TR was still grimly and vociferously opposed to Woodrow Wilson and all his works. In a recent article, he had called the Fourteen Points “fourteen scraps of paper.” He told a visiting Henry Cabot Lodge he would like to be left alone in a room with “our great and good president” for about fifteen minutes. Then he would “cheerfully be hung.”42
On the last day of the old year, the government’s citation honoring Quentin’s death arrived. That same day, newspapers carried an account by the German flier who had shot him down. Both spread wisps of gloom through Sagamore Hill. For the next few days, Roosevelt spent most of his time upstairs on a sofa, gazing mournfully at wintry Oyster Bay. His wife wrote their son Kermit that he was in constant pain. On January 5, a wan Flora Payne Whitney came for a visit. She had been spending much of her time with the Roosevelts. TR had told her he hoped she would find happiness with “another good and fine man,” but she remained devastated by Quentin’s death.
The doctors had assured the former president he was going to recover but it would take time. TR promised he would be patient and tried to get some work done. On January 5, he seemed on the way to resuming a normal schedule. He dictated a letter to Kermit and saw several visitors. He read the proofs of a magazine article and worked on an editorial for the Kansas City Star, in which he found more fault with Wilson’s ideas about a league of nations. TR favored forming a limited league with the victorious Allies. At the peace table, the United States should make sure “real justice is done” by demanding “the sternest reparation” from Germany. Only after this just peace was achieved might it be possible to admit other countries into the league.43
Relaxing on a sofa after dinner, TR seemed contented until he suddenly called his wife to his side. He said he had just felt a strange sensation: A great, shadowy hand seemed to be seizing his body, crushing breath out of his lungs. His wife summoned a doctor, who could find nothing wrong. About midnight, TR’s former White House valet, James Amos, helped him upstairs to his bedroom and dozed in a corner chair while the sick man went to sleep.
At about 4 A.M., Amos was awakened by a strange rattling noise. It was TR; something was very wrong with his breathing. The valet rushed to awaken Mrs. Roosevelt and TR’s nurse. By the time they reached the bedroom, Theodore Roosevelt was dead of a pulmonary embolism at the age of sixty-one.44
Woodrow Wilson heard the news in the railroad station of Modena, Italy, on his way back to Paris. Two reporters on the platform watched him as he unfolded the telegram. His first reaction was shock; next came a smile of “transcendent triumph.” the Republicans had no one of Roosevelt’s stature to oppose the peace treaty that Wilson, having drunk the adulation of Paris, London and Rome, was now sure he could impose on Europe and the United States.45
X
While Wilson was feasting on worshipful applause in Italy, Germany was confronting a Bolshevik onslaught. Soldiers and People’s Councils had taken over many cities. Berlin remained unconquered, but it was teetering on the brink. Demonstrations, strikes and armed mobs were everywhere. Behind most of the demonstrations was the Spartacus Union, a radical group that found inspiration in the story of the gladiator Spartacus, leader of a revolt against Rome in 73 B.C. The Spartacists were led by Karl Liebknecht, son of a founder of the German Socialist Party, and Rosa Luxemburg, a brilliant Polish activist. Behind them was the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who shipped them gold from Russia’s treasury and ordered them to turn Germany into a Soviet satellite.
The new German chancellor, Socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, felt more and more helpless. He saw control of the capital and the rest of the country slipping away from him. As his panic mounted, Ebert made a fateful decision. Not long after the armistice, he had received a call from General Wilhelm Groener, the man who had replaced Quartermaster General Ludendorff, asking if he wanted or needed the army’s support. Ebert gratefully accepted the offer. Other Socialists angrily criticized his decision. They called for dismantling the army and replacing it with a democratic militia that would elect its own officers.
Ebert dithered and at first agreed to let them try to arm workers. They turned out to be useless soldiers. Public disorder increased exponentially, and an emboldened Karl Liebknecht decided the capital was ready for revolution. (Rosa Luxemburg disagreed.) On the night of January 5–6, 1919, thousands of armed leftists poured down Berlin’s broad streets. They swiftly captured major buildings in the center of Berlin and prepared to take over the capital.
By this time the Spartacists had changed their names to the Communist Party, leaving no doubt about their goals. Ebert called on the army for help. Into action went thousands of demobilized veterans, recruited into new units called Free Corps. Their generals told them: “The place of the Imperial Government has been taken by that of Reichschancellor Ebert. . . . [He] needs strength for the struggle on our borders and the struggle within. . . . Plunder and disorder are everywhere. Nowhere can one find respect for law and justice, respect for personal and government property. . . . Therefore, we must intervene!”46
On January 10, an all-out battle erupted in the center of Berlin. The army used flamethrowers, machine guns, hand grenades, mortars and artillery to smash the Communists out of major buildings and improvised street forts. An estimated 1,000 bystanders and pedestrians were killed in the ferocious fighting, which left several buildings gutted. Hundreds of Spartacists were executed on the spot, even when they tried to surrender under white flags. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were hunted down and dragged to a nearby hotel for a brief interrogation, then ordered to the Moabit Prison. En route their heads were smashed by rifle butts. Pistols added a coup de grâce. Luxemburg’s body was thrown into a canal, where it rotted until the end of May. The government issued a communiqué, declaring the two revolutionaries had been shot while trying to escape.
The New York Times Berlin correspondent all but congratulated the Free Corps for disposing of “fomenters of robbery, murder and anarchy.” A member of a special U.S. mission sent to investigate conditions in Germany wrote a more accurate epitaph for the Spartacists. They had attracted recruits because of “the serious food and economic situation, resulting in hunger, disease and unemployment . . . [and] the fact that they are in control of large sums of money principally from Russian sources.”47
A liberal visitor to Germany, Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, blamed Woodrow Wilson for Germany’s descent into chaos. With a vehemence worthy of his abolitionist grandfather, William Lloyd Garrison, Villard accused the president of trying to keep secret the continuation of the blockade and the deaths of thousands of women, children and old men from starvation and malnutrition.“The godly Presbyterian from the White House . . . could not be induced to make a public stand against this indefensible cruelty to noncombatants; the screw of starvation was kept turned in order to compel the vanquished to sign whatever treaty might be drafted.”
48 A cable Wilson had sent to Washington from Rome would seem to support Villard’s wrathful contention. The president asked for an appropriation of $100 million to buy food for the relief of European people “outside of Germany.” In a follow-up cable, Wilson declared “food relief is now the key to the whole European situation and to the solution of peace.” an appalled Robert La Follette listened as senator after senator rose,“each straining to outdo the others to make sure not a cent should go to feed a German.”
“Can these Americans have forgotten Grant at Appomattox, sending rations to feed Robert E. Lee’s starving army and letting the soldiers take their horses home to plow their farms?” Senator La Follette wondered. Here were grown men gloating at the prospect of “denying a starving German child something to eat.” La Follette began to think that Wilson’s peacemaking enterprise was a case of “the blind leading the blind,” abroad and at home. The senator made a ferocious attack on Wilson’s proposal, but the appropriation passed the Senate with the German exclusion intact, 53 to 18. 49
XI
On January 18, 1919
, in the gilded Salle de la Paix of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay, the Paris Peace Conference finally began. Bearded, pudgy Raymond Poincaré, the president of France, opened the first plenary session with a speech that he read in a monotone, perhaps on the assumption that only a small percentage of the room understood French. Before him, around a horseshoe-shaped table sat representatives from thirty-two Allied and associated states, representing about 75 percent of the world’s population. Absent from the table were any representatives from Russia or from Germany and its allies. Russia’s Bolshevik rulers had refused to come. The enemy had not been invited.50
Poincaré’s speech, translated into English by red-bearded Paul Mantoux, had worrisome overtones for true believers in the Fourteen Points. It also revealed why the French had delayed the opening date of the peace conference.“On this day, forty-eight years ago,” the French president declared, “the German Empire was proclaimed by an army of invasion in the Château at Versailles. . . . Born in injustice, it has ended in opprobrium. You are assembled to repair the evil it has done and to prevent a recurrence of it. You hold in your hands the future of the world.”51
Poincaré was describing the event that he had made the centerpiece of his political career, the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War. He had dedicated his life to revenging this calamitous defeat, which had engraved blind hatred of Germany in his soul. He was the architect of the prewar alliances with Russia and England, which had convinced the Germans they were being encircled as a prelude to extermination.
After a moment of embarrassed silence, Woodrow Wilson rose to nominate Premier Georges Clemenceau as chairman of the peace conference. He praised the old man extravagantly. Lloyd George followed in a seconding speech that was equally effusive. With a twinkle in his eye, the prime minister called him “the Grand Young Man of France.”
Clemenceau accepted the accolades with little or no emotion. His acceptance speech went to the heart of the peace conference, as he saw it. The participants’ task was to decide who was responsible for the war, who should be punished for it and how much Germany should pay for the terrible depredations that had “devastated and ruined one of the richest regions of France.” the premier did not so much as mention a league of nations.52
This was confrontational diplomacy of the most blatant kind—a veritable declaration of war on the Fourteen Points. Wilson was not entirely surprised. Since January 12, the five so-called Great Powers—England, France, Italy, the United States and Japan—had been meeting in executive sessions to discuss the issues, the structure, and the machinery of the peace conference. The president soon had no illusions about what the other major powers wanted from the conference: loot. For the time being, Wilson discounted this gritty fact. His mind remained focused on winning the conference’s backing for a league of nations that would be intertwined with the peace treaty.
In these preliminary sessions and his earlier talks with the Allied leaders, Wilson worked out a rough strategy for winning support for the league. Two members of the British delegation, Lord David Cecil and Jan Christian Smuts, premier of South Africa, favored the idea. Both had even produced drafts of a possible constitution, or “covenant,” as Wilson liked to call it, that were fairly close to the president’s ideas.“It would be good politics to play the British game more or less in formulating the covenant,” the president told Admiral Cary Grayson, who was rapidly replacing Colonel House as a confidant.
Simultaneously the British decided on an overall strategy of cooperating with Wilson as much as possible. A future alliance with the United States stood to benefit Britain far more than clinging to their ties with battered, war-devastated France. If this made Georges Clemenceau unhappy, so be it.53 These backstairs strategies did not come close to solving the conference’s burgeoning problems. Incredibly, in spite of the swarms of experts and advisers that all the governments had brought with them—the Americans eventually had 1,300 people in Paris, and the British staff occupied five hotels—no one had produced an agenda. Even more worrisome was the growing hostility of the press. More than 500 journalists had swarmed to Paris (150 of them American) buoyed by the first of the Fourteen Points:“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.”
Both the press and the American people assumed this meant they would have access to all the details of the peace conference. Wasn’t this what the Wilson’s “New Diplomacy” meant? Instead, they found themselves barred from all sessions of the Council of Ten (the Big Five and their foreign ministers), which seldom issued more than a five-sentence press release to summarize its doings. This code of silence left the reporters reduced to peering through the doors at the relatively rare plenary council sessions, where little was debated and the lesser delegates were simply asked to ratify the decisions of the major powers.
Wilson had seen open covenants as a way to ban secret treaties such as the prewar accords Foreign Secretary Grey had signed with the French and Russians and the mercenary deal the Allies had cut with the Italians in 1915. He never dreamed people would want to know about the give-and-take of negotiations between foreign ministers and leaders. But the reporters were not interested in the president’s clarifications. They called the plenary sessions “washouts” and started writing about a gag rule that made a mockery of Wilson’s idealistic promises. It was the old-style diplomacy in the dark all over again.
Behind the scenes, Wilson tried to improve the situation. He persuaded the British and French to stop censoring the Atlantic cable traffic. He asked Admiral Grayson to talk to reporters on his behalf. But it was too late. Alarmed cables from Joe Tumulty back in Washington reported a public-relations disaster. The president compounded the problem by refusing to meet regularly with American reporters for give-and-take press conferences. He tried it only twice, insisting in advance that everything he said was off the record. When two reporters quoted him, he was infuriated and never talked to a newsman again. The other Allied leaders met regularly with the press of their individual countries.54
Kansas newsman William Allen White, on his way to fame as the voice of Middle America, summed up the situation in mournful terms. “The newspapermen, for the most part eager to support the American position, were not permitted to know even semi-officially what the American position was. It is not surprising under this state of facts they began to lose confidence in American leadership.”55
Where was George Creel while this public-relations disaster was occurring? He had been shunted to the sidelines by the astute infighting of Secretary of State Lansing and Colonel House. Lansing detested Creel because the CPI had usurped the State Department’s powers and privileges in its overseas propaganda campaign. House disliked Creel’s brash style and considered him ill suited to deal with European news reporters and politicians. The colonel had wanted Frank Cobb for the job. But Cobb’s conviction that Wilson should not come to Europe had disqualified him.56
Another influential American with a negative opinion of Creel was Walter Lippmann, who considered the CPI propaganda campaign in Europe “one of the genuine calamities” of the war.“The general tone of it was one of unmitigated brag accompanied by unmitigated gullibility. . . .” It left Europeans with the impression that a “rich bumpkin had come to town with his pockets bulging.”57
For want of something better to do, Creel volunteered to go to the newly liberated countries of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He would set up propaganda offices there, touting the Fourteen Points and the rest of the Wilsonian world vision, and distributing wireless sets that would enable people to hear CPI broadcasts. Unfortunately, Creel’s performance in Prague and points east left much to be desired from a diplomatic point of view. He described himself as Wilson’s secretary and made speeches in which he declared,“America is ready to give you everything.” In Budapest, he proposed that the liberated nations of Austria-Hungary should form an American-style federal union, with the Hungarian president as its head. At one point, members of Creel’s staff participated i
n a Czech invasion of the duchy of Teschen, on the border of Poland, to seize its valuable coal mines. All in all, it was a performance that convinced Wilson and the other Americans in Paris that Creel should go home as soon as possible.58
Meanwhile, Wilson persevered in his single-minded struggle for the League of Nations, which he saw as the eventual answer to almost every problem confronting the conference. On January 25, he went before the second plenary session and proposed the creation of a special commission to hammer out the structure of the league. Two days earlier, he had persuaded Clemenceau and Lloyd George to accept the league as an essential part of the peace treaty. Now he wanted the plenary session to confirm this decision. Wilson swiftly won the approval he sought—and surprised his colleagues on the Council of Ten by nominating himself as chairman of the commission that would draft the covenant.
Simultaneously, in the Council of Ten, the president was fighting a ferocious battle with his putative allies over the disposition of Germany’s colonies. It started on January 24, with two declarations. First, the prime ministers of New Zealand and Australia announced that they wanted Samoa, New Guinea and other Pacific islands formerly controlled by Germany. Second, Jan Christian Smuts, the leader of the Union of South Africa, declared his determination to annex German southwest Africa, a colony just north of his country, now known as Namibia. The three men were backed by Lloyd George, although he piously said he agreed with the U.S. president that most liberated territories should be placed under mandates. But the dominions had a right to insist on these “exceptions.” the prime minister also made no objection when France announced it wanted two other German colonies in Africa, Togoland and the Cameroons.59
The Illusion of Victory Page 42