1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Then there were Los Angeles (September 20), Sacramento (September 21), Reno (September 22), and Las Vegas (September 23). Every stop left the president of the United States more exhausted and disoriented than the last. But Salt Lake City was where things really began to go wrong.

  The Mormon Tabernacle on September 24 was stiflingly hot; even Edith nearly passed out from the “fetid air.” When the crowd, however well meaning, cheered as Wilson read Lodge’s reservation on Article 10, he completely lost his temper. “Now wait a minute!” he roared at the startled crowd. “You want to applaud that!”35

  Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Denver, Colorado, saw him barely able to stand, let alone speak. Then the president’s train pulled into the station in Pueblo, Colorado. Wilson was on the verge of collapse but still spoke in a hoarse voice to those who had come to hear him. He referred to the children of the next generation, to the American soldiers who had served and died in France, and to seeing Frenchwomen putting flowers on their graves. Then he said this: “I believe men will see the truth, eye to eye and face to face. There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace.”36

  It was his last public speech. Twenty miles outside Pueblo, Dr. Grayson asked for the train to stop. President Wilson was clearly in deep distress. He told his doctor he had such a headache that he could barely see. Grayson hoped a walk in the open air would help him recover his breath and his wits. The two walked for almost an hour. Wilson met a farmer, who gave him a head of cabbage and some apples; they spied a young veteran in a private’s uniform, and Wilson stopped to chat with the soldier and his family.37

  They boarded the train again, and it headed down the track for a brief stop at Rocky Ford. Wilson did not feel up to speaking; he did stand and wave as they headed out of Rocky Ford and into the early evening sunlight.

  That night “was the longest and most heart-breaking of my life,” Edith Wilson later recalled. Wilson felt sick, very sick, and was in intense pain. He finally fell asleep, but then sat bolt upright at 5:30 a.m.

  Wichita was the next stop—ironically, the hometown of his old rival William Jennings Bryan. Wilson gamely dressed and shaved, but after several minutes, it was clear he was not up to speaking to the crowd outside the train station. “I don’t seem to realize it,” he then confessed to Tumulty, “but I seem to have gone to pieces.” Then he burst into tears.38

  Wilson broke off the rest of the speaking tour and with its shades drawn, the presidential train headed back to Washington at top speed.

  MEANWHILE, IN THE Capitol, Henry Cabot Lodge was marshaling his forces to compel Wilson to give way on the League of Nations.

  He had already proposed making substantial changes to the treaty. One was dropping the language that transferred Germany’s treaty rights in Shandong to Japan, and substituting China instead—ironically, a move that reinforced the principle of “self-determination.” Lodge himself was deeply suspicious of Japan’s ambitions regarding China, and Asia generally. “Their oral promises are worthless . . . They are the Prussia of the East. Their culture is German, their ambitions are German . . . You might as well argue that Belgium ought to be handed over to France and Britain because France and England rescued Belgium from Germany.”39

  Another change was adding language that exempted the Americas from the collective security requirements that would have violated the Monroe Doctrine. Wilson’s earlier change—“nothing but a mere mention of the name [Monroe Doctrine],” as Lodge put it—was less than adequate; there could be no ambiguity about the United States’ right to enforce its own interests in its own hemisphere. There was even an amendment, led by Sen. Hiram Johnson, to give the United States six votes in the League General Assembly as a counterweight to the provision that gave League votes to Britain’s dominions, including Canada and Australia.

  All these amendments went down to defeat in the Senate, as Democrats and moderate pro-League Republicans came together to say no. But like the chess master who sacrifices his queen in order to get to checkmate on the next move, Lodge knew what he was doing. “I never expected to carry the amendments,” he privately told one of his nephews.40 With the amendments out of the way, the Senate could now move on to the reservations: these lay at the heart of Lodge’s strategy. Amendments changing the language of the Covenant and treaty would have required renegotiating with the other Allies—a highly unlikely possibility, and one that, it is important to note, would have killed the treaty and the League of Nations outright, which was never Lodge’s goal.

  Inclusion of the reservations, however, would make it possible to get enough votes for ratification. “What I fear,” Lodge wrote to his ally and Roosevelt’s former secretary of war Elihu Root, “is that if we do not make the reservations strong and effective . . . the whole may be killed on the floor of the Senate. You may not realize how strong the feeling has grown against it . . . I want reasonable reservations but strong and efficient ones.”41

  The initiative was now firmly in Lodge’s hands. With masterly and exquisite skill, he had managed to keep the Republicans united behind his reservations strategy. For Democrats who still supported Wilson’s vision of the League without changes, such as their leader Sen. Gilbert Hitchcock, what they needed now was for their president to show the same degree of skill and strategy in heading off the Republicans.

  That was precisely what they would not get, for the next two crucial months.

  The president’s train returned to Union Station on Sunday morning, September 28. Although his daughter Margaret and a crowd of one thousand people were waiting for him, none of them knew what had happened in Pueblo. Wilson managed to walk to his car without help, and bowed and waved stiffly to the cheering throng. In the White House, “he wandered like a ghost between the study at one end of the hall and my room at the other,” Edith recalled. “The awful pain in his head that drove him back and forth was too acute to permit work.”42 For four days he stayed in the residential quarters of the White House, seeing no one and unable to conduct any business. Then, on October 1, he suddenly seemed better than he had in days. He read aloud to the family from the Bible. The next morning, when he awoke, however, he confessed he had no feeling at all in his left hand. He asked Edith to help him walk to the bathroom.

  On the way, he collapsed and fell to the floor. Edith screamed for Dr. Grayson. Together they brought the president back to his bed. Woodrow Wilson was paralyzed along his entire left side. The White House’s chief usher, Ike Hoover, caught a glimpse of him later that day, stretched out on the Lincoln bed. “He looked as if dead. There was no sign of life. His face bore a long cut above the temple” from his fall, “from which signs of blood were still evident.”43

  This was the stroke that now left the nation without a functioning president for more than a year, and left Senate Democrats leaderless and rudderless as the final votes for the League of Nations approached.

  Throughout October, as Lodge’s Foreign Relations Committee voted on one reservation after another, particularly the reservation on Article 10, Woodrow Wilson was completely bedridden, unable to see anyone except his wife and doctor—or, rather, doctors, as a serious prostate infection had been found that threatened to kill the invalided president. On October 24, the committee submitted a total of fourteen reservations to the full Senate—and yet nothing was coming from the Oval Office or the White House.

  It was not until November 7 that Edith Wilson finally permitted Senator Hitchcock to meet with the president. Wilson was still clearly paralyzed on his left side; his mouth worked with difficulty. Hitchcock was wary about mentioning Lodge’s name, for fear that it would provoke a fresh emotional outburst from the president, even another stroke. He carefully laid out what the Democrats could still do to stop Lodge from getting his victory. Lodge had his majority to pass the reservations; the Democrats, however, had enough votes to prevent the required two-thirds majority needed to ratify a treaty. Should the De
mocrats let the treaty with reservations go down to defeat, Hitchcock now asked Wilson, or should they compromise and accept some reservations in order to get the treaty approved—and if so, which ones?

  Wilson refused to consider any compromise. “Let Lodge compromise,” he mumbled.

  “Well, of course, he must compromise also,” Hitchcock replied, “but we might well hold out the olive branch.”

  “Let Lodge hold out the olive branch,” Wilson finally barked. And that was that.44

  With the final vote on the treaty and the reservations to take place in less than a week, Hitchcock realized that the person he needed to talk some sense into wasn’t the president, but the president’s wife, who was constantly at his side and was still compos mentis. On November 13, he penned a note to Edith Wilson laying out a last-minute strategy for saving the treaty, and Wilson’s League.

  “One by one we are voting on the Lodge reservations,” he informed her. “The Republicans are supporting these reservations solidly.” The plan was for Democrats to offer a resolution to pass the treaty without reservations. “We shall be beaten on that and shall then offer interpretative reservations to take the place of the drastic reservations proposed by Lodge.” They would lose those as well, but once Lodge’s treaty plus reservations failed to get the needed two-thirds majority, the Democrats would revive their version of the compromise. Republicans would either have to vote for the compromise or go home and face an angry constituency wondering what had happened to the peace treaty.45

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but at least it was a plan. Yet there was no reply from the White House. On November 15, Hitchcock asked for some sign that the president accepted the Democrats’ strategy. In response, Edith wrote on the envelope that the president would be willing to sign on to Hitchcock’s watered-down version of Lodge’s reservation on Article 10; but when they met again, for the last time, on November 17 (two days before the vote), Wilson was adamant about opposing any acceptance of Lodge’s version (which was actually almost indistinguishable from Hitchcock’s) or any of the other reservations, which now numbered fifteen.

  “If the Republicans are bent on defeating this Treaty,” he said in a quavering voice, “I want the vote of each Republican and Democrat recorded, because they will have to answer to the country in the future for their acts. They must answer to the people.” Wilson said he knew he was a sick man, but “if I have breath enough in my body to carry on this fight, I shall do this . . .” He then added with real venom, “I will get their political scalps.”46

  In short, Wilson had ruled out any compromise. To make sure of it, he signed a letter drafted by Hitchcock the next day stating that “the friends and supporters of the treaty will vote against the Lodge resolution of reservation.”

  On November 19, the predictable happened. Lodge and the Republicans defeated the Democrats’ compromise reservations one by one. Then Lodge called for a vote on the treaty with his reservations. It went to defeat, failing to get a two-thirds majority. Then he held a vote on the treaty without the reservations. It, too, went down to defeat.

  The treaty was dead, as was American participation in the League of Nations. It was a crushing defeat for Wilson, and Henry Cabot Lodge had no doubt as to whose doorstep the failure belonged on.

  “He would not consult, he would not compromise,” Lodge later wrote; “he would not consider any change of meaning or consequence.” He added, “If Wilson had not written his letter to the Democratic caucus, calling on them to kill the treaty rather than accept the reservations, the treaty would have been ratified on the 19th of November. There would have been enough Democrats voting with us to have done it. It was killed by Wilson.”47

  It’s hard to disagree with Lodge’s postmortem. Wilson’s antipathy and bitterness toward Lodge and the Republicans had blinded him to what the implications would be if the treaty and the League did indeed fail to gain the two-thirds majority. The defeat resounded around the world; it left the Allies high and dry, and the future of America’s relations with the world uncertain. But Wilson was too sick and too mentally and emotionally unbalanced to fully grasp what had happened.

  That was not entirely the end of the story. On December 17, Wilson roused himself to put forward one of the most extraordinary proposals any president had ever made to Congress. He suggested that the fifty-six senators who opposed him resign and run for reelection in a special election, as a way to test their vote on the League against public opinion. Wilson was so convinced that the American people would support him—he still saw himself as their champion and spokesman—that he made a wager: “if all [the anti-League senators] or a majority of them are reelected, I will resign the presidency.”48

  The plan was never made public. Even if it had been, Lodge and the others would have recognized it for what it was: a mad scheme by a man who had now completely lost touch with reality, just as he had lost control of the presidency. By now, Edith Wilson was signing all Wilson’s bills and holding all his Cabinet meetings. From this point on, she was in fact acting as president, while she and the doctors, in the most elaborate and successful cover-up in presidential history, continued to maintain the fiction that Wilson was still functioning as chief executive.49

  If Wilson had given up, the Democrats had not. The following January, they tried to reach an agreement with Lodge to revive the League and the treaty in a compromise form, with appropriate reservations. Lodge was open to the idea, but when Senate Democrats approached Wilson, now a virtual recluse with a long white beard, he fought the plan with all his remaining strength. Barely able to remain alert and conscious more than ten minutes at a time, he rallied enough to issue a statement condemning the compromise as a nullification of the entire treaty.

  In the end, twenty-one Democratic senators bucked their president and voted with Republicans for the treaty with reservations on March 19, 1920. That was still seven votes shy of the two-thirds needed, and so the treaty, and American participation in the League of Nations, passed into history. Lodge pronounced the League “as dead as Marley’s Ghost.” Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding added, in a swipe at Wilson and the Democrats’ past, “dead as slavery.”50

  So was the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. That November, Democrats would go down to a crushing defeat at the polls, with the election of a new Republican president, Warren G. Harding—largely out of bitterness over the war and where Wilsonism had led the country. As Eugene Debs, still sitting in his jail cell at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, wrote, “No man in public life in American history ever retired so thoroughly discredited, so scathingly rebuked, so overwhelmingly impeached and repudiated as Woodrow Wilson.”51

  Discredited and repudiated, yes. Defeated and forgotten, no—as the next century would show.

  CONCLUSION

  I am, it seems, immensely guilty before the workers of Russia.

  —LENIN, DECEMBER 26, 1923

  ON MAY 25, 1922, Lenin suffered a massive stroke, eerily similar to the one Wilson suffered on his return from his speaking tour in 1919. As with Wilson, the stroke paralyzed an entire side of Lenin’s body, but in his case the right instead of the left. And like Wilson, Lenin would be helpless over the following months as control over his legacy slipped out of his hands.

  Yet, unlike Wilson’s, the stroke hit Lenin when he seemed at the very height of his personal power. He had no more rivals or opposition. The Whites’ fleeing supreme ruler of Russia, Admiral Kolchak, had been captured on January 14, 1920, and shot, his body dumped under the ice of a frozen Siberian river. There had been a real scare in March 1921, when sailors at Kronstadt naval base, the same men who had put Lenin in power in November 1917, rose up in armed revolt against the regime. They demanded reforms such as the freeing of all political prisoners, the abolishing of secret police control of all army and naval units, and freedom for Russia’s peasants to “do as they please with their land”—in effect, an end to everything Lenin and the Central Committee had imposed since the revoluti
on.1 For a few short weeks, the Communist regime (as it was now increasingly called) seemed once again in peril. Then Marshal Tukhachevsky and his troops stormed the fortress, and the sailors involved in the revolt were captured and executed.

  For Lenin, the Kronstadt mutiny was the excuse to wipe out any remaining sources of opposition. He presented the Kronstadt sailors as agents of White and counterrevolutionary forces and denounced all those who were not members of the Communist Party as “nothing else but Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries dressed up in modern, Kronstadt, non-party attire.”2 There was a roundup of remaining Socialist Revolutionaries and a trial for treason in 1921—the first of the “show trials” that would be a hallmark of the Soviet regime. There was no trial for the Mensheviks, but by then they had simply ceased to exist. Any survivors had joined Alexander Kerensky, Viktor Chernov, Nikolai Chkheidze, General Denikin, and the tens of thousands of other Russians (czarists; democrats; Socialist Revolutionaries; princes and princesses; and musicians and artists such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, George Balanchine, Marc Chagall, and Igor Stravinsky) who would now spend the rest of their lives as “White” Russian exiles and émigrés.

  By the time of his stroke, Lenin “had systematically constructed, in all its essentials, the most carefully engineered apparatus of state tyranny the world had ever seen.”3 It included the power of the Cheka (which had carried out some fifty thousand death sentences by the start of 1921) to punish “the helping in any way” of opposition to the Communist regime in thought, word, or deed—a license for terror that, as Lenin told his minister of justice just days before his stroke, “must be formulated as wide as possible.”4 It even included the power of the Central Committee to sentence to death anyone in the country, including members of the Central Committee.

  Yet this was absolute power over a country in ruins. A third of Russia’s prewar landmass was gone; so was a quarter of its population, having vanished into the new nations created after Brest-Litovsk, including Poland and the Baltic states. The economy had been wrecked almost beyond recognition. Industrial production had fallen to 10 percent of prewar levels; Russian manufactured-goods production stood at 12.9 percent of what it had been in 1913. Production of cast iron, for example, was less than 2.5 percent of the total in 1913. The ruble was worth 1 percent of its prewar value.