The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  On November 12, 1917, Woodrow Wilson made a speech to the American Federation of Labor convention in Buffalo, New York. When he mentioned the Russian Decree of Peace, he made it clear that he had no intention of sharing the ideological leadership of the war with the Bolsheviks. He called them fatuous dreamers and lumped them with American “pacifists,” whom the U.S. government was busily silencing, putting in jail, or both.“What I am opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity,” he said.“My heart is with them but my mind has a contempt for them.” Proof of the Russians’ low IQs, Wilson thought, was their readiness to negotiate peace with the present German government. That idea violated the first article of faith in Wilson’s latest creed.4

  Back in the White House, early reports from Russia encouraged the president to think that the leader of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, would soon regain power. In a letter to a congressman, Wilson expressed confidence that the Russian Revolution, like the French Revolution of 1789, would have to go through some “deep waters,” but he was sure the Russians would reach “firm land” on the other side. The president seemed to have forgotten that by the time the French reached firm land, they had killed huge numbers of people in France and neighboring countries and wound up with a dictator named Napoleon Bonaparte.5

  Leon Trotsky, now in charge of the Russian Foreign Office, had recently spent ten weeks working as a journalist in New York and considered himself an authority on the United States. In a widely reported speech, he said the Americans had decided to intervene in the war “under the influence . . . of the American stock exchange.” He went on to describe how much money the Americans were making from the war and suggested they were primarily interested in seeing the other belligerents weaken each other until there was a “hegemony of American capital.” Much of this statement would have won emphatic approval from Senators George Norris and Robert La Follette. We can be certain, however, that it did not enthuse Woodrow Wilson.6

  A few days later, Trotsky began exhuming from the Russian diplomatic archives copies of the secret treaties the Allies had made to divide up the spoils of victory. All the sordid deals cut by the supposed defenders of small nations and universal democracy were suddenly revealed to shocked Americans. No one was more dismayed than Woodrow Wilson to have this dirty linen exposed and his sacred struggle for the “right” held up to ridicule.7

  By coincidence, representatives from the Allies, including Wilson’s confidential envoy, Colonel House, were meeting in Paris to try to coordinate their disconnected and in some cases sagging war efforts. House decided the only way to retain a patina of idealism for the war was a frontal assault on the secret treaties. He called for their repudiation. The French and the Italians reacted with outrage and huffily insisted a deal was a deal, whether it was secret or public. The British gave the colonel support so tepid it amounted to another repudiation. All the conferees could agree on was a lame statement that each nation would communicate with Petrograd in its own way and express a willingness to “reconsider” their war aims as soon as Russia had a “stable government.” that gave the backs of their hands to the Bolsheviks, who obviously did not measure up to the Allied definition of stability.8

  The Allied disarray gave the Germans a chance to play a trump card. On December 2, 1917, they sent their foreign minister before the Reichstag to orate on the moderation of Germany’s war aims and its readiness for a compromise peace. The Allies, exposed by the secret treaties as “demanding victory and nothing but victory,” were driven by narrow, greedy motives. The foreign minister added that he was ready to discuss with the Bolsheviks a “reorganization of affairs in the east”—code words for a peace conference. The Russians accepted the offer and delegates began talking at German army headquarters in Brest-Litovsk on the Russian-Polish border.9

  This démarche left the international ideological stage swept bare of players—except for Woodrow Wilson. Colonel House clearly recognized this and urged his alter ego not to make “any statement concerning foreign affairs until I can see you.” The colonel obviously thought Philip Dru needed all the help he could get.10

  II

  In the midst of this diplomatic turmoil, on November 2, 1917, the British cabinet, over the signature of Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, issued a statement that looms large in retrospect but seemed a minor matter to most of the world at the time. The Balfour Declaration, embodied in a letter that the foreign secretary wrote to Lord Rothschild, the unofficial leader of the Jewish community in England, said that His Majesty’s government “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object; it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”11

  This epochal document was created by a complex interplay between the dynamics of the war and personal diplomacy by Jews who had become converts to Zionism, a vision of a regained Jewish homeland articulated by the late-nineteenth-century poet and playwright Theodore Herzl. In England one of Zionism’s leading exponents was the gifted chemist Chaim Weizmann, who had intermittently conferred with Balfour and Lloyd George during the preceding decade. Both these powerful politicians developed an attachment to the idea, thanks to their noncomformist religious past. But few if any statesmen allow religious sentiment to guide their policies. The driving force behind the decision to issue the statement at the close of the disastrous year 1917 was visible in a coded telegram that Balfour sent to Sir William Wiseman, the director of British intelligence in the United States and a confidant of Colonel House.

  London, Oct. 6, ’17

  Following from Falsterbro [Balfour] for Brussa [House]

  IN VIEW OF REPORTS THAT GERMAN GOVERNMENT ARE MAKING GREAT EFFORTS TO CAPTURE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, QUESTION OF A MESSAGE OF SYMPATHY WITH MOVEMENT FROM H.M. GOVERNMENT HAS AGAIN BEEN CONSIDERED BY CABINET . . . BEFORE TAKING ANY DECISION CABINET INTEND TO HEAR VIEWS OF SOME OF REPRESENTA-TIVE ZIONISTS, BUT MEANWHILE THEY WOULD BE GRATEFUL IF YOU FOUND IT POSSIBLE TO ASCERTAIN OPINION OF ADRAMYTI [Wilson] WITH REGARD TO FORMULA.12

  Wiseman swiftly passed this telegram to House, who soon handed it toWilson. Seven days later, the colonel got the following note from the president.

  My dear House:

  I find in my pocket the memorandum you gave me about the Zionist movement. I am afraid I did not say to you that I concurred in the formula suggested from the other side. I do, and would be obliged if you would let them know it.13

  Clearly, the matter was not a major concern, if the president put the memorandum in his pocket and forgot about it. Palestine and the entire Middle East was British turf, in which Wilson and House had little interest.

  What interest they had was overlaid by caution. On October 16, Wiseman cabled London, reporting that “Brussa [House] put formula before Adramyti [Wilson], who approves it, but asks that no mention of his approval shall be made when H.M. G. [His Majesty’s Government] makes formula public, as he has arranged that American Jews shall then ask him for his approval which he will give publicly here.”14

  III

  Onrushing events left little or no time to devote much thought to the Middle East. The United States never even bothered to declare war on Turkey. The European drama absorbed the attention of U.S. politicians. On the heels of the Bolshevik call for an early peace and the diplomatic contretemps over the secret treaties came a startling appeal for an end to the war from one of England’s leading conservatives. The Marquis of Lansdowne, former foreign secretary and viceroy of India, published a letter in the London Telegraph, saying the murderous conflict had already lasted too long. The marquis had lost two sons in the struggle. Calmly, magisterially, he repudiated the economic jealousy and newspaper-manufactured hatred of Germany, which he blamed for drawing England into the war. Lansdowne urged a pe
ace that would neither threaten Germany with annihilation nor deny its rightful place as the dominant industrial nation of Europe. He added to these ideas a proposal for an international organization that would preserve such a peace.

  The British leader clearly differed with Wilson and with his own government about their refusal to negotiate with the supposedly autocratic German government. He did not belabor the point. But he was obviously calling for a peace without victory. German-hating Ambassador Walter Hines Page reported that Lansdowne was supported only by “pacifists and semi-pacifists and a war-weary minority.” But the nobleman’s appeal put new pressure on Woodrow Wilson to find an answer to these calls for peace and somehow restore the idealistic glow in which his rhetoric had coated the war on April 2, 1917. 15

  IV

  The president was scheduled to go before the second session of the Sixty-Fifth Congress on December 4 to give his state-of-the-union address. He realized that House’s advice to remain silent on foreign policy was patently impossible. Wilson had to say something, as he pointed out to his alter ego in a terse cable: “SORRY IMPOSSIBLE TO OMIT FOREIGN AFFAIRS FROM ADDRESS TO CONGRESS. RETICENCE ON MY PART AT THIS JUNCTUREWOULD BE MISUNDERSTOOD AND RESENTED AND DO MUCH HARM.”16

  The New York Times reported the president looked fresh and determined, and remarked on his colorful, new tie. He struck his main theme hard and early.“Let there be no misunderstanding. Our present and immediate task is to win the war and nothing shall turn us aside from it until it is accomplished. ” There could be no negotiations, no compromise with “German autocracy.” As for principles and goals, Wilson endorsed the idea of “no annexations, no indemnities.” They were good principles, but they had been used “by the masters of German intrigue to lead the Russian people astray.” when the war was won,“a right use” will be made of these principles. Peace would be based on “generosity and justice, to the exclusion of all selfish claims to advantage, even on the part of the victors. . . . There must be no covenants of selfishness and compromise.”

  Wilson was telling the Allies what he thought of the secret treaties: not much. He then embarked on an even more unilateral argument. He wished these principles had been “made plain at the very outset” of the war. If that had been done,“the sympathy and enthusiasm of the Russian people might have been once and for all enlisted on the side of the Allies, suspicion and mistrust swept away, and a real and lasting union of purpose effected.” Instead, the Russian people had been “poisoned by the same dark falsehoods that kept the German people in the dark, and the poison has been administered by the very same hands.”

  With rhetoric that soared above any semblance of psychological realism, Wilson claimed he sympathized with the German people, who had allowed their evil leaders to deceive them into thinking they were fighting for their national existence. He expressed similar sympathy for the people of Austria-Hungary and insisted he had no desire to “impair or rearrange” their empire. But to speed the progress to victory, Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Austria-Hungary because it was “simply a vassal of the German government.”17

  This request for a wider war evoked, according to the New York Times, an eruption that combined war rage and hatred of hyphenated Americans. “A cheer that came from a dozen places at once broke the silence that had been intensified by the sense of disappointment over the feeling he had created that the day of reckoning with the Vienna Government and particularly with those Austrian subjects in America who were playing Germany’s game of intrigue and incendiarism under the nose of the United States was now at hand.” the cheering, punctuated by the yip-yip-yip of the rebel yell from Southern senators, lasted so long that the president had to step away from the lectern until it subsided. Only Senator Robert La Follette remained seated, stubbornly refusing to join the acclamation.18

  The president closed with a call for “vigorous, rapid, and successful prosecution of the great task of winning the war.” the struggle, he insisted, was for America one of “high disinterested purpose.” the cause was “just and holy” and the settlement must be of “like motive and quality.” He was saying the secret treaties must be abandoned, but for the time being, he left the problem in the realm of the ideal.19

  The Times of London called the speech “illuminating and inspiring.” Ambassador Walter Hines Page cabled:“It is regarded as his most important utterance”—an indication of how badly the British needed an answer to the Bolsheviks and Lord Lansdowne. A New York Times sampling of editorial opinion around the country declared the president had given a definitive answer to the peace seekers. Lloyd George’s knockout blow was still in charge of the war.20

  Behind the scenes there was a dramatic revelation of Wilson’s real feelings about this outcome. Not long after he finished his speech, the president conferred with William C. Bullitt, a young Philadelphia journalist whose astute reporting on European affairs, especially inside Germany, had persuaded Colonel House to make him an assistant secretary of state. Bullitt congratulated Wilson on the state-of-the-union address. The president replied, “Wasn’t it horrible? All those congressmen and senators applauding every wretched warlike thing I had to say, ignoring all the things for which I really care. I hate this war! . . . The only thing I care about on earth is the peace I am going to make at the end of it.”

  Tears ran down Woodrow Wilson’s cheeks. 21

  V

  While the president was trying to hold the western end of the Allied coalition together with rhetoric that combined war will and idealism, a very different drama was taking place in Paris. The new premier, Georges Clemenceau, was struggling to stamp out a plot to overthrow the government and take France out of the war. The defeatism that General Henri-Philippe Pétain had worried about during his first meeting with General Pershing had fermented into a full-blown conspiracy. At its center was a wealthy, bald-headed, left-of-center politician named Joseph Caillaux.

  A former premier (in 1911), Caillaux led the largest party in the French Chamber of Deputies, the Radical Socialists. They were mostly small businessmen and farmers, few either radical or very socialistic. But they had a motto, “No enemies to the left,” which often led them to vote with the genuine Socialists, France’s second largest party, making them formidable. Caillaux was not popular with French conservatives, who accused him of being a friend of Germany—tantamount to treason, in their view. In fact, the former premier believed that enmity between the two nations made no sense. He thought France’s best hope for prosperity lay in an economic alliance with Germany’s dynamic economy.

  Caillaux had not held office since 1914. That year, conservatives had tried to destroy him by persuading the editor of their flagship paper, Le Figaro, to publish allegations about his steamy private life, backed by revealing letters supplied by his bitter first wife. His second wife, Henriette Caillaux, who figured largely in the letters, settled matters by shooting Le Figaro’s editor dead in his office. She was acquitted in a sensational trial; the jury accepted her lawyers’ very French argument that her passion had been uncontrollable. But Caillaux emerged so violently hated by the right wing that no government could survive with him in office.22

  That did not mean Caillaux and his point of view disappeared from French politics. The Radical Socialists remained passionately devoted to him. So did a very powerful man in the French government, Louis Malvy, minister of the interior in the various governments that rose and fell in the course of the war. Malvy was in charge of internal security. He had secret agents everywhere—and the power to put almost anyone but a member of the chamber of deputies in jail.

  Caillaux played a waiting game. He served for a while as an army paymaster, which enabled him to keep in touch with soldiers from his district. He toured South America on a vague trade mission. In Argentina, with its large German colony, he easily got in touch with Berlin’s ambassador. Through intermediaries, he made it clear that he thought the war would end in French defeat. Then would come the time for a sensible man to tak
e command of France with the backing of the French army—and the victorious Germans.23

  By some accounts, Caillaux threw in a long-range plan for a later war against England, with a Latin League composed of Spain, Italy and France supporting the kaiser’s government. At the head of this league would be Joseph Caillaux, maximum ruler of France. The Germans were predictably delighted.24

  Back in France, Caillaux’s protégé, Interior Minister Malvy, kept him fully informed of the inner politics of successive French cabinets and their uneasy relationship with the army. Caillaux also stayed in contact with left-leaning General Maurice Sarrail, who was commanding French troops in Greece. Caillaux had appointed him to his high rank during his premiership.

  Meanwhile, Malvy evolved a strategy that he described as co-opting the left, supposedly to prevent them from disrupting the war effort. He sponsored a radical editor, Miguel Almereyda, and his paper, the Bonnet Rouge, on the theory that they would discourage violent resistance to the war, while seeming to criticize it. Almereyda, incidentally, was an adopted name, an anagram for ’Y a la merde (“Everything is shitty”)—a neat summation of his philosophy of life.25