by G. J. Meyer
Palmer found the weapon he needed in Senator Hardwick’s Immigration Act, which simplified the process of deporting noncitizens considered undesirable. On November 7 federal agents under Hoover’s direction raided the facilities of a leftist organization that called itself—almost as if it wished to make itself a target—the Union of Russian Workers. Hoover cast a wide net, striking in twelve cities simultaneously. He was hunting not just “dangerous radicals,” as in Buffalo, but dangerous and alien radicals. The Immigration Act had made them easy pickings.
The raids were little better than police riots. At nine P.M., agents entered the building near New York’s Union Square that housed, among other and unrelated things, the Union of Russian Workers’ headquarters. They forcibly removed and took custody of everyone found on all the floors, including visitors and persons attending algebra and language classes. People offering no resistance were beaten with blackjacks and metal truncheons and thrown down stairs. Offices were ransacked, typewriters and windows smashed, files strewn across floors. In two nights—on November 8 local police staged similar raids on the Communist Party and something called the Socialist Left Wing Section—some twelve hundred people were arrested in New York alone. Of that number, seventy-five proved to be members of organizations regarded as suspect by the Justice Department, and only two were found to have violated any law (the violation involving, in both cases, a recently enacted state statute aimed at anarchists). It was much the same across the country. In Detroit, federal agents shut down a play being performed in Russian, detaining and interrogating the entire audience of fifteen hundred, ultimately arresting forty.
The public, on the whole, appeared to be delighted. Most congressmen and most of the press were thrilled. Palmer became a national hero, “the Fighting Quaker.” It occurred to him that more such ventures might just propel him into the White House.
Chapter 24
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“The Door Is Closed”
AS THE SUMMER of 1919 came to an end, those who had doubts about the agreements that President Wilson brought back from Paris held the high ground in the Senate. They had only to stand firm and appear open to being persuaded. Wilson and his Democrats were supplicants, doomed to failure if they could not broaden their support. They had to ask and explain and defend.
At the pinnacle of the high ground, in command, was Henry Cabot Lodge. His first speech as the Republicans’ new Senate majority leader had come on August 12, and to no one’s surprise he had taken as his subject the League of Nations and its covenant. He gave particular attention to Article 10, the enforcement provision, and did so in a spirit of extreme skepticism. He called the covenant “a deformed experiment upon a noble purpose” and said it was “tainted” because harnessed to a bad peace settlement.
“If Europe desires such an alliance with a power of this kind,” the senator said, referring to Article 10’s empowering of the league to intervene in disputes around the world, “so be it.” But the United States should shun any such arrangement, he continued, and need not fear that doing so would prevent it from “continuing to help in all ways to preserve the world’s peace.” The claim that his position was in any way isolationist, he said emphatically, was “empty.”
Lodge’s words did not quite put him in the ranks of the irreconcilables. To go that far, he would have had to declare that the league could never be made acceptable, and he said nothing of the kind. The redoubtable Senator Philander Knox, by contrast, chose this as his moment to do so, thereby lending his considerable prestige to the irreconcilable camp and at the same time showing how the complexities of the treaty made it difficult for even like-minded senators to come into complete accord. He must have pleased Lodge when he said, “I cannot vote for the treaty unless the league covenant is separated from it and unless material modifications are made to the body of the document.” But with almost the next breath, he distanced himself from Lodge by saying that the United States should want nothing to do with a coalition of victors, which was more or less exactly what Lodge thought the league should be. While disavowing any sympathy for the Germans, Knox described the peace that the treaty would impose as “hard and cruel” and therefore self-defeating. But again like Lodge, he denied being an isolationist, calling upon the president to summon a new international conference to create a different, better kind of league, one to which “all the world are parties in its formation.”
The Senate’s slowness in coming to grips with the treaty—members delivered only twelve speeches on the subject in August—was maddening to the president but precisely what Lodge wanted. He devoted half the month to committee hearings, calling as witnesses both members of the Wilson cabinet and spokesmen for groups (such as Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans) that found the treaty objectionable. Every day of testimony served Lodge’s purposes, keeping progress at a crawl while building public interest. (There could be no thought of calling the president to testify, by the way. It had always been accepted that, under the Constitution’s separation of powers, the chief executive could not be subjected to interrogation.)
Secretary of State Lansing was on the stand for some eight hours over two days. Simmering with long-concealed resentment at how the president had ignored and humiliated him in Paris, he took his revenge with an artful display of passive hostility. He responded in monosyllables to many questions, making no effort to demonstrate support, let alone enthusiasm, for what had been hammered out at the peace conference. While doing nothing to generate headlines, he succeeded in conveying the impression, indistinct but clear enough, that he had no liking for or stake in the treaty and was not the only former delegate who felt that way. He suggested that many of the senators’ questions should be directed at the president, because only he could possibly explain everything that had been done and why. He depicted himself as a bystander who had had nothing of consequence to do with the treaty—which was not far from the truth. When asked if in his opinion the transfer of Germany’s Shantung concessions to Japan violated the Wilsonian principle of self-determination, he answered with an unadorned yes. This added fuel to a controversy in which the public was showing unexpected interest.
The president needed to seize the initiative, and so on August 14 he took a step that was without precedent. He sent word that he was prepared to meet with the Foreign Relations Committee for a discussion of the treaty and the league. He thereby came closer than any president ever had, or ever would again, to testifying before a committee of Congress. He would do so not on Capitol Hill—that would be going too far—but at the White House, where he could act as host and the press could be excluded. Committee members quickly voted to accept.
And so at ten A.M. on Tuesday, August 19, President Wilson took a corner seat at a table in the East Room of the White House, the executive mansion’s largest space, opulent by Washington standards if almost drab when compared with Versailles. Henry Cabot Lodge sat on one side of the president, and pro-league Democratic Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi on the other. Their fourteen fellow committee members were arrayed in a square before them. The only other persons in the room were two stenographers and White House head usher Ike Hoover.
The meeting went on for three hours and twenty minutes—it would be Lodge, not Wilson, who finally suggested calling a halt—and by all accounts it was never less than civil. Certainly it was no inquisition; Hiram Johnson of California would complain afterward that Wilson had not been pressed hard enough. His fellow committee members, Johnson suggested, had been overawed by the solemnity of the occasion, too concerned about what history would say of their part in it—“sixteen vain men, sitting around a table, each of whom was certain that the world hung upon his words, and each of whom knew his own ability to outshine his fellows.”
That the irreconcilable Johnson was willing to concede that the president had handled himself “generally excellently” shows that the meeting was by no means a setback for the league cause. Neither, however, did it achieve Wilson’s purposes. He
damaged his credibility and risked offending his visitors by giving obviously and inexplicably false answers to a number of questions. When Borah of Idaho asked when Wilson and Secretary Lansing had first learned of the Allies’ secret treaties, the president said they had had no knowledge of such things until the start of the peace conference. Evidence was already available to establish that Wilson knew at least much of the truth more than a year before that, by the end of 1917 at the latest.
He stumbled badly in answering questions about the Shantung concessions, which were becoming notorious both because awarding them to Japan clearly violated the Fourteen Points and because of Americans’ concerns about Japanese expansion in the Far East. Wilson first denied having consented to the deal with Japan. Then, pressed, he said he had accepted it in order to keep Japan from exiting the conference. With equal foolishness he denied involvement in redrawing the borders of eastern Europe or in the awarding of the African and Pacific mandates.
Inevitably, many questions had to do with Article 10 and the obligations it would impose on the United States. Here Wilson was prepared and persuasive, pointing out that all league decisions would require unanimous consent of the council, of which the United States would be a permanent member, and that even unanimous decisions would be advisory only, never compulsory. But he allowed himself to be drawn, largely by the persistent if not impressively focused questions of stately and silver-haired freshman Senator Warren Harding of Ohio, into a quasi-philosophical discussion of whether any obligations imposed by Article 10 would be legal or moral. Many citizens would have found it a challenge to follow the president as he declared that Article 10 entailed “a moral, not a legal obligation—binding in conscience only, not in law.” Nor did he help himself with the obscure assertion that moral obligations were just as binding as legal ones, “but operative in a different way.”
Word of this brought Wilson nothing but scorn. Elihu Root, when he heard of it, accused the president of “curious and childlike casuistry”—of drawing a distinction that was “false, demoralizing and dishonest.” Senator Borah expressed the same thought more obliquely. “What will your league amount to,” he asked sarcastically, “if it does not contain powers that no one dreams of giving it?”
Wilson appears to have been more annoyed by Harding’s questions than by any other part of the meeting. He said later that Harding appeared to have “a disturbingly dull mind” and that “it seemed impossible to get any explanation to lodge in it.” The memory of August 19 would add considerably to Wilson’s scorn when, fifteen months later, Harding was elected to succeed him in the White House.
President and senators followed their meeting with a cordial lunch and went their various ways. Lodge would opine that the session had exposed Wilson’s “ignorance and disingenuousness,” but he did so privately. Most public reports of what had transpired were favorable, if only politely so. Hiram Johnson wrote to his sons in California, but did not say publicly, that the president gave the impression of being “hard, cold and cruel, some mysterious, ill-defined monster.”
On balance it had been something like a draw. But with his opponents still on the high ground, the president needed more. It was time to try another initiative, one that Tumulty had been planning since before Wilson’s return from Europe. Ignoring the warnings of his doctor that such an undertaking could prove beyond his strength, Wilson determined to set forth on a four-week speaking tour that would carry him across ten thousand miles of the American landscape. The schedule called upon him to deliver full-blown orations at a rate of almost two a day on average and to make briefer appearances at frequent whistle-stops along his route. Massive press coverage was ensured: twenty-one reporters from the wire services and leading newspapers would travel on the presidential train, and wherever it stopped, writers from local journals could be depended upon to turn out in force. A private car with a double bed and sitting room was readied for Wilson and his wife. It would be their home for almost the whole of the journey. The train would advance from city to city by night, while the presidential couple rested.
Shortly before departing on the tour, Wilson had the British diplomat Sir William Wiseman to the White House for lunch. Wiseman’s account of the visit sheds light on why presidential physician Cary Grayson was opposed to the journey. “The president was cordial as ever,” he reported. “I was, however, shocked by his appearance. He was obviously a sick man. His face was drawn and of a grey color, and frequently twitching in a pitiful effort to control nerves which had broken down under the burden of the world’s distress.”
Nevertheless, the Wilsons set out on September 3, accompanied by Tumulty and Dr. Grayson. They crossed the Alleghenies into western Ohio that first night, and the next day the president gave two speeches, in Columbus and Indianapolis. On September 5 he addressed two audiences in St. Louis, one at midday and the other that night, and on the sixth he spoke first in Kansas City and then in Des Moines. So it went: Omaha and Sioux Falls; two speeches in St. Paul and one in Minneapolis; Bismarck and Billings; Helena and Coeur d’Alene. At every stop he expressed himself in urgent terms. “I can predict with absolute certainty,” he said in Omaha on September 8, “that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world—if the League of Nations—does not prevent it by concerted action.” He then struck a brighter note—and rather spoiled the speech as a demonstration of prophetic powers—by saying that no such thing was going to happen because the kinds of Americans represented by his audience would never allow it. “The heart of this people is pure,” he said. “This great people loves liberty. It loves justice….It is the great idealistic force of history, and the idealism of America is what has made conquest of the spirit of man.”
The speeches continued to be substantial and eloquent; Wilson was very nearly in peak form, doing a markedly better job than he had in Washington of explaining the treaty and answering questions. He spoke extemporaneously, without a written script. As soon as he finished each speech, a stenographer’s notes were transformed at maximum speed into printed copies that were then handed to the reporters on the scene and mailed to papers across the country. The costs of this improvised publicity operation, about a thousand dollars a day, were paid by the Michigan Democratic Party’s narrowly unsuccessful 1918 Senate candidate, league supporter and auto magnate Henry Ford.
Soon almost every speech included a defense of the Shantung settlement, an issue that refused to die. With Tumulty’s coaching, Wilson was generally successful at keeping his disdain for congressional skeptics within the boundaries of politeness. He suggested that the skeptics were uninformed, and that some might have parochial and selfish aims, but rarely went further than that.
Trouble pursued him, however, and not just figuratively. At the end of the first week, as his train traversed the blank flatlands of North Dakota, three of the Senate’s irreconcilables—Joseph Medill McCormick of Illinois and progressive firebrands Borah and Johnson—began speaking tours of their own, their aim to neutralize the press coverage Wilson’s tour was generating. They spoke together at an anti-league rally in Chicago on September 10 and then fanned out, McCormick and Borah across the Midwest, Johnson following the president down the West Coast to Los Angeles. The crowds they attracted were comparable in size to Wilson’s.
The question of Ireland, of why promulgation of the Fourteen Points had not brought British rule of Ireland under challenge at Paris, was, like Shantung, a major nuisance. The president was asked about it repeatedly and sometimes heckled. His response was to observe—always without naming particular countries—that the peace conference had not been able to right all the world’s wrongs, but that when the league was in operation it would be free to do so. This satisfied few Irish-Americans, who noted that, as a permanent member of the league’s ruling council, Britain would have veto power over all proposals. Wilson’s position became more awkward when, in the middle of his tour, British authorities in Dublin outlawed a self-proclaimed Irish republi
can government (winner of a recent election) that was demanding independence. A vicious guerrilla war developed, and Britain would commit two hundred thousand troops to it. It had nothing to do with a September 9 strike by most of Boston’s police force—the policemen were motivated by wretched pay and workweeks of up to eighty-three hours—but the fact that most of the strikers were of Irish extraction did not go unnoticed. Nor did the fact that Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge used 6,700 troops to crush the walkout, making himself a Republican hero (and a future president) by doing so.
Irish-Americans accused Wilson of hypocrisy. Italian-Americans blamed him for thwarting Italy’s aspirations at the peace conference. Many German-Americans, though still fearful of being accused of treason if they spoke out, were deeply unhappy about the consequences of the starvation blockade and the terms of the peace treaty. Though Wilson in his speeches was pointing proudly to the part of the league covenant that he called a Magna Carta of global workers’ rights, American unions found nothing to celebrate. They saw no evidence of presidential interest in supporting them in disputes with companies that were unwilling even to acknowledge their existence.
Gradually, the president began to show signs of the strain that the tour was placing on him and the effects of strain on his judgment. As early as Omaha, and later with accelerating frequency, he reverted to his wartime attacks on “the hyphenates,” repeating his accusations of disloyalty. “There are a great many hyphens left in America,” he said in St. Paul on September 9. “For my part, I think the most un-American thing in the world is a hyphen….It ought not to be there.” These words must have undone whatever goodwill he might have generated with German-Americans earlier the same day in Minneapolis, where he said that a democratic Germany would be “as welcome to the league as anybody else.”