The Illusion of Victory Read online

  “‘Once lead this people into war,’Wilson continued,‘and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be ruthless and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter the very fibre of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street’ . . .

  “He thought the Constitution would not survive it,” Cobb said.“That free speech and the right of assembly would go. He said a nation couldn’t put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it had never been done.

  “‘If there’s any alternative, for God’s sake let’s take it,’ he (Wilson) exclaimed. Well I couldn’t see any, and I told him so,” Cobb concluded.10

  It is a moving scene. But there are grave reasons for doubting that it happened on the night of April 1–2, or any other night. The White House log contains no record of Cobb’s visiting Wilson at 1 A.M. on April 2. A president can sneak people in side doors and avoid the log—but such evasions usually involve secret affairs of state or clandestine national politics.

  There are other reasons for doubting Cobb’s account. The picture of Wilson summoning Cobb from New York—four hours away by train—for this last-minute plea for advice, when the decision for war had already been made, Congress had been summoned and his speech written, is extremely dubious. Although Cobb was an ardent Wilson man and the president often expressed appreciation for his friendship, he was unlikely to confide such potentially explosive thoughts to him—or any other newspaperman. If Wilson went through such a dark night of the soul, the only believable witness would have been Colonel House.

  Loath to lose this heartbreaking image of a tormented chief executive, some Wilson biographers have transferred Cobb’s White House visit back two weeks to mid-March, when Wilson made the decision to go to war, after the cabinet meeting in which the vote was unanimous. But the image of Wilson confiding in Cobb, who did visit him at that time, grows equally dubious when we take a closer look at the story’s timing—and the two men who supplied the third-hand account.11

  The story surfaced in 1924, when both Cobb and Wilson were dead. By that time, Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson were both bitterly disillusioned with the U.S. experience in the war and had written a cynical hit play, What Price Glory, as testimony. Stallings, who lost a leg in combat, had also published an autobiographical novel, Plumes, about a soldier who came back from France “a broken fool,” convinced the war had been “a brutal and vicious dance directed by ghastly men.”12

  A far better explanation for the Stallings-Anderson recollection of Cobb’s recollection (he left no written account) is the mordant fact that almost everything this pseudo-Wilson predicted would happen to the United States when it went to war against Germany transpired. But the real President Wilson was unlikely to have foreseen these developments, for a very simple reason: He had only the dimmest idea of how the United States would fight the war. At the time he spoke to Cobb, the president—and the vast majority of those who called for war—thought the United States would not have to send a single soldier to France.13

  The World had been fiercely anti-German. Cobb and his colleagues had reason to be grateful to Wilson for several leaks of confidential documents that had put the Germans in the worst possible light—and created sensational news beats for the paper. What better way to win historical forgiveness for the president—and repay a debt—than to remember Wilson foresaw that the war would make a mess of the United States, yet he felt compelled to launch the nation into it? This perspective not only won sympathy, but also gave Wilson high marks for courage and realism—two traits his critics found singularly lacking in his complex character.14

  Not to be gainsaid as a final ingredient in this blurry picture is the tradition of faking it—fabricating stories that put across a newspaper’s point of view. In 1898, Joseph Pulitzer and his fabulous clone, William Randolph Hearst, had collaborated to start the Spanish-American War with this technique, which they had refined but by no means invented. Faking it was widespread in nineteenth-century journalism. After the “splendid little war” with Spain ended, Pulitzer ordered his top editors to gather the staff of the World and tell them that henceforth, truthfulness would be the paper’s policy. But faking it was by no means extinct in the minds and hearts of numerous reporters and editors.15

  V

  Presidential secretary Tumulty had arrived at the White House before breakfast to dispatch the final copy of the president’s speech to the public printer. Later in the morning, in spite of the April showers, the restless Wilson and his wife had played eighteen holes of golf, a game at which he did not excel. It once took him twenty-six strokes to complete a single hole. His wife regularly beat him. He played only because Admiral Grayson had told him it was vital to his precarious health.16

  Back in the White House, the tense president told Colonel House he was annoyed to discover there was still no word from Congress. What was taking the legislators so long to get organized? He would put off the speech until tomorrow if he could not give it by 3 P.M. He did not want to look as if he were “unduly pressing matters.” House, by now a past master of soothing Wilson, persuaded the president that he should give the speech whenever Congress said it was ready to hear him.

  After lunch, Wilson read the speech to Colonel House, who told him it was the best thing he had ever written. In his mind (and later in his diary) the colonel smugly took credit for several of the most important ideas. House asked Wilson if he had shown the manuscript to his cabinet. Wilson shook his head and curtly replied that it would have been “picked to pieces.” He had decided to keep it to himself and take all the responsibility. Although House disapproved of Wilson’s tendency to ignore and even to humiliate his cabinet, most of whom had been chosen by the shrewd little Texan, he wisely decided to confine this opinion to his diary.17

  VI

  By this time, Colonel House had become more than Wilson’s closest friend. He was an alter ego whom the president needed and used constantly. A wealthy progressive Democrat who had helped elect two Texas governors, in 1911 House had chosen Wilson as his vehicle to power politics beyond the Lone Star State. He had won Wilson’s friendship with a deft combination of flattery and artful persuasion of key Wilson opponents in the Democratic Party, such as William Jennings Bryan, to back the instant politician from New Jersey.

  House was Wilson’s political self, his bridge to a world that Wilson was too aloof and often too condescending to tolerate. Wilson’s ideal interview with any politician lasted five minutes. House was prepared to spend hours listening, cajoling and listening again. What was House’s reward for this often exhausting process? One of the most delicious sensations in the human emotional repertoire, power—plus the almost equally delicious pleasure of recording in his diary his impact on the history of his time.18

  House’s goals were benevolent; he labored to increase the sum of human happiness and reduce the often appalling toll of human misery. But he had little or no faith in the people’s capacity to make their way toward these goals on their own initiative. His ideal government was portrayed in a novel he wrote a few years before he met Woodrow Wilson: Philip Dru, Administrator. It was the story of a military and political genius who took over a wealthy, disordered, quarrelsome nation and led it into an era of almost superhuman contentment by persuading the people to make him their supreme autocrat.

  Few people were aware that this vision was not very different from Woodrow Wilson’s view of how things worked best politically. In one of his books, Wilson wrote that the “graver questions” of politics, such as the choice between peace and war, could only be decided by “the selected leaders of public opinion and rulers of state policy.” He maintained that in the United States, the leader of public opinion and the most trustworthy architect of state policy was the president.“Congressional government” was a messy, ultimately feckless process, to be avoided at all costs. It was easy to see how in Edward Mandell House’s reveries, Woodrow Wilson became Philip
Dru.19

  VII

  Most Wilson biographers have been reluctant to look hard at the Philip Dru side of Wilson. Nor have many people bothered to read this rather lugubrious novel. A close examination reveals a surprisingly militaristic side to Dru’s approach to political problems. Although the details are submerged in murky generalities, Dru, a graduate of West Point, fights a largescale civil war with the forces of “privilege” before ushering the United States into an era of domestic peace and harmony.

  Wilson’s performance as president revealed a similar readiness to resort to military solutions. During his first term, he sent the U.S. Marines into Haiti and the Dominican Republic to support governments that had few backers outside of the business elite and their American friends. Wilson also used the marines to make Nicaragua a virtual protectorate of the United States. The irony of this policy was not lost on Wilson’s critics. During his campaign for the presidency in 1912, he had denounced the Republicans for a similar use of force—he called it gunboat diplomacy—to keep order in the Caribbean.

  The Dominicans accepted the U.S. military occupation rather passively, but the Haitian invasion turned into a brutal guerrilla war between the marines and the cacos, the island’s semiprofessional soldiers. The death toll for the cacos eventually reached 3,250. One student of these forgotten imbroglios concluded: “In not a few instances, the legacy of American rule was unmitigated hatred of the United States.”20

  Mexico proved even more resistant to Philip Dru–style diplomacy. There a revolution had been sputtering since 1910. More than 75,000 Americans lived and worked in this southern neighbor, running businesses and overseeing the millions of dollars that U.S. banks and corporations had invested in the country. When General Victoriano Huerta overthrew the ineffective reform government of Francisco I. Madero and murdered him, most Americans in Mexico welcomed the soldier as a man who would restore order to the country. Wilson saw the situation differently. Refusing to recognize a “government of butchers,” he went to work on undermining the Huerta regime.

  The Mexicans resented Wilson’s interference in their internal affairs. The president ignored them and announced that he was backing a Huerta rival, Venustiano Carranza, who called himself a Constitutionalist and an heir of Madero. Wilson allowed Carranza to buy arms in the United States, and hinted that he was prepared to help him depose Huerta with several regiments of marines. The president was dismayed to discover that Carranza was no more enthusiastic about U.S. intervention than the Huertistas.

  Still determined to settle things his way, Wilson seized on the arrest of a navy paymaster and his whaleboat crew by a Huerta general at Tampico. Although the sailors were released with an immediate apology, Wilson called the incident an insult to the honor of the United States and told General Huerta he would have to salute the American flag with twenty-one guns by way of apology. The Mexican president declined to do any such thing.

  While Congress debated whether to give Wilson the authority to intervene in Mexico, Wilson learned that a German ship, the Ypiranga, was approaching Vera Cruz with a cargo of weapons for Huerta. To prevent the guns from being unloaded, on April 21, 1914, Wilson ordered the navy to seize the port. The Mexicans resisted, and a day of fighting left 126 Mexicans and 19 Americans dead. Carranza, the man Wilson was backing, denounced the invasion as a gross violation of the rights and dignity of the Mexican people.

  Wilson condemned German meddling in Mexico’s affairs, unaware that the guns were from the Colt automatic arms factory in Hartford, Connecticut, and had been shipped via Germany to escape the U.S. embargo on arms exports to Huerta. The German government had had nothing to do with the shipment. Meanwhile, anti-American riots erupted in South America.21

  By this time, the rest of the world had begun to wonder about Wilson’s judgment. Such blatant interference in the internal affairs of another country was unusual in modern diplomacy. Although he was shaken by the casualties at Vera Cruz, Wilson remained convinced that it was his duty to back the man who represented the forces of democracy in Mexico. The only trouble was, these “democrats” had a bad habit of murdering priests and nuns and an occasional American.

  The U.S. Army and U.S. Navy withdrew from Vera Cruz, leaving behind tons of weapons to arm the Carranzistas, who soon made rapid progress toward Mexico City. General Huerta fled to Spain—but the revolutionaries split into two factions. One was led by the dignified, white-bearded Carranza; the other by his swaggering, rambunctious general, Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Relying on information from the amateur spokesmen whom Wilson persisted in sending into Mexico because he did not trust the U.S. State Department’s personnel, the president decided to back Villa—a decision he soon regretted.

  Before this messy adventure ended, Wilson was forced to send a 6,675 man Punitive Expedition into Mexico to hunt down Villa, who had begun murdering Americans on both sides of the border. All things considered, Wilson’s intervention in Mexico was not a performance worthy of administrator Philip Dru. The real world was considerably more complicated than Colonel House in his fictional daydreams—or Woodrow Wilson in his pursuit of the ideal—imagined.22

  VIII

  In the White House, the day wore on with no word from Congress. The House of Representatives was distracted by a brouhaha within the Republican Party. The Democrats were in the minority. Wilson’s whisker-thin reelection in 1916, decided by a mere 4,000 votes in California, had left the people’s chamber in nominal Republican control, with the swing vote in the hands of eight independents. The GOP nominated Congressman James R. Mann of Chicago for speaker, over the furious objections of some members of his party, because he supposedly favored the German side in the war. In fact, Mann had gotten in trouble for backing Wilson’s call for peace without victory in December 1916. This shift had prompted many newspapers and pro-war Republicans, notably former president Theodore Roosevelt, to denounce him as a tool of the kaiser.

  Thanks to the disunited GOP, the gleeful House Democrats reelected their candidate for speaker, Champ Clark of Missouri, who had held the job since 1911. But the Republicans, trying to salvage something from their intraparty contretemps, called for voice votes on the selection of the other officers of the House—a process that took most of the afternoon.23

  At about half past four, the restless president walked across the street to the ornate State, War and Navy Building and spent some time with Secretary of War Newton Baker. There is a better-than-even chance that they discussed a controversial topic: conscription. Wilson had opposed it publicly in his reelection campaign. Now he was about to endorse it. This reversal seemed to confirm an adage often used by the president’s critics: Anyone who followed Wilson down a political path was almost certain to meet him coming in the opposite direction. Theodore Roosevelt maintained that Wilson had taken contradictory stands on almost every political issue under the sun.

  Next, Wilson joined Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels at a meeting of the navy’s general board. The deeply religious Daniels had found the lurch to war a “Gethsemane,” but he had reluctantly concurred in Wilson’s decision. Cooperation with the British navy was now assumed to be imminent. Rear Admiral William S. Sims had sailed for England on March 31 to work out the details.

  The president also paused to discuss with Secretary of State Robert Lansing some minor changes in the proclamation of war that would be issued after his speech. The secretary, who had been urging Wilson to get into the war on England’s side for a year, expressed concern for the president’s safety on his way to the Capitol. Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory, who happened to be visiting Lansing, earnestly concurred. Wilson dismissed their fears. But the moment the president departed, Lansing called Secretary of War Baker and persuaded him to add a troop of cavalry to Wilson’s usual police and Secret Service escort.24

  Back in the White House, the president learned that the House of Representatives had finally gotten itself organized. Wilson sent word that he would speak at 8:30 P.M. He had dinner with his w
ife, his daughter, Margaret, and Colonel House in the mansion’s private dining room around 6:30. House later recalled that they chatted about “everything excepting the matter at hand.” They all knew how important it was to reduce the stress on the edgy president. In 1906, under the comparatively minor strains of the presidency of Princeton, Wilson had suffered a physical collapse that had left him partially blind in one eye. Doctors had diagnosed hypertension and arteriosclerosis and told him he could never work again. Although a six-month vacation in England had restored him, his health remained a source of concern—one of the reasons why his almost constant companion was Admiral Cary Grayson.25

  IX

  Not all Americans agreed with the course the nation was about to take. Throughout the day in Washington, D.C., hundreds of antiwar protesters roamed the streets, carrying placards and handing out pamphlets against plunging the United States into the European cataclysm—this “Great War,” which had already killed 5 million men. The newspapers called these protesters pacifists, a pejorative term that made them sound as if they were opposed to all wars and were supinely prepared to let aggressive enemies of their country step all over them. In fact, most of them were opposed to entering this war, for reasons they considered extremely persuasive. They were led by idealistic David Starr Jordan, former president of Stanford University. Less than forty-eight hours earlier, Jordan had been battered and bruised by a mob when he addressed an antiwar meeting in Baltimore. But he accepted command of this last-ditch effort for peace.26