19

VICTORY

Of the four wartime presidents who preceded him, Woodrow Wilson thought and cared most about Abraham Lincoln. He left no record of saying anything about James Madison, James K. Polk, or William McKinley during the war. Madison was an odd omission because in earlier years he had remarked on how he and Madison were the only “Princeton men” to become president. At the beginning of 1918, he might well have worried about sharing Madison’s fate of being a president who failed to lead the nation to victory, but not the “peace without victory” he desired. The Allies’ troubles grew when Lenin took Russia out of the war by accepting the humiliating peace terms laid down at Brest-Litovsk. This move freed the Germans to hurl all their might at the Western Front, thereby making the spring of 1918 the Allies’ direst hour. The critical question remained, could enough American troops get into combat in time?

Wilson had a special reason for thinking about Lincoln soon after he delivered the Fourteen Points address. Critics on Capitol Hill assailed his administration’s conduct of the war and sought to wrest management from the president’s hands, much as others in Congress had tried to do half a century earlier. The chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, George E. Chamberlain of Oregon, was a progressive Democrat who usually supported Wilson’s policies, but in keeping with his state’s political culture, he had a strong maverick streak. At the middle of January 1918, against the backdrop of foul-ups on the railroads and fuel shortages, Chamberlain held hearings that exposed the administration’s war managers, particularly Secretary of War Baker, to charges of gross incompetence. Chamberlain introduced a bill to establish a war cabinet of “three distinguished citizens of private ability”—he did not suggest whom—with virtually limitless jurisdiction. This measure would have taken the conduct of the war out of the hands of not only the secretaries of war and the navy but the president himself.¹

These moves in the Capitol stirred intrigue and anger at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. House saw an opportunity to renew his scheme to shove Baker aside, and he bided his time for the right moment to offer his advice. Wilson, however, did not ask House’s or anyone else’s advice and lashed out in a statement to the press, in which he noted that Chamberlain had not consulted him about the war cabinet proposal. He called the senator’s allegations “astonishing and absolutely unjustifiable” and lauded Baker as “one of the ablest public officials I have ever known.” In a cabinet meeting the next day, he said the Republicans wanted a war cabinet representing privilege: “They do not think as we do because they wish to act for a class.”²

Baker thanked Wilson for his support but offered to resign. The president brushed the suggestion aside and encouraged the secretary to fight back. The former mayor had a quick mind and ready tongue, which he had recently displayed when he deftly parried attacks by Chamberlain, Weeks, and others at a Military Affairs Committee hearing earlier in January. Baker bettered that feat when he appeared again before the committee on January 28. He spoke for five hours, dominating the meeting and demolishing charges of mismanagement. He did so well that during the noon recess Senator Ollie James of Kentucky, an administration stalwart, hailed a cab and hurried to the White House. Admitted to the president’s office, James forgot himself in his excitement and uttered a sacrilegious expression that Wilson disliked: “Jesus, you ought to see that little Baker. He’s eating them up!”³ Several Republican senators were already having second thoughts about the war cabinet bill, and Baker’s performance permanently derailed the drive to hobble his and Wilson’s management of the war. But that did not signal any surcease in harsh criticism and scathing attacks from Republicans on and off Capitol Hill, particularly Roosevelt.

The incident in January did prompt Wilson to beef up industrial mobilization. McAdoo was lobbying for Baruch to head the War Industries Board. Secretary of Agriculture Houston and Secretary of Commerce Redfield objected, saying that the financier lacked executive experience; Secretary of the Navy Daniels strongly supported the appointment, while Baker was unsure. Despite his affection for Baruch, Wilson briefly leaned toward appointing Edward R. Stettinius, a partner with J. P. Morgan and Company who was serving in the War Department. Tumulty argued that Stettinius’s appointment would send the wrong message to Democrats and labor. Whether that argument was what swayed the president is not clear, but he did decide to go with Baruch, who accepted promptly. The letter of offer spelled out what appeared to be broad authority over production and procurement for both the American armed forces and the Allies, describing the post as “the general eye of all supply departments in the field of industry.”⁴

With his genius for self-promotion, Baruch soon made himself one of the most visible and popular figures in the civilian war effort, rivaling Hoover. He publicized himself relentlessly, cultivating not only newspapermen but also movie cameramen. Newsreels now reached big audiences, and the tall, handsome WIB chairman appeared in them regularly, to great applause. Baruch burnished an image of omnicompetence, earning the possibly self-coined nicknames Wizard and Doctor Facts, and he encouraged people to view him as the benevolent czar of American industry. In fact, he possessed neither the authority nor the staff to crack the whip over businesses, and he relied instead mainly on voluntary cooperation. The WIB divided the country into twenty-one production zones, in each of which business leaders were assigned to advisory committees. The approach worked well in promoting conservation of material and standardization of production processes. Baruch got around his lack of authority to set prices through the allocation of priorities. The army’s refusal to relinquish control of military procurement complicated matters, but the officer assigned to be the liaison to the WIB, Colonel Hugh S. Johnson, quickly came to see the merits of cooperation and helped get the two bodies to work together.⁵

For all Baruch’s public relations success, his agency’s substantive record was less than stellar. Small-arms production for the army and the British did improve; even before Baruch took over, factories were turning out more than 5,000 rifles a day. Machine-gun production took hold as well, with Browning automatic rifles and heavy machine guns starting to come out in large numbers early in 1918. Still, most of the doughboys’ automatic weapons came from Britain and France until the final weeks of the war. The AEF also had to rely on artillery supplied by the Allies in Europe because of production failures at home. Tanks likewise languished because of Pershing’s coolness toward these new combat vehicles and delays in building them. Aircraft production failed dismally, though not for lack of interest and money. Instead, indecision by military commanders and turf wars between the government and private industry stalemated production efforts. Only one American-designed plane even reached the testing stage. Of the nearly 6,400 planes flown by the U.S. Army Air Service, nearly 4,900 were French and the rest mostly British. As with the shipping program, it remains a matter of speculation whether Baruch’s leadership of the WIB might have produced better results if the war had lasted longer.

Wilson took so long to name Baruch chairman of the WIB because he had other matters on his mind. He especially wanted to maintain the momentum of his drive for a liberal, nonpunitive peace by keeping up his rhetorical offensive. Germany and Austria-Hungary, against which Congress had now also declared war, replied to the Fourteen Points in polite but unsatisfactory terms, and Wilson believed he needed to answer them with another speech to Congress. The speech that he delivered, on February 11, came to be known as the Four Points Address because in it Wilson laid down four additional elements of his program:

First, that each part of the final settlement must be based upon the essential justice of that particular case … Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game … Third, every territorial settlement … must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned. … Fourth, that all well defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism.

He condemned the “military and annexationist party in Germany” for standing in the way of achieving a peace based on these principles, and he pledged to throw the whole strength of America into “this war of emancipation.”⁶

This was another artful performance. He was enlarging upon the first of the Fourteen Points—“open covenants … openly arrived at”—by envisioning an entirely new way of conducting diplomacy. He was likewise enlarging upon the last point—“a general association of nations … under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike”—by declaring in this address that such covenants would make the bartering of sovereignty against people’s wishes impossible and would be backed by the united force of all peace-loving nations. That was the closest he had come in more than a year to a renewed endorsement of a league of nations empowered to maintain peace. Perhaps most important, he moved toward embracing “self-determination,” although he still did not utter the word and he eschewed too ready or too broad an application of the idea, maintaining escape hatches for the sake of peace and stability.

Wilson’s recent silence about a league of nations was deliberate. At the time, he was holding the League to Enforce Peace at arm’s length—for several reasons. The 1916 election campaign had aggravated partisan animosities between him and the LEP’s mostly Republican leaders, particularly Taft. After intervention, the LEP had hitched the league idea to the Allied cause, an approach that did not square with the president’s resolve to keep his distance from his new co-belligerents. Wilson also resented distractions from what he privately called this organization’s “butters-in” and “woolgatherers.” At the beginning of March, he told an LEP activist, “Frankly, I do not feel that it is wise to discuss the formal constitution of a league to enforce peace. The principle is easy to adhere to, but the moment questions of organization are taken up all sorts of jealousies come to the front which ought not to be added to matters of delicacy.”⁷

House worried about maintaining outside contacts, and he persuaded Wilson to meet Taft and another LEP leader, President Lowell of Harvard, at the White House on March 28. According to Taft, Wilson began by reiterating his dislike for specific plans for a league: “He said it might embarrass him in dealing with the subject.” He believed that nations might come to guarantee others’ territorial integrity and hold conferences in case of violations. He acknowledged that this process would be slow, but he reminded his visitors, who were both lawyers, that this was the way the common law had developed. He believed that a series of conferences could ultimately make it possible to create machinery to enforce peace, with precedent and custom dictating the form of such machinery. Wilson also “gave it as his opinion that the Senate of the United States would be unwilling to enter into an agreement by which a majority of other nations could tell the United States when they must go to war.”⁸

Taft correctly called this a “minimizing statement.” Although it was consistent with Wilson’s Burkean proclivity, it sounded odd in view of his well-known taste for bold moves. Lowell challenged Wilson’s caution by asking whether at a critical moment such as this more could be accomplished, and he cited the Constitution as an example of going further than anyone except Hamilton had thought possible. Wilson insisted that the circumstances were different, but Lowell persisted in calling for a definite plan. The meeting ended inconclusively, with the parties tacitly agreeing to disagree. The encounter was ironic: in less than a year, Wilson would seize the moment the way Lowell urged him to, and he would push forward the Covenant of the League of Nations against exactly the kind of opposition from the Senate that he was predicting. Despite what he told his visitors, he probably had such a reversal and bold strike in mind in the spring of 1918. Two months earlier, he and House had discussed the possible makeup of the delegation to a peace conference. This discussion, which House called “one of the pleasantest sessions for a long while,” revealed that Wilson was thinking ahead and positioning himself for the possibility of big moves.⁹

He was also thinking about how to involve Republicans in the war and the peacemaking. As a student of parliamentary systems, Wilson appreciated the value of coalition governments, and he had the current example of Britain before him. For nearly a year, House had been harping on the need to involve prominent Republicans in the war effort. The appointment of Root to head the mission to Russia had been a gesture in that direction. Wilson made a similar move just a week after his meeting with Taft and Lowell, appointing Taft co-chairman of the newly created National War Labor Board (NWLB). Announced as the “Supreme Court of Labor Relations,” this agency brought together representatives of management and unions to formulate and interpret labor policies. Like the Food Administration and WIB, the NWLB relied on patriotic appeals and voluntary cooperation to enforce its rulings. Taft and his co-chairman, the labor lawyer Frank P. Walsh, worked together surprisingly well, and the NWLB instilled a measure of harmony in wartime labor relations. As an experiment in bipartisanship, however, Taft’s appointment was less successful. It did not involve the ex-president in high-level policy making, and it did not temper his attacks on the administration during the 1918 election campaign.¹⁰

Wilson’s unwillingness to invite Republicans to join in policy making and management of the war did not extend to those already within the administration. Late in February, House passed along a suggestion to form a “War Board,” to consist of the secretaries of war and the navy and the heads of the major support agencies. Wilson liked the idea, and two weeks later he invited Baruch, Harry Garfield, Hoover, and McAdoo, together with Edward Hurley, the head of the Shipping Board, and Vance McCormick, now chairman of the War Trade Board, to come to the White House. This was the first meeting of what came to be called the War Cabinet, which gathered nearly every week for the duration of the war. Although Wilson continued to meet with the full cabinet, this War Cabinet offered him a smaller and more congenial forum for thrashing out supply and transportation problems. In these meetings, Wilson acted much as he did in cabinet meetings: he allowed freewheeling talk, did not dominate discussions, and intimately involved himself in the details of mobilization. He would not have admitted it, but he was probably responding to his Republican critics when he formed his War Cabinet.¹¹

After giving the Fourteen Points address, the president had also devoted considerable attention to trying to keep the Bolsheviks from leaving the war. He was likewise working to fend off Allied schemes to intervene in Russia, particularly a Japanese move—which the British and French supported—to occupy the port of Vladivostok and a swath of eastern Siberia. By the time Lenin accepted the final terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Germans were beginning to mount their massive offensive on the Western Front. The British and French pleaded for American troops to be inserted into the gaps in their depleted lines. Lloyd George infuriated Wilson by sending a public message that seemed to imply that the administration was dragging its feet about sending men to Europe. Working through Wiseman, House induced the prime minister to issue another statement, written by Wilson, declaring that the administration was doing everything possible to help.¹²

Wilson temporarily neutralized his domestic critics with a speech he gave on the first anniversary of the American entry into the war. He still hung back from statements except to Congress, but this anniversary, which coincided with the opening of the third Liberty Loan campaign, was an occasion he could not pass up. Speaking to a crowd of 15,000 in Baltimore on April 6, he denounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for showing the German government’s true face. The German leaders were trying to erect an empire that had no place for “the principle of free self-determination of nations,” and they were seeking “mastery of the World.” He insisted that he was ready to discuss a fair and just peace any time, but there was no mistaking where the Germans stood. “There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”¹³ Someone who read rather than heard those words might have thought they came from Roosevelt, not Wilson.

He recognized that he had gone too far and had created the wrong impression—one of militancy and crusading for democracy. Two days later, in off-the-record remarks to a group of reporters from foreign newspapers, he eschewed “the language of braggadocio” and insisted that he had “no desire to march triumphantly into Berlin.” Contrary to his apparent embrace of “self-determination,” he claimed, “There isn’t any one kind of government which we have the right to impose upon any nation. So that I am not fighting for democracy except for the peoples that want democracy.”¹⁴ Those remarks lacked the fire of April 6, but they expressed his views far more faithfully.

If Wilson had spoken on the record for public consumption, what he said might have helped quell some of the madness that he saw around him. In April 1918, a young German-born man was lynched in Illinois, and now that the Bolsheviks appeared to be making common cause with the Germans, radicals suffered further repression. Attorney General Gregory and others around him had complained that the Espionage Act did not sufficiently restrict utterances they deemed dangerous. Congress filled the breach by passing a series of amendments, known as the Sedition Act, that broadly prohibited many kinds of expression in speech and print and conferred censorship powers on the postmaster general. Gregory welcomed the measure’s new powers, although in a letter to Wilson he questioned the constitutionality of the censorship provisions.¹⁵

Even before the new law went into effect, fresh prosecutions under the Espionage Act targeted radicals. In April, 113 IWW leaders, including Haywood, went on trial in Chicago. Despite the flimsy and often ludicrous nature of much of the government’s case, the six-month-long trial resulted in convictions of all the accused. Other high-profile cases involved members of the Socialist Party. The previous July, a federal court in North Dakota had convicted Kate Richards O’Hare, who had spoken against the war at several public meetings. In May 1918, a Kansas City court convicted Rose Pastor Stokes, who had likewise spoken and written against the war. The most publicized case occurred in September, when the perennial Socialist Party presidential nominee, Eugene Debs, was convicted after a trial in Ohio. In his pre-sentencing statement, Debs avowed, “I say now that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”¹⁶

Gregory and Wilson had mixed reactions to these cases. Except for the IWW trial, Gregory left prosecutions to the discretion of federal district attorneys. He later rued that decision because many of those attorneys, as well as the federal district judges, proved prone to hysteria or bowed to local pressures. As earlier with Haywood, the Justice Department leadership tried to avoid making a martyr of Debs—which Debs desperately wished that they would do—and recommended against prosecution, but the U.S. attorney went ahead anyway, probably because he was feeling the heat from patriotic organizations in Ohio. For his part, Wilson did comment to Gregory on “the (very just) conviction of Rose Pastor Stokes” and asked whether the editor of The Kansas City Starmight notalso be indicted. Yet he shared the concern of western progressives that these prosecutions might alienate supporters of his domestic and foreign policies. In October, he told Gregory it might be wise to put enforcement “upon the basis you and I would put it upon if we were handling it ourselves.”¹⁷ Those second thoughts came too late to do anything about the repression of civil liberties.

The actions against the socialists look doubly strange in light of some of the president’s private thinking. Stockton Axson recalled that in June 1918, Wilson said to him, “Now the world is going to change radically, and I am satisfied that governments will have to do many things which are now left to individuals and corporations. I am satisfied for instance that the government will have to take over all the great natural resources[;] … all the water power; all the coal mines; all the oil fields, etc. They will have to be government-owned.” Axson remembered him adding, “Now if I should say that outside, people would call me a socialist, but I am not a socialist.” He said he was not, but he believed that the next president must take such steps in order to stave off communism. Wilson may have been thinking about himself and a third term. The previous February, he had told House he liked the boldly egalitarian and government-interventionist manifesto just issued by the British Labour Party and talked about forming a new party in America: “He did not believe the Democratic Party could be used as an instrument to go as far as it would be needful to go largely because of the reactionary element in the South.”¹⁸ He would soon show that he meant to purge his party of men who were not to his liking.

Before Wilson could move on partisan and progressive fronts, he had to meet other challenges abroad and at home. The greatest danger remained the German onslaught in France. The British kept demanding that AEF units be placed under their command—a scheme called brigading, which Pershing adamantly opposed. Despite repeated face-to-face importuning by the ambassador, Lord Reading, Wilson was reluctant to decide the matter until Baker returned from a tour of the front in Europe. The House-Wiseman axis likewise was active; the Englishman also met with the president and then sailed for home to apprise Lloyd George and Balfour of the situation. When Baker returned, just after the middle of April, he advised Wilson to stick to a tentative agreement to supply the British with 120,000 troops a month from then through July while leaving final decisions to Pershing. After further wrangling involving the French, this deal held, despite efforts by House and Wiseman to undermine Pershing. In the trenches, the last-ditch fortitude of the beleaguered British Tommies and French poilus, combined with German blunders, stalled the great offensive. Units from the First Division of the U.S. Army, which had been brigaded to the French, took part in an attack that captured the town of Cantigny on the Arras sector of the front. Meanwhile, stepped-up shipping across the Atlantic was supplying Pershing with greater numbers of doughboys, and by summer the AEF was ready to operate on its own.¹⁹

Domestic political infighting mirrored the combat across the ocean. The fiasco of the aircraft production program drew sharp and justified criticism, and Wilson responded by making an unusual choice to investigate the matter: Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who would later carve the monument at Mount Rushmore. Borglum’s qualifications to lead the inquiry lay in his enthusiasm for aviation and his friendship with Roosevelt. The sculptor’s haphazard investigation seemed to make problems worse, and in May an angry Senate Military Affairs Committee authorized its own inquiry. To head off this move, Wilson reluctantly asked Charles Evans Hughes to head a new probe. Hughes’s report, released just before the end of the war, found evidence of disorganization and incompetence, but not corruption, in the aircraft program. Also in May, McAdoo’s call for additional taxes to pay for the war threatened to spark a revolt among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Some of them simply balked at the new taxes, while others feared renewal of the sectional attack that Republicans had leveled against them in 1916—that the improvident South and West were raiding the hard-earned wealth of the Northeast and Midwest. In addition, representatives and senators up for reelection were eager to adjourn and hit the campaign trail rather than stay in Washington for the time-consuming business of passing revenue legislation.²⁰

As in the past, Wilson handled trouble at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue with private and public initiatives. He met several times with agitated Democratic legislators—a chore he did not enjoy—and managed to soothe congressional tempers a bit. At the same time, he spoke out a little more often than he had done recently. Addressing Red Cross volunteers at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on May 18, he observed, “In my own mind I am convinced that not a hundred years of peace could have knitted this nation together as this single year of war has knitted it together.”²¹ Five days later, he issued a statement to the press praising foreign-born citizens for their expressions of loyalty and eagerness to serve.

Those statements disclosed a new strain in Wilson’s thinking—a belief that this war could become more than a necessary evil and could achieve positive good by uniting the nation and particularly by overcoming ethnic and sectional divisions. They came as a warm-up for a surprise address to a joint session of Congress on May 27. In that speech, Wilson stressed the necessity for new taxes, which would help in planning expenditures, remedy inequities, and prevent speculation and waste. The overriding issue was winning the war, and everything else must go by the boards: “Politics is adjourned. The elections will go to those who think least of it.” As earlier, Wilson was striking a note that did not fully reflect his private thinking. “Politics is adjourned” was another of his stirring phrases, which he sometimes made good on, as when he publicly endorsed two Republican senators, William S. Kenyon of Iowa and Knute Nelson of Minnesota, for reelection in the fall. But “politics is adjourned” belied the uses that he was about to make of the politics of loyalty. Back in March, he had written a public letter endorsing Joseph Davies, the Democratic candidate in a special senatorial election in Wisconsin, by praising him for having passed “the acid test” of loyalty. Despite the endorsement, Davies lost to a Republican, Irvine Lenroot, whose election was also a blow to La Follette, who regarded Lenroot as a renegade and had his own candidate in the race.²²

For a president to endorse his party’s candidate over the opposition is standard politics, although Wilson’s “acid test” of loyalty did raise the emotional and rhetorical stakes. What was not standard politics was to apply this test to members of his own party. Wilson in fact hesitated at first to intervene in Democratic primaries in 1918. In June, however, he came out in South Carolina’s senatorial primary against former governor Cole-man Blease, a Bryanite who earlier failed the acid test. A month later, South Carolina Democrats gratified him by rejecting Blease in favor of a pro-administration candidate. His next incursion into primaries in the South came in July in Texas, as a result of some intrigue by Burleson. The postmaster general’s brother-in-law was running against Representative James Slayden in the San Antonio district, and Burleson drafted a telegram for the president to send criticizing the congressman. To Burleson’s surprise, Wilson sent the telegram, though he soon regretted the move and said that Burleson had gotten him into trouble. Why he went along with the scheme is not clear. Slayden withdrew from the primary, and Burleson’s brother-in-law was nominated but later lost to the first Texas Republican to be elected to Congress since Reconstruction. Elsewhere in the state, administration supporters succeeded, without the president’s direct intervention, in easily defeating Representative Jeff McLemore, the author of the offending resolution in 1916 against traveling on belligerent merchant ships.²³

Those successes in Texas prefigured further forays into primaries, though for a while Wilson remained chary about involvement in intra-party contests. Even though he made no secret of his loathing for Senator John Shields of Tennessee, a Bourbon Democrat who had given the administration trouble on a variety of issues, he did not make a public statement against the senator, who won renomination early in August. He likewise refrained from speaking out against Representative George Huddleston of Alabama, another Bryanite, but then changed his mind and telegraphed a Birmingham newspaper editor: “I think I am justified in saying that Mr. Huddleston’s record proved him in every way an opponent of the Administration.” The congressman fought back with endorsements from the Democratic leadership in the House and handily prevailed in his primary.²⁴

Those disappointments did not deter Wilson from going after what he saw as bigger game: senators James K. Vardaman of Mississippi and Thomas Hardwick of Georgia. No one fit the profile of a failure to pass the “acid test” of loyalty better than Vardaman, who had been one of the six senators to vote against the war resolution. Mississippi’s flowing-haired, flamboyant “White Chief” was an agrarian radical and a virulent racist demagogue who embodied everything that respectable whites found so repugnant in southern politics. Wilson needed little prompting to send a public letter that stated, “Senator Vardaman has been conspicuous among the Democrats in the Senate in his opposition to the administration.” If Mississippians chose to renominate Vardaman, the president would feel “obliged to accept their action as a condemnation of my administration.” Vardaman struck back with his trademark appeal to white supremacy, demanding that black veterans be barred from returning to the South. This time, racism could not trump patriotism, and the senator lost badly in the primary on August 21.²⁵

Wilson despised Georgia’s Hardwick almost as much as he despised Vardaman. Hardwick was a political cohort of the man who outdid him, and sometimes even Vardaman, as an agrarian race-baiting rabble-rouser and an opponent of Wilson’s foreign policy—Tom Watson. Although Hardwick had voted for the war resolution, he stood against most of the administration’s policies before and after intervention. Now Georgia’s newly enacted “county unit” requirement meant that the winner of a primary or general election had to carry a majority of the state’s counties regardless of the popular vote; this rule obviously discriminated against voters in cities, particularly Atlanta, and gave a big boost to Hardwick’s and Watson’s rural followers. In this race, Wilson publicly called Hardwick a “constant and active opponent of my administration” and urged Georgians to vote for William J. Harris, who had been serving on the FTC. On September 10, Harris swamped Hardwick in the popular vote and carried 114 of Georgia’s 152 counties. The news from Georgia was doubly welcome because three weeks earlier Tom Watson had lost in a primary to Representative Carl Vinson, who had denounced the challenger for his opposition to the war.²⁶

As a whole, these activities constituted a notable feat of leadership. The failures notwithstanding, Wilson’s involvement in the 1918 primaries would become the only successful party purge by a president in American history. Twenty years later, Franklin Roosevelt would try to do the same thing on the same turf and would fail miserably. In 1918, Wilson enjoyed the advantages of acting amid a superheated political atmosphere, thanks to the war, and of being a native southerner, thereby muffling charges of outside interference. He issued his denunciation of lynching just before he intervened in these primaries—which may have been only a coincidence or may have sprung from his confidence that he would not arouse the beast of racism that always lurked in the shadows of southern politics. Vardaman’s failure to save himself with a fresh injection of white supremacist demagoguery appeared to prove Wilson right. He was playing for larger stakes than just settling scores with opponents in his own party. This was the final, knockout blow in his fight for supremacy among Democrats. Henceforth, no Democrat would challenge him for mastery, not even in the disheartening days that would befall him and the party in the months to come. Moreover, by purging opponents of his foreign policy, he was taking a giant step toward transforming the South from the most anti-military, anti-interventionist, potentially isolationist section of the country into the most pro-military, interventionist, and at times internationalist section—locating military bases there would help, too.²⁷

Domestic politics were not uppermost in the president’s mind during the summer of 1918. Above all, there was the fighting in France. In June, the AEF got a bigger taste of what the Germans had been dishing out to the British and the French, first at Chemin des Dames in the Reims-Soissons sector of the front, where two American divisions led the attack, and then on the Aisne-Marne salient. A full corps of doughboys went into action at Château-Thierry, with especially heavy fighting at Belleau Wood, where the U.S. Marines lived up to their reputation as fierce warriors. Their presence was, in the words of a French officer on Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s staff, “the magical operation of a transfusion of blood. Life arrived in floods to reanimate the body of a France bled white by the innumerable wounds of four years.” As these battles raged through June and July, the AEF took heavy casualties and played its part in foiling the German lunge toward victory on the Western Front. By August, Pershing had enough troops to take over a sector, and he was able to mount independent offensives in September at St.-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne. The Meuse-Argonne offensive struck at the Germans’ main supply line and involved the largest number of American troops, and casualties, in any engagement the army ever fought—larger than the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. By November, 2 million American soldiers were in Europe, and Allied war plans called for crossing the Rhine early in 1919, with the bulk of combat in the invasion of Germany to fall on the AEF.²⁸

Wilson received regular reports about the fighting, but he almost never discussed any aspect of it with the cabinet or the War Cabinet. One exception occurred in May, when General Leonard Wood—the former army chief of staff, close friend of Roosevelt’s, and frequent critic of administration policies—protested his not being sent to France to command a division. Wilson prepared a statement that criticized Wood’s erratic temperament and habit of contesting his superiors’ decisions, which could be fatal “in the face of the enemy.” When he read that statement to the cabinet, most of the members opposed his saying anything about Wood, but they admitted that Pershing did not want Wood and had told Wood so. Wilson met with Wood and listened to his argument for being sent overseas, but he did not budge. Sidelining Wood ignited public criticism, including widespread charges that politics were involved. As earlier with the rejection of Roosevelt’s bid to raise a division, personal and political motives may have entered into the decision tangentially, but basically Wilson was sticking to his policy of keeping his hands off military commands and decisions.²⁹

Wilson’s reluctance to talk about what he considered strictly military matters did not extend to the limited use of American forces for diplomatic purposes. One place posed this problem more than any other—Russia. Entreaties from the Allies to intervene there persisted through the first half of 1918, the most sensitive spot being the Pacific coast of Siberia, where the Japanese remained eager to send in an army. Wilson continued to resist those pleas, but strenuous lobbying for intervention ranged from the Democratic Party to the French—who sent the philosopher Henri Bergson to present their case to the president in person—to American agents in Asia. The most unusual and ultimately influential lobbyist was the Czech leader Tomáš Masaryk, who sought to enlist American support for his people’s independence and for his mission to transport Czech soldiers who had been prisoners of war in Russia to Vladivostok so that they might then be shipped to Europe to fight alongside the Allied forces in France. At a meeting on June 19, Wilson and Masaryk discussed intervention strictly as a technical matter, which pleased the president, who was worried about having enough troops to send into Siberia. Ten days later, Czech soldiers seized control of Vladivostok, giving Wilson the excuse he needed to intervene to support them. In early July, he sent 7,000 American troops, to be matched by 7,000 Japanese troops.³⁰

Meanwhile, small numbers of American troops went into Archangel and Murmansk, in the northern part of European Russia, while British and French troops also operated there and in the Black Sea. These were limited, complicated, messy operations that seemed to defy Wilson’s best intentions. “I have been sweating blood over the question of what it is right and feasible (possible) to do in Russia,” he lamented to House in July. “It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch.” In August, he issued a statement to the press in which he maintained that these incursions implied no interference with Russian sovereignty and were intended only to help the Russians regain control of their own affairs. In October, he told Wiseman, “My policy regarding Russia is very similar to my Mexican policy. I believe in letting them work out their own salvation, even though they wallow in anarchy for a while.” He also told Wiseman that he thought the Russian problems should be held over for the peace conference.³¹

As that reference to a peace conference indicated, post-war settlements occupied a prominent place in Wilson’s thinking. Much of that thinking arose on his own initiative, but some of it stemmed from the machinations of House. The relationship between the two men reached a second high point during the summer and fall of 1918—not as warm and intimate as it had been during the months after Ellen Wilson’s death, but close and familiar. Yet during the summer, the two men did not see each other for two and a half months. Wilson telephoned occasionally, but he wrote only three letters—something House complained about in his diary. This neglect did not betoken diminished regard for the colonel’s counsel. Rather, at the middle of August, Wilson—accompanied by Edith and Dr. Grayson—paid a five-day visit to House in Massachusetts to discuss a number of subjects, especially a league of nations.

Earlier in the summer, House had received the Phillimore Report, prepared for the British government by a commission headed by the jurist Sir Walter Phillimore, which recommended an “alliance” for mutual security and arbitration. House had shared the report with the LEP leaders and had got A. Lawrence Lowell to urge Wilson to set up a comparable commission and work with the British on the project. The president had rebuffed Lowell, and on the first day of the meeting with House he told Wiseman, who was present for part of the discussion, that a public statement by him about a league would only invite attacks. “One section of the Senate, led by Lodge, would cry that he had gone [too] far in committing the United States to a Utopian scheme, and, on the other hand, theLeague enthusiasts would attack him for not going far enough,” Wiseman paraphrased Wilson saying.³²

Those discouraging words did not reflect the main line of Wilson’s thinking about the league idea. He had revised a paper prepared earlier by David Hunter Miller, the Inquiry’s legal expert, on a league covenant. His revisions provided for equality of nations, deleted any mention of an international court, and insisted that all parties guarantee each other’s independence and territorial integrity, “subject to the principle of self-determination.” Wilson did not show this revised covenant to Wiseman, but he did tell him that a league “must be virile, a reality, not a paper League,” and that the one sketched in the Phillimore Report “has no teeth.” In their subsequent one-on-one discussion, House could not get Wilson to abandon equality of nations in favor of a great power directorate. They did agree that the league should be part of the peace treaty, and they talked about who should be part of the delegation to the peace conference. Wilson dismissed Roosevelt and Taft out of hand, and he rejected Root as too old and legalistic in his thinking. Lansing would probably have to go, but, as for himself, House wrote in his diary, “I am not certain that I would like to be a delegate, … unless, indeed, the President should not go himself.”³³

The discussion of a league of nations on the first day of the visit was their longest and most important one. On the other days, except Sunday, Wilson spent the morning playing golf with Edith and Grayson and saw House in the afternoon. The colonel mentioned the Inquiry and found out Wilson valued its work on details but probably would not use it that much. They also discussed diplomatic appointments, particularly a possible replacement in London for Walter Page, whose health was failing, and considered how best to use McAdoo, who felt overworked and underappreciated. House privately quizzed Grayson about the president’s health and his capacity to serve another term. Wilson himself joked to House “that his mind was getting ‘leaky,’” and the colonel told Edith that her husband was working too hard and not delegating enough. She answered that “when he delegated to others he found it was not well done.”³⁴

In Washington, Wilson tried to maintain his accustomed routine, including golf games, car rides, and evenings at the theater, yet the workload continued to pile up, with papers, correspondence, and official functions. Except for brief trips to Mount Vernon for a Fourth of July speech and to Philadelphia for a ship launching, the visit to House gave the president his only chance to escape the heat and humidity of summertime Washington. Some observers then and later said that they detected changes in Wilson’s psychology around this time. Brandeis later said he thought Wilson’s bold, independent thinking began to slip in August 1918. Whether these were signs of a deeper problem—stemming from his long-dormant arteriosclerosis—is impossible to tell. Still, it was clear that this sixty-one-year-old man, who was burdened with responsibilities that he seemed loath to share, was not at the peak of his powers.³⁵ That did not bode well for the job of tackling big new challenges.

One task Wilson knew he must tackle was to share his ideas about a postwar world with the public. During the summer of 1918, he did issue press statements on specific subjects, but only in his Fourth of July address at Mount Vernon did he air his larger thinking. There, Wilson declared, “The Past and Present are in deadly grapple.” The war’s settlement must be final and must rest on four principles, which he enumerated:

I. The destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere … [or] its reduction to virtual impotence. II. The settlement of every question … upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned … III. The consent of all nations to be governed … by the same principles of honour and respect that govern individual citizens of all modern states … IV. The establishment of an organization of peace which shall make it certain that the combined power of free nations will … serve to make peace and justice the more secure.

These “great ends” could not come through high-level intrigues, “with their projects for balances of power and of national opportunity,” but must spring from the people, “with their longing hope for justice and social freedom and opportunity.”³⁶ This speech gave a whiff of uplift and again endorsed self-determination, though not by name this time. Otherwise, it marked a retreat into generalities from the Fourteen Points and the four additional points.

Wilson knew he was going to have to do more by way of educating the public. A fine opportunity arose when McAdoo suggested that the president make a trip to the West in September and October as part of a new Liberty Loan campaign. The White House announced a tour to the West Coast and back, but on September 9, Wilson canceled the trip. “I have keenly felt again and again the privation of being confined to the Capital,” he explained, “and prevented from having the sort of direct contact with people … which would be of so much benefit and stimulation to me.”³⁷ But delicate and critical matters did not allow him to leave. He was not exaggerating: he genuinely regretted having to abort this trip. As he had with his speaking tour on behalf of the preparedness program in 1916, he would have had a chance to explain his aims and plans in homely, compelling language. That was his forte as a leader, and a tour at this time could have done him and his programs a lot of good.

In the fall of 1918, he issued more statements to the press, but he gave just two speeches before the end of the war. One was the appeal to the Senate to pass the woman suffrage amendment, which he linked to the war aim of spreading liberty. The other had come three days earlier, on September 27, when he addressed a Liberty Loan gathering, again at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. In that speech, Wilson enlarged upon points he had made in July at Mount Vernon. People’s free choices of governments and equal rights among strong and weak nations must be backed by an instrument to make peace just and lasting: “a League of Nations formed under Covenants that will be efficacious.” He reiterated five of the Fourteen Points—impartial justice, a ban on special interests, a ban on alliances, a ban on economic discrimination, and publicity for all agreements—and he closed by demanding “complete victory,” not on Germany’s slippery “terms” but a “final triumph of justice and fair dealing.”³⁸

Wilson made that ringing avowal because he was getting diplomatic feelers that he knew might lead to an end to the war. The Central Powers were crumbling away at the edges. The Turks were retreating from Palestine and Mesopotamia, while Bulgaria was collapsing and about to sue for peace. On September 15, Austria-Hungary had sent out a vaguely worded public appeal for an informal conference to explore “compromise peace.” Because the United States was not at war with Turkey or Bulgaria, Wilson declined to take part in negotiations with those countries, and he made a quick, terse reply to the Austro-Hungarian appeal, noting that the United States had stated its terms “repeatedly and with entire candor.”³⁹ House, who was not consulted about that reply, thought Wilson should have waited to answer the Austrians and used the occasion to rally the Allies behind liberal peace terms.

Wilson was conducting diplomacy with an eye toward domestic politics. Lodge, Roosevelt, and other Republicans were thundering about “unconditional surrender” and punitive peace terms. At the beginning of October, he told the financier Thomas Lamont that the whole country was growing “intolerant [and] revengeful,” and he worried that the Allied governments, particularly the British, were bent on colonial and commercial aggrandizement. He feared the dangers of a “non-healing peace.” Any other kind of peace would leave nations determined to right perceived wrongs: “Providentially I have been placed in a position at this time to have great power for good or ill. I see you smile, Mr. Lamont, when I use the word ‘providentially.’ I do not mean to indicate that it is necessarily a wise providence that has placed me in this position, but merely that circumstances have done so.”⁴⁰

The falling away of Germany’s allies foreshadowed a peace move from the main adversary itself. On October 6, the country’s newly installed civilian chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, transmitted a public note to Wilson requesting peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points and principles laid down in the September 27 speech. This note sparked the kind of reaction at home that Wilson feared. Various newspapers lambasted the overture as an insincere ploy by the Germans to evade their complete and richly deserved defeat, and a fierce debate erupted on October 7 in the Senate, where Republicans, particularly Lodge, and some Democrats vied with each other in demands for total, crushing victory. The Senate passed a resolution declaring that there be no armistice until the Germans totally disarmed and agreed to pay reparations and indemnities. Despite those reactions and against House’s advice, Wilson sent a prompt reply to the German note in which he asked whether the German government agreed to the Fourteen Points and subsequent principles and would negotiate only “the practical details of their application.” He warned that he could not agree to an armistice until German troops evacuated all invaded territory, and he asked whether the chancellor was “speaking merely for the constituted authorities of the Empire who have so far conducted the war.”⁴¹

Reaction abroad to the German overture was even fiercer than at home. Before Wilson’s reply went out, the three Allied prime ministers—Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy—met as the Supreme War Council at Versailles and drafted harsh, specific terms for an armistice. In a tense meeting at the White House with Jusserand, the French ambassador, Wilson objected to those terms having been elaborated without the United States being consulted. Jusserand countered by saying that the Allied leaders needed to have “a person who knows the President’s thinking and would be in a position to take a real part in debates and decisions.” Jusserand himself believed that Wilson was not inclined to delegate power and did not think an armistice was imminent.⁴² Then, on October 12, the Germans responded by agreeing to Wilson’s reply and expressing their belief that the Allied governments likewise accepted the Fourteen Points; they also told Wilson that they were speaking for their government and their people.

The German reply set off another explosion in the Senate on October 14, and a Democrat, Henry Ashurst of Arizona, went to the White House that afternoon. Ushered into the president’s office, the senator told Wilson that if he failed to express “the American spirit, you are destroyed.” Wilson shot back, “So far as my being destroyed, I am willing if I can serve the country to go into a cellar and read poetry the remainder of my life.” He said he was not making armistices, which must be left to the commanders in the field. Ashurst replied that not demanding unconditional surrender would mean that Wilson would have to read poetry in a cellar “to escape the cyclone of the people’s wrath.” Four days later, Wilson recalled that he told Ashurst, “Senator, it would relieve a great many people of anxiety if they did not start with the assumption that I am a damn fool.”⁴³

He may have anticipated such senatorial bluster. That morning he closeted himself with House, Lansing, Baker, and Daniels to discuss his answer to the latest German note. He wanted to frame a reply that would not lead to any further dickering, and he and his advisers agreed that if the Germans felt beaten, they would accept any terms. But he did not want vengeful terms. “Neither did we desire to have the Allied armies ravage Germany as Germany has ravaged the countries she has invaded,” Wilson wrote after the others had departed. In this note, he left no doubt that Germany must come through the door to peace on bended knee. Only the military commanders could negotiate terms for an armistice, and such terms must maintain Allied military supremacy in the field. Germany’s armed forces must also at once stop such “illegal and inhumane practices” as sinking civilian ships, deporting Belgians to work in war industries, and stripping occupied territories of property and people. Finally, any armistice must “come by the action of the German people themselves.”⁴⁴

House called October 14 “one of the most stirring days of my life.” He was referring not to the discussion of the reply but to what happened that evening. After he had dinner with House and Edith, the president wrote a letter appointing the colonel “my personal representative … to take part as such in the conferences of the Supreme War Council and in any other conferences in which it may be serviceable for him to represent me.” House exulted at having been given “the broadest powers. It puts me in his place in Europe.” They once again arranged a secret code, and as House was leaving, Wilson told him, “I have not given you any instructions because I feel you will know what to do.” This lack of instructions suited House fine. “He knows that our mind runs [parallel], and he knows where they diverge. … He has his weaknesses, his prejudices and his limitations like other men, but all in all, Woodrow Wilson will probably go down in history as the great figure of his time, and I hope, of all time.”⁴⁵ The colonel left at once on a rough crossing of the Atlantic. He kept in touch with the president by wireless, but he took no part in the next round of dealings with the Germans.

On October 20, Wilson received a defensive and somewhat ambiguous response from the Germans. After discussing the next move—first with Lansing, Daniels, Baker, and the army chief of staff, then with the cabinet, and finally with the War Cabinet—he told the Germans that he and the Allies could negotiate only with a government that spoke for its own people: any further dealing with “the military masters and the monarchical autocrats” would require “not peace negotiations, but surrender.” House thought this move was a blunder. He faulted Wilson for not having consulted with the Allies, risking a stiffened German resistance, and losing a golden opportunity to achieve a liberal, nonpunitive peace. The colonel had sent the journalist Ray Stannard Baker to Europe to sound out opinion among liberals and socialists, and those contacts encouraged his view of the prospects of rallying international opinion behind a nonimperialistic settlement and a league of nations. Despite sharing those hopes and aims, Wilson had still decided to take this harsh line.⁴⁶

Two days after he sent that note to Germany, the president turned to domestic politics. On October 25, he issued a statement to the press in which he appealed to voters to elect Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. This appeal had been at least a month in the making, and on October 18, he had shown a draft of it to Vance McCormick and Homer Cummings. According to Cummings, McCormick objected to language that might seem bitter, and Wilson deleted it. In the final, published version of the appeal, he observed that the impending elections were occurring at a critical time. He said he was seeking only “undivided support to the government” and was not impugning Republicans’ patriotism or support for the war. Rather, he feared the impression that a Republican victory would create abroad: “It is well understood there as well as here that the Republican leaders desire not so much to support the President as to control him.” Wilson insisted that he was not appealing for himself or his party: “In ordinary times I would not feel at liberty to make such an appeal to you. But these are not ordinary times.” He begged voters to “sustain me with undivided minds” and not embarrass him at home or abroad. “I submit my difficulties and my hopes to you.”⁴⁷

No single act of Wilson’s as president would spark more criticism at the time and lead to more retrospective repudiation. Of the few people who knew about the appeal in advance, only McCormick expressed doubts about it. Once the appeal went out, members of the cabinet grumbled about not having been consulted, and Franklin Lane commented, “The country thinks that the President lowered himself by his letter.” After the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress two weeks later, the second-guessing swelled into a veritable chorus. McCormick, Gregory, and Daniels all later said they thought this was the biggest mistake Wilson made. Burleson and Gregory also claimed afterward that it inflamed partisan passions and that the Democrats would have won if Wilson had just kept his mouth shut.⁴⁸

Why did such an intelligent man do something so universally derided as an act of folly? Part of the explanation lay in pressure to help the party’s candidates who were up for reelection. Wilson’s aborted speaking tour for the Liberty Loan could have served as a campaign swing and might have obviated the need for this appeal. The night before the appeal went to the press, as Edith later recalled, she tried to talk her husband out of issuing it, but he said it was too late: “I have told them I would do it.” Presumably, he was referring to fellow Democrats, and he did feel an obligation to help them, especially after getting such strong support for his intervention in the primaries. It was unlikely, however, that he felt any last-minute qualms. Lane put his finger on the heart of the matter when he noted on November 1, “[H]e likes the idea of personal-party leadership—Cabinet responsibility is still on his mind.” The appeal came as a logical outgrowth of Wilson’s studies of parliamentary governments and his ideas of making the American system more like them. Those ideas, together with his penchant for taking action, made a move like this well-nigh impossible for him to resist.⁴⁹

Contemporary charges and wise hindsight about the appeal were overworked. Wilson’s action made a bad partisan situation marginally worse, but opposition to him already bordered on and sometimes crossed over into hatred. Roosevelt and Lodge defined the far edge of bitterness, but the normally milder-mannered Taft—who had now reconciled with Roosevelt—likewise assailed Wilson and his works with venom. The party’s national chairman, Will Hays, displayed superb organizational skills and urged Republicans to stress issues that united rather than divided them. Insurgency and progressivism played almost no part in the campaign, even in Wisconsin, where La Follette and his followers were temporarily eclipsed by war frenzy. Not all Republicans jumped aboard the bandwagon. Senator Norris won reelection in Nebraska despite his vote against the declaration of war, but he was an exception. The run of Republicans gleefully joined in cries for all-out war to the finish and harsh treatment of “traitors.”⁵⁰

It would be wrong, however, to read the 1918 election results as a referendum on foreign policy. If the electorate had been as war-mad as many people believed, the opposition party would have scored an even bigger victory. The Republicans picked up thirty-eight seats in the House, to give them a majority of 238 to 193, and twelve seats in the Senate, to give them a two-vote majority. That new Senate majority included La Follette, Norris, and one other war opponent, Asle Gronna of North Dakota, as well as such uneasy supporters of the war as Borah and Hiram Johnson, who had been elected in 1916. The Republicans gained these majorities by further strengthening their traditional dominance in the Northeast and Midwest and by rebounding in the West from a string of losses in the last four elections. Like most midterm contests, this one turned chiefly on domestic and local issues rather than foreign affairs, even though a war was raging.⁵¹

In the regions where the Republicans picked up seats, they played heavily on sectional feelings. East of the Mississippi, they harped once more on resentment at Democratic tax policies as raids by the South and West. In the West, they exploited feelings of being neglected and discriminated against in different ways. Government price controls had fanned discontent among wheat farmers, who believed they should have been getting better prices and saw favoritism in the higher prices allotted to southern cotton growers. Also in the West, as several observers reported, Republicans and conservatives were exploiting anti-radical hysteria to defeat progressive and pro-labor Democrats. Elsewhere, targeting in senatorial elections by the woman suffrage organizations helped defeat one Democrat and one Republican. More generally, high prices, wartime shortages, and myriad inconveniences worked against the president’s party.⁵²

Conversely, Democrats could take solace from upset victories in the Northeast, where Al Smith won the governorship in New York and David Walsh won a Senate seat in Massachusetts, defeating Weeks, who was one of the suffragists’ targets. Both of those winners were Irish Americans, and their victories offered signs of a rising tide of ethnic voting power in their party, a development that owed nothing to Wilson. Most of the races outside the South were close, and the president’s appeal may have contributed to the narrowness of the outcomes, saved some Democrats, and kept the party from suffering a worse defeat. If nothing else, Wilson’s action earned him gratitude among his party followers: he had shown that he was willing to stick out his neck for them and suffer the consequences.

Although it was not a foreign policy referendum, this election did have foreign policy consequences. Republican control of the Senate meant that Lodge—perhaps Wilson’s worst enemy in that chamber—would become both majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. In those capacities, particularly as the committee chairman, he would exert great influence over consideration of any peace treaties or other pacts that might come out of post-war conferences. Lodge and his friend Roosevelt—who now looked like a sure bet to be the party’s next presidential nominee—started at once to flex their newfound foreign policy muscles by crowing that the American people had rejected Wilson’s leadership. “[I]n any free country, except the United States,” Roosevelt told Foreign Secretary Balfour, “the result of the Congressional elections on November 5th would have meant Mr. Wilson’s retirement from office and return to private life. He demanded a vote of confidence. The people voted a want of confidence.”⁵³Still, the Republicans would almost certainly have said the same things if he had not made his appeal.

Roosevelt and Lodge’s public utterances amounted to little more than spiteful after-the-fact campaign talk. What counted for much more were the actions they soon took. Between the election and the end of 1918, they made overtures to foreign leaders. Roosevelt wrote to Lloyd George, Balfour, and Clemenceau, telling them to disregard Wilson and impose a harsh peace on Germany. His party stood, he told Balfour, “for absolute loyalty to France and England in the peace negotiations … to stand with the allies at the Peace Conference and present an undivided front to the world.” Lodge wrote to Balfour in the same vein and warned against making “an almost hopelessly impossible” scheme for a league of nations part of a peace treaty. The senator also visited the British and French embassies to tell the envoys there that their governments should not follow Wilson’s lead in dealing with Germany. These were blatant violations of the principle—albeit more often honored in the breach—that politics should stop at the water’s edge. If the party situation had been reversed, if the Republicans had been in power, particularly if Roosevelt had been president, he and Lodge would have damned such actions as treason. Wisely, the British and French understood that they still had to deal with Wilson and did not respond to those overtures.⁵⁴

For his part, Wilson put a public brave face on the outcome of the election, but in private he was less sanguine. Right afterward, he had an hour-long meeting with Homer Cummings. “He told me frankly that it made his difficulties enormously greater,” Cummings wrote. It would encourage opposition at home to his foreign policies, and he felt hurt that people had rejected his appeal.⁵⁵ Wilson’s parliamentary proclivities notwithstanding, he gave no thought to stepping aside, even though he knew his path of leadership was going to get much rougher. Also, it is worth asking what might have happened in the 1918 elections if the war had ended a week earlier. Would public relief and joy have tipped the scales just enough to retain a Democratic majority, at least in the Senate?

As matters transpired, the Armistice did not come until six days after voters had gone to the polls. It took that long to arrange in part because of another exchange with the Germans but more because of arguments with the Allies. As soon as House reached Paris, on October 27, he moved into negotiations with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and the military commanders. A constant flow of cables kept Wilson informed of their discussions, and he did not like what he was hearing about French unwillingness to accept the Fourteen Points and British caviling at freedom of the seas. “It is my solemn duty to authorize you to say that I cannot consent to take part in the negotiation of a peace which does not include freedom of the seas,” he cabled back on October 30, “because we are pledged to fight not only to do away with Prussian militarism but with militarism everywhere. Neither could I participate in a settlement which did not include a league of nations because peace would be without any guarantee except universal armament which would be intolerable. I hope I shall not be obliged to make this decision public.”⁵⁶

In response to Lloyd George’s and Clemenceau’s objections, House suggested that the president might have to share those differences with Congress. That seemed to have an impact. “Everything is changing for the better since yesterday,” House cabled on October 31, and he asked for a free hand in dealing with these matters.⁵⁷ Taking Wilson’s silence as assent, he busied himself discussing armistices with Austria-Hungary and Turkey and fending off a last-minute push by Pershing for unconditional surrender. The British continued to balk at freedom of the seas, and Wilson cabled House instructing him to tell them that if they could not accept this principle, the United States would build a bigger navy than theirs. Before House received that cable, he met with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando, and other Allied representatives for a conference that formally accepted the Fourteen Points as the basis for making peace. But their resolution stated that freedom of the seas was open to unacceptable interpretations and they would reserve to themselves complete freedom on this subject at the peace conference. In short, the British had not budged. Yet Wilson thought this was half a loaf worth having, and he planned to take up freedom of the seas later, when he had a chance to bring other countries around to his point of view. He did not cable his acceptance, and again House took his silence as assent.

For his part, the colonel was ecstatic at what he took to be the Allies’ acceptance of the American position. He made light of British dissent on freedom of the seas and said he had straightened out the British on the importance of the League of Nations. This resolution, which would later be known as the Pre-Armistice Agreement, had to remain secret until the Germans heard and accepted the specific provisions that the generals were about to impose on them. November 5 was election day in the United States, which meant that this step toward peace could bring no political profit to the president and his party. The negotiations that led to the Pre-Armistice Agreement exposed major differences between Wilson and House. The colonel favored a softer touch in negotiating, in part because of his personality and in part because he was the one on the scene dealing with the Allied leaders face-to-face. The president was more confrontational. The two men were not polar opposites, however. It was House who originally favored pushing for more liberal peace terms and privately suggested to the British that America might outbuild them in the navy even before Wilson raised that as a possible threat. On his side, Wilson cabled House to stress flexibility and trust over freedom of the seas, and he implicitly assured Wiseman that his country had little to fear about the disposition of Germany’s colonies.

Yet their differences went deeper than style and circumstance. House was not only willing to get into the details of the settlement sooner, but he was also steadily becoming more accommodating to the wishes of the Allies. An illustration of how deep those differences were came when House solicited a quick exegesis of the Fourteen Points and their application to the armistice negotiations from Frank Cobb and Walter Lippmann, who were also in Paris. Wilson liked their memorandum but warned that it should be used “as merely illustrative and reserved for [the] peace conference.” The difference in interpreting the Fourteen Points may have spawned what many critics would later identify as the source of a fatal flaw in the peace settlement. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson, despite great admiration for House, described that flaw when he argued that the colonel’s use of Cobb and Lippmann’s memorandum led to a “fundamental misunderstanding”—that is, that the Germans accepted Wilson’s principles as stated, whereas the Allies accepted them as filtered through House’s interpretation.⁵⁸

The end of the fighting came six days after the Pre-Armistice Agreement. German morale sagged as news of negotiations leaked out. Sailors mutinied when the admirals attempted to mount a final attack in the North Sea. Riots and uprisings broke out in a number of cities, and rumors of Bolshevik-incited revolution were rife. The kaiser abdicated on November 9 and fled to exile in the Netherlands. German envoys met in a railway car in a forest near Compiègne with a delegation headed by Foch and, except for two British liaison officers, composed entirely of French representatives. Foch’s terms called for the Germans to disarm completely on land and sea, surrender much of the rolling stock of their railways, and withdraw their forces to the right bank of the Rhine, ceding the Rhineland to immediate Allied occupation. The harshness of those terms and the uncertain governmental situation in Germany delayed final signing until three o’clock in the morning of November 11. Orders went out from the high commands to cease operations at eleven o’clock, thus lending the symbolic litany of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month to what would afterward be called the Armistice.⁵⁹

Wilson got the news in a series of cables from House that began to arrive around midnight Washington time. He and Edith had not gone to bed, and, as she recalled, final confirmation of the end of the hostilities came at three in the morning. “Many persons have asked me what we did,” she later wrote, “and all I can say is, we stood mute—unable to grasp the significance of the words.” The president immediately issued a statement to the press: “A supreme moment of history has come. The eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favour, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of His own justice and mercy.” Wilson did not often invoke the name of God, and he did so now to strike a note of humility and caution. His words stood in stark contrast to the reactions of other leaders. “Autocracy is dead,” House cabled from Paris. “Long live democracy and its immortal leader.” In London, Lloyd George told the House of Commons, “I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars”—thereby giving rise to the phrase “war to end all wars,” which Wilson did not coin, although it would later be widely and mistakenly attributed to him.⁶⁰

Just after noon, the president went to Capitol Hill to address a joint session of Congress. The speech consisted almost entirely of a solemn, half-hour reading of the terms of the Armistice. Despite the drab presentation, when Wilson read the second clause, which mandated evacuation of Alsace and Lorraine, the tension in the House chamber broke and tumultuous applause broke out. He devoted the remainder of the speech to sober reflections on the meaning of victory, urging patience, forbearance, and generosity.⁶¹ This circumspect tone brought him back to where he had begun when he took the country into the war. Passion and its control remained his greatest concern. The unleashing of passions at home, as in anti-German and anti-radical hysteria, race rioting, and bloodthirsty cries for war to the finish, was the worst price that the country paid for fighting this war—worse even than the 126,000 men who died in combat, of wounds, and from disease, making this the third deadliest war in all of American history, despite its being the second shortest. Failure to try to control those passions would stand as Wilson’s greatest failure as a war leader.

The Armistice of November 11 would be his cruelest irony of fate in foreign affairs. It was at once his greatest triumph and his greatest tragedy. Without question, his proclamation of the Fourteen Points and subsequent statements of what he called a “healing peace” shortened the war. A quarter century later, roughly the same coalition of Allies—augmented by a more powerful Russia—would fight under the banner of “unconditional surrender,” which itself would be a reaction against alleged flaws in the ending of this war. Then Germany would hold out against that more crushing coalition—in spite of being led by a genocidal Satan—until totally crushed. The Armistice saved hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and untold physical destruction. For such salvation, Wilson deserved honor and gratitude, but he would seldom get much of either in generations to come.

His achievement with the Armistice would go largely unsung because it contained the elements of its own destruction. From many standpoints, World War I ended too soon. If it had gone on longer, it would have taken on a different character at home and abroad. Domestically, a longer war would have afforded Wilson opportunities to rein in the excesses of repression and reconnect with the public, strengthen his hand politically, and make his case for a liberal peace. He might not have succeeded, but his leadership would look better for his having tried. In mobilization, he and his War Cabinet would have had more time to try different techniques of management, which might have led to more efficient procurement and production. Militarily, if World War I had lasted even a few months longer, it would have begun to resemble World War II. The British and American armies were finally perfecting tank warfare, and the future supreme commander in Europe and president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, was still stateside, training with those tanks. The British were also developing aircraft with longer flying ranges and the capacity to carry heavier payloads of explosives, thus opening possibilities for providing tactical support of ground forces and bombing targets behind the battle lines. Above all, the steady weakening of German forces and the ever-mounting number of doughboys meant that the coming months would have featured a war of movement instead of further deadlock in the trenches. Much of the sweep and dash that would make World War II a more satisfying and more fondly remembered war were in the offing at the end of 1918.

The worst consequences of this foreshortened war lay in diplomacy. Some interpreters would criticize Wilson and his supporters for making a soft peace that allowed Germany to rise again and menace the world a final time. Others would criticize him for abetting a hard peace that left Germans embittered and bent on revenge. Those criticisms would miss the point that Wilson was in the worst possible position to go far in either of those directions. The only chances for a peace that might have reconciled the Germans had come when he offered “peace without victory” at the beginning of 1917 and when he proclaimed the Fourteen Points a year later—both of which they spurned in the nastiest possible way. The only chance for a peace that might have tamed the Germans would have come if the war had gone on longer and resulted in a crushing defeat for them. That outcome would have conferred the added benefit of putting the president in the position he most desired. America would have been in the war longer and demonstrably contributed much more to a bigger victory. The Allies would have been utterly dependent on America and Wilson would have been able to dictate the terms of the settlement. Either of those alternatives might have led to lasting peace. Instead, Wilson was going to have to try to make bricks without straw.