The Illusion of Victory (74 page)

Pershing brought along many of his AEF favorites, and the trip took on the character of a royal progress. In thirty-two states, local VIPs held receptions and banquets to welcome the conquering heroes. Pershing turned on the charm, wowing women as usual, kissing children and greeting AEF veterans with hearty handshakes. In speeches, he hailed American patriotism and urged voters to support universal military training so America would never again be caught unprepared to fight a war.
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Unfortunately, the general had liabilities that Woodrow Wilson’s performance in the White House slowly turned into impediments. Pershing was Wilson’s appointee, and the voters’ disenchantment with Wilson soon extended to his war. Much if not most of this disenchantment emanated from Republicans. A Pershing nomination could be viewed as an oblique endorsement of Wilson’s war. By 1920, this was something most Republicans were unwilling to do. Nor was the push for universal military training the best political move in the prevailing atmosphere of disillusion with the war.

On April 20, Nebraska held a Republican presidential primary. Pershing’s friends launched a vigorous campaign, replete with mailings, admiring articles by selected reporters and heavy newspaper advertising. The other candidates were Senator Hiram Johnson of California, one of the liberal irreconcilables, and General Leonard Wood. Pershing finished third. In Michigan, in a field of five candidates, he finished a dismal fifth.
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Undaunted, his friends persuaded the general to make a statement at a Washington, D.C., reception in his honor. Pershing said he was not seeking the nation’s highest office, but would not “decline to serve” if the people summoned him. The
Washington Post
made it a page-one headline. A few days later, the
Literary Digest
reported a nationwide poll on eight possible Republican nominees. Pershing ranked eighth. A magazine commissioned a writer to find out why this was happening. He reported a widespread conviction among politicians who had spent some time in France that most of the 2 million doughboys in the AEF would vote no on the proposal to put Pershing in the White House.
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Still, the general refused to abandon his by now almost clandestine candidacy. As the Republican convention loomed, he wrote his old friend Charles Dawes, urging him to make sure someone would be on hand to push his name to the front if the delegates deadlocked. It was a hope almost as forlorn as Woodrow Wilson’s great and solemn referendum.
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The Republicans convened first, on June 8, in Chicago. They were confident but by no means complacent, because they confronted another potentially disastrous split in their ranks. Most of the League of Nations irreconcilables in the Senate were Republicans, and they were led by two hotheads, Hiram Johnson and William Borah. They had already served notice that they might bolt if the idea of ratifying the treaty with the Lodge reservations appeared in the party’s platform. The mere suggestion of a replay of the 1912 election gave everyone nervous tremors. Johnson had run for vice president with Theodore Roosevelt on the Progressive Party ticket in that ruinous year.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was chosen temporary chairman, a tribute to the parliamentary skills he had displayed in the Senate, holding the fractious GOP majority together. Lodge was determined to repeat the performance in Chicago. This meant a platform that did not upset the irreconcilables, but still paid some sort of lip service to the idea of a league of nations—if not to Wilson’s version. After several tries, Lodge and Elihu Root, once more demonstrating his lawyerly brilliance, came up with a plank aimed at being all things to all men—and women, who were voting for the first time. In 1919, the Republican-led Congress had passed the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote, and the necessary number of states had swiftly ratified it.

The plank praised the idea of some sort of international association “to preserve the peace of the world.” This association should be based on “international justice” and should “provide methods” that would promote an “instant and general international conference” when war threatened the world. Former Secretary of State Robert Lansing called it “about as near a void as science permits.” Nevertheless, given the situation inside the Republican Party, it was a political masterpiece.
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Lodge’s keynote address more than made up for the lack of specifics in the Republican platform. It was a relentless attack on Woodrow Wilson, the peace treaty and his version of the League of Nations. There were artful taunts, such as noting that after keeping America out of war when America wanted to fight, Wilson had now “kept us out of peace.” He praised the Republican senators who had defended America’s sovereignty from Wilson’s utopian internationalism. At the same time, Lodge insisted that the United States had a role to play in the world, and would play it responsibly, as it did in 1917, when the Republican Party heartily affirmed the decision to throw “our great weight into the wavering scale.”
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Lodge’s speech was considered a huge success. He had proved himself adept at both managing his party and catching the national mood of disillusion with Wilson. His estimate of that mood also led him to collaborate in choosing a candidate that could be artfully guided, if not controlled, in a campaign that caught the same mood. Theodore Roosevelt’s death had left a void in the Republicans’ leadership. Lodge and Root were too old to seek the presidency. None of the leading candidates, Senator Hiram Johnson, Governor Leonard Wood or Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, commanded a majority of the party. After ten deadlocked ballots, George Harvey, still at his favorite sport of president-making in spite of his disappointment with Woodrow Wilson, called bosses and congressional leaders to his hotel suite. Together they decided that Senator Warren Harding of Ohio was the perfect compromise. He had nothing negative on his record, because he had no record worth mentioning. He had no enemies, because he had no strong opinions on the issues.

In 1920, most people saw Harding as another William McKinley, a kindly, earnest spokesman from the American heartland. The chief motivation for choosing him was a reaction against Wilson’s presidential style. Lodge and other leading Republicans thought the American people were tired of being lectured, exhorted and summoned to save the world. “Harding will not try to be an autocrat but will do his best to carry on the government in the old and accepted Constitutional ways,” Lodge told Owen Wister, the novelist and close friend of the late Theodore Roosevelt.
By “the old and accepted ways,” Lodge meant a president who was inclined to listen to the accumulated wisdom of Congress.
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For vice president, the Republicans chose Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts, the man who broke the Boston police walkout with his blunt denunciation of striking against the public safety. He too represented a reaction against the turmoil the war had created in the United States—in his case against the backwash of the Bolshevik revolution and its rhetoric about power to the people. The Democrats, traditional friends of the working class, could only wince at the way labor issues had become a weapon in the GOP’s hands.

In the White House, the president had made a modest recovery from the most crippling aspects of his cerebral thrombosis. With the help of a physical therapist, he had made some progress in walking, although he required a cane and still dragged his crippled left leg. In April, Wilson attended his first cabinet meeting. His trio of White House helpers brought him to the cabinet room first and seated him at the table before the department heads arrived. He made some feeble jokes and for a few minutes seemed to be able to do some business. But it soon became apparent that he could not follow a train of thought for more than sixty seconds—and when he did follow one, he had nothing to say. After an hour, Edith Wilson and Admiral Grayson, hovering outside the door, abruptly appeared to announce the meeting was over.“This is an experiment, you know,” Edith said.
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Wilson’s White House regimen remained on an invalid’s plane. Each morning, he limped to his wheelchair and was taken to the South Portico or out on a part of the grounds where trees and shrubbery shielded him from passersby on the street. Returning to the White House about noon, he invariably watched a movie for an hour before lunch. Since he had difficulty reading books, these films became his favorite recreation. Ike Hoover scoured Washington, D.C., and eventually the entire country to find new releases for the president.
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Hoover was not always successful in locating films of decent quality. To his great joy, the head usher discovered five newsreels that Wilson had no objections to seeing more than once. They were footage put together by
the U.S. Army Signal Corps showing the president’s triumphant receptions in Paris, London, Rome and Milan.

Wilson was so fond of watching these past glories, he frequently invited guests for lunch and asked if they would like to see the film first. It gave the president a legitimate excuse to watch it again. The scene makes one wince with retrospective pain. It also reveals, again, the roots of Wilson’s political psychology—the overweening pride in his oratorical ability, which convinced him he did not have to compromise with his opponents, because he could rely on “the people” to support him. In the depths of his tortured soul, the president had the instincts of the demagogue.
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Oblivious to the detestation that a majority of Americans now felt for him, Wilson pursued his great and solemn referendum. As the Democratic convention approached, this strategy acquired a new dimension: Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic nominee. A staggered Joe Tumulty begged the president to announce he would not seek a third term. Some Republicans were accusing him of using the fight over the treaty as an excuse to demand another four years in the White House. Wilson refused to issue anything even faintly resembling a disclaimer.

Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo had resigned and announced he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination. Five times in the month of May, McAdoo tried to see his father-in-law and got nowhere. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, also in the running, was similarly spurned. (At the Jackson Day dinner, the Democrats had resoundingly endorsed Palmer’s Red hunting.) Feeding the president’s fantasy was a
Literary Digest
poll, which showed Wilson running second to McAdoo and well ahead of other announced candidates for the nomination. It represented a triumph of the Edith Wilson–Cary Grayson policy of assiduous lying and a sad commentary on the gullibility of the American press.
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In desperation—Tumulty’s prevailing state of mind—the president’s secretary cooked up a scheme with Louis Seibold, a veteran reporter from the
New York World,
who was anxious to be the first newsman to interview Wilson since his collapse. The week after the Republican Convention, when denunciations of Wilson and the league were fresh in the public’s mind, seemed the right moment. Tumulty drew up a set of loaded questions and answers in advance, designed to show that Wilson was very much in touch with things. The league, the treaty, relations with Mexico, the Volstead Act, taxes, labor, were among the topics covered, with solid answers constructed from Tumulty’s energetic research. At the close was a final question about Wilson’s desire for a third term—and a carefully phrased statement of renunciation.

Tumulty took this prepackaged interview to Wilson so he would be ready to play his part in the performance. To the secretary’s dismay, Wilson dismissed most of the topics. Next came a memo from Edith Wilson, informing Tumulty that Seibold was expected to portray Wilson as ready, willing and able to seek a third term. For once, Tumulty allowed his Irish temper to flare. As he filed the memo, he scribbled on it a fervent hope that Edith Wilson would burn in hell.
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Seibold’s eagerness to get the interview easily persuaded him to go along with the Wilsons’ scam. The reporter told how delighted he was to find the president almost his old self. He joshed with him about running a footrace in a month or two; he would give the president a modest handicap because of his “slight limp.” Seibold noted that General Wood, who had almost won the Republican nomination in Chicago, also dragged his left leg, the result of an old injury. As for the treaty and the league, Seibold reported that Wilson demanded a Democratic Party platform that called for ratification without changing a comma. The president was supremely confident that American voters would show their scorn for the “ambiguity and evasion” that the “Prussian-like” Republicans had displayed in the Senate with their reservations.

In obedience to Edith Wilson’s orders, Seibold lied shamelessly about the president.“I saw him transact the most important functions of his office with his old time decisiveness, method and keenness of intellectual appraisement,” the reporter declared. Seibold claimed to have watched Wilson sign a document “with the same copper plate signature.” he even maintained Wilson was functioning better as president than before his “illness” because now he had more time to deliberate on matters.

Admiral Grayson chimed in with a plethora of new lies about Wilson’s amazing recovery. The hoary tradition of faking it was still alive and well in Louis Seibold’s corner of the
New York World
’s newsroom. For a final irony, the interview won Seibold the Pulitzer Prize.
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The next day, a photographer assigned by the
World
came to the White House and took a carefully staged picture of Wilson signing a document, with Edith standing beside him. Seibold also returned for a brief follow-up
interview. The picture was taken from the right side, showing the uncollapsed side of Wilson’s face and avoiding his useless left hand and arm. The photographer said: “The pictures [he took several shots] speak for themselves.” So they did—proving that the camera could lie as convincingly as a reporter—or a president’s wife and doctor.