The Illusion of Victory (66 page)

Among America’s most unnerving 1919 transformations was Prohibition, which became the law of the land on July 1, 1919, thanks to the rider the drys in Congress had attached to the appropriation bill in 1918—the move Joe Tumulty had denounced as “mob legislation.” working-class Americans were outraged. A consortium of New York City unions threatened a “no beer no work” strike. At its annual convention, the American Federation of Labor voted all but unanimously against the legislation.

Wilson did nothing to block the law, in spite of a spate of cables from Tumulty, urging him at least to permit the sale of beer and wine. The president yielded to the legalistic argument that the law prevented him from acting, because the army had not yet “demobilized”—a term open to wide interpretation. Almost 3 million men had been discharged. About 1 million were still in uniform.

An on-the-job president could have issued a presidential order or a proposal to Congress that would have thrown the drys on the defensive and won him millions of working-class votes. Instead, from the
George Washington
on his voyage home, Wilson rejected a last-gasp appeal from the despairing Tumulty. The new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, worsened the administration’s performance by issuing a public statement declaring that violators of the ban would be prosecuted.
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Another explosive issue that cried out for presidential leadership was race relations. The war had been a great leap forward for black Americans, economically and psychologically. Tens of thousands had moved north to work in the booming factories. They were determined to enjoy the civil rights that had been denied them in the segregated South. Black spokesman W.E. B. DuBois had summed up their attitude:“We return
from fighting
. We
return fighting
. Make way for Democracy. We saved it in France and by Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America.” In city after city, tensions between the races mounted.

The South did not help matters by lynching at least ten discharged black servicemen because they persisted in wearing their uniforms after they
returned home. Dozens of other black veterans were badly beaten for this supposed offense. A disgusted black paper in Baltimore published a poem, mocking Wilson’s League of Nations:

In the North, layoffs in no longer busy factories left thousands of blacks, including many veterans, jobless. In Chicago, the Department of Labor reported 99 percent of discharged black servicemen were unemployed. The army noted thousands of black soldiers had announced their intention to settle in the North, rather than return to the Jim Crow South. Black radicals encouraged this attitude. One black Chicago magazine declared: “Any Negro [veteran] who boards a train for Dixie should be derailed into the Mississippi River.”
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Washington, D.C., still a Southern city, but with a growing Northern consciousness, was a potential volcano of racial unrest when Wilson returned from Europe. In mid-July, a white woman, the wife of a soldier, claimed she was roughed up by two black teenagers. Whites were already complaining about a black crime wave. The next day, about four hundred soldiers, sailors and marines armed with revolvers and clubs headed for the black section of the city. They were joined by some three hundred civilians, who began beating up blacks on the streets. Police broke up the riot, but an incredibly stupid department spokesman blamed the trouble on black veterans who had become intimate with white women in France.

The next night, mobs of whites roamed Pennsylvania Avenue and other main thoroughfares in the District of Columbia, beating any black person they found. Blacks were dragged from streetcars in front of the White House and clubbed bloody. The following day blacks retaliated. Armed with revolvers, they clashed with more than 1,000 equally well-armed whites. A black man emptied his gun at a streetcar full of whites. Blacks in cars roared into posh northwest Washington shooting at any white person they saw. A black on a motorcycle shot a marine in front of the White House.

The next day a distraught President Wilson called Secretary of War Newton Baker and ordered him to summon the U.S. Army. Soon 3,000 rifle-toting infantrymen were patrolling the capital’s streets. A heavy rainstorm, breaking the heat wave, also helped calm the seething city. The death toll was at least fifteen, with additional hundreds injured and thousands terrorized.

This Washington upheaval started a chain reaction of race riots that erupted in twenty-five U.S. cities in the summer of 1919. Late in July, a huge riot exploded in Chicago when whites stoned a black teenager who accidentally drifted across a marker segregating a Lake Michigan beach. A rock struck the boy in the head, and he drowned. The resulting riot engulfed Chicago’s business district, killing 38 people and seriously injuring 500. More than 1,000 people were left homeless when arson was added to the rioters’weaponry.
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Would a Southern-born president do anything about this sputtering time bomb? Apparently not. Especially when all he wanted to talk about was the League of Nations.

Underlying the unrest and disillusion was a growing fear that Bolshevism might invade the United States and cause the sort of upheaval that was desolating Russia. Wilson had withdrawn the two American expeditionary forces from Siberia and Murmansk, but White and Red armies remained locked in a death grapple throughout the huge country, and American newspapers were full of stories about Bolshevik uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and other nations.

Anxiety reached the flash point on June 2, 1919, while Woodrow Wilson was still in Paris insisting in the Council of Four that no changes should be made to the peace treaty with Germany. At 11:15 P.M. that night, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was reading in the front room of his brick house on R Street in northwest Washington. A progressive Pennsylvania Democrat and practicing Quaker who had backed Wilson since 1912, Palmer had been Tumulty’s choice to succeed the war-weary Thomas Gregory. With a yawn, Palmer tossed his book aside and strolled toward the bedroom in the back of the house, where his wife was already asleep.

At about the same time, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and his unhappy wife, Eleanor, were parking their car in a nearby
garage, on their way home from a dinner party. They planned to walk the few short blocks to their house, across the street from Palmer’s. A tremendous blast split the silent spring night. Roosevelt jokingly wondered if an artillery shell he had brought home from France had exploded. His good humor vanished when the wail of police sirens, the clang of ambulances, and hysterical screams of neighbors drifted toward them. Roosevelt broke into a run, leaving Eleanor stumbling behind him in her long skirt. Their eleven-year-old son James was in their house, with their cook.

At the scene, Roosevelt gaped at Palmer’s house. The front was smashed into a sagging, windowless ruin. The door dangled from a lone hinge. The dazed attorney general stood amid the rubble on the lawn, his arm around his terrified wife. The front of Roosevelt’s house was also windowless—as were those of almost all the other houses within several hundred yards.

In the street was a human leg. Part of another leg was on a neighbor’s lawn. Bits of blood and flesh were splattered on the steps of Roosevelt’s house. Inside he could hear his cook screaming hysterically. He flung open the door and raced upstairs to James’s bedroom. Although the floor was littered with shards of glass, the boy did not have as much as a scratch. He was enjoying the uproar outside. “Father . . . grabbed me in an embrace that almost cracked my ribs,” James later recalled.
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Back in the street, Roosevelt helped the police gather sheets of anarchist literature that had been scattered everywhere. The police theorized the lone victim of the blast, the bomber himself, had miscalculated how fast he had to run after he lit the fuse of his nitroglycerin bomb. His most salient message was in a pamphlet entitled
Plain Words,
written by someone who signed himself “The Anarchist Fighters.”

The writer expressed his rage at the Americans for trying to stop the worldwide spread of revolution. The “working multitude” was going to regain the “stolen millions” the ruling class had made in the Great War. “You jailed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could,” the anarchist ranted. But the capitalists could not stop them from “dreaming of freedom” and “aspir[ing] to a better world.”
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That same night, similar terrorist bombs exploded in front of the private homes of a New York judge, the mayor of Cleveland, two local politicians in Massachusetts, an industrialist in Paterson, New Jersey (the scene of a famous 1913 IWW strike), an immigration official in Pittsburgh, and, for some baffling reason, a Catholic Church in Philadelphia. An elderly
woman caretaker in the judge’s house was killed. Otherwise, injuries were minor. But the threat of a wave of anarchist terror jangled the nerves of congressmen and senators and the American public.

No one was more exercised than Attorney General Palmer. He saw “the blaze of Revolution sweeping over every American institution of law and order . . . licking the altars of churches . . . crawling into the sacred corners of American homes.” Palmer swiftly reorganized the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation to stamp out this peril. Among the new leaders was a twenty-five-year-old former librarian named John Edgar Hoover, who became head of the General Intelligence Division. Hoover began compiling cross-indexed files on every radical organization in the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, quick to embrace a trend, was soon addressing women’s luncheons, telling them that membership in the League of Nations was the best defense against the awful Bolshevik doctrine of free love.
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This unstable, uncertain, disillusioned America was the setting for Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to rescue his League of Nations from rejection by the Senate. After his disastrous speech to Congress on July 10, the president waited a week for a reaction. What he saw in the Senate was not encouraging. On July 15, George Norris of Nebraska rose to deliver a three-day tirade against the league and the treaty. Like Oswald Garrison Villard, Norris’s liberal credentials were impeccable. He had long supported disarmament and some sort of international organization to prevent war. He was willing to diminish U.S. sovereignty and even abandon the Monroe Doctrine to achieve these goals. But he could not support a league that was wedded to the peace treaty. He cited Japan’s seizure of Shantung as the worst of many immoralities and barbarities in the treaty. The blatant “greed and avarice” of the nations that were going to control the league made it absurd to ask the Senate to permit the United States to lend it America’s good name.
¹⁹

Wilson may have been able to disregard a similar conclusion in
The Nation
’s articles, which were published while he was in Europe. But he could not ignore this rebuke from one of the Senate’s leading liberals. The words must have cut deep. Here, again, was a cruel reminder of his primary
mistake, going to Europe to negotiate the treaty, and his repeated failures to defend the Fourteen Points face-to-face with Clemenceau and Lloyd George.

The day before Norris spoke, Wilson had begun to meet with individual senators, who had said they would be satisfied with very modest changes in the covenant. He gave these so-called mild reservationists about fifteen minutes each and encouraged the impression that their modifications would be acceptable to him. But there were not enough of these moderates to make a difference in winning a two-thirds majority. What Wilson needed was someone who could negotiate with those who had strong objections to the treaty and the league. The decision to cut himself off from Colonel House grew more damaging with every passing day.

On July 18, the day after Senator Norris ended his tirade against the treaty, Woodrow Wilson took to his bed, suffering from acute diarrhea and an agonizing headache. Admiral Cary Grayson hustled him aboard the presidential yacht,
Mayflower,
and kept him there for the weekend, in spite of violently stormy weather. After first saying Wilson had a cold, Grayson changed his diagnosis to a dysentery attack. Some historians and doctors who have studied Wilson’s medical history think the illness was a stroke. Others see it as a psychosomatic reaction to Norris’s ferocious assault. Wilson’s digestive system had frequently reacted negatively to stress.

Wilson made a quick recovery from his indisposition, although the political situation did not improve. In the hearing room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge had begun by reading the treaty aloud, word for word, a task that took two weeks. Next, Lodge announced, would come hearings at which the committee would question those who participated in the peace conference and listen to those who wanted to comment on the results of Wilson’s seven months in Paris.

On the surface, there seemed to be strong sentiment among American newspapers and voters in favor of the league. A
Literary Digest
poll of 1,377 daily newspapers found that a majority (718 to 659) favored quick ratification. The League to Enforce Peace claimed that a survey of newspaper editorials showed supporters of the league outnumbering opponents by 5 to 1. GOP foreign policy guru Elihu Root admitted that a majority of the voters, impatient with the endless peace process, wanted ratification “at once.”