The Illusion of Victory (77 page)

A flabbergasted Roosevelt summoned newsman Arthur Krock to Hyde Park to help him draft a reply and filed a $500,000 libel suit against Rathom. A few weeks earlier, the Democratic candidate had bragged to friends that his performance on the hustings in the West meant “from now the vice presidency is going to be a highly respected and live wire office.” Suddenly he was face-to-face with political catastrophe.

Fellow Democrats in the U.S. Department of Justice helped him counterattack in the press. They released documents of a prosecution the government had brought against Rathom in 1918 for claiming he had personally captured numerous German agents. The government found Rathom had lied about almost every item in his highly colored autobiography. To escape indictment, the editor had made a humiliating confession.
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The intrusion of lowlifes such as Chancellor and Rathom into Woodrow Wilson’s great and solemn referendum on the League of Nations was the final irony of the 1920 presidential campaign. In the closing days, the Democratic candidates exchanged frantic wires, predicting victory.“WE ARE HAVING THE MOST REMARKABLE MEETINGS I HAVE EVER SEEN,” Cox wired Roosevelt.“THE FIGHT IS WON.” Roosevelt was so sure they were going to win, he told one of his aides he was looking forward to seeing him at the inauguration on March 4, 1921. The aide, a dour Irish-American named Lynch, brutally punctured this balloon of hope:“Listen, Frank, you’re not going to Washington.”
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In the White House, Woodrow Wilson clung to the same illusion of victory. At a cabinet meeting on election day, several men warned the president that defeat was a strong probability. Wilson replied:“The American people will not turn Cox down and elect Harding. A great moral issue is involved.”
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On November 2, 1920, the Republican ticket steamrollered through all parts of the nation, crushing Democratic candidates everywhere but in the Solid South. Even there, hitherto Democratic Tennessee and Texas succumbed to the GOP. Harding and Coolidge garnered a staggering 61 percent of the vote—16,141,536 to Cox-Roosevelt’s 9,128,488. The Republicans carried 37 states and won 404 of 531 electoral votes. Another 919,799 voters cast their ballots for Convict Number 9653, Eugene V. Debs. In the House of Representatives, the Republican majority swelled to 300 to 135. In the Senate, their edge became 59 to 37. Popular Democrats such as Governor Al Smith of New York and Champ Clark of Missouri were buried in the wreckage. The Cox-Roosevelt ticket lost New York City by 440,000 votes, a hitherto unthinkable beating for a Democratic candidate. Franklin Roosevelt’s value on the ticket turned out to be zero-minus. The Democrats did not carry a single county in New York State.
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In New Jersey, Boss Frank Hague, seeing every Democratic candidate in sight crumbling before his eyes, went all out to rescue the sheriff ’s office in his Hudson County home base. The sheriff controlled the selection of the grand jury, a crucial factor if the victorious Republicans sought criminal indictments. The candidate, Thomas “Skidder” Madigan, was running in spite of a disability that most politicians would have considered daunting: He could not read or write. His campaign slogan was even more unusual: “He was good to his mother.” Abandoning all other candidates, the Democratic organization elected Skidder with a majority that was 100 percent stolen. It was a mordant commentary on the durability of Woodrow Wilson’s reform of New Jersey’s politics.
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“We have torn up Wilsonism by the roots,” declared Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. The German, Italian and Irish press voiced similar sentiments. The
Irish World
gloated:“The chief fugleman for the conspiracy to make the Republic stand sponsor for the preservation of the British Empire received his answer on the second day of November.” George Sylvester Viereck chortled: “T. Woodrow Wilson is the most humiliated president in the history of the United States. ” a stunned Joe Tumulty said it was not a landslide, it was “an earthquake.”
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Woodrow Wilson’s great and solemn referendum on the League of Nations—and America’s participation in World War I—was over. His last illusion of victory had become the debris of humiliating defeat. The president remained impervious to his central role in perpetrating the disaster. Self-righteous to the last, Wilson now blamed the American voters.“They have disgraced us in the eyes of the world,” he told the stricken, ever-faithful Tumulty.
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Historians and biographers sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson have expended an ocean of ink trying to explain away the catastrophic election of 1920. Agreeing with William Jennings Bryan, they have argued that a genuine referendum on the League of Nations or any other issue was impossible because of the local complexities of American politics. The contention undoubtedly has some merit. But Wilson and the Democratic candidates made 1920 as close to a referendum as a presidential election can become. The League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles were unquestionably the foremost issues. Wilson’s enemies undoubtedly misrepresented them in their often furious diatribes against him and his uncompromising ways. It was an imperfect referendum—but it
was
a referendum.

Franklin D. Roosevelt at first blamed the defeat on the ethnic Americans. He ruefully told Josephus Daniels of a postelection conversation with his German-born gardener, Sebastian Baumann. Roosevelt asked him how he had voted.“For Harding,” Baumann replied.

Roosevelt asked why. Baumann had worked at Hyde Park for twenty years. He was an American citizen. Baumann said he had received letters from Germany, telling him of mass starvation and terrible shortages of warm clothing. Wilson had joined with England and France to destroy Germany. That made Baumann remember he was a German—and vote Republican. It was a mournful echo of the war’s worst atrocity, the British blockade. But Roosevelt, already a ferocious German-hater, did not see it
that way. He wanted an explanation of why his performance on the campaign trail had not translated into votes.

Later, with his remarkable ability to revise or avoid the truth—a talent by no means unique to him—Roosevelt blamed the defeat on the pamphlet accusing Harding of having Negro blood. He told one of his 1940 presidential aides that the story had been concocted by Harry Daugherty, Harding’s campaign manager, who then cleverly blamed the Democrats, causing a backlash that cost them the election. Aside from giving us a glimpse of Roosevelt’s low opinion of the intelligence of the average voter, both these comments make it clear that he declined to see the 1920 election as a referendum, much less a great and solemn one.
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The Republicans had no doubt about the election’s being both a great and a solemn referendum. In fact, their 7-million-vote margin of victory gradually expanded the referendum’s greatness and solemnity. In Warren Harding’s inaugural address, the new president said that the United States was ready to confer with “nations great and small” to promote disarmament and any other program that would “lessen the probability of war.” But he said nothing about the League of Nations. Some pro-league newspapers wondered if he were repudiating the league. No significant protest came from the public or from members of Harding’s cabinet, such as Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who had strongly backed joining the league with Lodge’s reservations.

Five weeks after the inauguration, when Harding addressed Congress for the first time, he said joining the League of Nations would be a “betrayal” of the “deliberate expression of the American people in the recent election.” the statement was made with the advice and consent of Henry Cabot Lodge. In a letter written a week after the election, the senator had told the new president that it would be better “to make a fresh start” rather than try to “make over the League” with reservations. The important thing was to sign a swift, early peace with Germany. This formality was soon made fact by a joint resolution of Congress on July 2, 1921, and a separate peace was ratified by both countries in August.

Harding had needed no urging to junk “Wilson’s league.” He had merely moved cautiously, taking the public pulse before announcing the decision. Lodge claimed to have changed his mind about the league in the course of the 1920 campaign. After orating to thousands of people and talking to hundreds, Lodge became convinced that “the people at large
were much more decided about not having anything to do with the League of Nations than the men in public life.” Once more, an almost total lack of public outcry seemed to confirm the senator’s words.
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This abandonment of the league did not mean that the United States retreated into total isolation. The world situation, especially the continuing chaos in Europe, made such a posture impossible. Under the auspices of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, a disarmament conference convened in Washington in 1921 and negotiated significant reductions in the world’s warships. The French blocked any discussion of land disarmament. But the United States persuaded Japan to sign an agreement returning Shantung Province to Chinese control.

A major share of America’s international activity concerned the ongoing question of German reparations and the repayment of Allied war debts. Within a few months of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Americans began questioning the wisdom of demanding a huge sum from Germany. Norman H. Davis, one of Wilson’s top economic advisers during the Paris negotiations, put it wryly: “Some of the delegates wanted to destroy Germany, some wanted to collect reparations, others wanted to do both.” Bernard Baruch warned the American government to reject the British and French policy of forcing Germany to pay “a certain indemnity and yet making it impossible for her to pay.”
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In 1921, the reparations commission appointed by the peace conference announced that Germany had to pay 132 billion gold marks. In prewar values, when the mark traded at 4.1 to a dollar, this would have been $43 billion, no small sum. (In twenty-first-century money, this is equivalent to $434 billion.) But wartime inflation had decimated the mark, making the real sum close to 750 billion marks—$7.5 trillion in today’s dollars. To show they meant business, the commission demanded 1 billion marks within twenty-five days.

The Germans made the first payment, but the succeeding installments were another story. Their bitterness and rage over the Treaty of Versailles impelled them to allow inflation to run wild, hoping to pay off the reparations in depreciated marks. The device escalated out of control, until in November 1923, it took 4.2 trillion marks to equal a single dollar. This
hyperinflation meant economic agony to millions of Germans on fixed incomes—and inflicted a fatal wound on their confidence in the government of the German republic.
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By this time, that ultimate German-hater, Raymond Poincaré, was premier of France. He sent French troops into the Ruhr valley, Germany’s industrial heartland, to make sure future reparations payments had real value. Meanwhile, Britain was demanding that France, Italy and Belgium repay the huge sums loaned them—and the United States was reminding everyone that it expected all its former allies, including Britain, to repay the dollars Uncle Sam had shipped to them. When smaller countries such as Greece and Cuba were included in the astronomical addition, the total owed to the United States came close to $10.5 billion (more than $106 billion in twenty-first-century dollars).

The British tried to persuade the United States to cancel their $4 billion debt, if London canceled the $10 billion supposedly owed it by France, Greece and other allied countries. France too pleaded for debt cancellation. The United States stonily insisted on payment, and Congress created the World War Foreign Debt Commission, which set up a schedule of payments that was going to last sixty-two years, at an interest rate of 2.1 percent.

The United States next played a major role in reorganizing Germany’s finances under a commission headed by General Pershing’s purchasing wizard, Charles Dawes. The Americans insisted on French withdrawal from the Ruhr and set up a schedule of reparations payments based on a realistic assessment of Germany’s ability to pay. The achievement won Dawes the Nobel Peace Prize and prompted Calvin Coolidge to make him his vice president in his successful run for the White House in 1924.

Thereafter, Germany became America’s favorite trading partner. American banks and corporations poured millions into its struggling economy, and in 1929, another commission renegotiated the Dawes Plan, again reducing the Germans’ reparation debt. All these difficult international labors came to naught as the nations of Europe, saddled with huge internal war debts, sank into recession in the late 1920s. The United States canceled most of the money Italy had borrowed and 60 percent of France’s obligations, but these gestures did little to prevent Europe’s downward slide into depression.

In 1931, as the American economy too succumbed to the worldwide economic paralysis, President Herbert Hoover, the man who had left Paris
deeply disappointed with Woodrow Wilson, decreed a moratorium on all debt payments, including Germany’s. America’s “special relationship” with Germany continued until Adolf Hitler became the nation’s chancellor two years later. By that time, the worldwide economic crisis ended all hope of receiving further payments from any of the debtor countries and also spelled kaput to German reparations. The net effect among average Americans was an even deeper disillusion with World War I.
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We have torn Wilsonism up by the roots
. Did Lodge’s triumphant cry reflect a victory over an ideology or a man? What was Wilsonism, anyway? Some Wilson biographers argue that it was a set of principles that guided the president throughout his political career. This argument leads to his portrayal as a prophet without honor in his own country, a tragic figure who refused to compromise his lofty moral standards. In this drama, Republicans such as Henry Cabot Lodge are the villains, saddled with the opprobrious term “isolationists.” Ultimately, as Wilson’s comment to Tumulty indicated, the true villains become the American people, who were too easily diverted by other issues and/or too selfish to confront the sacrifices necessary to maintain the peace of the world.

These conclusions are debatable, to say the least. The brief against the American people is the easiest to dismiss. What electorate would not have become disillusioned with a president like Wilson? From the time he asked Congress to declare war under the illusion that he would not have to send more than a token force to France to his mishandling of the peace treaty, his conduct of public affairs was deeply flawed. Capping this performance were the seventeen months of lies his wife and doctor perpetrated with his eventual collusion, after his cerebral thrombosis. The verdict the American people rendered in the great and solemn referendum was richly deserved by this president and the Democratic Party that gave him its support.

An examination of Wilson’s career forces one to ask, What were his principles? Aboard ship on the way to the Paris Peace Conference, he told his aides and fellow passengers that peace would have to be made “on the highest principles of justice.” Otherwise he would “run away and hide.” he saw himself as the Solomonic judge who would arbitrate the selfish goals of the Allies. The results of the peace conference revealed how little weight he gave these words.

In his speech calling for a declaration of war, Wilson had said that the German people were not the enemy; the crime of the war lay with their leaders. At the peace conference, he approved Article 231, the infamous war guilt clause. How to explain this total reversal of so-called principle—from lofty forgiveness to low revenge?

The president said he was for absolute freedom of the seas. He nevertheless permitted the British to strangle American commerce with Europe in the name of their infamous blockade and abandoned freedom of the seas along with the rest of the Fourteen Points at the peace conference.

Wilson proclaimed self-determination as a great principle—and then gave away chunks of German-speaking Europe to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy and France, sowing the seeds of the next war. Knowing that Austria favored a union with Germany after Vienna lost its empire, Wilson wrote into the Treaty of Versailles an article barring the union, no matter how the Austrians voted.

Wilson himself admitted the irrelevance—even the foolishness—of this so-called principle of self-determination in his talk with the advocates of Irish independence in Paris. He realized too late that it was an irresistible temptation for petty demagogues everywhere. It remains so to this day.

The more one examines the historical record, the clearer it becomes that Wilson regularly applied his rhetoric of principles after the fact or in blithe indifference to the facts. It was an oratorical device, not a well-thought-out philosophy. He took political positions and then cooked up principles to justify them. One might almost call it a bad habit, which caused him immense trouble all his life. When he could not get his way at Princeton, his opponents became advocates of special privilege and enemies of democracy. Until Pancho Villa started murdering Americans in cold blood, the Mexican rebel was the embodiment of Mexico’s revolution against privilege in the name of democracy.

No one summed up this side of Wilson better than the man he tried to silence, Senator Robert La Follette. Commenting on Wilson’s claim that the peace treaty fulfilled his Fourteen Points, La Follette wrote:“I sometimes think the man has no sense of things that penetrate below the surface. With him the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself. He is either wanting in understanding or convictions or both. Words—phrases, felicity of expression and a blind egotism have been his stock in trade.”
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When Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the effrontery of Foreign Minister Zimmermann’s telegram created a crisis, Wilson again invoked principles: Submarine warfare was a war against mankind; Americans had a right to travel on belligerent ships in the war zone and a right to trade with England while making no attempt to invoke a similar right to trade with Germany.