The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  Sensing how close to absurdity she was treading in this fictionalized version, Edith claimed she asked the doctor, Would the sensible thing be for the president to resign and “let Mr. Marshall succeed to the Presidency?”

  “No,” Dercum purportedly said, suddenly thrusting himself into the political arena.“For Mr. Wilson to resign would have a bad effect on the country and a serious effect on our patient. He has staked his life and made his promise to the world to do all in his power to get the Treaty ratified and make the League of Nations complete. If he resigns, the greatest incentive to recovery is gone; and as his mind is clear as crystal he can still do more with a maimed body than anyone else. He has the utmost confidence in you. Dr. Grayson tells me he has always discussed public affairs with you, so you will not come to them uninformed.”54

  Of the many quotations in this book that were almost certainly never said, this one ranks at the top. When Edith Wilson published My Memoir in 1938, Dercum was as safely dead as Henry Morgenthau’s German ambassador. But history has a way of catching up with public liars. In 1991, Cary Grayson’s family found in his private files Dercum’s report on Woodrow Wilson’s “devastating trauma,” which Dercum had made to the admiral on October 20, 1919. This was a follow-up of what the neurologist had obviously told Grayson verbally. The report made it clear that Wilson would never achieve more than a “minimal state of recovery.” Dercum also clearly stated that he had told this bad news to Mrs. Wilson and her stepdaughter, Margaret Wilson, early in October 1919. 55

  The Dercum report confirmed what Ike Hoover wrote in his memoir about the aftermath of Wilson’s stroke. “It was perhaps three weeks or more before any change came over things. I had been in and out of the room many times during this period and I saw very little progress in the president’s condition. He just lay helpless.”

  Hoover admitted that after three weeks there was some improvement. “He lived on; but oh, what a wreck of his former self! . . . I was with him at some time every day. . . . 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 in every wise. He was physically almost incapacitated; he could articulate but indistinctly and think but feebly.”56

  From the evasions and vagaries Grayson told the cabinet, the president’s physician soon progressed to public lies. On October 9, when Wilson, according to Hoover, was still in a virtual blob state, Grayson told a reporter the president’s mind was “as good as it ever was.” He said nothing about a prostate condition that had shut down Wilson’s kidneys and brought him close to death for several days. At the end of the month, Grayson issued another statement denying that Wilson had the slightest mental impairment, based on the “normal” status of his blood pressure and heartbeat. The doctor’s diary and memorandums in his papers make it clear that Edith Wilson had ordered him to avoid specifics and reiterate Wilson’s supposedly unimpaired mind.

  Is there an explanation for this behavior, beyond the obvious evidence that two men—Tumulty and Grayson—had succumbed to the dictates of a strong-willed woman? From almost a century’s distance, the Wilson White House in October 1919 fits the general portrait of a nation—and a world—destabilized by years of hate propaganda and the catastrophic grief the war inflicted on millions of people. In this atmosphere, people were prey to delusions and denial, two psychological mechanisms that lead to bizarre behavior. Edith Wilson was able to convince herself that it was her patriotic duty as well as her loving responsibility to keep Woodrow Wilson in the White House until he recovered his strength and rescued his beloved League of Nations from the hateful Republicans, the enraged Irish-Americans, the evil German-Americans and the hysterical Italian-Americans. To some extent, Cary Grayson and Joe Tumulty shared this illusion of eventual victory.

  What none of these deluded conspirators seems to have realized was the potential power of the truth. If they had announced that Woodrow Wilson had sacrificed his health and strength in pursuit of his unreserved commitment to the League of Nations, and handed over the presidency to Vice President Marshall, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s carefully constructed plan to either defeat the treaty or make it a “Republicanized” document with his reservations would have been swept away in a burst of national sympathy for the fallen president. When Wilson collapsed aboard his train after the Pueblo speech, the New York Times had hailed him as a sacrificial hero:“The figure that will stand out in the memory of the Western people is that of a man burning with a restrained passion for a great purpose, for the accomplishment of which he would gladly lay down his life.” It is not hard to imagine how powerfully an honest statement about the president’s cerebral thrombosis would have affected the Senate—and the American people.57

  Instead, Edith Wilson’s illusion of eventual victory created a web of lies and political ineptitude that inflicted mortal wounds on the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations, and America’s entire experience in World War I.

  XIV

  With nothing to go on but Grayson’s vagaries, rumors swirled through Washington. Some people said Wilson was insane and pointed to bars on certain White House windows. The bars had been put there during Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure to protect the glass from footballs and baseballs flung by the younger members of TR’s tribe. Others pointed to the gushes of sympathy in the New York Times and other pro-Wilson papers and persisted in seeing his illness as a sham, a last desperate gasp of his losing campaign for the treaty. Total cynics said Wilson was suffering from syphilis, acquired in the bordellos of Paris.58

  Around the fallen president, Americans grappled with problems that cried out for leadership. Inflation continued to soar and more strikes roiled the economy, as labor leaders were virtually ordered by their rank and file to get more money from corporations. First came a steel walkout that erupted into violence in several cities. At the end of October, the United Mine Workers walked off the job, threatening to bring the country to a dead stop. Coal was the vital fuel on which ships, trains and factories depended—not to mention the millions who used it to heat their homes.

  The headless administration floundered. Tumulty took charge of a rump committee composed of the secretary of labor and the head of the nationalized railroads. They drafted an official appeal against the strike, issued over Wilson’s name. They called the walkout unjustifiable and unlawful. While the public watched with mounting anxiety, Federal Fuel Administrator Harry Garfield drew up a plan for rationing coal and Tumulty persuaded Attorney General Palmer to agree that a wartime act forbidding strikes in vital industries was still in force.

  When the union walked out anyway, federal troops were ordered into the coal towns. Tumulty drew up a statement for the president, calling for a federal injunction. The new president of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, staged the first of his many public tantrums. He was joined by AFL head Samuel Gompers, the administration’s wartime ally against the hated Germans. When the court ruled for the government, Lewis called off the strike—but very few miners went back to work. In the coal towns, friction between the troops and strikers grew ominous.

  Meanwhile, Harry Garfield had gone to Mrs. Wilson and persuaded her to get a ruling from the president that would limit a wage increase to 14 percent. The union wanted 31 percent. Mrs. Wilson—and the president, if he was compos mentis at this point—had only the dimmest idea of what was going on. The secretary of labor, who thought the miners deserved considerably more than 14 percent, threatened to resign. The entire cabinet voted in a body to support him and implored Wilson to change his mind. After an initial refusal, word finally descended from the second floor that the president agreed. Whereupon Fuel Administrator Garfield quit in disgust and embarrassment, feeling betrayed by his friend the president.

  The miners eventually went back to work in late December, with a 14 percent increase and a promise of another increase in the near future, to be decided by a three-man committee representing labor, management and the government. The imbroglio left the public with the i
mage of an administration with so many cooks, it was frequently unable to find the broth. The president’s invisibility added to the sense of unnerving confusion.59

  XV

  On the floor of Congress, Representative James Byrnes of South Carolina made an incendiary speech, accusing the Bolsheviks of influencing black Americans to turn against their country. He blamed the reds for the recent riots in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. A Department of Justice investigation of the role of radicals in racial unrest confirmed this accusation. An incident in Texas suggested the problem was much more complex.

  John R. Shillady, the white secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, journeyed to Austin to improve the relationship between whites and the local NAACP chapter. Shillady patiently explained to the state attorney general that the NAACP had no program for “immediate” racial equality. The association only wanted to ameliorate racial hatred and was opposed to all forms of violence. Not long after, Shillady was badly beaten by a white mob in daylight on an Austin main street.

  On November 7, 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered federal agents to raid organizations suspected of Bolshevik ties in eleven cities. Hundreds were arrested and held without bail on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government. Many were aliens, and Palmer declared they should be deported as soon as possible. He estimated that there were 60,000 Bolshevik plotters loose in the United States. Virtually confirming this estimate for the jittery public, in Centralia, Washington, a gunfight broke out when the newly founded American Legion, marching in its first Armistice Day parade, detoured to clean out an IWW union hall with baseball bats and pistols. Wesley Everett, the local Wobbly secretary (ironically an AEF veteran) and several others responded with gunfire, killing two legionnaires. Everett was castrated and lynched by a vengeful mob a few hours later. A half dozen Wobblies, selected almost at random, were convicted of murder by a reluctant jury, virtually at the order of the presiding judge. They were sentenced to long prison terms.60

  A dismayed Walter Lippmann complained that the ship of state was adrift, wallowing haplessly into “severe internal conflict.” no one was exercising the slightest leadership to get America back “to some kind of peace footing.” Lippmann condemned the tendency to blame the problem on Bolsheviks, blacks and radicals. The administration’s leaders had “refused to look ahead, refused to think, refused to plan.” The supposed Bolshevik attack on the government was a minor worry compared to “the paralysis of the government.”61

  From the White House came only silence.

  XVI

  In Ireland, while Wilson had been stumping the American West, a full-scale rebellion took shape. Policemen and soldiers were shot and their guns seized. The British poured in troops until their numbers topped 200,000. But the Irish rebels, buoyed by the support of their American cousins, remained unintimidated. Their growing boldness reached a climax when they opened fire on sixteen soldiers of the Shropshire Light Infantry on their way to church in the town of Fermoy. They killed one man and wounded a half dozen others, seized their rifles and sped away in waiting cars.

  The local coroner’s jury sympathized with the dead soldier’s family, but declined to bring a charge of murder. They claimed the attackers only intended to seize rifles to defend their country and had not intended to kill anyone. The British garrison in Fermoy went wild. Charging down the main street, they smashed more than fifty shop windows and allowed a mob that followed in their wake to loot to their heart’s content. The jewelry shop owned by the foreman of the coroner’s jury was stripped of every ring, watch and bracelet on the premises.

  In Dublin, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Viscount General John French, denounced the Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s parliament, as a “dangerous association” and disbanded it. Swarms of soldiers in helmets, rifles at the ready, stormed Sinn Féin headquarters and swept up supposedly incriminating documents. They arrested two Sinn Féin members of the British Parliament who were still boycotting that no-longer-respected body. In retaliation, Irish Republican Army gunmen killed a detective that night not far from a Dublin police station.

  This mounting violence made headlines in the United States, where President Eamon de Valera’s speaking tour was winning him audiences frequently larger than the president’s. Calling Lloyd George’s Irish policy “the very bankruptcy of statesmanship,” the Times of London glumly added that the government’s tactics seemed designed to play into the hands of the “anti-British element” in America. That was an understatement. The Friends of Irish Freedom used Ireland’s struggle to raise vast sums to fund their ongoing fight to destroy Wilson and the League of Nations.62

  XVII

  In Italy, as Wilson orated his way across the United States, another brand of violence erupted, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles. The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had been among the leading denouncers of Woodrow Wilson when the president appealed to the Italian people to give up Fiume and the Dalmatian coast in the name of justice and truth. By September 1919, Fiume was occupied by French and Italian troops who were on the brink of open warfare. When an Allied commission blamed the Italians and ordered them out of the city, the fifty-five-year-old D’Annunzio leaped on a motorbike, raced to the scene and persuaded the ousted Italians to join him in a military takeover.

  Accumulating supporters along the way, including not a few followers of Benito Mussolini, the poet soon had an army of 4,000 men. He faced down the Italian general guarding the border and marched into Fiume, where he was greeted as a hero by the Italian residents, while thousands of Yugoslavs fled. In a hysterical speech, D’Annunzio proclaimed Fiume part of Italy and called on “Victor Hugo’s France, Milton’s England and Lincoln’s America” to approve his conquest.

  In Rome, Premier Francesco Nitti, Vittorio Orlando’s successor, denounced the poet and his soldiers as “lunatics and traitors.” he was ignored by virtually every Italian in the country. Sailors jumped ship to join the army of Fiume. Hundreds of soldiers deserted their regiments to do likewise. D’Annunzio grandly demanded Nitti’s resignation, saying he was “tired of dealing with the dog.” The government was paralyzed. When Nitti sought backing from the Chamber of Deputies, a brawl soon had socialists and nationalists kicking and gouging each other on the parliamentary floor. The distraught premier dissolved the government and called new elections.

  In Milan, Benito Mussolini took notes on how quickly a few thousand armed and determined men, backed by poetic eloquence, could terminate that stupid idea called democracy.63

  XVIII

  In Germany, a sullen hatred of the Treaty of Versailles pervaded the nation. Politics oscillated violently between socialism and reaction. Judges, many of them holdovers from the old regime, expressed kaiser-like opinions from the bench whenever they could intrude them into a decision. One of the few Socialist judges remarked that there was “a state of war between the people and the judiciary.” meanwhile, the Majority Socialist Party was self-destructing. A plan to socialize all of Germany’s factories by continuing wartime controls collapsed in August 1919, when the middle-class parties in the Reichstag united to reject it.64

  One liberal analyst of the situation, Count Henry Kessler, concluded that “the revolution is provisionally over. Counter-revolution is on the march.” When reaction triumphed, Kessler predicted, “that will be Germany’s real defeat.” The former leaders of the Free Corps, having crushed worker revolts in various parts of Germany, were forming a group called the National Union, which aimed at a military takeover.

  In Munich, where martial law reigned and machine guns and barbed wire guarded the entrances of government buildings and hotels, former corporal Adolf Hitler was working as a political officer for the Second Infantry Regiment of the Reichswehr, the new Germany army. In the closing weeks of the war, he had been gassed and shipped to a hospital, where for a while he lay blind. As his sight slowly returned, he had learned of the kaiser’s abdication. Overwhelmed with grief, Hitler had listened to the p
astor of the hospital tell him and the other patients to accept the armistice “with confidence in the magnanimity of our former enemies.” How hollow those words must have seemed now, face-to-face with the Treaty of Versailles.65

  Hitler was under orders to detect symptoms of communism and socialism in the ranks of the Second Infantry Regiment and to talk the enlisted men out of these disloyal doctrines. For someone with minimal education, and that mostly as an artist, Hitler was a surprisingly effective speaker. Throughout the war, he had spent his spare time reading books.“Even at his battle station,” recalled a comrade in his wartime regiment,“he sat in a corner, ammunition bag around his middle, rifle in his arms, and read.” His favorite book was Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, which convinced him that the human will could triumph over any adversity.66

  The officers of the Second Infantry Regiment also employed Hitler as a spy. On September 12, 1919, while Woodrow Wilson was orating his way across the Midwest, Hitler dropped in on a meeting of the minuscule German Workers Party in the back room of a Munich beer hall. About twenty-five forlorn Socialists listened to a professor lecture them on how to create a worker’s paradise. Hitler was about to leave when someone suggested Bavaria should secede from Germany and join Austria. The Austrian-born Hitler fiercely denounced the idea. He declared a “greater Germany” was the nation’s only hope.