On May 27, Wilson went before Congress and spoke to the politicians—and the public—about the imperative need for new taxes. The address was a superb example of the American presidency’s capacity for wartime leadership. Speaking as commander in chief, Wilson told the legislators he regretted asking them to stay in Washington’s summer heat to hammer out a tax bill. But there was only one consideration now, and it made congressional comfort and political expediency seem “trivial and negligible.” that was “the winning of the war.” they were not only in the war, they were at “the very peak and crisis of it.” In fact, on that very day, the German army was storming across the Chemin des Dames and heading for Paris.
Wilson added words that would give him grief—and the nation not a little turmoil.“Politics is adjourned. The elections will go to those who think least of it; to those who go to their constituents without explanations or excuses, with a plain record of duty faithfully and disinterestedly performed.”9
This was strange stuff from the man who had just injected “the acid test” into the political scene in his attempt to elect a Democrat in Wisconsin. The volte-face illustrated Wilson’s amazing (or dismaying) ability to reverse his political field without even a hint of an apology or an explanation. The politicians confronting him in the chamber of the House of Representatives all but snorted aloud their disbelief. The idea that the elections would be won by those who did not bother to give them any thought would have produced mocking guffaws in any less formal setting.
thought would have produced mocking guffaws in any less formal setting. As with other Wilson rhetorical flourishes (including the acid test), newspapers seized on the phrase. Democratic papers used it to belabor Republicans for their supposedly blatant partisanship. Republican papers told their readers the president was little more than a con artist, trying to intimidate them into passivity. The GOP was particularly annoyed because they had been responsible for rescuing many of Wilson’s war measures when congressional Democrats deserted him. They would have been even more outraged if they had known that within days of the speech, Wilson spent several hours with Joe Tumulty discussing tactics for the fall campaign. The secretary advised the president to remain silent and let Roosevelt and the other Republicans rant. At the climax of the campaign, Wilson would release a public letter to some prominent Democrat, crushing the enemy with the accusation of disloyalty in wartime. Wilson concurred with this strategy, which Colonel House praised as “in every way admirable.”10
III
Infuriated by General Leonard Wood’s testimony in the airplane uproar, Wilson and Secretary of War Baker allowed personal pique to lure them into a public relations disaster that inflicted immediate damage to the claim that politics was adjourned. General Wood had returned to Kansas to prepare his Eighty-Ninth Division for shipment to Europe. While the 28,000 men were wending their way to New York for embarkation, Wood received a telegram from the War Department, ordering him to surrender command of the division and take up duties in San Francisco, as commander of the Western Department.
Wood headed for Washington, where he demanded interviews with Baker and the president. Republican newspapers such as the New York Tribune erupted. So did former presidents Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, both of whom were writing newspaper columns that regularly attacked the administration. Life ran a cartoon of the pint-sized Baker handing a towering Wood an order:“STAY HOME.” The Tribune ran a cartoon showing Wood and Roosevelt, with Wilson in the background, as they groused,“Well he kept us out of the war.” the Portland Oregonian ran a big hand, labeled “Politics,” shoving Wood off the dock while his division vanished over the Atlantic horizon. Even the usually pro-Wilson New York World said Wood’s removal would “give every fair minded man a bad taste in the mouth.”11
Wood had a bristling interview with Baker and a less hostile one with the president. Both blandly denied they had any animus against him and blamed his removal on General Pershing, who had failed to list Wood as an officer he wanted in Europe. They bypassed the well-documented fact that the War Department had thus far ignored Pershing’s lists and recommendations and sent the AEF the generals it preferred. An infuriated Wood muttered darkly about the way he had covered up Pershing’s sexual peccadilloes in the Philippines. But he could hardly retaliate on that low road without losing all sympathy. Instead, Wood offered to lead an expeditionary force to Italy. Even one division would boost the Italians’ crumbling morale. Wilson said he would think about it.
As he left the White House, Wood met Tumulty, who expressed his sympathy and said “the biggest possible mistake” had been made in the way Wood’s relief had been handled. He blamed it entirely on Newton Baker, saying Pershing had been “used”—perhaps willingly. In fact, Pershing did not want Wood in Europe because he feared he would immediately start trying to supplant him. He had enough trouble with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Haig and Foch on that score.
To complete Wood’s humiliation, at the last minute the War Department changed its mind and sent him back to Kansas, where he was ordered to train the new Tenth Division. This was a political mistake; the eloquent general did everything in his power during the next few months to persuade Kansas and neighboring states to vote Republican. Looking ahead to 1920, the city of Salina, Kansas, responded by organizing a Wood-for-President club.12
IV
In June, Wilson went from clandestine deceit about the adjournment of politics to public hypocrisy—with a touch of the bizarre. Contemplating the situation in Michigan, where a Republican senator was retiring, Wilson decided to draft Henry Ford as his candidate. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels had explored the idea with Ford and found him ambivalent. Daniels brought the automaker to the White House, where the president told him,“You are the only man in Michigan who can be elected and help bring about the peace you desire.”13
Swept away, Ford announced his candidacy, and let all and sundry know he hoped he could take advantage of Michigan’s cross-filing election law, which would permit him to win both the Republican and the Democratic primaries. Wilson’s German-hating backers were boggled: In 1915, Ford had organized a peace ship that sailed to Europe and tried to start negotiations between the belligerents—the last thing the proponents of the knockout blow wanted. The hard-line Milwaukee Journal, which had spent the previous year and a half denouncing Senator La Follette, called Ford “not our kind of American.” the New York World deplored the president’s choice, declaring that it would sow discord in the Democratic Party.14
Wilson’s plan to run Ford as a nonpartisan supporter of the administration blew up in his face. In the August primary, Ford was swamped on the Republican line by a well-financed Detroit businessman, Truman H. Newberry. In this much-publicized campaign, the GOP was able to portray Ford—and by implication, Wilson—as a peace-at-any-price man. They also dredged up the numerous outrageous things Ford had said about patriotism, the flag and American history in his loose-lipped career. The automaker’s attempt to win on both electoral lines also gave the Republicans an opportunity to blast Wilson with the epithet he was fond of laying on Kaiser Wilhelm—autocrat. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge deplored the idea of a senator whose only platform was a promise to vote “in obedience to the president’s directions.”15
V
While the Ford fiasco gathered momentum in the summer of 1918, Wilson sought to tighten his leadership of the Democratic Party. He intervened by telegram and public letter in the primary elections of congressmen and senators who had opposed him. This was tricky business, especially in the South, where a formidable antiwar movement was gaining momentum among the so-called wool-hat voters in rural districts. With newspaper support, Wilson used the acid-test argument to dispose of two contrary Democratic senators, James Vardaman of Mississippi and Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia. (Vardaman had opposed the vote for war, Hardwick the draft.) In Tennessee, the president singled out Senator John K. Shields “as one of the men I would dearly love to see left out of the Senate because I don’t like his attit
ude or his principles.” But Shields passed the acid test and won easily, his enmity to Wilson reinforced.16
Not even the acid-test argument got Wilson very far in trying to purge Congressman George Huddleston of Alabama. He failed the test catastrophically. Wilson added to his woes by denouncing Huddleston as “an opponent of the administration.” But the congressman had a trump card: friends in high places. House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin and Speaker of the House Champ Clark praised Huddleston in public letters, implicitly giving the backs of their political hands to the president. Huddleston won going away.17
Another election in which Wilson had intense interest was the New Jersey race for a senate seat vacated by the death of a Democrat. Like all presidents, he badly wanted to demonstrate his appeal in his home state. Alas, this hope too crashed in flames. A popular governor, Walter Edge, was running on the Republican line, and both houses of the legislature were in Republican hands. The Democratic Party was controlled by a new leader, Frank Hague, the mayor of Jersey City, who had a low opinion of former governor Wilson for his double cross of the party’s regulars in 1910. When several people suggested that Tumulty return to the state and oppose Edge, the president’s secretary sadly rejected the idea. Making the race “strongly appealed” to him, he admitted to a friend. But he could not muster “a corporal’s guard” in Jersey City. His response was graphic testimony that Tumulty’s devotion to Wilson had terminated his promising political career.18
Meanwhile, the National Security League leaped into numerous primary elections by expanding the president’s acid-test list from three issues to eight, and scrutinizing the “war records”(actually, the prewar records) of every member of Congress. The NSL found only forty-seven men survived this stringent examination, and only three were Democrats. The league put its research in the form of a chart and distributed it to 1,800 newspapers. With Theodore Roosevelt as one of the NSL’s guiding spirits, this document was really Republican campaign literature.
Soon more than a few Democrats were wishing Woodrow Wilson would give more thought to his political rhetoric. In Colorado, Ohio and Missouri, veteran Democratic members of Congress went down to primary defeats on this largely spurious argument. In Wisconsin, the expanded acid test sent three progressive Republican followers of La Follette into forced retirement. As so often happens, patriotism went hand in hand with conservatism in this strange manipulation of facts and votes.19
VI
The Germans’ decision to try for a military victory and their initial successes against the British and French deepened war rage in the United States. The president set the tone in April, when he went to Baltimore to open the Third Liberty Loan drive. Before an audience of 15,000 in the Fifth Regiment Armory, where he had been nominated in 1912, he denounced the “the German program.” If it were carried out, he said, “everything that America has lived for and loved and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious realization will have fallen in utter ruin.” there was only one possible response:“Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world.” the crowd went wild. British and French newspapers were equally enthusiastic.20
By this time the top leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World was in jail, indicted for no less than one hundred separate crimes. In the summer of 1918, a jury would find them guilty on every count, after deliberating a bare sixty minutes. From his cell, the Wobbly president, Big Bill Haywood, sentenced to twenty years, wrote to a journalist friend:“The big game is over and we never won a hand. The other fellow had the cut, shuffle and deal all the time.”21
The Socialist Party was next on the government’s hit list. Many local leaders were already behind bars or under indictment. The party’s candidate for governor in Minnesota got five years in jail for accusing the Morgans and the Carnegies of starting the war. A Minnesota Socialist candidate for the senate got four years for saying the United States was playing patsy for the territorial ambitions of England and France. Another Socialist politician, indicted for opposing the draft, committed suicide by exploding a stick of dynamite in his mouth.22
Eugene V. Debs, the sixty-three-year-old founding father of the party, decided it was time to make a gesture of defiance. On June 15, 1918, he journeyed to Canton, Ohio, to address a rally. Before he spoke, he visited three Socialists in a local jail. On the platform, he condemned the patriots who “with magnifying glasses in hand” scan the country for disloyalty and “apply the brand of treason” to anyone who opposed the war. He urged his audience to ignore these threats, to stand up for their Socialist principles. “You cannot do your duty by proxy,” he shouted.“You have got to do it yourself and do it squarely.”23
In the audience was the U.S. attorney for northern Ohio, with stenographers who took down every word Debs said. By June 29, Debs was in jail, charged with ten violations of the Espionage Act and a recently passed supplement, the Sedition Act. He pleaded guilty to all the charges. By mid-September, he was convicted, in spite of his fervent claim that the trial made a mockery of the Constitution. He was, Debs said,“the smallest part of this trial. . . . There is an infinitely greater issue that is being tried . . . here before a court of American citizens.” at his sentencing the judge praised his courage but offered no quarter to someone who was trying to “strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in defending herself against a foreign and brutal power.” a stunned Debs got ten years.24
VII
George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, which had begun the war proclaiming that it was going to win the struggle with facts, not hate, shifted gears as the first anniversary of Wilson’s April 2 speech to Congress approached. The posters for the Third Liberty Loan drive screamed, “Stop the Hun!” and portrayed an American soldier seizing a hulking German as he assaulted a cowering mother and child with his bayoneted rifle.
Hollywood also jumped on the propaganda bandwagon. Having learned from the fate of Robert Goldstein, producer of the unfortunate Spirit of 1776, what the government wanted, Tinsel Town responded with slander of all things German. One of the most popular films was My Four Years in Germany, based on the book by James W. Gerard, former ambassador to Berlin. In the first reel, a card announced,“Fact Not Fiction.” the kaiser was portrayed as a man with the IQ of a paranoid six-year-old. He rode a hobby horse as he made plans to invade Belgium. The German general staff was introduced with a series of superimposed images comparing each man to an animal. The “rape” of Belgium was dramatized in horrific terms while a German official boasted that they had nothing to worry about because “America won’t fight.” the film leaped forward to doughboys slaughtering Germans in hand-to-hand combat. As one Yank bayoneted a Hun, a grinning American told his buddy,“I promised Dad I’d get six.”25
The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin opened on Broadway in the spring of 1918. The content more than justified the title. The man whom the New York Times had acclaimed as the Prince of Peace in 1913 was portrayed as gloating over slaughtered Belgian civilians and torpedoed ships. To add to the fun, audiences were told that they could “hiss the Kaiser” every time his mustachioed face appeared on the screen. The New York Times called the film “a travesty of war and America’s serious purpose in it.” But Moving Picture World disagreed:“The scenes are said to be historically accurate and picture a strong dramatic series of events in a commendable way.”26
In the hissing department, an actor soon attracted more vituperation from audiences than the kaiser. Erich von Stroheim, with his shaved head and saber-scarred cheek, became the prototypical monstrous German officer. In The Unbeliever, he murdered old people and children for the fun of it and raped any woman who caught his eye. In Heart of Humanity, he reached a high (or low) point when his lust led him to an attractive Red Cross nurse. In a cradle nearby was her baby. When the child’s wails annoyed him, von Stroheim tossed the infant out the window. In both pictures, he got his comeuppance, of cour
se, shot, in The Unbeliever, by his own soldiers, and in Heart of Humanity, by the nurse’s husband, who happened to be home on leave.27
Often, these films aroused audiences to such rage, they burned the kaiser in effigy and trashed the theater. Police frequently had to be summoned to restore order. Woodrow Wilson was troubled by what he heard about My Four Years in Germany. When Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who had been ambassador to Turkey, returned to the United States and published a virulently hostile book about the Germans, he sent a copy to Wilson and told him it too might be made into a film. Wilson urged him to drop the idea. He felt that Gerard had whipped up more than enough German hatred.28
Hearts of the World, a film D.W. Griffith made for the British and French governments, premiered in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1918. Mrs. Wilson was among the VIP audience. No doubt with Wilson’s approval, she wrote Griffith a letter, urging him to cut or moderate a scene in which actress Lillian Gish was brutally whipped by a German soldier. These deep background gestures were Wilson’s only attempt to halt the tidal wave of film hate.29
VIII
Spokesmen of all stripes fanned the flames of war rage with shrill pronouncements. A Detroit minister said any American who claimed to be neutral should be “jailed, interned or labelled.” The Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church published a book on German atrocities. The tome ended with an exhortation to tell the kaiser and his general staff:“You shall not skewer babes upon your bayonets . . . you shall not nail young nuns to the doors of the schoolhouses . . . you shall not mutilate the bodies of little girls and noble women.”
In Chicago the American Protective League kept what one paper called “a steady stream of handcuffed men” marching to jail, because they had been overheard exulting over the progress of General Ludendorff ’s offensives. Neither in the Windy City nor anywhere else in the country did the APL’s 250,000 “Secret Service” sleuths catch a single German spy. Nor did the real Secret Service or the agents of the Bureau of Investigation. This dearth of German spies did not deter John Revelstoke Rathom of the Providence Journal from concocting ever more improbable stories of evil German reservists ferreting out information about the war effort and fomenting strikes among hyphenates.30
The Illusion of Victory Page 31