Baker and persuaded him to add a troop of cavalry to Wilson’s usual police and Secret Service escort.
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Back in the White House, the president learned that the House of Representatives had finally gotten itself organized. Wilson sent word that he would speak at 8:30 P.M. He had dinner with his wife, his daughter, Margaret, and Colonel House in the mansion’s private dining room around 6:30. House later recalled that they chatted about “everything excepting the matter at hand.” They all knew how important it was to reduce the stress on the edgy president. In 1906, under the comparatively minor strains of the presidency of Princeton, Wilson had suffered a physical collapse that had left him partially blind in one eye. Doctors had diagnosed hypertension and arteriosclerosis and told him he could never work again. Although a six-month vacation in England had restored him, his health remained a source of concern—one of the reasons why his almost constant companion was Admiral Cary Grayson.
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Not all Americans agreed with the course the nation was about to take. Throughout the day in Washington, D.C., hundreds of antiwar protesters roamed the streets, carrying placards and handing out pamphlets against plunging the United States into the European cataclysm—this “Great War,” which had already killed 5 million men. The newspapers called these protesters pacifists, a pejorative term that made them sound as if they were opposed to all wars and were supinely prepared to let aggressive enemies of their country step all over them. In fact, most of them were opposed to entering this war, for reasons they considered extremely persuasive. They were led by idealistic David Starr Jordan, former president of Stanford University. Less than forty-eight hours earlier, Jordan had been battered and bruised by a mob when he addressed an antiwar meeting in Baltimore. But he accepted command of this last-ditch effort for peace.
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Also in the capital were numerous members of Pilgrims for Patriotism, a group organized by the violently pro-war National Security League. Among the league’s leaders were Theodore Roosevelt and Alton B. Parker, the Democratic candidate for president in 1904. The members of the league were convinced that the Germans were already enemies of the United States and that anyone who opposed fighting them was a traitor. The Washington police defused a confrontation between the two groups by banning all parades and rallies.

Barred from the White House by a heavy police detail, and repulsed from an attempt to invade the State, War and Navy Building, the antiwar protesters trudged down Pennsylvania Avenue in the rain to the Capitol, where they gathered on the steps. They were led by a young woman carrying a banner that underscored one of the chief reasons that these people objected to Woodrow Wilson’s course:“Is This the United States of Great Britain?”
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Some protesters ventured into the Senate Office Building, which was patrolled by the Secret Service, the District of Columbia police and even the Post Office Department police, as anxiety mounted over the influx of proand antiwar activists. A half dozen proponents of peace from Massachusetts found their way to the offices of their senior senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, who had been urging Americans to get into the war on the English side almost from the day the fighting started. When they insisted on speaking to the white-bearded, sixty-seven-year-old politician, he finally came to the door of his office to hear their dissent from his well-publicized opinions.

The discussion grew heated. Lodge suggested they were degenerates and cowards and started to return to his office. One of the protesters, a husky Princeton student named Alexander Bannwart, shouted,“You’re a damned coward.”

Lodge wheeled and confronted his accuser. “You’re a damned liar,” he snarled.

Bannwart threw a roundhouse right at Lodge, who ducked and punched “the German,” as he later incorrectly called his attacker, in the face. (Bannwart was an American of Swiss German descent.) Male secretaries from Lodge’s office, a passing Western Union messenger, and Capitol police piled on Bannwart and beat him badly. Soon the story swept through the Capitol that Lodge had flattened “the German” with one punch.
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At about eight o’clock, the triumphant senator and his fellow solons headed for the House of Representatives to welcome the president. The chamber was rapidly filling with dignitaries. The justices of the Supreme Court, sans robes, sat in places of honor before the rostrum. Off to one side sat the cabinet and the entire diplomatic corps in full gold-laced regalia—the first time they had been welcomed to this sanctum in anyone’s memory. In the packed gallery, the wives of the cabinet sat in the front row. They were joined by Edith and Margaret Wilson and Colonel House.

Back at the White House, as the president’s limousine rolled through the north gate onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the car was surrounded by a troop of poncho-draped cavalrymen. They cantered beside it, their drawn sabers gleaming in the streetlights. A few hardy souls cheered feebly from the sidewalks. Earlier in the day the streets had been crowded with prospective applauders; most had long since gone home to dinner. Washington bureaucrats, anticipating the president’s decision, had decked the city with patriotic bunting, which now drooped soggily in the rain. Up ahead, the Capitol’s illuminated dome gleamed in newly installed indirect lights, a gigantic symbol of the republic’s power and putative purity.

About a block from the Capitol, other cavalrymen had cordoned off the antiwar protesters. They shouted angry, despairing cries at the presidential limousine. At the east portico of the Capitol, Wilson’s cavalry escort halted to permit the president’s driver to glide to a stop at the foot of the steps. As Wilson got out of the car, several hundred pro-war demonstrators on the steps shouted cheers of encouragement.
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Inside, Speaker of the House Champ Clark, the man Wilson had defeated for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1912, rapped his gavel for order. Two minutes later, the rear doors opened and the vice president of the United States, Thomas R. Marshall of Indiana, entered, followed in a column of twos by the senators, representing the forty-eight states of the Union. Most of the senators were carrying or wore in their breast pockets small American flags. Vice President Marshall looked glum. He was opposed to entering the war. But President Wilson was utterly indifferent to his opinion. Marshall sometimes summed up the insignificance of his office by telling a story:“Once there were two brothers. One of them ran away to sea and the other one became vice president of the United States. Neither was ever heard from again.”
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The senators were soon in their allotted seats. The speaker banged his gavel once more. Behind him the hands on the big official clock read 8:35. The clerk of the House of Representatives solemnly intoned: “The President of the United States!”
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As Wilson came down the aisle, everyone on the floor and in the gallery rose and cheered, shouted, clapped with a wild emotion that made only too clear what they expected him to say—and how they hoped he would say it. Expressionless, Wilson strode to the rostrum, his eyes down, his speech clutched in both hands. He opened it on the lectern and waited for the ovation to subside.

Like many great actors, Wilson often experienced acute nervousness as he approached an audience. But his anxiety vanished when he reached the moment of delivery. Wilson had supreme confidence in himself as a public speaker. He had honed his considerable talents in hundreds of addresses while at Princeton and earlier academic posts. He had won the governorship of New Jersey and the White House with his oratory. He was the first president in 113 years to address joint sessions of Congress. (His predecessors’ messages had been read by clerks.) His speeches had already gone far, in the words of an admiring editorial in the
New York Times,
toward “stamping his personality upon his age.”
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Eventually, there was total silence in the huge chamber.“Gentlemen of the Congress,” Wilson began in a voice that one listener found “husky” with emotion. “I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.”

Swiftly he narrated the developments of the last two months, in which the “Imperial German Government” announced its intention to “put aside all restraints of law or of humanity” and use its submarines to sink every vessel that ventured into the barred zone around the British Isles. He briefly recalled that in April 1916, Germany, in response to Wilson’s protests, had promised to stop this practice and to order its submarines to give “due warning” to targeted ships to enable the crews to escape. The Germans had also promised to refrain from sinking passenger ships.

The new policy, Wilson somberly declared, had “swept every restriction aside.” Once more, ships were going down without the slightest concern for their cargo, their destination or their crews. Even hospital ships and vessels carrying food to “the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium” had been sunk “with the same reckless lack of compassion and principle.”

At first, the president said, he was “unable to believe that such things would in fact be done by any government that had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations.” But he had been forced to conclude that “German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind.”

It was also a war against all nations, including the United States. He grieved for the losses of other neutral nations. How each would meet the challenge was up to each country to decide. America’s choice would be made with “a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation.”

Solemnly, the president reinforced this point:“We must put excited feeling away.” America’s motive would not be revenge or a demonstration of its physical might. Instead the United States would fight for “the vindication of the right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion.”

For a few months, Wilson said, he had considered arming U.S. merchantmen against the submarines as a way to maintain a precarious neutrality. But the “outlaw” tactics of submarine warfare made this “impracticable.”

What choice, then, did the United States have? Wilson’s voice darkened, grimness deepened on his somber face.“There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making, we will not choose the path of submission.”

As Wilson said these words, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Edward Douglass White raised his arms in the air, and in the words of a
New York Times
reporter,“brought them together with a heartfelt bang. . . . House, Senate and galleries followed him with a roar like a storm.”
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It was the response Wilson had been looking for. A new emotion, a mixture of defiance and anger, appeared in his voice. “The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.”

With renewed solemnity, Wilson asked the Congress to declare “the course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the people of the United States.” It was time to “formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps . . . to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.”

Chief Justice White began cheering in the middle of this declaration of hostilities. By the time Wilson got to the final phrases, White and the entire chamber were on their feet, shouting, applauding. The chief justice’s face, reported the
New York Times
reporter, “worked almost convulsively and great tears began to roll down his cheeks.”
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