The Illusion of Victory (55 page)

These graphic warnings of a Europe in turmoil were echoed by news of similar violence in the United States. Labor unions, infuriated by rising prices and heavy layoffs as industry adjusted to a peacetime economy, were in an ugly mood. In Seattle, stronghold of the Industrial Workers of the World, unions called a general strike. Many people thought it was a step toward a Bolshevik takeover of the United States. The mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson, asked Secretary Baker for federal troops, and within hours, khakiclad riflemen were pouring into the city. They pointed to handbills that reminded workers “Russia Did It!” to prove the strike was a Bolshevik plot. Mayor Hanson’s defiance made him a national hero. Elsewhere, the American Protective League and other vigilante groups that had spent the war years persecuting German-Americans and dissenters began hunting Bolsheviks.
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The threat of violence created massive anxiety as Wilson came ashore in Boston. Troops and police lined the streets; riflemen manned the rooftops. The crowd of 200,000 was wildly enthusiastic, screaming like Romans or Parisians as Wilson’s procession of automobiles wound through the narrow streets to the Copley Plaza Hotel for lunch. From there he headed for Mechanics Hall, where 8,000 selected Bostonians were waiting to hear him.

Wilson began with some mild remarks about how good it was to be back in the United States—and a semiapology for how long it was taking to write the peace treaty. But he soon segued to a mood of militant defiance. The key to peace was not a division of the spoils but a summons to forge a new world through the League of Nations. That was the unmistakable wish of the world’s people—and the people of the United States. The president dared any politician, anywhere, to resist this surging “spirit of the age.” america would not disappoint the world by rebuffing this great moral challenge. He invited critics to “test the sentiment of the nation.” His “fighting blood” could barely wait to see the outcome of a contest with these “narrow, selfish, provincial” minds. The overwhelmingly Democratic audience roared its approval.
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The Associated Press told its millions of readers that Wilson had “thrown down the gauntlet” to his congressional enemies with these angry words. This was not the warm-up Colonel House had in mind for the crucial dinner with the foreign affairs committees in Washington, two days hence. House had urged the president to be as conciliatory as possible in Boston. Henry Cabot Lodge wrote wryly to a friend:“Mr. Wilson has asked me to dinner. [He] also asked me to say nothing. He then goes to my home town and makes a speech—very characteristic.” Later he called Wilson’s excursion “a piece of small cunning in which [Wilson] is fond of indulging.”
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Two nights later, Wilson sat down to dinner with Senator Lodge and thirty-three other members of the foreign relations committees. Two senators, Borah of Idaho and Fall of New Mexico, had declined to come, declaring the meeting a waste of time. Mrs. Wilson, displaying her political limitations, sat next to Senator Lodge and chattered artlessly about the wonderful reception the president had received in Boston. After she withdrew, the senators and congressmen spent three hours with the president, questioning him about the League of Nations. Admiral Cary Grayson, who talked to Wilson shortly afterward, reported the atmosphere was “free and easy.” But the good doctor failed to detect the many hostile undertones.

Lodge and Senator Philander Knox of Pennsylvania, the two men with the strongest backgrounds in foreign affairs (Knox had been President Taft’s secretary of state), said little. The jittery Wilson found their silence threatening and hostile; he interpreted it as contempt. Senator Frank B. Brandegee of Connecticut, known for his explosive temper, did much of the questioning. His tone was cool and skeptical. No one said anything in defense of the league except the president, who answered questions in a conciliatory tone. He emphasized, however, that he did not see any room or reason for major changes in the covenant. That would make enormous difficulties for him because he would have to renegotiate the altered articles with the Council of Ten and resubmit them to the Plenary Council of the peace conference.

The chief issue discussed was sovereignty. Was the United States surrendering Congress’s constitutional right to declare war? Would the league have the right to decide issues such as immigration to the United States? Would the league control the size of America’s armed forces? Would it abrogate the Monroe Doctrine? Wilson stressed the need for trust in the good faith of the league’s members and admitted that the United States—and the other nations—would all have to surrender some sovereignty in the name of world peace.

The usually pro-Wilson
New York Times
questioned many of the participants after the meeting and concluded that the president had acquitted himself well. The even more supportive
New York World
reported the same conclusion. But the following day, the hard-line Republican
New York Sun
published an interview with Senator Brandegee that conveyed a very different impression. Brandegee said his visit to the White House had made him wonder if he had been “wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter.” He sneered that the president had, “with the wide open eyes of an ingenue,” relied on “glittering generalities” to meet the legal and constitutional questions he and other senators had raised.
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That same day, Henry Cabot Lodge rose in the Senate to give a speech that analyzed the articles of the league covenant, particularly Article 10, which guaranteed the territory of every member of the league. The senator called the covenant crude and loosely written. Lodge said he wanted world peace as ardently as the president. But there were vast issues involved—an abandonment of George Washington’s warning against entangling alliances, the relationship of the league to the Monroe Doctrine and to the constitutional powers of Congress. Lodge called on the Senate to retain a critical attitude, to move slowly, and with profound caution, before approving Woodrow Wilson’s version of the League of Nations.

That night, the president met with members of the Democratic National Committee at the White House. He seemed to think he was speaking off the record, although a government stenographer was on hand taking down every word. Wilson was supposed to be rallying his demoralized troops after their midterm election defeat. That required a discussion of domestic problems, especially the growing wrath of the labor unions and the need for issues on which to run in 1920. Instead, Wilson orated about the importance of the League of Nations and urged the committee members to tell Congress that the covenant had overwhelming support among the American people. He lashed out at Congress for being psychologically divorced from the rest of the country. “Washington is not part of the United States,” he said. Turning his wrath on the congressional opponents of the league, Wilson used words like “contemptible,”“blind” and “provincial” to describe them. He sneered that it was “not their character so much that I have contempt for, though that contempt is thoroughgoing, but their minds. They do not have even working imitations of minds.” Inevitably, some of these intemperate remarks were soon in the newspapers.
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Worse was to come. On March 2, combative Senator Brandegee asked Lodge to consider putting the Senate on record as opposed to the League of Nations. The Connecticut solon brandished a letter from a constituent, calling for such a statement. Lodge conferred with Senator Philander Knox, who suggested a devious device, a round-robin. The three senators soon had the names of thirty-seven senators who were prepared to say they would vote against the league.

On March 3, near midnight, with the Sixty-Fifth Congress one day from adjournment, Lodge rose in the Senate and read the resolution, stating it was “the sense of the Senate” that “the league of nations in the form now proposed” should not be accepted by the United States. Instead, further efforts on the part of the United States should be directed “with the utmost expedition” to negotiating peace terms with Germany. A league of nations could then be taken up “for careful consideration.”

When a Democratic senator objected to Lodge’s call for unanimous consent to the resolution, Lodge promptly yielded. The last thing he wanted was a vote, which would have buried the proposal. Instead, he read the names of the thirty-seven senators and sat down. If as few as thirty-three Senators voted no, the league would fall short of the two-thirds majority the Constitution required for the approval of a treaty. Lodge knew that the next morning, headlines would blossom across the country reporting that Wilson’s league looked dead on arrival.
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The Republicans also made sure that when the president went to the Capitol the following day to sign the appropriations bills that Congress was supposed to pass—the ostensible reason for his journey from Paris—he would have nothing to sign. The GOP had filibustered the money measures into oblivion. This tactic meant that Wilson would have to summon the new Congress to an emergency session, enabling the GOP majority to take charge of the legislative branch months before the usual date for Congress to convene—December 1. Wilson responded with a furious denunciation of “a group of men in the Senate” who for partisan reasons chose to risk throwing the country into financial chaos.

The same day, March 4, Wilson headed for New York, where he had scheduled an appearance with William Howard Taft at the Metropolitan Opera House. The former president was head of a bipartisan organization called the League to Enforce Peace, which had been pushing for an international organization since 1915. He had endorsed the league covenant, even though it was very different from the largely judicial body that Taft and his group had envisioned. Here was another chance—it turned out to be the last chance—for Wilson to say something conciliatory to the Senate. Not all the senators who had signed the round-robin were irreconcilable. The rest—a substantial majority—were not opposed to the league, though many were still sulky about the way Wilson had snubbed them in selecting the delegates to the peace conference.

New York’s Democrats poured into the streets to give the president a tumultuous reception that more than equaled Boston’s fervor. The cheers no doubt reinforced Wilson’s conviction that the people were on his side. The program at the Metropolitan Opera House began on a note of promising harmony. Wilson and Taft came onstage arm in arm. Taft spoke first, defending Wilson’s league on virtually all points, and holding out an olive branch to the round-robin senators by admitting that Lodge and other critics had made valuable suggestions about revising the covenant.

If Wilson had followed a similar approach, the fight against the league might have ended that night. Instead his speech bristled with apocalyptic denunciation and arrogant defiance. He proclaimed himself on the winning side, because “the great tides of the world” were with him. Those who opposed this mass movement were certain to be overwhelmed.“The heart of the world was awake and the heart of the world must be satisfied!” Wilson went on to declare that his critics suffered from a “comprehensive ignorance” of what was happening all around them. He despised their “doctrine of careful selfishness.” Americans had proven in France that they were willing to die for an idea. Publicly disagreeing with Taft, Wilson said he had heard “no constructive suggestion” from Congress.

Finally, the president repudiated the round-robin’s call for a peace treaty first and consideration of a league of nations later. He all but flung a challenge in Senator Lodge’s face:“When that treaty comes back, gentlemen on this side will find the covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the covenant, that you cannot dissect the covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.” Edith Wilson later said she had never seen an audience go so “wild.”
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The next day, the
Indianapolis Star
had a very different reaction to Wilson’s defiance:“It is hard to escape the impression that President Wilson is riding for a fall.”
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Amid the cheers at the Metropolitan Opera House, there was a voice that punctured this moment of illusory triumph:“What about Ireland?” someone shouted. The cry may have come—and probably did come—from a group of Irish-Americans who sat onstage during Wilson’s speech. Offstage, the president confronted Joe Tumulty with an angry question:“Is Judge Cohalan in the delegation?”

Tumulty admitted that Judge Daniel Cohalan of New York was among the members of the group on the stage. They were all members of the Committee for Irish Independence and were now waiting for their scheduled meeting with the president. Wilson told Tumulty to get rid of Cohalan. If the judge did not vanish instantly, the president would head for Hoboken to board the
George Washington
for his return trip to Europe.

Wilson’s hostility to Judge Cohalan went back to 1912, when the jurist had vociferously opposed his nomination at the Democratic National Convention. The president’s animus had deepened when Cohalan criticized America’s declaration of war against Germany. In September 1917, the State Department had implied that the judge was on the German secret service payroll. None of this publicity had prevented Cohalan from remaining very popular with Irish-Americans.

Tumulty said snubbing Cohalan would make a terrible impression on the committee.“That’s just what I want to do, Tumulty,” wilson said.“But I think it will make a good impression on decent people.”

The humiliated Tumulty delivered the president’s ultimatum. Cohalan withdrew, and in five minutes, Wilson confronted twenty-three grim-faced, resentful Irish-Americans in a private room at the opera house. They were far from nobodies. One of the leaders was Frank P. Walsh, who had served as joint chairman of the War Labor Board. As a member of the executive committee of the League to Enforce Peace, Walsh had recently toured the country with former President Taft, speaking for the league. But the infuriated Wilson only saw a group of contentious “micks,” reiterating the impudent question that had been shouted from the audience: “What about Ireland?”