Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Before Wilson could move on partisan and progressive fronts, he had to meet other challenges abroad and at home. The greatest danger remained the German onslaught in France. The British kept demanding that AEF units be placed under their command—a scheme called brigading, which Pershing adamantly opposed. Despite repeated face-to-face importuning by the ambassador, Lord Reading, Wilson was reluctant to decide the matter until Baker returned from a tour of the front in Europe. The House-Wiseman axis likewise was active; the Englishman also met with the president and then sailed for home to apprise Lloyd George and Balfour of the situation. When Baker returned, just after the middle of April, he advised Wilson to stick to a tentative agreement to supply the British with 120,000 troops a month from then through July while leaving final decisions to Pershing. After further wrangling involving the French, this deal held, despite efforts by House and Wiseman to undermine Pershing. In the trenches, the last-ditch fortitude of the beleaguered British Tommies and French poilus, combined with German blunders, stalled the great offensive. Units from the First Division of the U.S. Army, which had been brigaded to the French, took part in an attack that captured the town of Cantigny on the Arras sector of the front. Meanwhile, stepped-up shipping across the Atlantic was supplying Pershing with greater numbers of doughboys, and by summer the AEF was ready to operate on its own.19

  Domestic political infighting mirrored the combat across the ocean. The fiasco of the aircraft production program drew sharp and justified criticism, and Wilson responded by making an unusual choice to investigate the matter: Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who would later carve the monument at Mount Rushmore. Borglum’s qualifications to lead the inquiry lay in his enthusiasm for aviation and his friendship with Roosevelt. The sculptor’s haphazard investigation seemed to make problems worse, and in May an angry Senate Military Affairs Committee authorized its own inquiry. To head off this move, Wilson reluctantly asked Charles Evans Hughes to head a new probe. Hughes’s report, released just before the end of the war, found evidence of disorganization and incompetence, but not corruption, in the aircraft program. Also in May, McAdoo’s call for additional taxes to pay for the war threatened to spark a revolt among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Some of them simply balked at the new taxes, while others feared renewal of the sectional attack that Republicans had leveled against them in 1916—that the improvident South and West were raiding the hard-earned wealth of the Northeast and Midwest. In addition, representatives and senators up for reelection were eager to adjourn and hit the campaign trail rather than stay in Washington for the time-consuming business of passing revenue legislation.20

  As in the past, Wilson handled trouble at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue with private and public initiatives. He met several times with agitated Democratic legislators—a chore he did not enjoy—and managed to soothe congressional tempers a bit. At the same time, he spoke out a little more often than he had done recently. Addressing Red Cross volunteers at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on May 18, he observed, “In my own mind I am convinced that not a hundred years of peace could have knitted this nation together as this single year of war has knitted it together.”21 Five days later, he issued a statement to the press praising foreign-born citizens for their expressions of loyalty and eagerness to serve.

  Those statements disclosed a new strain in Wilson’s thinking—a belief that this war could become more than a necessary evil and could achieve positive good by uniting the nation and particularly by overcoming ethnic and sectional divisions. They came as a warm-up for a surprise address to a joint session of Congress on May 27. In that speech, Wilson stressed the necessity for new taxes, which would help in planning expenditures, remedy inequities, and prevent speculation and waste. The overriding issue was winning the war, and everything else must go by the boards: “Politics is adjourned. The elections will go to those who think least of it.” As earlier, Wilson was striking a note that did not fully reflect his private thinking. “Politics is adjourned” was another of his stirring phrases, which he sometimes made good on, as when he publicly endorsed two Republican senators, William S. Kenyon of Iowa and Knute Nelson of Minnesota, for reelection in the fall. But “politics is adjourned” belied the uses that he was about to make of the politics of loyalty. Back in March, he had written a public letter endorsing Joseph Davies, the Democratic candidate in a special senatorial election in Wisconsin, by praising him for having passed “the acid test” of loyalty. Despite the endorsement, Davies lost to a Republican, Irvine Lenroot, whose election was also a blow to La Follette, who regarded Lenroot as a renegade and had his own candidate in the race.22

  For a president to endorse his party’s candidate over the opposition is standard politics, although Wilson’s “acid test” of loyalty did raise the emotional and rhetorical stakes. What was not standard politics was to apply this test to members of his own party. Wilson in fact hesitated at first to intervene in Democratic primaries in 1918. In June, however, he came out in South Carolina’s senatorial primary against former governor Cole-man Blease, a Bryanite who earlier failed the acid test. A month later, South Carolina Democrats gratified him by rejecting Blease in favor of a pro-administration candidate. His next incursion into primaries in the South came in July in Texas, as a result of some intrigue by Burleson. The postmaster general’s brother-in-law was running against Representative James Slayden in the San Antonio district, and Burleson drafted a telegram for the president to send criticizing the congressman. To Burleson’s surprise, Wilson sent the telegram, though he soon regretted the move and said that Burleson had gotten him into trouble. Why he went along with the scheme is not clear. Slayden withdrew from the primary, and Burleson’s brother-in-law was nominated but later lost to the first Texas Republican to be elected to Congress since Reconstruction. Elsewhere in the state, administration supporters succeeded, without the president’s direct intervention, in easily defeating Representative Jeff McLemore, the author of the offending resolution in 1916 against traveling on belligerent merchant ships.23

  Those successes in Texas prefigured further forays into primaries, though for a while Wilson remained chary about involvement in intra-party contests. Even though he made no secret of his loathing for Senator John Shields of Tennessee, a Bourbon Democrat who had given the administration trouble on a variety of issues, he did not make a public statement against the senator, who won renomination early in August. He likewise refrained from speaking out against Representative George Huddleston of Alabama, another Bryanite, but then changed his mind and telegraphed a Birmingham newspaper editor: “I think I am justified in saying that Mr. Huddleston’s record proved him in every way an opponent of the Administration.” The congressman fought back with endorsements from the Democratic leadership in the House and handily prevailed in his primary.24

  Those disappointments did not deter Wilson from going after what he saw as bigger game: senators James K. Vardaman of Mississippi and Thomas Hardwick of Georgia. No one fit the profile of a failure to pass the “acid test” of loyalty better than Vardaman, who had been one of the six senators to vote against the war resolution. Mississippi’s flowing-haired, flamboyant “White Chief” was an agrarian radical and a virulent racist demagogue who embodied everything that respectable whites found so repugnant in southern politics. Wilson needed little prompting to send a public letter that stated, “Senator Vardaman has been conspicuous among the Democrats in the Senate in his opposition to the administration.” If Mississippians chose to renominate Vardaman, the president would feel “obliged to accept their action as a condemnation of my administration.” Vardaman struck back with his trademark appeal to white supremacy, demanding that black veterans be barred from returning to the South. This time, racism could not trump patriotism, and the senator lost badly in the primary on August 21.25

  Wilson despised Georgia’s Hardwick almost as much as he despised Vardaman. Hardwick was a political cohort of the man who outdid him, and sometimes even Vardaman, as an agrarian rac
e-baiting rabble-rouser and an opponent of Wilson’s foreign policy—Tom Watson. Although Hardwick had voted for the war resolution, he stood against most of the administration’s policies before and after intervention. Now Georgia’s newly enacted “county unit” requirement meant that the winner of a primary or general election had to carry a majority of the state’s counties regardless of the popular vote; this rule obviously discriminated against voters in cities, particularly Atlanta, and gave a big boost to Hardwick’s and Watson’s rural followers. In this race, Wilson publicly called Hardwick a “constant and active opponent of my administration” and urged Georgians to vote for William J. Harris, who had been serving on the FTC. On September 10, Harris swamped Hardwick in the popular vote and carried 114 of Georgia’s 152 counties. The news from Georgia was doubly welcome because three weeks earlier Tom Watson had lost in a primary to Representative Carl Vinson, who had denounced the challenger for his opposition to the war.26

  As a whole, these activities constituted a notable feat of leadership. The failures notwithstanding, Wilson’s involvement in the 1918 primaries would become the only successful party purge by a president in American history. Twenty years later, Franklin Roosevelt would try to do the same thing on the same turf and would fail miserably. In 1918, Wilson enjoyed the advantages of acting amid a superheated political atmosphere, thanks to the war, and of being a native southerner, thereby muffling charges of outside interference. He issued his denunciation of lynching just before he intervened in these primaries—which may have been only a coincidence or may have sprung from his confidence that he would not arouse the beast of racism that always lurked in the shadows of southern politics. Vardaman’s failure to save himself with a fresh injection of white supremacist demagoguery appeared to prove Wilson right. He was playing for larger stakes than just settling scores with opponents in his own party. This was the final, knockout blow in his fight for supremacy among Democrats. Henceforth, no Democrat would challenge him for mastery, not even in the disheartening days that would befall him and the party in the months to come. Moreover, by purging opponents of his foreign policy, he was taking a giant step toward transforming the South from the most anti-military, anti-interventionist, potentially isolationist section of the country into the most pro-military, interventionist, and at times internationalist section—locating military bases there would help, too.27

  Domestic politics were not uppermost in the president’s mind during the summer of 1918. Above all, there was the fighting in France. In June, the AEF got a bigger taste of what the Germans had been dishing out to the British and the French, first at Chemin des Dames in the Reims-Soissons sector of the front, where two American divisions led the attack, and then on the Aisne-Marne salient. A full corps of doughboys went into action at Château-Thierry, with especially heavy fighting at Belleau Wood, where the U.S. Marines lived up to their reputation as fierce warriors. Their presence was, in the words of a French officer on Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s staff, “the magical operation of a transfusion of blood. Life arrived in floods to reanimate the body of a France bled white by the innumerable wounds of four years.” As these battles raged through June and July, the AEF took heavy casualties and played its part in foiling the German lunge toward victory on the Western Front. By August, Pershing had enough troops to take over a sector, and he was able to mount independent offensives in September at St.-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne. The Meuse-Argonne offensive struck at the Germans’ main supply line and involved the largest number of American troops, and casualties, in any engagement the army ever fought—larger than the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. By November, 2 million American soldiers were in Europe, and Allied war plans called for crossing the Rhine early in 1919, with the bulk of combat in the invasion of Germany to fall on the AEF.28

  Wilson received regular reports about the fighting, but he almost never discussed any aspect of it with the cabinet or the War Cabinet. One exception occurred in May, when General Leonard Wood—the former army chief of staff, close friend of Roosevelt’s, and frequent critic of administration policies—protested his not being sent to France to command a division. Wilson prepared a statement that criticized Wood’s erratic temperament and habit of contesting his superiors’ decisions, which could be fatal “in the face of the enemy.” When he read that statement to the cabinet, most of the members opposed his saying anything about Wood, but they admitted that Pershing did not want Wood and had told Wood so. Wilson met with Wood and listened to his argument for being sent overseas, but he did not budge. Sidelining Wood ignited public criticism, including widespread charges that politics were involved. As earlier with the rejection of Roosevelt’s bid to raise a division, personal and political motives may have entered into the decision tangentially, but basically Wilson was sticking to his policy of keeping his hands off military commands and decisions.29

  Wilson’s reluctance to talk about what he considered strictly military matters did not extend to the limited use of American forces for diplomatic purposes. One place posed this problem more than any other—Russia. Entreaties from the Allies to intervene there persisted through the first half of 1918, the most sensitive spot being the Pacific coast of Siberia, where the Japanese remained eager to send in an army. Wilson continued to resist those pleas, but strenuous lobbying for intervention ranged from the Democratic Party to the French—who sent the philosopher Henri Bergson to present their case to the president in person—to American agents in Asia. The most unusual and ultimately influential lobbyist was the Czech leader Tomáš Masaryk, who sought to enlist American support for his people’s independence and for his mission to transport Czech soldiers who had been prisoners of war in Russia to Vladivostok so that they might then be shipped to Europe to fight alongside the Allied forces in France. At a meeting on June 19, Wilson and Masaryk discussed intervention strictly as a technical matter, which pleased the president, who was worried about having enough troops to send into Siberia. Ten days later, Czech soldiers seized control of Vladivostok, giving Wilson the excuse he needed to intervene to support them. In early July, he sent 7,000 American troops, to be matched by 7,000 Japanese troops.30

  Meanwhile, small numbers of American troops went into Archangel and Murmansk, in the northern part of European Russia, while British and French troops also operated there and in the Black Sea. These were limited, complicated, messy operations that seemed to defy Wilson’s best intentions. “I have been sweating blood over the question of what it is right and feasible (possible) to do in Russia,” he lamented to House in July. “It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch.” In August, he issued a statement to the press in which he maintained that these incursions implied no interference with Russian sovereignty and were intended only to help the Russians regain control of their own affairs. In October, he told Wiseman, “My policy regarding Russia is very similar to my Mexican policy. I believe in letting them work out their own salvation, even though they wallow in anarchy for a while.” He also told Wiseman that he thought the Russian problems should be held over for the peace conference.31

  As that reference to a peace conference indicated, post-war settlements occupied a prominent place in Wilson’s thinking. Much of that thinking arose on his own initiative, but some of it stemmed from the machinations of House. The relationship between the two men reached a second high point during the summer and fall of 1918—not as warm and intimate as it had been during the months after Ellen Wilson’s death, but close and familiar. Yet during the summer, the two men did not see each other for two and a half months. Wilson telephoned occasionally, but he wrote only three letters—something House complained about in his diary. This neglect did not betoken diminished regard for the colonel’s counsel. Rather, at the middle of August, Wilson—accompanied by Edith and Dr. Grayson—paid a five-day visit to House in Massachusetts to discuss a number of subjects, especially a league of nations.

  Earlier in the summer, House had received the Phillimore Report, prepared for the Britis
h government by a commission headed by the jurist Sir Walter Phillimore, which recommended an “alliance” for mutual security and arbitration. House had shared the report with the LEP leaders and had got A. Lawrence Lowell to urge Wilson to set up a comparable commission and work with the British on the project. The president had rebuffed Lowell, and on the first day of the meeting with House he told Wiseman, who was present for part of the discussion, that a public statement by him about a league would only invite attacks. “One section of the Senate, led by Lodge, would cry that he had gone [too] far in committing the United States to a Utopian scheme, and, on the other hand, the League enthusiasts would attack him for not going far enough,” Wiseman paraphrased Wilson saying.32

  Those discouraging words did not reflect the main line of Wilson’s thinking about the league idea. He had revised a paper prepared earlier by David Hunter Miller, the Inquiry’s legal expert, on a league covenant. His revisions provided for equality of nations, deleted any mention of an international court, and insisted that all parties guarantee each other’s independence and territorial integrity, “subject to the principle of self-determination.” Wilson did not show this revised covenant to Wiseman, but he did tell him that a league “must be virile, a reality, not a paper League,” and that the one sketched in the Phillimore Report “has no teeth.” In their subsequent one-on-one discussion, House could not get Wilson to abandon equality of nations in favor of a great power directorate. They did agree that the league should be part of the peace treaty, and they talked about who should be part of the delegation to the peace conference. Wilson dismissed Roosevelt and Taft out of hand, and he rejected Root as too old and legalistic in his thinking. Lansing would probably have to go, but, as for himself, House wrote in his diary, “I am not certain that I would like to be a delegate, … unless, indeed, the President should not go himself.”33