The South did not help matters by lynching at least ten discharged black servicemen because they persisted in wearing their uniforms after they returned home. Dozens of other black veterans were badly beaten for this supposed offense. A disgusted black paper in Baltimore published a poem, mocking Wilson’s League of Nations:
How can a nation dare dictate to men Of foreign climes what their conduct should be In dealing with their weaker subjects, when Their own are lynched with all impunity Restricted and deprived of every right Because they were born black instead of white?13
In the North, layoffs in no longer busy factories left thousands of blacks, including many veterans, jobless. In Chicago, the Department of Labor reported 99 percent of discharged black servicemen were unemployed. The army noted thousands of black soldiers had announced their intention to settle in the North, rather than return to the Jim Crow South. Black radicals encouraged this attitude. One black Chicago magazine declared: “Any Negro [veteran] who boards a train for Dixie should be derailed into the Mississippi River.”14
Washington, D.C., still a Southern city, but with a growing Northern consciousness, was a potential volcano of racial unrest when Wilson returned from Europe. In mid-July, a white woman, the wife of a soldier, claimed she was roughed up by two black teenagers. Whites were already complaining about a black crime wave. The next day, about four hundred soldiers, sailors and marines armed with revolvers and clubs headed for the black section of the city. They were joined by some three hundred civilians, who began beating up blacks on the streets. Police broke up the riot, but an incredibly stupid department spokesman blamed the trouble on black veterans who had become intimate with white women in France.
The next night, mobs of whites roamed Pennsylvania Avenue and other main thoroughfares in the District of Columbia, beating any black person they found. Blacks were dragged from streetcars in front of the White House and clubbed bloody. The following day blacks retaliated. Armed with revolvers, they clashed with more than 1,000 equally well-armed whites. A black man emptied his gun at a streetcar full of whites. Blacks in cars roared into posh northwest Washington shooting at any white person they saw. A black on a motorcycle shot a marine in front of the White House.
The next day a distraught President Wilson called Secretary of War Newton Baker and ordered him to summon the U.S. Army. Soon 3,000 rifle-toting infantrymen were patrolling the capital’s streets. A heavy rainstorm, breaking the heat wave, also helped calm the seething city. The death toll was at least fifteen, with additional hundreds injured and thousands terrorized.
This Washington upheaval started a chain reaction of race riots that erupted in twenty-five U.S. cities in the summer of 1919. Late in July, a huge riot exploded in Chicago when whites stoned a black teenager who accidentally drifted across a marker segregating a Lake Michigan beach. A rock struck the boy in the head, and he drowned. The resulting riot engulfed Chicago’s business district, killing 38 people and seriously injuring 500. More than 1,000 people were left homeless when arson was added to the rioters’weaponry.15
Would a Southern-born president do anything about this sputtering time bomb? Apparently not. Especially when all he wanted to talk about was the League of Nations.
IV
Underlying the unrest and disillusion was a growing fear that Bolshevism might invade the United States and cause the sort of upheaval that was desolating Russia. Wilson had withdrawn the two American expeditionary forces from Siberia and Murmansk, but White and Red armies remained locked in a death grapple throughout the huge country, and American newspapers were full of stories about Bolshevik uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and other nations.
Anxiety reached the flash point on June 2, 1919, while Woodrow Wilson was still in Paris insisting in the Council of Four that no changes should be made to the peace treaty with Germany. At 11:15 P.M. that night, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was reading in the front room of his brick house on R Street in northwest Washington. A progressive Pennsylvania Democrat and practicing Quaker who had backed Wilson since 1912, Palmer had been Tumulty’s choice to succeed the war-weary Thomas Gregory. With a yawn, Palmer tossed his book aside and strolled toward the bedroom in the back of the house, where his wife was already asleep.
At about the same time, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and his unhappy wife, Eleanor, were parking their car in a nearby garage, on their way home from a dinner party. They planned to walk the few short blocks to their house, across the street from Palmer’s. A tremendous blast split the silent spring night. Roosevelt jokingly wondered if an artillery shell he had brought home from France had exploded. His good humor vanished when the wail of police sirens, the clang of ambulances, and hysterical screams of neighbors drifted toward them. Roosevelt broke into a run, leaving Eleanor stumbling behind him in her long skirt. Their eleven-year-old son James was in their house, with their cook.
At the scene, Roosevelt gaped at Palmer’s house. The front was smashed into a sagging, windowless ruin. The door dangled from a lone hinge. The dazed attorney general stood amid the rubble on the lawn, his arm around his terrified wife. The front of Roosevelt’s house was also windowless—as were those of almost all the other houses within several hundred yards.
In the street was a human leg. Part of another leg was on a neighbor’s lawn. Bits of blood and flesh were splattered on the steps of Roosevelt’s house. Inside he could hear his cook screaming hysterically. He flung open the door and raced upstairs to James’s bedroom. Although the floor was littered with shards of glass, the boy did not have as much as a scratch. He was enjoying the uproar outside. “Father . . . grabbed me in an embrace that almost cracked my ribs,” James later recalled.16
Back in the street, Roosevelt helped the police gather sheets of anarchist literature that had been scattered everywhere. The police theorized the lone victim of the blast, the bomber himself, had miscalculated how fast he had to run after he lit the fuse of his nitroglycerin bomb. His most salient message was in a pamphlet entitled Plain Words, written by someone who signed himself “The Anarchist Fighters.”
The writer expressed his rage at the Americans for trying to stop the worldwide spread of revolution. The “working multitude” was going to regain the “stolen millions” the ruling class had made in the Great War. “You jailed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could,” the anarchist ranted. But the capitalists could not stop them from “dreaming of freedom” and “aspir[ing] to a better world.”17
That same night, similar terrorist bombs exploded in front of the private homes of a New York judge, the mayor of Cleveland, two local politicians in Massachusetts, an industrialist in Paterson, New Jersey (the scene of a famous 1913 IWW strike), an immigration official in Pittsburgh, and, for some baffling reason, a Catholic Church in Philadelphia. An elderly woman caretaker in the judge’s house was killed. Otherwise, injuries were minor. But the threat of a wave of anarchist terror jangled the nerves of congressmen and senators and the American public.
No one was more exercised than Attorney General Palmer. He saw “the blaze of Revolution sweeping over every American institution of law and order . . . licking the altars of churches . . . crawling into the sacred corners of American homes.” Palmer swiftly reorganized the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation to stamp out this peril. Among the new leaders was a twenty-five-year-old former librarian named John Edgar Hoover, who became head of the General Intelligence Division. Hoover began compiling cross-indexed files on every radical organization in the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, quick to embrace a trend, was soon addressing women’s luncheons, telling them that membership in the League of Nations was the best defense against the awful Bolshevik doctrine of free love.18
V
This unstable, uncertain, disillusioned America was the setting for Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to rescue his League of Nations from rejection by the Senate. After his disastrous speech to Congress on July 10, the president waited a week for a reac
tion. What he saw in the Senate was not encouraging. On July 15, George Norris of Nebraska rose to deliver a three-day tirade against the league and the treaty. Like Oswald Garrison Villard, Norris’s liberal credentials were impeccable. He had long supported disarmament and some sort of international organization to prevent war. He was willing to diminish U.S. sovereignty and even abandon the Monroe Doctrine to achieve these goals. But he could not support a league that was wedded to the peace treaty. He cited Japan’s seizure of Shantung as the worst of many immoralities and barbarities in the treaty. The blatant “greed and avarice” of the nations that were going to control the league made it absurd to ask the Senate to permit the United States to lend it America’s good name.19
Wilson may have been able to disregard a similar conclusion in The Nation’s articles, which were published while he was in Europe. But he could not ignore this rebuke from one of the Senate’s leading liberals. The words must have cut deep. Here, again, was a cruel reminder of his primary mistake, going to Europe to negotiate the treaty, and his repeated failures to defend the Fourteen Points face-to-face with Clemenceau and Lloyd George.
The day before Norris spoke, Wilson had begun to meet with individual senators, who had said they would be satisfied with very modest changes in the covenant. He gave these so-called mild reservationists about fifteen minutes each and encouraged the impression that their modifications would be acceptable to him. But there were not enough of these moderates to make a difference in winning a two-thirds majority. What Wilson needed was someone who could negotiate with those who had strong objections to the treaty and the league. The decision to cut himself off from Colonel House grew more damaging with every passing day.
On July 18, the day after Senator Norris ended his tirade against the treaty, Woodrow Wilson took to his bed, suffering from acute diarrhea and an agonizing headache. Admiral Cary Grayson hustled him aboard the presidential yacht, Mayflower, and kept him there for the weekend, in spite of violently stormy weather. After first saying Wilson had a cold, Grayson changed his diagnosis to a dysentery attack. Some historians and doctors who have studied Wilson’s medical history think the illness was a stroke. Others see it as a psychosomatic reaction to Norris’s ferocious assault. Wilson’s digestive system had frequently reacted negatively to stress.
Wilson made a quick recovery from his indisposition, although the political situation did not improve. In the hearing room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge had begun by reading the treaty aloud, word for word, a task that took two weeks. Next, Lodge announced, would come hearings at which the committee would question those who participated in the peace conference and listen to those who wanted to comment on the results of Wilson’s seven months in Paris.
On the surface, there seemed to be strong sentiment among American newspapers and voters in favor of the league. A Literary Digest poll of 1,377 daily newspapers found that a majority (718 to 659) favored quick ratification. The League to Enforce Peace claimed that a survey of newspaper editorials showed supporters of the league outnumbering opponents by 5 to 1. GOP foreign policy guru Elihu Root admitted that a majority of the voters, impatient with the endless peace process, wanted ratification “at once.”
Some people have accused Lodge of trying to talk the treaty and the league to death. In fact, the senator had a well-thought-out, conservative philosophy, rooted in the Constitution. He was determined not to allow Wilson to stampede the country into a hasty approval of the treaty. Lodge acknowledged to several correspondents that if a vote were taken immediately, the treaty and the league would probably win. Only the small liberal minority disapproved the harsh treatment of Germany. The league at first glance seemed a noble idea, part of the idealism that Wilson had invoked to lead the United States into the war.
But Lodge did not think the Senate should vote on something so important based on a hasty first glance. He believed “the most momentous decision that this country has ever been called upon to make” should be based not on “the passions of the moment” but on the “calm second thought” of the American people. That was one among several reasons why the Constitution gave the Senate the right and obligation to advise and consent on any treaty a president made. Elihu Root echoed this view when he said the Senate should not succumb to “ignorant popular sentiment.”20
VI
Senator Lodge and Senator Philander Knox now made major speeches, attacking the treaty and the league. Lodge, as majority leader of the Senate and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was restrained. The Republican senators were divided into four groups: irreconcilables such as Norris and Borah; mild reservationists such as the men Wilson was wooing; strong reservationists, who wanted major amendments to the covenant; and a handful who sided with William Howard Taft and his League to Enforce Peace, who favored ratification of Wilson’s version of the covenant. Lodge was trying to hold his party together, and his speech tried to offend none of these people. Essentially he argued that the covenant was too open-ended. It was committing the American people to international obligations—in particular to fighting wars—they might on second thought not want to fulfill.
Lodge took a firm stand against this vague internationalism.“I can never be anything but an American,” he said.“I must think of the United States first in an arrangement like this.” But he did not mean America should withdraw into isolationism. Far from it. He was “thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails the best hopes of mankind fail with it.”21
Philander Knox was far more scathing. The former secretary of state more than matched Norris in his contempt for the treaty. Knox was the first senator to criticize the vengeful treatment of Germany from the conservative side. He called it “not the treaty but the truce of Versailles.” the senator did not think the treaty was tough enough. The terms goaded Germany to evade them and begin planning for another war but did little to prevent it from getting away with a resurrection. For this Knox blamed Wilson and his Fourteen Points. The senator dismissed the League of Nations as simply an alliance of the victors, which would soon fall apart. He ended by calling for outright rejection of this “hard and cruel peace.” With those words, Knox joined the irreconcilables—not good news for Wilson. The senator’s standing as a foreign policy spokesman equaled and may even have exceeded Henry Cabot Lodge’s status in this wordy arena.22
For those outside the rather exclusive foreign policy club, the debate began to acquire a strange unreality. The covenant of the league and the treaty were published as a 268-page book. But that was hardly the same thing as educating public opinion on the subject. The document was written in legalistic, diplomacy-speak prose that was virtually impenetrable, as the Peoria (Illinois) Transcript remarked: “Nobody is competent to discuss the Treaty of Versailles until he has read it and nobody who would take the time to read it would be competent to discuss it.” Presumably because the reader’s brain would be dead.23
Lack of comprehension did not prevent the public passions aroused by the war and the bungled peace conference from flaring violently. The Irish led the way with a ferocious attack on Wilson and the treaty. The Celtic-dominated Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution condemning “the so called Covenant of the League of Nations claim to commit this republic to recognize . . . the title of England to own and rule Ireland.” the Friends of Irish Freedom established an Irish National Bureau in Washington, D.C., which lobbied senators and issued a stream of denunciations of the treaty. Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana went to the White House and implored Wilson to make a statement, declaring that the first order of American business in the League of Nations would be a motion on behalf of Ireland’s freedom. Former president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, offered similar advice. Wilson, by this time a confirmed Irish-hater, did nothing.24
In New York, Wilson’s old enemy, Jeremiah O’Leary, was one of the leading antitreaty voices. O’Leary had been seized in his West Coast hide-away and dragged back to New York for trial i
n October 1918. He contracted influenza, and the government was forced to postpone his trial until January 1919, when Wilson’s coldness toward Irish independence had largely dissipated Gotham’s enthusiasm for the war. Conducting his own defense, O’Leary portrayed himself as a martyr to Wilsonian vengeance and the pro-British New York press. He even subpoenaed Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and subjected him to a ferocious grilling about his supposed British sympathies. Acquitted of all charges, O’Leary went to work organizing an Irish-American speaker’s bureau to assail Wilson and the treaty.25
Italian-Americans, still angry over Fiume, were also making themselves heard. Their newspapers printed a statement Wilson had made in 1902, when he was a conservative Democrat, deploring the immigration “of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy.” The countries of southern Europe, he said, were “disburdening themselves of the more hapless elements of their population.” the Chinese, Wilson had added,“were more to be desired as workmen if not as citizens.” In New York, a young maverick Republican, Fiorello LaGuardia, who had won some modest fame as a pilot in France, switched from supporting the league to damning it in every speech. Soon he was calling for the election of Republican candidates everywhere to show the world that the president was “discredited at home.”26
The rest of the Republican Party was quick to take advantage of this mass disaffection. Senator Lodge issued a statement to his Italian constituents in Massachusetts, comparing their desire for Fiume to the value the Americans had placed on the port of New Orleans in the early 1800s. State legislators with large Italian constituencies passed resolutions calling on Wilson to do or say something to soothe these outraged hyphenates. Senator Lawrence Y. Sherman of Illinois made Italy’s grievance a personal crusade, orating endlessly on Fiume.27
The Illusion of Victory Page 51