by G. J. Meyer
The situation called for the kind of political mastery that Wilson had demonstrated in his brief time as governor of New Jersey and at the start of his presidency. The first question was how to proceed: whether to apply his powers of persuasion to the Senate, or to create a groundswell of support by appealing directly to the public. He decided to do both, courting the Senate first and then reaching out more widely. It was a sensible enough decision.
The problem turned out to be not the strategy but the execution. The president misplayed a strong hand, possibly because of the delicate state of his health. Upon returning to the White House, he resumed the habits with which he had husbanded his strength through his first six years there. Once again he stayed away from his office until after lunch, played golf almost every day with his wife and physician, and went for long chauffeur-driven rides. All this helped with his recuperation, but not enough. Paris had taken a heavy toll. In his last weeks in France, the left side of his face had begun to twitch uncontrollably. This did not altogether stop after he got home.
He nevertheless plunged into the fray. On the day after his return, he held a press conference in which, for the first time in a long time, the things he said were not off the record. The questions were almost entirely about the league, Article 10 in particular. He explained his position clearly, firmly, and without belligerence. A day later he appeared before the Senate and formally presented the peace treaty for ratification. Friends and foes alike had awaited with great expectation the speech he gave on that occasion. The irreconcilables had braced themselves for another of the president’s stirring orations, a call to action in pursuit of noble goals. Wilson understood this and appears to have been uncharacteristically daunted; the writing gave him more difficulty than any of his previous speeches. On the voyage home, most unusually, he read a draft aloud to five of his fellow passengers, asking for their thoughts. The response was positive, but the men who gave it were ill suited to be of much help: three Wall Street moguls, an economist, and a member of Chicago’s wealthy McCormick family. Having limited experience of Congress or politics, they were unable to save the president from wasting a singularly good opportunity.
League supporters were disappointed when the president appeared before the Senate, while opponents had to struggle to keep from gloating. The speech was crafted capably enough, but it was too Wilsonian to suit the occasion. It had too much rhetoric, too little substance. Such an approach had served him well on earlier occasions, when listeners already understood in fairly clear terms what he was asking or promising—a war against tyranny, a progressive legislative agenda—and were eager to demonstrate their support. But in July Senate and nation wanted an explanation of just what this treaty and this league were about, and that they did not get.
They wanted to hear about Article 10, the treaty’s implications for the Monroe Doctrine, why Japan was being given a piece of China, et cetera. The president did not even mention these things. His speech was therefore as dull as it was long, a professorial mixture of recent history and worn-out platitudes about America’s new and glorious place in world affairs. The treaty itself he seemed almost to damn with faint praise. It was “not exactly what we would have written,” he said. “It is probably not what any of the national delegations would have written. But results were worked out which on the whole bear test.” These were not words to bring even Democratic senators out of their seats cheering. Nor did he make any effort to explain what the “results” he referred to were or why he found them acceptable.
Here is the reaction of Democratic Senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona, a dependable friend of the administration: “Wilson’s speech was as if the head of a great corporation, after committing his company to enormous undertakings, when called upon to render a statement as to the meanings and extent of the obligation he had incurred, should go before the Board of Directors and read Longfellow’s Psalm of Life. Wilson was called upon to render an accounting of the most momentous cause ever entrusted to an individual. His audience wanted raw meat, he fed them cold turnips.”
The speech instilled no sense of urgency. There followed, instead of a great climactic debate, an intermittent succession of speeches pro and con, with days sometimes passing between one senator’s contribution and the next. In a departure from his customary remoteness, in the last two weeks of July the president met individually with twenty-six senators, twenty-two of them Republicans. He made not a single convert. He then fell ill and retreated to his bed. Here again there is speculation that he might have suffered a minor stroke. Senator Ashurst, in describing the president’s appearance as he arrived at the Senate to deliver his failure of an address, had noted “a contraction of the back of his neck and a transparency of his ears; infallible indices of a man whose vitality is gone.”
Meanwhile the satisfactions of victory were proving to be almost as short-lived in the United States as in Europe. In July, in the nation’s capital, rumors that a white woman had been raped by a black man caused angry gangs of whites, many of them servicemen in uniform, to attack blacks wherever they found them. The result, with the police not intervening and blacks fighting back, was not so much a race riot as race war, and it did not end until three thousand army troops had been sent in and fifteen people were dead. This was the first of twenty-five such irruptions across the country that summer. The worst would happen in Chicago, where the downtown Loop was ravaged, thirty-eight people were killed, more than five hundred injured, and the homes of more than a thousand people went up in flames.
Raging inflation, when combined with the determination of employers to reverse the wage gains of wartime, deny recognition to unions, and keep the twelve-hour workday, generated waves of labor disputes. In the course of 1919, one American worker in five would at some point be on strike. By midsummer, workers in industries as massive and essential as steel, coal mining, and the railroads were squaring off for what looked to be an epic showdown with management. The comfortable classes were becoming increasingly inclined to condemn even the AFL as part of the Bolshevik threat to Christian civilization.
All of which must have made approval of the league even more imperative in the president’s eyes. With so many things going wrong, at home little less than abroad, the league might prove to be the only positive thing to come out of America’s expenditure of so much treasure and so many lives.
Background
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The Palmer Raids
Early in 1919, Thomas Gregory having decided that five years as the head of the U.S. Justice Department were enough, President Wilson found himself in need of an attorney general.
There were many qualified and interested candidates. Among them were men who had helped Gregory draft and enforce the Espionage and Sedition Acts and turn the department into an instrument for keeping a close eye on the American population and taking corrective action wherever they saw evidence of unacceptable opinions. None, however, stood out as obviously the right choice.
Among the possibilities was forty-six-year-old Alexander Mitchell Palmer, a loyal Wilsonian Democrat who, in the appointive position of alien property custodian, was responsible for managing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of assets that belonged to the Central Powers but had been stranded in the United States by the war. The president knew him and had reason to think well of him. At the Democratic Convention of 1912, then-Congressman Palmer had served as floor manager of the Wilson campaign and held his home state of Pennsylvania’s delegation firmly in the Wilson camp through long days of deadlocked balloting.
When Wilson became president-elect, he offered Palmer an appointment as secretary of war. Palmer declined, explaining that as a Quaker and a pacifist he would be unable to execute the duties of the office with the vigor it required. He expressed interest in becoming attorney general, but Wilson and House had already filled that position. In 1914, when Palmer gave up his seat in the House to run unsuccessfully for the Senate, he did so at White House urging. He was therefore a man to whom
the administration owed a political debt.
He was liked by progressive Democrats because he was one of them, having during his six years in Congress supported such measures as a lowering of tariffs, regulation of child labor, and even woman suffrage. In 1915 Bryanite Democrats and Republicans in the La Follette camp applauded him for publicly questioning whether American citizens should have taken passage on the Lusitania in spite of the German government’s warnings. After losing his Senate race, he remained Democratic national committeeman for Pennsylvania and therefore a figure of significance. These connections formed a network of support to which he was able to turn in 1917, when he asked for an opportunity to contribute to the war effort. When the office of alien property custodian was created, he was both available and an unobjectionable choice.
A. Mitchell Palmer, U.S. attorney general, 1919–1921
He saw the expulsion of “undesirable” aliens as his ticket to the White House.
The job involved taking possession, managing, and disposing of German property of almost every description, from ocean liners to industrial patents. Palmer was soon overseeing assets worth more than half a billion dollars and dispensing patronage positions and favors, including the right to buy German property on attractive terms. This added new dimensions to his support network—to the number of people of influence willing to put in a good word for him when he set out to become Gregory’s successor at Justice.
It was also an advantage that he had established himself, well before the Armistice, as a solidly pro-war progressive. Years earlier, in declining appointment as war secretary, he had said that if the United States ever found itself at war, he would willingly serve. After intervention, as property custodian, he fulfilled that pledge zealously. In September 1918, called to testify about German holdings in the United States by a Senate committee, he condemned German-American beer barons as fomenters of disloyalty. As the war ended, he professed to believe that Germany, having failed to conquer the world militarily, would next attempt to do so economically and again had to be stopped. This was going to entail making the Germans permanently uncompetitive in the global marketplace. To this end, Palmer got congressional authority to sell off the business assets, including patents and other intellectual property, that had made German companies preeminent in chemicals and other industries before the war. The sales conferred enormous commercial benefits on the American purchasers and gave Palmer yet another cadre of influential friends. (Proceeds from the sales were impounded, not for eventual payment to the former owners but to provide funds for compensating Americans judged to have suffered financial losses as a result of the war.)
As the search for a replacement for Gregory got under way, Palmer was once again an unobjectionable candidate. His greatest asset was the support of fellow progressives with access to the president. From the White House, Joe Tumulty barraged Wilson in Paris with messages praising Palmer as “young, militant, progressive and fearless,” and saying that his appointment would “give us all heart and new courage.” Navy Secretary Daniels advised Wilson that “in addition to his recognized ability and high character his appointment would be pleasing alike to the bar and to the Old Guard of Democrats.” Having no reason to disagree or to prefer other candidates, the president announced his decision at the end of February. There were no notable objections.
At first Palmer seemed determined to end the excesses of the Gregory years and put the Justice Department on a new course. He ordered the release of nearly half of the 239 persons then in prison for violations of the Espionage Act, excluding those (such as Eugene V. Debs) who refused to express contrition. He also freed several thousand citizens, mainly German-Americans, who were in confinement not for breaking any law but because their loyalty had been brought into question. He stopped accepting information offered by the quasi-official vigilantes of Gregory’s American Protective League, essentially putting it out of business. He told the president that Debs’s sentence was too long and should be commuted—though not quite yet.
In Congress, however, war fever was transmuting into what would come to be called the Red Scare—the fear that Communists, controlled and financed by the Leninists of Russia, were plotting revolution in the United States. Though soon carried to extremes that would give rise to gross misuse of police power and outlandish acts of injustice by government officials, such fears were not totally without foundation. The months following the Armistice were pocked with labor violence across the United States, though it rarely had anything to do with radical ideology, still less with schemes for overthrowing the government. Terrorist bombings were by no means unheard of, though the authorities were rarely able to establish guilt or even identify suspects. Such acts were blamed on phantom Bolsheviks with the same thoughtless ease that strikes and industrial accidents had earlier been blamed on phantom German saboteurs.
Attempts to deal with these matters led to a thicket of confusion in which socialists, communists, and anarchists were all jumbled together. Such people were assumed to be jointly guilty in spite of the scarcity of incriminating evidence, and were seen as a serious threat in spite of being an almost invisibly tiny percentage of the population and in most cases guilty of nothing more than harboring opinions that their more respectable fellow citizens found repellent. The American Socialist Party, which in 1914 had appeared to have the potential to become a national force, was by 1919 so battered as to be incapable of recovery. The Communist Party of America and its rival the Communist Labor Party together had a membership of about twelve thousand nationally.
Further confusing the situation were the anarchists, adherents of a vague and elastic creed embracing everything from libertarian-type individualism to chaotic collectives in which every member was free to make his or her own rules. Almost the only thing anarchists had in common was a rejection of hierarchies, rulers, and authority of every kind. Russian anarchists had participated in and supported the Bolshevik Revolution, but once in power, the Russian Communist Party—hierarchical, authoritarian, and brutal—was quick to expel and suppress them. Around the world, meanwhile, people styling themselves anarchists were making their cause synonymous with terrorism and murder. In the decades before the Great War, they assassinated a tsar of Russia, an empress of Austria-Hungary, kings of Greece, Italy, and Portugal, a president of France, and President William McKinley of the United States.
In the United States the most dangerous anarchists were the so-called Galleanists, followers of an Italian named Luigi Galleani. He had arrived in the United States in 1901, the year McKinley was murdered, and preached “the propaganda of the deed”—the use of violence not for any specifiable political purpose but simply to spread fear and disorder. Apparently random acts of terrorism contributed to an understandable if not really justified fear that revolutionaries lurked everywhere. American nativism was a factor in all this, feeding the belief that newcomers with strange-sounding names did not belong in the United States and should never have been admitted.
Palmer was not yet attorney general when, in February 1919, federal troops were called in to help quell Seattle’s general strike. He took office in time, however, to be faced with the strike’s consequences, particularly the effects of the mayor of Seattle’s claim that the strike was the result not of legitimate worker grievances but of the international Communist conspiracy. At the end of April, thirty-six packages that were labeled “novelties” from the Gimbel Brothers department store but were packed with explosives were mailed to prominent public figures across the country. The press quickly drew a connection to the Seattle troubles and other disturbances elsewhere. Most of the packages were intercepted before delivery because the conspirators had failed to affix sufficient postage. None of the addressees—two senators, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Jr., Postmaster General Burleson, and Palmer among them—were injured. A package that reached the Georgia home of former senator Thomas Hardwick, who before leaving office had sponsore
d a 1918 law reducing obstacles to the deportation of noncitizens, blew off the hands of the maid who opened it and injured Hardwick’s wife.
This was followed by May Day disturbances in several cities, as parading leftists clashed with citizens offended by the public celebration of what they regarded as subversion. Tension continued to rise, climaxing on June 2 when large bombs were detonated late at night in eight cities. One of the terrorists, a Galleanist wanted by the authorities, was himself blown to bits when his bomb went off an instant after he placed it at the door of Palmer’s Washington home. The attorney general, who had been up late reading until moments before the explosion, narrowly escaped serious injury or death. His wife and daughter, asleep at the back of the house, were almost blown out of their beds.
The result, not surprisingly, was near-hysteria in Congress and much of the nation. Palmer requested additional funding for his department and undertook a reorganization of its investigative capabilities. An ambitious young law school graduate named John Edgar Hoover took charge of gathering information about radicals and subversives.
In July, with Hoover acting as his field commander, the attorney general went on the offensive. The first of the soon-to-be-notorious “Palmer raids” was launched in Buffalo, New York, and rounded up a number of individuals whose names appeared on Hoover’s growing lists of un-American Americans. All were charged with violating the Espionage Act. But a judge spoiled everything, dismissing the charges and rebuking the Justice Department for attempting to criminalize free speech. Foiled, Palmer gave up on the Espionage Act as a tool for cleansing the nation. He urgently needed an alternative, however. In the aftermath of the labor troubles that were sweeping the country that summer, with unexplained bombings continuing sporadically, Congress was under heavy pressure to demonstrate that it was not going to allow the country to slip into chaos. On October 17 the Senate diverted this pressure to Palmer, passing a resolution demanding that he explain what he was doing to contain the radical threat. Hoover eagerly volunteered that his files now contained the names of sixty thousand dangerous persons, and that most of them were aliens. Palmer assured Congress that preparations to deal with these people were well advanced.