The Illusion of Victory (76 page)

In the fall of 1920, Irish-American politicians virtually abandoned the Democratic Party in a body. Few were willing to say a word for Governor Cox out of fear that they would be wiped out on a local level by their enraged followers. When Cox came to Worcester, Massachusetts, the local leaders begged the candidate to make his visit no more than a whistle stop. A long speech about the League of Nations would turn Worcester totally Republican. An amused Henry Cabot Lodge remarked,“The Democratic leadership is motionless in Massachusetts.”
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Cox tried to deal with these massive defections on the ethnic side by attacking Harding and his Republican Old Guard backers, hoping to retain some of the middle-class progressives who had supported Wilson in 1912 and 1916. A sturdy, even dynamic man, full of energy, Cox traveled 22,000 miles and spoke to more than 2 million people. The Ohio governor denounced the $30 million that the GOP was supposedly raising to guarantee the election, calling it a slush fund and labeling the Republicans’ two chief fund-raisers “the Gold Dust Twins.” He assailed Harding’s “wobbles” on the League of Nations and blasted the Senate “oligarchy.” In
Collier’s
Magazine, veteran journalist Mark Sullivan wrote that the candidate was so vehement, he made many voters think of him as a frontier “bad man” shooting up the meeting.
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Franklin Roosevelt also essayed an over-the-top style. Trying to defend Wilson’s decision to give the British six votes in the League of Nations, Roosevelt told an audience in Butte, Montana, that the United States controlled twelve votes in the league. He proceeded to list Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Panama and other Central American countries that would not dare to vote against the wishes of their big brother, the United States.

This casual endorsement of American imperialism was bad enough. Roosevelt compounded it by claiming that he had run a couple of these “little republics.” In fact, he had written Haiti’s constitution.“And if I do say so, it’s a pretty good constitution.”

The assistant secretary of the navy had not written a line of Haiti’s constitution—nor did he ever “run” its government. He had done no more than supervise from Washington, D.C., the U.S. Marines’ bloody pacification of Haiti in 1915 at Woodrow Wilson’s order. To compound his woes, Roosevelt was unaware that
The Nation
was running a series of articles exposing the dark side of Wilson-style imperialism in Haiti and Santo Domingo.

Republicans pounced on the candidate’s gaffe. Warren Harding professed to be horrified to learn that “thousands of native Haitians have been killed by American Marines . . . to secure a vote in the League.” He called Roosevelt’s braggadocio “the most shocking assertion that ever emanated from a responsible member of the government of the United States. ”
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With his usual effrontery, FDR denied saying anything about Haiti, and tried to blame a local Associated Press stringer for misquoting him. The stringer persuaded thirty-one citizens of Butte to swear that Roosevelt was telling a lie almost as big as his claim that he wrote Haiti’s constitution. That was the last time Roosevelt mentioned Haiti in the campaign.

In Centralia, Washington, FDR gave a speech that would have brought tears of joy to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s eyes. Roosevelt saluted the members of the American Legion who had been gunned down in the 1919 Armistice Day assault on the IWW union hall, calling them martyrs “to the sacred cause of Americanism.” He said not a word about the castration and lynching of Wesley Everett, the IWW local’s secretary, by a frenzied mob. Instead Roosevelt orated on the way the legionnaires’ deaths had aroused the nation “to the great task of ridding this land of the alien anarchist, the criminal syndicalist, and all similar anti-Americans.” He was, of course, only echoing the civil rights policy of the Wilson administration.
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With the electoral tide running strongly in their favor, the Republicans did their utmost to straddle every issue and look confident of victory. In one of his first public statements, Harding summed up the underlying philosophy of his campaign: “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy . . . not surgery but serenity.” Most of the time, Harding took a leaf from William McKinley’s book and stayed on his front porch in Marion, Ohio, greeting delegations who pledged their fervent support and listening cheerfully to choral groups who warbled

At one point, Harding intimated strongly that he had little use for the League of Nations and would reject it. This pleased irreconcilables like Senators Johnson and Borah. But the Lodge-Root wing of the party protested that a league with reservations was what the people wanted. Consequently, in a succeeding speech, Harding wobbled back to saying that when he became president, he would convene a meeting of the nation’s best minds to study the league and see if it were worthy of ratification. In another speech, he said the United States might propose some other form of international association. But there was one point on which Harding never wobbled: Wilson’s League. The Republican candidate called it all sorts of nasty names, from monster to fraud.
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Even more effective were thousands of other Republican orators who made Wilson the centerpiece of their negative campaign. To remind Irish, Italian-, and German-American voters how Wilson had treated their homelands, speakers pictured Wilson playing a losing poker game with Lloyd George. “I’ll bet you Fiume,” says Lloyd George. “I’ll raise you Alsace!” says Wilson. The president was portrayed as a stubborn, vain, gullible fool who was taken to the cleaners by the shrewd Europeans. He was described as pounding the table and yelling, “You can never have Fiume!” the orator would add:“Nobody knew where Fiume was, whether one of the Sandwich Islands or a fixed star.” In the American heartland, the speech won howls of laughter and applause.
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In the closing weeks of the campaign, both Cox and Roosevelt, sensing imminent defeat, heaped abuse on ethnic Americans. Here, ironically, the big influence was Tumulty, who was playing the game that had worked for Wilson in 1916. The candidates began suggesting that German-Americans and Italian-Americans were disloyal and their support tainted Harding’s candidacy. Tumulty was delighted and so was Wilson, who hoped Cox would send George Sylvester Viereck an insulting telegram like the one the president had sent Jeremiah O’Leary in 1916.
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By October 14, Cox was pointing to “the motley array of questionable groups” backing Harding. Along with the “pro-German party,” there were the Italians, the Greeks and the Bulgarians, all putting “nationalistic ambition” above “the welfare of the world” by opposing the League of Nations. In subsequent speeches, Cox began talking about “the enemies of America during the war,” attempting to evoke the war rage that had run wild in 1918. In his final speech, Cox reached a predictable low point with the shout “Every traitor in America will vote tomorrow for Warren G. Harding!”
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When it came to the low road, Cox’s vice presidential candidate was no improvement. Roosevelt regularly castigated the Republicans for soliciting votes from the country’s “dangerous element,” who had been disloyal during the war. The Democrats scorned such tactics, Roosevelt declared. They wanted “all-American votes only.” an Italian-American newspaper sneered that Roosevelt was “a rah-rah boy whose sole asset in politics is his name.” Upping the ante, Roosevelt said that Italian-Americans had only “half-consciences” and were “fifty-fifty citizens.”
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In this Tumulty-inspired game plan, the Irish-Americans were exempted from such attacks. The president’s secretary was hoping to appeal to their patriotism and their jealousy of the other ethnics. But the fates foredoomed this shaky strategy, which probably had little impact on the enraged Irish rank and file in the first place. On October 25, hunger-striking Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney of Cork died, defiant to his last anguished breath. Irish-American leaders promptly proclaimed the Sunday before the election MacSwiney Observance Day. In New York’s Polo Grounds, 50,000 Celts heard Wilson and the League of Nations denounced once more as mortal enemies of Ireland’s right to self-determination. Similarly huge meetings took place in Chicago and other cities, at which orators told the Irish it was their solemn duty to vote against the Democratic ticket.
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Cox and Roosevelt struggled to combine their descents to the low road with repeated apostrophes to the League of Nations. When the league, already operating in Geneva, settled a dispute between Poland and Lithuania, Tumulty urged Cox to point it out to the American people. Roosevelt, in a fog illusionary optimism, replied,“Things are going vastly better. The President’s judgment that the League would be the only true issue is wholly borne out.”
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But Cox soon revealed his desperation when he began saying that he would accept a league with reservations. His would-be vice president began saying the same thing and added a pie-in-the-sky statement that convinced not a few people he had charm but little else to recommend him. Roosevelt declared if Cox were elected, the treaty would be ratified within sixty days. Neither man could see what was obvious to many other people: By this time the main issue was not the league but Wilsonism.
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Steve Early, a former Associated Press reporter who served as Roosevelt’s advance man aboard his campaign train, was impressed by the young candidate’s performance, in spite of his gaffes and a preference for speaking off the top of his head rather than from a prepared text. But Early was depressed by the public’s reaction. The Democrats’ problem was “the bitterness toward Wilson everywhere. He hasn’t a friend. ” In a halfhearted way, people still wanted to join a league of nations, but not “Mr. Wilson’s League.” Senator Lodge’s call for second thoughts on the league had been an overwhelming success.
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No one summed up the Democrats’ dilemma better than Franklin K. Lane, Wilson’s former secretary of the interior:“Oh, if he [Wilson] had been frank as to his illness, the people would have forgotten everything, his going to Paris, his refusal to deal with the mild reservationists—everything would have been swept away in a great wave of sympathy. But he could not be frank, he who talked so high of faith in the people distrusted them, and they will not be mastered by mystery. So he is so much less than a hero that he bears down his party to defeat.”
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Tumulty struggled in vain to persuade Wilson to join the campaign. The secretary proposed releasing a weekly address to the American people. Wilson spurned the idea, fearing it would get him into a debate with Harding, whom he had grown to loathe. Not until October 27, with the election only a week away, did the president decide to make a statement. He chose the oddest imaginable audience—a forlorn little band of Republican supporters of the League to Enforce Peace, who clung to accepting the covenant without reservations. They had came to the White House to pledge their allegiance to him.

The LEP remnant listened as the president read his semi-speech from his wheelchair. It was clearly intended not for them but for the nation.“My fellow countrymen,” wilson began. “It is feared the supreme issue presented for your consideration in this campaign is growing more obscure rather than clearer.” as he went on, his voice dwindled to a near whisper. But the words were strong and emphatic. He was telling the voters that the election was a national referendum on the league and the treaty. “The nation was never called upon to make a more solemn determination than it must now make.” wilson urged the voters to measure every candidate—those running for the Senate and the House as well as for president and vice president—by the same strict standard: “Shall we or shall we not redeem the great moral obligations of the United States?”
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Not once in this final burst of Wilsonian idealism did the president mention the names of Cox or Roosevelt. Was he suggesting that in his embittered soul he did not think they were worthy of carrying the standard he had lifted before the nation? Perhaps. In the final analysis, Woodrow Wilson found it hard to share the stage with anyone.

From this summons to the high road, the Democratic campaign lurched to the lowest imaginable low road a few days later. Hundreds of thousands of copies of a pamphlet circulated throughout the country, informing voters that Warren G. Harding had “Negro blood,” and his election would result in “international shame and domestic ruin.” the author was a race-baiting history professor named W.E. Chancellor. Rumors about Harding’s ancestry had swirled through Ohio for years. The Republicans had a denial ready for instant release and threw in a denunciation of “conscienceless Democratic partisans.”
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Although by this time the betting odds on a Harding victory had reached 10 to 1—the highest in anyone’s memory—the Republicans decided a little revenge was in order. They connived with the editor of the
Providence Journal,
the Australian-born John Revelstoke Rathom, who had made a career out of publicizing mostly imaginary German spies during the war, to unleash a suitably underhanded attack on Franklin Roosevelt.

Rathom’s paper had covered some messy problems at Portsmouth Naval Prison, involving sailors convicted of sodomy. Secretary of the Navy Daniels had advocated a policy of forgiveness and rehabilitation for these men, and his assistant secretary had carried it out, ordering them returned to active duty after relatively brief incarceration. The upper ranks of the navy had violently opposed this lenient policy and were not averse to leaking their opinions to the press. Rathom used these facts to condemn Roosevelt for lacking “the qualities of frankness and manliness.” Clearly implying FDR was gay, Rathom sneered that his conduct had earned him “the detestation and contempt” of every officer in the U.S. Navy.
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