The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  The IWW was now considered synonymous with the hated Bolsheviks. A writer in Forum Magazine wrote that they were so closely allied,“if you prick one the other bleeds.” On December 26, 1917, the New York Times saw a “worldwide anarchist plot” that linked the Bolsheviks and the IWW with revolutionaries around the globe. The idea was not wholly fanciful. In Australia, the IWW had been banned for treason and “wholesale arson.”84

  Early in January 1918, a group of sailors and a few civilians stormed Seattle’s Piggott Printing Company, which printed Socialist and IWW publications. They wrecked presses, smashed typefaces, and warned that the next time they visited,“it will mean death.” the leader of the raid was acquitted on the grounds of “mental irresponsibility” because the seditious articles printed by Piggott enraged him into taking the law in his own hands.85

  XI

  War rage also complicated Senator La Follette’s attempt to defend himself against the campaign to expel him from the Senate. The Wilson administration refused to give him access to files that would prove his claim that the president knew the Lusitania carried ammunition in its hold. The senator found an unexpected ally in Dudley Field Malone, a progressive Democrat who had been Collector of the Port of New York when the liner sailed. Malone expressed outrage at the administration for closing its files and said he had notified Secretary of State Bryan of the ammunition. The senator also obtained from a member of the New York TimesWashington bureau a statement that Bryan had told him he had warned Wilson about the Lusitania’s deadly cargo.86

  Meanwhile, La Follette was under ferocious attack from the Vigilantes, the group of mostly Republican writers and illustrators whose services George Creel had spurned. One of their leading members, Samuel Hopkins Adams, wrote an article in the New York Tribune, “Is Wisconsin Against America?” claiming that La Follette had undermined the loyalty of the state. An accompanying cartoon showed the senator jamming a German helmet on the head of a crouching woman, labeled “Wisconsin.”87 In Washington, Woodrow Wilson issued a statement through Senator Atlee Pomerene of Ohio, claiming he did not want La Follette expelled from the Senate, because it would make him a martyr. Meanwhile, the subcommittee on privileges kept postponing a hearing, partly because Bryan refused to testify under oath, and partly because they wanted to keep the political pot boiling.

  The hate campaign against La Follette continued to mount in ferocity. Life, in those days a humor magazine, published a “Traitor’s Number,” featuring La Follette receiving the Iron Cross from the kaiser. Another set of cartoons showed Satan inducting La Follette into the “Traitor’s Club,” with Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold and other members eagerly welcoming him. Early in January, Vice President Marshall announced he had received dozens of letters from the Vigilantes, demanding La Follette’s expulsion from the Senate. He was sending them to the senators of the states in which the writers lived.88

  The New York Tribune and the Washington Post published excerpts from the letters. Most of these famous writers have been long forgotten. One said La Follette “speaks the language of Berlin.” Another called him a “frank seditionist.” a third claimed that the senator was the victim of “distorted mental machinery.” Perhaps the lowest blow was struck by Irvin S. Cobb, who wrote a story for the Saturday Evening Post, portraying a thinly disguised La Follette as an outright traitor.89

  In his home state, La Follette endured humiliations that wounded him deeply. Various clubs expelled him. The state legislature passed a joint resolution accusing him of sedition. The faculty of the University of Wisconsin voted 421 to 2 to condemn his “unwise and disloyal utterances.” A saddened La Follette noted in his diary that “my picture was taken down from where it was hanging in all of the university buildings.” His son Phil, a student at the university, had to endure face-to-face insults and sneers.90

  La Follette was not completely abandoned. In later years, he liked to note that a third of all the letters he received in his nineteen years in the Senate came in 1917, and they ran more than 60 to 1 in his favor. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs praised “your courage, your manhood and your devotion to the cause of the people in the face of the bitterest and most brutal persecution to which the lawless looters of this nation and their prostitute press ever subjected a faithful public servant.”91

  But the “Get La Follette” campaign continued. The American Defense Society submitted an elaborate brief, drawn by prominent New York lawyers, to the subcommittee on privileges, arguing the legality of La Follette’s expulsion. On January 8, 1918, the day the subcommittee was scheduled to finally meet (its original date had been December 3, 1917), the New York Sun ran a story on the brief under the headline “New Proof of La Follette’s Sedition Filed.” that same day, the senator’s son, Robert, Jr., collapsed with an acute streptococcus infection and had to be hospitalized. La Follette asked the committee to postpone the hearings, and his day of reckoning—or justification—was delayed, and delayed again, as young Bob hovered between life and death.

  Eventually, Bob La Follette began to recover. But the senator used his son’s poor health as a way to evade the hearing while war rage convulsed the country. As weeks stretched into months, it became apparent that Wilson had won. Senator Robert La Follette had been reduced to silence.

  XII

  In the White House, a very different drama was taking place. Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House began to think they might achieve the kind of peace they wanted—the overthrow of the military men around the kaiser and the emergence of a liberal majority in Germany. One reason for this ballooning hope was information the State Department was receiving about the situation on the German home front. The addition of ships from the U.S. Navy enabled the British to create a virtually impenetrable blockade. In the words of one historian, “the goal of preventing the arrival of even a single loaf of bread in Germany was all but achieved.”92

  Germany’s civilian economy was rapidly reaching a crisis point. Its foreign trade had fallen from $5.9 trillion in 1913 to $800 million in 1917. Shortages of everything—rubber, tin, copper, clothing, household items, and, above all, food—were endemic and worsened by a poor harvest in 1917. Civilians were living on 1,800 calories a day, little more than half the 3,300 minimum requirement. Fats and meat had all but vanished from the German diet. The death rate was climbing ominously. By the end of 1917, it was 32 percent above the 1913 figure. The tuberculosis rate had doubled.93

  On August 13, 1917, the U.S. State Department reported:“The death rate among old people [in Germany] is huge, as it is with small children. There is great discontent in the Navy. The food is very bad.” an American named Lang, who had recently left Germany, presumably via a neutral country, and returned to the United States, reported that hundreds of people “drop in the streets, faint from hunger.” Lang himself had lost fifty-five pounds while living on the standard food ration. Another report said the average weight loss was thirty-five to forty pounds and the mortality among people over forty-five was “immense.” In January 1918, labor unions called a general strike, and a million workers walked off the job in a half dozen cities.94

  Senator La Follette’s condemnation of the British blockade as an attack on defenseless women, children and old people would seem to be confirmed by these reports. But in the White House, there was not even a glimmer of guilt about killing innocent civilians. On January 31, Colonel House gleefully told Wilson:“It looks as if things are beginning to crack. I do not believe Germany can maintain a successful offensive with her people in their present frame of mind.” The House-Wilson team all but gloated when the foreign minister of Austria-Hungary and the chancellor of Germany replied to his Fourteen Points address in conciliatory tones, stressing their desire for peace. Both enemy leaders accepted the general points, freedom of the seas, lowered tariffs, a league of nations.

  A closer reading of the two replies considerably lowered House-Wilson hopes. The new German chancellor, Georg Hertling, maintained that arrangements between Germany and Russi
a were a separate matter and was ambiguous about Belgium. Count Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, stiffly rebuffed Wilson’s interference in the “territorial” problems of his nation. In short, they mostly rejected Wilson’s concrete proposals. But the desire for peace seemed genuine, and there were encouraging rumors of sharp differences between Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, the German army’s field commander, and Count Czernin.

  Journalist Carl Ackerman, one of House’s many informants, wrote him a long letter from Bern, Switzerland, reporting on labor unrest in Germany and urging a reply to Hertling and Czernin. It might help discredit the “German War Party,” which was still determined to fight to the finish. But Ackerman noted an unsettling problem: Too much talk of peace might also inspire the war-weary populations of France, England and Italy to start calling for an immediate armistice.95

  Meanwhile, the Allied Supreme War Council, obviously nervous about this possibility, met in Paris and, after much behind-the-scenes wrangling, issued its own reply to the peace feelers—a curt rejection that claimed the German negotiators at Brest-Litovsk had revealed new plans for “conquest and spoliation.” wilson was infuriated and fired off a cable to the American representatives at the Supreme War Council, ordering them to make it clear that their presence at the meeting did not mean the United States approved of anything the council said. Wilson was invoking his insistence that the United States was an “associated power,” not an ally.96

  The clash persuaded Wilson and House that the president should make a public reply to Hertling and Czernin to undo the Supreme War Council’s gaffe and preserve the momentum (as they imagined it) of a peace agreement with German liberals. William Bullitt had collected a number of recent antiwar statements by German socialists and had sent them to House. The colonel recommended incorporating them in the speech.97

  The president found it extremely difficult to write this speech. When Wilson read it to House on February 8, 1918, the colonel informed his diary that it was “a remarkable document but [I] knew that much of it would have to be eliminated.” Never before, House remarked in a later diary passage, had he found so much in a Wilson speech that needed to be jettisoned. On the day before Wilson spoke, House felt the speech “still lacked something,” and he virtually dictated a paragraph picturing the entire world ready for peace—except the German war party. It was another glimpse of a growing divergence between House and Wilson in their thinking about the right route to peace. Wilson was becoming more and more dubious about the idea that the German people could be distinguished from the kaiser and his generals. War rage was beginning to distort his psyche.98

  On February 11, Wilson went before Congress to give his speech. He remained unenthusiastic about this oratorical effort, and it was soon easy to see why. The first half was a complicated argument with Czernin and Hertling about rearranging the map of Europe. There were arcane references to the Congress of Vienna, an 1815 peace conference that had settled matters after the Napoleonic wars. One doubts many members of Congress had heard of this conclave, and it is a virtual certainty that for 98 percent of the American people, the term meant nothing. In the second half of the speech, Wilson fell back on by now familiar rhetoric.“We are striving for a new international order based upon broad and universal principles of right and justice. . . . Each part of the final settlement must be based on the essential justice of that particular case.” Et cetera, et cetera. Not too surprisingly, Congress, completely out of the loop on what the president was trying to do, listened to the speech in baffled silence.99

  In terms of achieving the goal of this public diplomacy, the speech was an almost total disappointment. A peace feeler from Austria-Hungary surfaced in Spain, but further conversations went nowhere. This bad news was minor compared to what emerged from Russia on March 3, 1918. While Wilson was playing House’s public diplomacy game, the Germans and the Bolsheviks had been negotiating a harsh peace at Brest-Litovsk. There, another rhetorician, Leon Trotsky, had learned some hard lessons about the difference between words and deeds.

  Trotsky had strutted on stage at Brest-Litovsk hurling denunciations at German imperialism and confidently predicting that the workers would overthrow the kaiser. The Germans ordered their armies to keep advancing. The battered remnants of the Russian army were unable to stop them. In a few weeks, the Bolsheviks were facing the possibility of German troops in Petrograd and Moscow—and they lamely settled for a far worse deal than the Germans had originally offered them. Lenin fired Trotsky as his negotiator and sent a new delegation to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.100

  The agreement gave independence to the Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, with the assumption that they would become German client states. Russia lost roughly 30 percent of its population, and the Bolsheviks humbly promised to cease all revolutionary agitation in the surrendered lands. The appalled British called Brest-Litovsk the greatest seizure of territory by conquest since the days of the Roman empire. In Germany, people celebrated. Only a few stubborn Socialists still talked peace. Victory over Russia had added cubits to the stature of hulking Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff and his titular commander, aging Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the men who had smashed Russia’s armies in stupendous battles during the first years of the war. They began using Brest-Litovsk to weld the German army and people into a feverish unity for a final campaign. The prevailing motto was “Three cheers for General Ludendorff! On to the Western Front!” In the State Department, a glum William Bullitt reported:“A scathing indictment of German policy in the East would serve merely to unite [the German] people behind the government. For the present . . . we had better fight and say nothing.”101

  Chapter 6

  THE WOMEN OF NO-MAN’S-LAND

  While Pershing’s warriors froze and fumed and were dribbled into the trenches by the cautious French for ten-day tryouts, American women became the first to see the real war. They managed it by ignoring a ukase issued by the AEF commander not long after he arrived in France: No American woman related to a soldier would be tolerated in Europe. This proclamation was soon escalated to no women, period, except army nurses and a cadre of female telephone operators. Seldom has a military order been more flouted. The women came anyway, first in a trickle, then in a flood. Before the war ended, no less than 25,000 skirted Yanks from twenty-one to sixty-something had made it over there.1

  One evening in the summer of 1917, Pershing found himself seated next to Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., at a Paris dinner party given by the Count de Chambrun, a descendant of Lafayette. Mrs. Roosevelt had left her three children with her mother to follow her husband to France, and was working for the YMCA. Pershing was amused to find someone so pretty in the prim and proper YM and remarked she must attract mobs of men to her canteen.

  Suddenly, to Mrs. Roosevelt’s dismay, the general’s face “set like the Day of Judgment” and he growled,“How do you happen to be here anyway? No wives are allowed to come overseas. Where are your children? You ought to be with them. . . . I think you should be sent home.”2

  Mrs. Roosevelt went back to her Paris house and wrote an angry letter to her husband, who had met Pershing many times at his father’s home. The next time the general inspected the First Division, Major Roosevelt saluted and said,“My goodness sir, but you’re in bad with my wife. What on earth did you do to her at the Chambruns?”

  The next time Eleanor Roosevelt met Pershing in Paris, he took both her hands and said, “I know about the work you’re doing and it’s good. Can we be friends again?”

  The general had discovered the best way to deal with the women-in-France issue was a graceful surrender. He was learning firsthand what many historians took much longer to realize: The modern woman strode onto history’s stage, not in the Roaring Twenties, but in the Tempestuous Tens. The progressive movement liberated a lot more than wage slaves from the tyranny of big business. As one writer put it, “Sex o’clock in America struck i
n 1913, about the same time as the repeal of reticence.” articles on birth control, prostitution, divorce and free love filled magazines and newspapers. Women were becoming doctors and lawyers and journalists. Why couldn’t they go to France? Theodore Roosevelt was telling every male in America that the war was the “Great Adventure” of their generation. These modern women were determined to share it.3

  II

  About half this skirted Western Front brigade became nurses. The rest did a wide variety of work. Many drove ambulances, others ran canteens financed by the Red Cross and the YMCA. Some, such as a sixteen-woman unit from Smith College, worked with French civilians in devastated areas just behind the front lines, helping them restore shattered towns and villages. A few women were war correspondents. They had a terrible time getting accredited by the male chauvinists in the U.S. Army. One described the military mind “like a steel mask with the key lost.” nevertheless, several got to the front. That was the ambition of almost every woman who came to France, and a remarkable number realized it.4

  For Marian Baldwin, who arrived in Paris in July 1917 to do canteen work, the excitement started almost immediately. “Last night I witnessed my first air raid,” she told an unnamed correspondent.“It was every bit as thrilling as anticipated. I was awakened out of a sound sleep by the most gruesome sirens imaginable.” Soon French pursuit planes were in the air, each with a glowing light on its wingtip. They looked like falling stars as they climbed and dove on the German bombers. Next French antiaircraft guns opened up.“I didn’t believe there could be anything louder and then suddenly a bomb dropped and the deafening crash completely obliterated for a second all the other sounds,” Baldwin wrote.5