The Illusion of Victory (47 page)

Some Wilson biographers have given readers the impression that the Allies’ opposition collapsed at this point. This was hardly the case. These politicians were not stupid men. They knew from a practical point of view that House’s threat was meaningless. They were well informed on what was being said and done in the congressional election campaign. The AEF was locked in mortal combat with the Germans in the Argonne. An offer of a separate peace would have made the Germans instant victors over the French and British. Given the prevailing war rage, such a move would have triggered a massive explosion of congressional and public fury that might well have led to Wilson’s impeachment.

Lloyd George said even if the Americans made a separate peace, England would continue the blockade, which would win the war for the Allies. The French and the Italians made no such heroic noises, but they prepared elaborate memorandums with a host of objections to various points. Still a French satellite, Belgium also chimed in with some complaints. When Clemenceau prepared to read his objections, House indulged in an even more fantastic bit of brinkmanship. He said that if the French premier presented his statement, the president would be forced to lay the matter before Congress, so that they could see “what Italy, France and Great Britain were fighting for.” It would then be up to Congress to decide whether to continue the war. Given the things that were being said about Wilson’s diplomacy in the Senate, letting Congress into the debate was the last thing on earth the president would ever have done.
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Nevertheless, Clemenceau decided not to present his statement. All the Europeans seemed to sense that demanding too much now might, at the very least, trigger a last-ditch psychology in the Germans. Irritating Wilson might be even more dangerous. He was very much an unknown quantity—and enormously popular with the voters of their respective countries.

If the Allies had seen what Wilson was telling House from Washington, D.C., they would have been even more wary. The president was infuriated by the British criticism of the principle of freedom of the seas. At one point he said he had no patience with British navalism, which was just another form of militarism. At another point he said if he were forced to turn to Congress for advice, he was sure it would “have no sympathy or wishes that American life and property shall be sacrificed for British naval control.”

House omitted this threat. But he put to good use other things Wilson said in the same cable. The president admitted that freedom of the seas was a question that needed “the most liberal exchange of views” in the peace conference. Wilson insisted he was sympathetic to the “necessities of the British . . . with regard to the sea.” House used these words to lure Lloyd George into a more favorable attitude toward the disputed principle. But the prime minister still refused to endorse it without an explicit reservation, clearly stating that the British retained the right of blockade. Wilson’s demand for freedom of the seas had been seen by too many English as an attack on the blockade of Germany. The prime minister claimed if he gave the point a blanket endorsement, he would be voted out of office and his successor would soon be in Paris saying the same thing.
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House said he was sure Wilson would accept a British affirmation of the freedom of the seas, with the reservation that the issue needed further discussion in the peace conference. Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour said this satisfied them. They added that along with insisting on the right to blockade in wartime, they wanted it understood that the current blockade against Germany would remain in force until a peace treaty was signed. House, mesmerized as usual by British savoir faire, agreed.

The British now teamed up with House to persuade the French, the Italians and the Belgians to drop their reservations about other points for the time being, except for an insistence on reparations for German destruction of civilian property. House proclaimed himself satisfied with this qualified affirmation of the Fourteen Points. He made no further attempt to change the generally negative attitude toward Wilson that prevailed in these meetings from start to finish.

On November 5, House cabled Wilson:“I consider that we have won a diplomatic victory. . . . This has been done in the face of a hostile and influential junta in the United States and the thoroughly unsympathetic personnel constituting the Entente governments.” Walter Lippmann euphorically wrote House that this was “the climax of a course that has been as wise as it was brilliant. . . . The president and you have more than justified the faith of those who insisted your leadership was a turning point in modern history.”
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From a distance of almost a hundred years, it is hard to see what House and Lippmann were crowing about. House had avoided a rupture with England, the linchpin of his Anglophiliac diplomacy since 1914, at a terrible price. The ongoing British blockade would become the greatest atrocity of World War I. The colonel seemed to think he could brush aside the profound hostility all the major Allies had demonstrated toward the president with a phrase about “unsympathetic personnel”—ignoring the indubitable fact that these same people would be back to negotiate the peace treaty. Calling the Republican Party a junta was an even more grotesque distortion of political reality.

Both these supposedly brilliant political thinkers also seemed to have forgotten an important point. On the very day of their illusory diplomatic triumph, American voters were going to the polls to decide whether to support or repudiate President Woodrow Wilson.

Only 50 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives were genuine contests. The rest were in solidly Democratic regions, such as the South, or mostly Republican, such as the Midwest. Unfortunately for the Democrats, most of the contested seats were in the West, where farmers were still seething about Wilson’s favoritism to the cotton growers of the South. With the Democrats clinging to control of the House by only 3 seats, their prospects in the popular chamber were not promising.

The Senate was another matter. There the Democrats went into the election with a 10-seat margin. There were 37 contests before the voters, 5 of them being special elections to replace senators who had succumbed to the scythe of death that had thinned the Democrats’ ranks. Still, Wilson’s party started with 11 seats guaranteed in the Deep South, a nice edge. Elsewhere, however, an unnerving number of Democratic senators were involved in bruising contests with well-financed opponents, while only a handful of Republicans had reason to worry about their survival.
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On November 6, giant headlines shouted the results: The Republicans had swept the West and won 37 of the 50 contested House seats. They would prevail in the lower chamber by a comfortable 237 to 193. The Senate still hung in the balance, with several states counting votes into the dawn to determine who had won. Not until the following day, when results trickled in from Michigan and one or two other states, did the
New York Times
announce that the Republicans had “apparently” carried both houses of Congress. The margin of victory in the Senate was 2 seats.
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Since Vice President Marshall gave the Democrats an extra vote in case of a tie, the Senate margin was actually 1 seat. In several states, such as New Hampshire and Delaware, fewer than 1,000 votes separated the Republican winner and the Democratic loser. Henry Ford amazed everyone by coming within 7,000 votes of winning a Senate seat in Michigan. A dismaying number of Democratic voters—21 percent—had stayed home. The drop in the Republicans’ turnout was 17 percent, suggesting that Wilson’s appeal for a Democratic Congress may have enraged just enough GOP stalwarts to win.

In some states, other issues complicated Wilson’s appeal for support. Nebraska postmortems blamed the American Protective League, whose persecution of German-Americans had turned them into an anti-Wilson bloc. In Oregon, the feud between Senator Chamberlain and Wilson caused the Democratic turnout to drop by 42 percent, dooming a Chamberlain supporter who ran against a Republican incumbent. In Indiana, Vice President Marshall, obeying Wilson’s orders, made another stump speech at the state Democratic convention, calling Republicans disloyal. Enraged GOP voters wiped out the state’s Democratic congressmen en masse.
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The Republicans did not allow such minor details to deflate their self-congratulations. Senator Lodge called it “a wonderful election.” He attributed the failure of Wilson’s appeal to the American people’s refusal to elect “a dictatorship or an autocracy.” Not even the “vast machinery of the government” in wartime enabled Wilson to win, though the president used it “ruthlessly for the benefit of the Democratic Party.” a few weeks later, Lodge told two other correspondents the Republican victory was “a country-wide revolt against dictatorship” and its magnitude was “unbelievable.”
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Theodore Roosevelt saw the victory as a repudiation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. He declared that the Republicans had “made the fight on the unconditional surrender issue” and the people had voted their uncompromising support. Another former Republican president, William Howard Taft, blamed the defeat on Wilson’s “crass egotism.” He also thought the president’s peace notes to Berlin had “alarmed the people.”
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By far the best explanation came from the liberals. The
New Republic
and
The Nation
both blamed Wilson for failing to maintain the Progressive-Democratic coalition that had elected him in 1916. He had allowed war rage and the actions of Attorney General Gregory and Postmaster General Burleson to create an atmosphere of repression and fear, which turned tens of thousands of liberals against the administration. Committee of Public Information Director Creel ruefully confirmed this conclusion in a gloomy letter to the president:“All [your] radical or liberal friends . . .were either silenced or intimidated. There was no voice left to argue for your kind of peace.”
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For Senator La Follette, the results produced a political resurrection. Suddenly all sorts of pro-war Republicans, who might have voted for his expulsion, were rushing over to shake his hand and tell him the election proved it was time “to unite all Republicans.” the
New York World,
which had called for La Follette’s expulsion, glumly concluded that with “Battle Bob” holding the balance of power in the Senate, the likelihood of further prosecution of the senator was close to zero. This prophecy was soon fulfilled. On November 22, the Privileges and Elections Committee voted to drop its investigation, 9 to 2.
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For Wilson the ironies of this election were large and painful. He had gambled his standing as the political leader of his country and lost. With his well-known preference for a parliamentary system of government, someone might have argued the president should resign, as Clemenceau or Lloyd George would have been forced to do, if they had lost a similar election. But the U.S. Constitution guaranteed Woodrow Wilson two more years of presidential power, and he soon made it clear he had no intention of abandoning the helm of the ship of state. To one influenza-stricken Democratic congressman who sent a sympathetic telegram from his sick bed, the president replied:“You may be sure the stubborn Scotch-Irish in me will be rendered no less stubborn and aggressive by the results.”
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Unfortunately, this attitude was not a formula for future political success.

In Europe, the politicians ordered the generals to set conditions that would render the German army incapable of renewing the war if peace negotiations failed. Field Marshal Haig’s proposed terms were surprisingly mild. He thought the Germans should be allowed to retreat across the Rhine with the honors of war. His reasons were bluntly practical. The German army was by no means broken. As Lloyd George, speaking for Haig, put it, “Wherever you hit them they hit back hard and inflicted heavy casualties.” Haig added that the Germans showed no symptoms of a disorganized army. Their retreat was being conducted “in perfect order and with the greatest skill.”
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Generalissimo Foch had other ideas. He demanded the surrender of a third of Germany’s artillery, 5,000 cannon, and half their machine guns—30,000—plus 3,000 trench mortars. In addition, he wanted 5,000 locomotives and 150,000 freight and passenger cars. He also insisted on bridgeheads on the east bank of the Rhine and Allied control of Germany west of the Rhine. Premier Clemenceau strongly backed these draconian measures.

On the naval side, Great Britain’s admirals were not nearly as moderate as its generals. The sailors demanded the internment of the entire German surface fleet at their Scapa Flow naval base in the Orkney Islands off Scotland. Some 150 submarines were to be towed away to other ports.

When Secretary of War Baker cabled General Pershing asking for his thoughts on armistice terms, the AEF commander replied that he favored unconditional surrender. He thought the Germans needed to be thoroughly beaten and he had the army to do the job. The statement infuriated Wilson and Baker. They suspected it was the opening gun of a Pershing run for the presidency. More likely, it was a combination of the general’s objective view of the military situation and his ongoing friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, who had made him a general. Under fierce pressure from Wilson, Pershing accepted the idea of an armistice. But he remained convinced it was a mistake.
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The politicians, after days of wrangling, took Foch’s advice. They were receiving worrisome reports of Bolshevik agitation in Germany. They decided it was vital to end the war as soon as possible and leave the German army with enough guns to preserve order—but not enough to resume the war. They also approved the terms demanded by the British navy.