In a private talk at Buckingham Palace, Wilson told King George V that Americans were neither cousins nor brothers, and he wished the king would not use these expressions. He also advised His Majesty not to refer to Americans as Anglo-Saxons. The term could “no longer be applied to the people of the United States.” Nor was there any special importance to sharing the same language. There were only two things that could “establish and maintain closer relations” between the two countries:“community of ideals and of interests.”25
Afterward King George told his private secretary,“I could not bear him. An entirely cold academical professor—an odious man.”26
VI
While Wilson was making political waves in England, heavier weather was brewing in France. Premier Georges Clemenceau decided he needed a vote of confidence from the Chamber of Deputies. Were the Radical Socialists and other followers of Joseph Caillaux still interested in a peace of reconciliation with Germany? Caillaux remained in jail, but in August 1918, when Germany’s imminent collapse was far from visible, the French senate had tried his right-hand man, Louis Malvy. Ignoring reams of evidence that Malvy had been collaborating with German agents, the senators let the former interior minister off with a small fine and a sentence of five years’ exile in Spain. A band of cheering Radical Socialists had escorted him to the railroad station, where they asked him what he planned to do in Spain.“Wait!” Malvy said.
After calling for a debate on France’s posture in the peace conference, Clemenceau did not say a word for five days, while arguments raged around him. He sat at his desk, taking occasional notes, and mostly scowling at the speakers. Finally, after the differences between liberals and conservatives had been thoroughly aired, he rose and gave one of his most ferocious speeches. Calling on the deputies to support the toughest possible terms with Germany, he appealed to their patriotism and hunger for vengeance. He won overwhelming support—almost a 4 to 1 majority.
Especially disturbing was Clemenceau’s declaration that France should rely on the old system of a balance of power to keep a revived Germany at bay. Alliances were far more dependable than the noble candeur of President Wilson. In French, candeur means both “simplicity” and “naïveté.”
An agitated Colonel House informed his diary that Clemenceau’s victory—and comment—were “about as bad an augury for the success of progressive principles at the Peace Conference as we could have.” He gloomily noted that it came “on the heels of the English elections.” If the congressional elections in the United States were added to the picture,“the situation strategically could not be worse.” House thought Wilson’s only hope was to remind the Allies that they had agreed on the Fourteen Points before they signed the armistice. By now House undoubtedly knew that this acceptance had been mere lip service to pry the guns out of the Germans’ hands. Clinging to it only underscored his growing anxiety.27
VII
On Armistice Day, Wilson had gone before Congress to announce the good news of the war’s cessation and the approach of a peace of “disinterested justice.” He pointed to the way the victorious governments were displaying their “humane temper” by a unanimous resolution in the Supreme War Council to supply the people of Germany and Austria-Hungary with food and fuel to relieve “the distressing want that is in so many places threatening their very lives.”28
In the preliminary talks about the Fourteen Points, House had already pushed the importance of feeding a starved German population. But he had been unable to alter the British determination to maintain the blockade. House’s solution was an urgent cable to Woodrow Wilson, asking him to send Herbert Hoover, the savior of starving Belgium, to Paris as soon as possible to take charge of the problem.
Few people knew that Hoover had spent as much time arguing with the British as with the Germans about getting food to the Belgians. The “poor little Belgium” of British propaganda meant little to the British admirals and bureaucrats who were sure the Germans would make off with the victuals. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who favored letting the Belgians starve and blaming the Germans, called Hoover “a son of a bitch.” Hoover responded by calling the admiralty “the sanctuary of British militarists.”29
Hoover was proud of his achievement in Belgium and instantly accepted the challenge of feeding the defeated enemy—and the rest of Europe, which was almost as hungry. Before he departed, he arranged for the shipment of 250,000 tons of foodstuffs to various European harbors. On the day he sailed, Hoover issued a statement from shipboard, calling for a relaxation of the “watertight blockade.” He warned that otherwise, anarchy would reign and there would be no government to make peace with and no one to pay for the damage done to Belgium and France.30
The exhortation and Hoover’s unilateral shipment of food had zero impact. When Hoover got to London, one of the top people in the British Food Ministry told him to stop making public statements about the blockade. The British government was opposed to lifting it “until the Germans learn a few things.” Not quite able to believe what he had heard, Hoover watched numbly as Lloyd George waged his “make the Hun pay” election campaign. In London’s newspapers, stories about German hunger were headed “Feeding the Beast” and “Germany Whines—Limits of Endurance Reached.” worsening matters was a British decision to forbid the German Baltic fishing fleet to catch so much as a herring, depriving the enemy of a source of food they had depended on throughout the war. This extension of the blockade began the day the armistice was signed. Heretofore, the British navy had had no access to the Baltic Sea.31
From London, Hoover sent an assistant into Germany to obtain a thorough report of the country’s situation. He brought back a study by the German National Health Office, describing a nation on the brink of mass starvation. To verify this portrait, Hoover sent a three-man team of American experts, who brought back even more dolorous facts. Most Germans were suffering from chronic malnutrition. The grain harvest, normally 30 million tons, had fallen to 16 million because of bad weather and lack of hands to harvest it. In north Germany, eight hundred adults were dying of starvation every day.32
Hoover reported the situation to Wilson, still in Washington, and the president ordered House to present a plan to the Allied governments, making Hoover director general of relief with the authority to lift the blockade and get food into Germany without delay. The Allies’ reaction was coldly negative. With almost incredible meanness, they accused Hoover of shipping food from the United States because American cold-storage warehouses were overcrowded with a surplus of pork and dairy products. They turned thumbs down on a Wilson proposal to put Germany’s merchant marine at Hoover’s disposal to ship more food, because the Allies wanted to seize the ships for their merchant fleets. They also balked at the idea that Hoover should run the emergency food program. At a London meeting between Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando, they announced plans to “investigate” how much food Germany needed—and how much reparations it could pay, a chilling linkage. Significantly, Hoover was not invited to the meeting.
Giving up on the British, Hoover moved his operation to Paris in mid-December. By that time, Wilson had received his tumultuous welcome in the City of Light. But Hoover found the atmosphere “miasmic” when it came to getting food into Germany.“The wolf,” Hoover cried, “is at the door of the world.” Clemenceau’s reply was a vicious wisecrack:“There are twenty million Germans too many.”33
The French, led by their vengeful premier, became even more intransigent than the British. They joined the Belgians in announcing the discovery that Germany had $570 million in gold in its Berlin vaults. When the armistice agreement was renewed on December 13, the gold was the only topic discussed. The commissioners added an amendment prohibiting Germany from disposing of this hard money for food or anything else, to make sure it was available for reparations. As for food, the commissioners simply rubber-stamped Article 26 of the agreement, stating that victuals would be provided “as shall be found necessary” and did nothin
g.
The day after Wilson reached Paris, House told him of Hoover’s problems. The president contacted Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando, and all three immediately agreed to approve Hoover as the director of an Allied food program. When Hoover went to British officials with his new authority, they stonewalled and proposed an inter-Allied committee to run things. Nevertheless, Hoover managed to wangle an agreement to permit food to be shipped to neutral countries around Germany, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, where it could be traded for German commodities.
Next Hoover asked Admiral William Benson, the courtly, white-mustached chief of U.S. naval operations, to persuade the British to lift the Baltic blockade against the German fishing fleet. Benson was the Americans’ senior naval adviser at the peace conference. He got nowhere. Surly British Admiral Edward Browning, president of the Allied Naval Armistice Commission, had only one idea in his head: Make the Huns squirm and plead. Then came stunning news from London: Officials of the British, French and Italian governments had revoked permission to ship food to neutral countries. The blockade remained in wartime force.
These same officials canceled orders for 200 million pounds of American bacon, already cured and ready for shipment to England. Also deep-sixed were contracts for 100 million bushels of wheat and hefty orders of beef, pork and dairy products. This was a neat way of saying “Drop dead” to the Americans, who were stuck with the surpluses. It also meant the Allies would be able to claim they had no food to spare for Germany.34
Hoover was a Quaker, but he cast aside meekness when he saw people doing unspeakable things. He paid a visit to Admiral Benson and asked him “if the Allies had any right to stop ships flying the American flag and carrying food to people dying of starvation.”
“Not as long there is a ship left in our fleet,” Benson replied. Like many American navy men, he was thoroughly sick of condescending British admirals and delighted to have an excuse to tell them off.
Benson soon informed Hoover that the British had dropped their objection to shipping food to neutral nations. The director of relief next convened a meeting with diplomats from France and Italy and talked them out of canceling their food contracts. They had done it under British pressure, and their people needed the food. But these victories were all but destroyed by a British-French counterattack. The Allied Blockade Committee forbade any sale of forthcoming American food to Germany from the neutral countries. Hoover stubbornly shipped the food anyway and stored it in Copenhagen and other cities. Soon neutral warehouses were bulging with $550 million worth of fats, wheat, pork and other products—and Hoover began to worry about a financial disaster that would rebound on American farmers.35
After more wrangling, Hoover became head of a compromise organization, the Supreme Council of Supply and Relief, with representatives from all the Allied governments. At their first meeting on January 11, 1919, the delegates informed Hoover that not a pat of butter or a peck of wheat would go to Germany until it surrendered its merchant fleet. They claimed this was necessary to alleviate a world shipping shortage, caused by the depredations of the U-boats. In fact, there was no shortage. By this time, shipbuilding efforts by the British and Americans had replaced 90 percent of the tonnage the U-boats had sent to Davy Jones’s locker. What the Allies wanted was the German merchant fleet, which had been omitted from the armistice accords.36
Two days later, Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando took up the problem of getting food to Germany. The French again insisted Germany could not pay for any food from its gold supply, and Belgium backed them up, once more underscoring its Paris satellite status. The desperate Germans were willing to surrender their merchant marine if they could get a guarantee of some food. But the French ban on paying for it in gold made any and all shipments impossible. The Germans could not raise money by selling goods in foreign markets from their factories. The Armistice Commission had banned German exports. For the next two months, this impasse continued, while tens of thousands of men, women and children succumbed to malnutrition and starvation in Germany and Austria.37
A member of Hoover’s mission sent back the following description of German children in one city:“You think this is a kindergarten for the little ones. No, these are children of seven and eight years. Tiny faces with large dull eyes, overshadowed by huge puffed rickety foreheads, their small arms just skin and bones, and above the crooked legs with their dislocated joints, the swollen stomachs of the hunger edema.”38
This was a long way from the “humane peace” that Woodrow Wilson had promised Congress he would deliver in his mission to Europe. Wilson—and the rest of the American delegation—were finding out that cheers on the Champs Élysée and in Trafalgar Square did not translate into political power.
VIII
On January 1, in a royal train provided by the Italian government, Wilson and his wife headed for Rome. As the train wound through the snow-covered Alps, the monks of Saint Bernard’s Abbey were forced to slaughter six of their famous rescue dogs because they had run out of food. Oblivious to such details, the president reveled in the adoration of the Italian people. His arrival in the Eternal City was a replay of his reception in Paris. Masses of Romans chanted, “Viva Wilson, god of peace.” Low-flying planes dropped flowers on his triumphal procession. There were pictures of him in every shop window. The streets were sprinkled with golden sand, a tradition that went back to ancient Rome’s days of imperial glory.
Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando and his fellow politicians already viewed Wilson with not a little anxiety. The president still objected to their attempt to claim the Dalmatian coast and other territories promised them in the 1915 Treaty of London. Lately they had been claiming the city of Fiume and portions of the new defunct Turkish empire in the Middle East. One of the most outspoken proponents of this view was an editor named Benito Mussolini, whose Milan newspaper proclaimed on January 1, 1919, that “imperialism is the eternal, the immutable law of life.”
The Italian government tried to keep Wilson busy at state dinners and similar ceremonies. No speeches to the people were on his schedule. In the midst of these official rituals, Orlando’s government suddenly informed the president that famous visitors to Rome normally made a gift of $10,000 to the poor. An embarrassed Wilson protested that the U.S. Congress had not authorized such an outlay and he personally could not afford it. This bit of theater was patently designed to make the president look bad.
Only after strenuous insistence did Wilson manage to meet the socialist leader Leonida Bissolati. The day before Wilson arrived, Bissolati had resigned to protest the government’s greedy determination to seize the territory promised Italy in the Treaty of London. He told the president,“The Italian people are the most Wilsonian in Europe, the most adapted to your ideals.” the interview created a sensation. At a reception in the American embassy, a pumped-up Wilson took a jab at Italy’s leader. He remarked that New York had become the biggest Italian city in the world, thanks to recent immigration. Was Orlando going to claim that, too?
On January 4, Wilson visited his erstwhile peace-terms adversary, Pope Benedict XV. As if to emphasize his own faith in liberalism, the president preceded his audience with a visit to the monument of the man whose leadership had created the Italian republic, Giuseppi Garibaldi. Thereafter Wilson’s route to the Vatican became another triumphal procession. Arriving a half-hour late, the president spent twenty minutes with the pontiff, talking of nothing but the League of Nations. The pope gave the idea his blessing.
Later that day, from his balcony in the Quirinal Palace, Wilson planned to give a speech to the people of Rome, urging them to abandon Orlando’s territorial ambitions. To Wilson’s dismay, the plaza abutting his residence remained devoid of people. Troops had cordoned it off, leaving Wilson without an audience. The president made some intemperate remarks to the press and left Rome at nine o’clock that evening in an exceedingly foul mood.39
In northern Italy, on his way back to Paris, Wilson’s popular recep
tion was equally hysterical. He was hailed as “the Savior of Humanity” and “the Moses from Across the Atlantic.” In many homes, families lit candles before his picture, an honor hitherto reserved for saints. Before a huge crowd in Milan, he delivered a bluntly radical speech, in which he proclaimed the superiority of the working classes. They were the foundation of all societies, and they were establishing “a world opinion” in favor of a league of nations and the abandonment of the old system of military alliances and imperialistic greed for territory.
This was not a message Premier Vittorio Orlando was inclined to applaud. It did not seem to occur to Wilson or his advisers that making critical speeches to enthusiastic crowds was unlikely to endear him to the politicians whom he would soon meet at the peace conference.
IX
In the United States, after forty-four days of medical treatment, Theodore Roosevelt had left the hospital and was back at his Sagamore Hill mansion, overlooking Oyster Bay. He was still a sick man; bouts of inflammatory rheumatism hampered the use of his left arm. Mysterious fevers, left over from his almost fatal exploration of Paraguay’s River of Doubt in 1914, weakened him. Quentin’s death still depressed him. But he was by no means ready to abandon politics. As he was leaving the hospital, a worried doctor tried to hold his arm to make sure he did not fall.“Don’t do that,” TR snapped, brushing the helping hand away. “I am not sick and it will give the wrong impression.”40
In the hospital, he had written out a progressive platform for a presidential campaign. It would be his last fight, he told his sister Corinne. There was not much doubt in the Republican party that the 1920 nomination was his for the asking. Will Hays, the party chairman, was 100 percent behind his candidacy. A Midwestern Republican leader remarked to a GOP big-city boss that Roosevelt would be nominated by acclamation.“Acclamation, hell,” the boss said.“We’re going to nominate him by assault!”41
The Illusion of Victory Page 41