by Adam Tooze
On 19 November at the first crucial Senate vote the Republicans defeated the treaty, whereupon on Wilson’s instructions the Democratic minority blocked a motion to accept the treaty with reservations. For five further months the Senate agonized. But on 8 March 1920 Wilson reaffirmed his refusal to grant any concessions to the Republican majority, and on 19 March the Senate failed to find the requisite two-thirds majority for either the original or the amended treaty.
The failure to pass the treaty even in an amended version was undeniably in large part Wilson’s doing. But it was far from obvious, even if the President had been willing to compromise, whether the reservations demanded by Lodge would have been acceptable to the Entente.7 In this regard Article X was certainly not the main sticking point. The British had no more interest than Lodge in being dictated to by the League Council. More serious problems might well have arisen from Lodge’s insistence that America could not be bound by any resolution in which the British Empire collectively had more than one vote. Lodge also wanted Japan’s claim on Shandong overturned. The only way to have been sure of avoiding the impasse reached by the autumn of 1919 was for the Republicans to have been part of the negotiating team at Paris. Wilson was much criticized for personally leading the US delegation to Paris and for excluding any of the more difficult elements of the Republican Party from the talks. Again, personal vanity played its part. But the increasing savagery of the polemics in the elections of 1916 and 1918 made it hard to imagine a bipartisan delegation. In those elections foreign policy had been politicized as never before.
However, more was at stake in the Treaty Fight than party conflict. The differences between Wilson and the Republicans were not those between liberal internationalists and hidebound isolationists, but they were nevertheless real. Whereas Wilson saw the US overseeing a global order, the Republican vision of the peace was in key respects closer to that of the Europeans. To the vague commitments of the League Covenant, Lodge much preferred a continuation of America’s wartime alliance with Britain and even with France. If America was to embark on radical new foreign commitments, it must be realistic about the constraints of its own polity. The wartime alliances had a compelling political rationale that had been hammered home to America’s fickle, democratic electorate.8 By contrast, the League of Nations was an ill-defined thing. Legally minded Republican internationalists such as Elihu Root took the wording of the Covenant more seriously than Wilson ever meant it.9 They saw America as threatened by a series of legally binding obligations to an organization whose principles were unclear. The open-ended and general commitment entered into under Article X was not something that Congress should be asked to approve. The evidence suggests that Wilson in fact saw the League precisely as a way of disentangling America from the clutches of its Entente associates. As he insisted to the Senate leadership at a White House lunch in mid-August, all that Article X implied was a moral obligation.10 If, however, the United States were to insist from the outset on bluntly asserting its sovereignty, it would lose the ability to lead the development of global opinion.11
Figure 2. The Forgotten Recession: America’s Post-War Shock, 1919–21
As he recovered from his strokes and the shock of the Senate’s first rejection of the treaty, Wilson in early 1920 gave every indication that he expected to resume that role of leadership. Between 7 and 30 October 1919 all the great powers recognized at Versailles – Italy, the British Empire, France and Japan – ratified the treaty with Germany. But this only began the long and complex process of enforcement. Furthermore, the question of the Adriatic still had to be settled, as did relations with the Ottoman Empire. Despite the fact that the Senate had not ratified the treaty with Germany and the United States had not been at war with the Ottoman Empire, Wilson claimed for himself once more the role of arbiter. Indeed, it seemed that as the confrontation with the Senate ground into its final round, it was all the more important for Wilson to act with assertive authority toward the outside world.
In February 1920 the President abruptly vetoed a compromise on the Fiume question brokered by Britain and France that he considered too favourable to Italy, threatening to withdraw altogether from engagement with Europe. Wilson then expressed his disagreement with the aggressive policy pursued by Britain in Turkey. But above all his pressure was directed against the French. On 9 March in an open letter to the Senate minority leader Gilbert M. Hitchcock, who was preparing for the final attempt to secure ratification, the President seemed to suggest that the contested Article X of the League Covenant was a guard as much against the resurgent militarism of France as it was against Germany. Though there were protests both from Paris and from the opposition in the Senate, Wilson did not shift from this position even when four days later there was a military coup – and not in France but in Germany. Despite the obvious menace of the Kapp putsch, Washington overrode the veto of Paris and approved the request by Berlin to move additional contingents of the Reichswehr and Freikorps into the Ruhr to put down the Red Army. When in April, France retaliated by occupying Frankfurt, Wilson’s reaction was to withdraw from the Senate the treaty guaranteeing France’s security that some senators had wished to put in place of the failed peace treaty.12
For London and Paris the sudden re-emergence of this assertive Wilsonian diplomacy came as a considerable shock. We know with hindsight that Wilson’s legacy was doomed. But as he himself appears to have seen it, the second rejection of the Versailles Treaty by the Senate in March 1920 and the clashes with France were merely part of an ongoing struggle in which as ever the domestic and international fronts were interconnected. The broken treaty gave him the possibility of leverage in Europe. A stand-off between the presidency and Congress was an in-built possibility of the American constitution.13 At moments of crisis, Wilson believed, the role of the President was to act as the interpreter of the true will of the American people and to stake this personal vision against the partisanship of Congress. After the first clash with the Senate, Wilson seriously considered the unprecedented step of challenging the opposition group in the Senate to resign en masse, thus triggering a referendum by way of an election on the treaty issue. It was after that extraordinary idea was dropped that Wilson instead came to see the general election of 1920 as a ‘great and solemn referendum’ on America’s future role in the world.14 In the event he not only underestimated the uncertainty and insecurity he was injecting into the international arena. At home he overtaxed his personal charisma. He tragically overestimated his own physical strength. But, more fundamentally, in counting on the electorate to see him through, he failed to grasp the explosive social and economic legacy left by the war. By the autumn of 1919 it was not only Wilson’s foreign policy but his vision of America’s own future that was coming apart.
II
At the peak of his progressive enthusiasm in 1916, Wilson had promised to craft a new style of government that would be beyond politics as hitherto practised, that would be focused squarely on the everyday material concerns of people’s lives.15 The idea that a new focus on economic and social matters would lead to a depoliticization of public life was an improbable prospect at the best of times. In 1919 the after-effects of wartime mobilization combined with intense partisan rhetoric to turn wages, the control of industry and the condition of agriculture into objects of furious argument. On Wilson’s return from Paris, in July 1919 only a few blocks away from the White House, entire African American neighbourhoods were aflame. Fifteen people were bludgeoned, shot and burned to death. In Chicago the death toll reached 38.16 One thousand African American families were left homeless. In all, 25 American cities were convulsed in the summer of 1919 by the most widespread outburst of racial violence since the Civil War. The White gangs targeted symbols of wartime social change – African American servicemen and recent migrants to Northern cities.
Wilson was racially minded, but he profoundly disapproved of mob action and he understood how seriously it called into questio
n America’s claim to progressive leadership. A year earlier on 26 July 1918, after a threatening upsurge in lynching, he had issued a presidential appeal to state prosecutors denouncing mob rule as a ‘blow at the heart of ordered law and humane justice’.17 Writing as a historian, Wilson had justified the original Ku Klux Klan. But its formation was an act of self-defence in the aftermath of the Civil War, during what Wilson considered to have been a period of lawlessness, aided and abetted by the criminal folly of the radical Republicans in Congress.18 In normal times, ‘while the courts of justice are open and the governments of the States and the Nation are ready and able to do their duty’, there was no excuse. ‘Lawless passion’ was precisely what America was fighting to defeat in Europe. ‘Germany has outlawed herself among the nations because she has disregarded the sacred obligations of law and has made lynchers of her armies . . . How shall we commend democracy to the acceptance of other peoples,’ Wilson went on, ‘if we disgrace our own by proving that it is, after all, no protection to the weak?’ Every lynching was a gift to German propaganda. ‘They can at least say that such things cannot happen in Germany except in times of revolution, when law is swept away.’19
Faced with the nationwide race riots of 1919, the National Equal Rights League turned the point directly against Wilson. The black racial minority in the United States demanded the same protections that Wilson had ‘forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities’.20 There was, of course, no possibility of any such thing. All Wilson was calling for was the proper enforcement of the law. The FBI for its part decided that its proper role, rather than prosecuting the racist ringleaders, was to track down Black radicals and their schemes of international subversion.21 Racial fears mingled in the summer of 1919 with the all-pervasive Red Scare.
The Republican mid-term election campaign of 1918 had incited anti-Bolshevik agitation. The citywide general strike organized in Seattle in February 1919 was a nationwide sensation. The American authorities saw enemies everywhere. On 19 February a lone gunman wounded Georges Clemenceau in Paris, which provided the US Secret Service with the occasion for a dramatic domestic crackdown on International Workers of the World and suffragette militants.22 On 2 June 1919 a bomb demolished the front porch of the house belonging to the Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer.23 Simultaneously, bombs exploded in six other cities. Over the summer, hysteria spread nationwide. Appalling mob violence was directed at the activists of the IWW. On 30 July 1919 Palmer advised Wilson against releasing Eugene Debs, the venerable socialist and anti-war organizer, who in September 1918 had been sentenced to ten years on sedition charges. To release Debs, Palmer insisted, ‘would be used by many opponents of the peace treaty as evidence of too great leniency toward law violators of the radical element . . .’. It might ‘prejudice many people against the liberal labour provisions of the Treaty’.24 Instead of clemency, Palmer spearheaded a campaign of investigations, arrests and deportations that culminated in the unprecedented round-up on 2 January 1920 of perhaps as many as three thousand suspected foreign-born radicals in 33 cities across America.25
It is conceivable, of course, that instead of this conservative turn the Wilson administration might have renewed its progressive purpose. Palmer himself was a veteran labour lawyer. An alliance with organized labour had been a key element in the ‘New freedom’ platform of 1912 and it was even more essential to Wilson’s narrow election victory in 1916. Since 1917 the role played by the American Federation of Labour (AFL) under their union leader Samuel Gompers, as partners in the war effort, had seemed to promise a new position for organized labour both in relation to the state and to private business.26 There were calls over the summer of 1919 for the Democrats to cement this relationship by passing a nationwide trade union recognition law. Talk of ‘Industrial Democracy’ and ‘Reconstruction’ were in the air. Nor was Wilson opposed to using popular pressure to strengthen Federal control in key sectors. In July 1919 he confided to his brother-in-law Samuel E. Axson that ‘it seems certain that some commodities will have to become the property of the state, the coal, the water powers and probably the railroads. Some people would call me a socialist for saying this’, but this did not put Wilson off.27 America’s industrialists and their Republican friends, however, sensed weakness. Would the Democrats be willing to stand by organized labour, if employers raised the stakes and confronted the Federal government with the risk of serious civil strife?
The business counter-attack began with the end of the war. Already by December 1918, companies such as General Electric were rolling back the concessions granted in the previous 18 months. The apparatus of wartime industrial arbitration was stalled and then turned against the unions. The unions resisted, with a strike wave the likes of which had never been seen before in American history. In 1919 one out of every five industrial workers was involved in a stoppage. But they faced bad odds and nowhere more so than in the great bastion of anti-unionism – the steel industry. Ever since the epic Homestead strike of 1892, the industry had stood firm against recognizing trade unions as bargaining partners, and it upheld that position throughout the war. At the end of August 1919, despite appeals from President Wilson himself, ‘Judge’ Elbert Henry Gary of US Steel refused to agree to public arbitration. Desperate to avoid an open clash, the administration appealed to both sides. In the hope of calming nerves, Wilson promised an Industrial Conference to discuss ‘fundamental means of bettering the whole relationship of capital and labor’.28 But with the employers digging in, on 22 September a second great steel strike began. By the end of the week 365,000 workers were out. The employers responded with force. Industrial Pennsylvania was flooded with an army of 25,000 private security guards backing up the heavy-handed police. The US Steel town of Gary, Indiana, was placed under martial law.29 Wilson’s Industrial Conference met on 11 October amidst an intense campaign of intimidation. So lopsided was the climate of violence and denunciation that Gompers, the usually compliant boss of the AFL, stormed out.
On the same day, under pressure from the Secretary of Labor, mine workers and coal barons were brought together in Washington in the hope of forestalling a second major stoppage. But these talks too broke down and the United Mine Workers (UMW) issued a strike call for 1 November. Wilson, who by this time had been confined to his sickbed and was increasingly under the sway of Palmer, denounced the coal strike as ‘a grave moral and legal wrong’, an attempted extortion ahead of the freezing winter months.30 Invoking wartime powers that were supposed to have expired with the Armistice, Palmer barred the UMW from involvement in the strike. This forced the AFL-CIO into an even more confrontational position. Defying Palmer, it backed the 394,000 miners who had followed the strike call. But Palmer’s legal pressure was unrelenting and the American labour movement, like its British counterpart, was unwilling to risk an all-out confrontation. On 11 November the UMW leadership was forced to concede that ‘as Americans . . . we cannot fight our government’. After the Secretary of Labour intervened to authorize a flat 14 per cent wage increase, the miners returned to work.
They fared better than the steelworkers. After the loss of 20 lives and over 112 million dollars in pay, the steel strike ended on 8 January 1920 with a complete victory for US Steel. It was a shock from which the American labour movement was never to recover.31 Talk of industrial democracy was abandoned in favour of the new managerial discipline of ‘industrial relations’ and company unionism.32 The coalition between the Democratic Party and organized labour that had brought Wilson victory in 1912 and 1916 was broken.
III
Attorney General Palmer ended 1919 with a New Year’s Eve address in which he promised an unrelenting struggle against the ‘Red movement’ that was threatening the entire social order of America. It was not just the barons of US Steel who were under threat. ‘Twenty million people in this country own Liberty bonds,’ Palmer reminded his audience.33 ‘These the Reds propose to take away . . . Eleven million people have savings accounts i
n savings banks and 18.6 million people have deposits in our national banks at which they aim.’ This kind of exaggerated demagoguery was soon to make Palmer a laughing stock. In 1920 the Red Scare fizzled out as rapidly as the strike wave.
What did not dissipate so easily was the very real threat to the savings of millions of American families posed not by anarchists or foreign radicals but by the anonymous, all-pervasive force of inflation. By October 1919, even in America, the society best cushioned against the impact of the war, the cost of living index had risen by 83.1 per cent since 1913.34 Up to the end of 1917, wages had lagged seriously behind. They caught up in 1918 under the pressure of the war effort.35 But as inflation accelerated in 1919, real wages were once again eaten away. One could fight strikes with armies of private security thugs. Court injunctions would humble trade union leaders. One could offer concessions, even including an eight-hour day. Attorney General Palmer promised a crackdown on hoarders and speculators.36 But none of this really addressed the grievances of tens of millions of people whose standard of living was threatened by the huge surge in prices. In May 1919, Massachusetts Democrats cabled Wilson in Paris reminding him that the ‘citizens of the United States want you home to help reduce the high cost of living, which we consider far more important than the League of Nations’.37 Their appeal was in vain. By the end of 1919 it took $2,000 a year to purchase a comfortable ‘American’ standard of living. At the time of the strike unskilled workers at US Steel struggled to make even the $1,575 that marked basic subsistence.38 It was these facts, not Bolshevik subversion, that impelled the strike wave of 1919, in which a record 5 million American workers participated in 3,600 separate disputes.