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?” 27
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.28
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.29
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.”30
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!”31
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.”32
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.”33
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.”34
The president proceeded to describe the program on which the United States would now embark. They would offer “the most liberal financial credits” to the governments now at war with Germany. They would share America’s material resources, immediately equip the navy to deal with enemy submarines, and expand the army by at least 500,000 men,“who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service.”
These words were an uplifting way of saying conscription, a draft. Along with this hard choice would be “equitable” taxation to finance the U.S. government’s war program and to protect people against the inflation produced by “vast war loans.”
More important than these “deeply momentous things” was the necessity to make America’s motives clear “to all the world.” The goal of the war would be to “vindicate the principles of peace and justice against “selfish and autocratic power.” It was “autocratic governments backed by organized force” that made neutrality impossible.
Wilson insisted that he did not blame the German people for this international malaise. “We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war.” The war had been provoked and waged in the interests of “dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men.”
In a voice vibrant with emotion, the president launched into a paean to democracy. “Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies” or launch “cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression . . . from generation to generation.” Such things can only be done “within the privacy of [royal] courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class.” they were “happily impossible” where public opinion insisted that a government give the people “full information” about the nation’s affairs.
At this point Wilson asked the audience if they did not share his enthusiasm for the “wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia.” That nation, he maintained, had always “been democratic at heart.” the autocracy that ran the country was an aberration, not even Russian in origin. Now Russia had become a fit partner for a “League of Honor.”
Returning to Germany, the president launched a scathing denunciation of the spies and saboteurs that the “Prussian autocracy” had sent to the United States to disturb the peace and disrupt U.S. industries. Even worse was the attempt to “stir up enemies against us at our very doors” by offering Mexico an alliance. This underhanded policy had made it clear that the German government had no “real friendship” for Americans and intended to “act against our peace and security” at its convenience. It was time to “accept the gauge of battle” with this “natural foe to liberty,” to fight for “the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the right of nations, great and small . . . the world must be made safe for democracy.”
At first, Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi was the only person in the chamber to react to these last words. He began clapping. The harsh sound of his beating hands seemed to take everyone by surprise. A moment later, the entire audience was imitating him.35
Wilson reiterated America’s disinterested motives. “We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. . . . We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.” He also restated America’s lack of enmity toward the German people. He declared that Americans would prove this friendship by their actions toward the millions of German Americans in their midst. In fact, they would prove their friendship for all the immigrants and their descendants who were “loyal to the government and to their neighbors in the hour of test.”
Finally, came a soaring peroration:
It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried in our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.36
The last line, a paraphrase of Martin Luther’s famous defense of his Protestant faith, guaranteed that this time, there was no need for cheerleading by Chief Justice White or Senator Williams. Almost every person in the chamber was standing up, clapping, shouting, waving flags, in some cases sobbing with the emotion Wilson had ignited. Only a few people noticed that one man made a point of doing none of these things. A small, sardonic smile on his wide, creased face, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, one of the stellar voices of liberalism in America, folded his arms across his broad chest and stood there in silent disagreement.37
X
Wilson left the House chamber immediately. Only a few people were able to shake his hand. One was Senator Lodge, who told him that he had “expressed in the loftiest manner the sentiments of the American people.” These were the first kind words Lodge had directed toward Wilson in a long time. The secretary of agriculture, David F. Houston, who had been arguing for war against Germany within Wilson’s cabinet as passionately as Lodge had been calling for it publicly, also shook the president’s hand and congratulated him. Wilson returned to the White House with Joe Tumulty and Cary Grayson where he found his wife and daughter and Colonel House waiting for him in his study on the second floor.
House told Wilson he had “taken a position as to policies that no other statesman had yet assumed.” Perhaps revealing a certain weariness with House’s sycophantic style, Wilson disagreed. He said Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln and the president’s favorite politician, Britain’s William Evart Gladstone, had relied on the same principles. House diplomatically disagreed.“It seemed to me,” House told his diary,“he did not have a true conception of the path he was blazing.
” was the colonel telling himself he understood the history they were making far better than Philip Dru?38
XI
Later, according to Joe Tumulty, he and Wilson adjourned to the Cabinet Room, where the president broke down.“My message today was a message of death for our young men,” he said.“How strange it seems to applaud that.” The president supposedly launched into a self-pitying monologue, defending his long struggle to keep the United States neutral. He spoke bitterly of how he had been maligned in the newspapers by men such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge. Wilson read Tumulty a letter from a friend who understood what he was trying to do. Finally, Tumulty said,“he wiped away great tears [and] laying his head on the table, sobbed as if he was a child.”
Repeated in dozens of history books and Wilson biographies, this touching scene almost certainly never happened. Tumulty wrote it in 1920, when the illusion of victory had been shattered by cruel realities. Like Frank Cobb’s imaginary interview, it represents something that Tumulty wished Wilson had said and done. By 1920, Tumulty was one of the few men in U.S. politics who remained loyal to Wilson, in spite of the shameful way the president and his wife had treated him.39
Without Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson might never have become president. The shrewd, genial Irish-American from Jersey City had shepherded Wilson through the wilderness of New Jersey machine politics when he ran for governor in 1910. Tumulty had stayed loyal when Wilson did what almost every Irish-American politician in the United States considered unforgivable. He broke his promise that he would not attack James Smith, the powerful Democratic Party boss whom George Harvey had persuaded to offer Wilson the gubernatorial nomination. Instead, to prove his liberal bona fides, Wilson made Smith one of his principal targets. In sticking with Wilson, a man whom fellow Irish-Americans called a liar and an ingrate, Tumulty destroyed his once bright future in the New Jersey Democratic Party.40
The Illusion of Victory Page 3