Energetic Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo was Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law. But when McAdoo ran for president in 1920, Wilson refused to endorse him. He wanted the nomination for himself. COUTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
General John J. Pershing and two members of his staff are welcomed by French officers at a Paris railroad station. Relations between the allies were far from cordial. The French and British repeatedly called for amalgamation of AEF troops into their armies.
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General Henri-Philippe Petain was pessimistic about France’s chances of winning the war. When he met Persh-ing in the summer of 1917, he said: “I hope you are not too late.”
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
Generalissimo Ferdinand Foch became supreme commander of all the allied armies in France in the spring of 1918. An apostle of the attack, he had been sidelined because of the heavy casualties suffered by troops under his command.
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
British Field Marshal Douglas Haig makes a point with Prime Minister David Lloyd George while France’s Marshal Joseph Joffre watches. Lloyd George yearned to fire Haig but his conservative backers in Parliament would not hear of it.
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
Kaiser Wilhelm II sometimes talked boastfully of German power. But he was unsure of his masculinity, had frequent nervous breakdowns, and hated to make a decision. He let Germany’s generals run the war.
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
Matthias Erzberger was the leader of the Catholic Centre Party in the German Reichstag. An advocate of a negotiated peace in 1917, he signed the Armistice under protest and denounced the Treaty of Versailles. Nevertheless, he became a symbol of defeatism and was assassinated in Berlin by right wing extremists.
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff’s victories over the Russians elevated him to demi-god status. In 1918, with Russia out of the war, Ludendorff convinced Germany’s leaders that total victory was within their grasp.
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
Slim sallow Austrian born Corporal Adolf Hitler was a messenger in the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Reserve Regiment. When he received the Iron Cross for courage under fire, he wrote to a friend that it was “the happiest day of my life.”
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
More than 25,000 American women came to France to participate in the war. Some entertained troops with theatrical performances. Others drove ambulances or worked for the YMCA or the Salvation Army, often running canteens close to the front.
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
American wounded emerge from the front lines in the Argonne. This fierce 47-day battle cost the AEF more than 100,000 casualties. At one point, a desperate
Pershing issued orders to shoot any man who ran away.
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Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur was called the “D’Artagnan of the AEF.” He designed his own uniform and refused to wear a helmet or gas mask at the front. He won two Distinguished Service Crosses.
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
Although Wilson declared that America would fight a war without hate, his administration was soon selling war bonds with a naked appeal to dark instincts. Hollywood produced films such as “The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin.”
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Eugene V. Debs, head of the American Socialist Party, attacked the war in this speech in Ohio. He was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison under the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to criticize the government.
EUGENE V. DEBS FOUNDATION
Liberal Republican Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin made a four hour speech opposing Woodrow Wilson’s call for war. He later denounced the Versailles Peace Treaty as “a spoils-grabbing compact of greed and hate.”
WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY (5455)
Conservative Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts opposed Wilson’s version of the League of Nations. Lodge was not an isolationist. He believed America had an important role to play in world affairs.
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General Leonard Wood was a former army chief of staff and political ally of Theodore Roosevelt. Wood relentlessly criticized the Wilson administration’s conduct of the war.
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Eamon de Valera was president of the as yet unrecognized Irish republic. He helped lead Irish-American opposition to the League of Nations when Wilson refused to ask the British government to grant Ireland independence.
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Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and his boss, Josephus Daniels, gaze at the White House from a balcony of the State, War and Navy building. Roosevelt repeatedly tried to ruin Daniels’ reputation so he could get his job.
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Secretary of State Robert Lansing undermined Wilson’s efforts to achieve a negotiated peace early in 1917. He saw nothing wrong with U.S. arms trade with the Allies. After the war he made little attempt to conceal his contempt for the Treaty of Versailles.
PHOTOS OF THE GREAT WAR
Woodrow Wilson accepts the plaudits of the Paris crowd in this carriage ride with French president Raymond Poincaré. The two men soon hated each other. Poincaré attacked Wilson as pro-German. Wilson blamed him for demanding a vengeful peace.
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Woodrow Wilson told King George V of England to stop calling the Americans cousins and advised him that the term “Anglo-Saxons” was also out of date. The King later called him an “entirely cold academical professor —an odious man.”
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Many thought Wilson blundered in his selection of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. From left to right, they were: Colonel Edward House, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, the president, retired diplomat Henry White and former chief of staff General Tasker Bliss. White was the only Republican. Wilson rejected advice to invite a leading Republican member of the Senate.
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To speed up the interminable peace conference, major decisions were reserved for the “Big Four” (left to right): David Lloyd George, prime minister of Great Britain, Vittorio Orlando, premier of Italy, Georges Clemenceau, premier of France, and President Wilson. Orlando went home in a rage when Wilson appealed over his head to the Italian people.
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Woodrow Wilson salutes wellwishers from the upper deck of the liner George Washington on his return from Europe. With him is his physician and close friend, Admiral Cary Grayson, guardian of the president’s precarious health.
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In the summer of 1919 race riots erupted in Washington D.C., Chicago and other cities. Here a crowd gathers on a Chicago corner. No fewer than 2,600 strikes, involving 4 million workers, also roiled the country. War-driven inflation had sent the cost of living soaring.
CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY DN-0071297
Many newspapers supported Wilson in the struggle over the peace treaty. Here, New York World cartoonist Rollin Kirby skewers three opponents, Senators Hiram Johnson, Henry Cabot Lodge and William Borah.
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In St. Paul, one of the first stops on his 1919 speaking tour, Woodrow Wilson seemed rested and confident. He expected to rally people behind his version of the League of Nations. But attacks by ethnic groups and senatorial critics soon turned the trip into an exhausting nightmare.
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Dandyish Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska was the leader of the Senate Democrats in the struggle over the Versailles treaty. Afterward he called his vote against the amended treaty, cast on Wilson’s orders, the greatest mistake of his life.
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Woodrow Wilson and his wife take their first auto ride after the president’s cerebral thrombosis. White House Chief Usher Ike Hoover said: “There never was a moment when he was more than a shadow of his former self. He had changed from a giant to a pygmy.”
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Democratic presidential nominee Governor James Cox of Ohio and his running mate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, campaign at a Toledo parade. Backing Wilson’s call for a “great and solemn referendum” on the League of Nations, they were buried by a stupendous Republican landslide.
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Chapter 10
PEACE THAT SURPASSES UNDERSTANDING II
One of the first things Woodrow Wilson said to Colonel House when they met at Brest on March 13, 1919, was a snarled rebuke:“Your dinner [with the foreign relations committees] was a failure as far as getting together was concerned.” Unflappable as always, House replied that the meeting still had some merit. It had diminished press criticism of Wilson’s neglect of Congress. Wilson grudgingly admitted this might be true.
The colonel refrained from pointing out that Wilson’s Boston speech had undermined the spirit of conciliation he had urged on the president. Nor did he rebuke Wilson for his even more intemperate remarks to the Democratic National Committee, the audience at the Metropolitan Opera House, and the committee from the Irish Race Convention. One wonders if the author of Philip Dru had begun to feel like Dr. Frankenstein. Had he created a monster that was running amok?
Wilson had put House in charge of the American delegation in his absence, and the colonel had continued to negotiate with French and British leaders. In her memoirs, Edith Wilson created a scene in which Wilson emerged from an extended conversation with House aboard the George Washington in Brest harbor looking dazed and horrified. Edith claims to have seized his hand and cried, “What is the matter? What has happened?”
The president supposedly replied,“House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again and this time it will be harder because he has given the impression my delegates are not in sympathy with me.”1
Again, we are dealing with something that Wilson almost certainly never said. For one thing, House did not board the George Washington, which had anchored out in Brest’s harbor. He had come down to Brest on Wilson’s special train and waited for him at the dock. But comments from other participants in the peace conference suggest there is a modicum of truth in the First Lady’s recollection. Wilson was extremely dissatisfied with the tenor and direction of the negotiations House had conducted while he was gone.
Aboard the train to Paris that night, House was frustrated by the presence of the French ambassador to the United States, Jules Jusserand, who prevented him from having a serious discussion with the president. But the next morning, before they left the train in Paris, the two men had a long talk. House told Wilson that negotiations on German reparations had gotten nowhere. The British and French refused to modify their astronomical demands. The French were also demanding the Saar basin, with its valuable coal mines, as promised in another secret treaty, and the creation of a “Rhenish Republic” in the Rhineland, which they would control. Both the French and the British wanted to separate the League of Nations from the treaty and conclude a peace with Germany as soon as possible.
House had not opposed the French demands; nor had he rejected the separation of the league and the treaty. He had begun to have grave doubts about Wilson’s obsession with the league to the detriment of almost everything else. Germany and much of the rest of central Europe were sliding into chaos and revolution. An immediate peace with Berlin seemed imperative. General Tasker Bliss, a fellow member of the peace commission, felt the same way. He had written a memorandum, saying that if an early peace were concluded with Germany, the American people might be willing to tackle other problems, including Soviet Russia.2
Wilson’s response to these proposals was dismaying, from House’s point of view. The president rejected the transfer of the Rhineland and the Saar to France, because it violated the principle of self-determination. He was even more intransigent on separating the league and the treaty. House did not realize how much Wilson had become involved, politically and emotionally, with his critics in the U.S. Senate. The discouraged colonel glumly noted,“The President comes back very militant and determined to put the league into the peace treaty.”
House saw this as a tremendous, potentially earthshaking mistake. Perhaps he could not conceal this conviction. Perhaps he did not try very hard. After all, he was not merely Wilson’s unofficial mouthpiece now. At the Paris Peace Conference, Edward Mandell House was almost if not quite Woodrow Wilson’s equal. As a peace commissioner, he had one of the most important assignments in American diplomatic history. He desperately wanted this conference to succeed, not only for the sake of Wilson’s place in history, but for his own. Their disagreement marked the beginning of the end of the colonel’s partnership with Woodrow Wilson.3
II
In Germany, American troops had moved into the Rhineland as part of an army of occupation. The Americans—and their British counterparts elsewhere in Germany—swiftly realized from the gaunt faces they saw on the street that the Germans were starving to death. The British began bombarding the War Office in London with horror stories. General Sir Herbert Plumer, commander of the British occupation army, said his soldiers could not stand the sight of hordes of skinny and bloated children pawing through the garbage in British camps. Minister of War Winston Churchill issued a statement, based on evidence he had seen from officers sent to Germany by the War Office: There was grave danger of “the entire collapse of the vital structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition.” One British journalist was particularly appalled by a visit to a maternity ward in a Cologne hospital. He described “rows of babies feverish from want of food, exhausted by privation to the point where their little limbs were like slender wands, their expression hopeless, and their faces full of pain.”4
Germany was not the only nation without food. The disparate pieces of the Austro-Hungarian empire were also sinking into starvation and chaos. No one had stopped to figure out how to stitch together the economic connections that the armistice had severed. Prague was devoid of meat, rice, coffee and tea. Its factories had no coal. The death rate for children under 14 was 40 percent. In a Czech mining town, 116 out of 165 children born in 1918 had already died. A wave of typhus was sweeping out of Russia into eastern Europe and Germany. Typhus was carried by lice, tiny crawling creatures that thrived on human bodies when there was no soap to wash them. Soap was made from a surplus of fats. When there was no surplus, the people consumed the fats and did without soap—with disastrous consequences.
On a fact-finding mission to Vienna, one of Colonel House’s top aides, Colonel Stephen Bonsal, saw with his own eyes the face of anarchy. As he strolled along one of the streets of the Ring, the circular heart of aristocratic Vienna, he was startled by the rattle of sabers and bursts of gunfire. Infantry and cavalry poured out of courtyards and confronted “a disorderly mob of men, women and barefooted children” emerging from the city’s working-class neighborhoods, heading toward the parliament buildings. As they drew nearer, Bonsal could see “how miserably clad they were” and he could hear their cries:“We are starving! Give us bread and jackets! We are famished and we freeze!”
Suddenly shots rang out, followed by volleys, and then by a fusillade. Policemen, soldiers and horses went down. Some of the workers ran away, but other “more resolute” groups pushed on. The troops opened fire with every weapon in their possession, and “soon the Ring was cleared of the living,” Bonsal wrote. “Here and there lay groups of dead and tangled masses of writhing wounded.” Among the dead was the pretty wife of a British engineer who had come to Vienna to help build factories and create jobs for the underclas
s. She had been caught in the crossfire while out for a stroll.
Next Bonsal saw something that made him realize what starving people will risk for food. Men and women crept from behind nearby buildings and began hacking chunks of meat from the dead horses, even though the troops continued to fire on them. Bonsal could only conclude that Vienna, the once magnificent capital of the Hapsburg empire, was on the brink of chaos.5
More and more people began to wonder what the peacemakers in Paris were doing. Almost five months had passed since the armistice. From Rome, Pope Benedict XV pleaded for the end of the blockade and an early peace treaty. Colonel Henry Anderson, the leader of an American civilian-military commission to aid the Balkan states, issued a similar plea. He described children walking the streets of Bucharest,“their limbs black and blue with cold.”
“The slogan of Europe ought to be, ‘Get back to work,’” Herbert Hoover said.“To a great extent the whole production is stopped. . . . We have got to have peace as soon as possible.” hoover finally got the blockade lifted for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Austria, but not for Germany or Hungary. Unfortunately, this concession made little difference in the desperate situation. The Italians, to reinforce their demands for the territory promised them in 1915, were blocking all attempts to ship food and fuel into eastern Europe.6
Rome was also hard at work demolishing Woodrow Wilson’s image as the savior of the world. Day after day, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s best-known poet, published newspaper articles denouncing the president as the country’s chief enemy at the peace conference.“What peace will in the end be imposed on us, poor little ones of Christ?” the poet cried in his usual extravagant style. “A Gallic peace, a British peace, a star-spangled peace?” D’Annunzio had become devoted to the man he saw as the savior of Italy, Benito Mussolini.7
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