Wilson spent his Fourth of July as the leading man in a patriotic extravaganza staged by George Creel. Meant to show off the unity of a country whose citizens hailed from every slice of the globe, the day began at the Navy Yard, where the president and first lady welcomed an assortment of diplomats and leaders of ethnic communities aboard the Mayflower for a cruise to Mount Vernon. Once ashore, the honored guests filed past Washington’s tomb, laying wreaths as the Irish-born tenor John McCormack pumped out verse after verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The immigrants’ designated speaker, a Belgian by birth, mentioned that he and his companions hailed from thirty-three nations but were “Americans all.” Behind them, he said, were millions more, “pledging themselves to the cause of this country and of the free nations with which she is joined.” For proof, he said, one had only to acknowledge the variety of names on the casualty lists.
In a speech that contained not a word about immigrants, Wilson spoke of the war as the global equivalent of the American Revolution, and voiced the hope that the United States and its friends in other nations would secure for all peoples what Washington and his compatriots had won for Americans: the right to govern themselves.
The only overpowered and suffering people Wilson mentioned at Mount Vernon were the Russians, who had gone from the miseries of living under Czar Nicholas II to the tyranny of Lenin and Bolshevism. Lenin’s decision to leave the war had thrown the Allies into a panic, and for months they had been begging the United States for troops to be used in two small military interventions in Russia—one in the northwest, near Archangel and Murmansk, the other in Siberia, six thousand miles to the east. At first the Allies aimed to block the Germans’ transfer of troops and matériel to the West, but when Ludendorff’s spring offensives inflicted hundreds of thousands of fresh casualties on French and British forces on the Western Front, Russia grew ever more alluring. Rationales multiplied, hopes waxed fantastical. With a few thousand well-placed troops, the Allies imagined that they could rally the Russian people to rise up against the Bolsheviks, reconstitute the Eastern Front, stave off the kaiser’s subjugation of Russia, and win the world war in the East if it could not be won in the West.
While they were at it, the Allies planned to connect with the so-called Czech Legion, some seventy thousand Czechs and Slovaks who had fought for Russia in hopes of defeating the Austro-Hungarian Empire and establishing a state of their own. On some days the Allies hoped to help the legionnaires move to Russian ports for transfer to the Western Front; on others they wanted to use the legion to keep Russian railways out of German hands. And then there was Japan, a short cruise away from the Siberian port of Vladivostok, where thousands of tons of weapons, munitions, and strategic raw materials were stockpiled. The Allies wanted Japan to handle the Siberian intervention and were willing to allow Japan to reward itself with a swatch of Asiatic Russia.
Wilson and his War Department saw both ventures as distractions from the AEF’s task on the Western Front. He also thoroughly disapproved of the Allies’ willingness to let Japan install itself in Russia. Nor did he buy the Allies’ assertion that the interventions would help the Russian people at a time when they could not help themselves. Chastened by his failed attempts to restore order in revolutionary Mexico, Wilson now believed in letting new governments “work out their own salvation, even though they wallow in anarchy for a while.”
Wilson had resisted the Allies’ Russian pleas for months, but when it became clear that Japan wished to go into Siberia on its own, he found himself in a corner: if he intervened, he would be accused of infringing upon Russian sovereignty, but if he stood by while Japan did as it pleased, all of Asia would be at risk. A few days after the excursion to Mount Vernon, Wilson wrote House that he was “sweating blood over the question of what is right and feasible (possible) to do in Russia. It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch.” He reported himself “very tired, for there never were so many problems per diem, it seems to me, as there are now.” Perhaps to reassure House, perhaps to reassure himself, he added, “I am well. We are well.”
Edith was indeed well. She spent her afternoons at an old Washington railway depot that had been turned into a Red Cross canteen. Troop trains pulled in, and the volunteers dispensed sandwiches and coffee along with good cheer. Edith enjoyed the work except for the wilting summer heat, which rumpled her uniform and left her feeling well below first lady standards. She bore the trial with good humor, and to judge by her own account, was pleased to be of service. Woodrow, still deeply in love, sometimes turned up at the end of her shift to take her home. He seemed especially pleased when there were troops on hand. As Edith remembered it, he was always glad to see them, and numerous photographs and firsthand accounts bear her out.
Such pleasures were fleeting. By the middle of July, after the Japanese ambassador promised the United States that his government would not compromise Russia’s territorial integrity or interfere in her politics, Wilson offered the Allies a few thousand American soldiers, but not for a military intervention. U.S. troops would guard military stores, help the Czech Legion to the Western Front, and render whatever aid the Russians found acceptable as they organized their defenses against the Germans. He reserved the right to withdraw the troops, and he held out the possibility of a venture more to his liking, an American mission to Siberia.
Wilson’s decision simultaneously pleased the Allies and affirmed his independence from them, but it won him no applause. Americans inspired by Wilson’s vision of a world free of Great Power aggression were particularly disappointed. To Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation, Wilson’s one foot in, one foot out approach seemed the height of hypocrisy: “The president has assured us that it is to be only a little intervention, and we are to forgive it or approve it on grounds of its littleness.”
• • •
However justifiable the interventions might have been in the bleak days after Russia’s exit from the war, they were irrelevant by the time Wilson acted. On the very day that he made his offer to the Allies, General Ludendorff concluded that Germany could not win the war on the Western Front. All of the general’s gains in the spring had been achieved by surprise, but on July 15, when he attacked Reims, the surprise was on him. German soldiers captured by the French had given away his plans, and the French and the Americans were ready for him. Called off on July 17, the advance on Reims would be the Germans’ last.
Ludendorff clung to the hope that God would not desert the German army but thought it prudent to inform the kaiser that the army was finished. Wilhelm, profoundly upset, began referring to himself as a defeated warlord and asking his retainers to treat him gently. That night, unable to sleep, he lay awake in the grip of a humiliating vision of himself reviewing an endless parade of royal cousins, ministers, and generals, all taunting him as they marched past. Ludendorff was no less distraught. One of his officers proposed a retreat to the Hindenburg Line, a chain of well-fortified positions that stretched on for a hundred miles. The southern tip of the line was only thirty miles from Reims, but Ludendorff seemed paralyzed, and his troops were deserting and surrendering by the thousands. On August 8, a 75,000-man British force broke the German line near Amiens. The Germans started the day with 37,000 men and ended with 10,000. Nearly half the men lost had handed themselves over to the enemy.
Ludendorff would remember August 8 as “the black day of the German army.” The British would immortalize it as the start of the Hundred Days Offensive, the drive that ended the war. By relentless, tightly coordinated fire from planes, tanks, and infantry, the British at Amiens had overwhelmed the German defenses. It was a new way of waging war, and the exhausted Germans never adjusted to it. It also marked the end of trench warfare. From Amiens till the end, the fighting would be done on the move, with the Germans in retreat and the Allies and the AEF at their heels.
Ludendorff raged, and the object of his rage was the German people, who were turning against the war in large numbers. A psychologist advised him to get more sleep and to sing German folk songs when he rose each morning. On August 13, Ludendorff and the rest of the High Command, along with the chancellor and the foreign secretary, appeared before the kaiser at the German General Headquarters at Spa. The foreign secretary, Paul von Hintze, was given permission to begin a confidential exploration of peace with the head of a neutral state, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, as intermediary. Emperor Charles I of Austria and his foreign minister reached Spa the next day and disclosed their desire to ask the enemy for peace. The Germans urged them to wait, believing that the Central Powers would have more bargaining power if they put up a stiff fight. Hintze was given the unpleasant task of returning to Berlin and assuring party leaders that there was no reason to doubt the army’s final triumph. “We shall be vanquished only when we doubt that we shall win,” he said.
• • •
While the Germans and Austrians parleyed at Spa, the president of the United States was on his way to the seaside town of Magnolia, Massachusetts, where he and Colonel House discussed the eventual peace conference. Wilson planned to attend as head of an American commission that he would appoint, but he was not ready to decide who would go with him. House told him (not for the first time) that he would have to appoint at least one Republican and supposed that the country would expect it to be Taft, Roosevelt, or Root. Wilson summarily rejected all three.
The two friends also had a troubling conversation about Wilson’s great dream for the postwar world, a league of nations. At the president’s request, the colonel had drafted a covenant for the league, Wilson had edited it, and they now felt that they had a substantive plan, which Wilson wanted to keep under lock and key until the peace conference. Both the colonel and the president hoped that the covenant would be written into the peace treaty, but they differed sharply on a crucial point. Like many Republicans and most European leaders willing to entertain the idea of an international peacekeeping league, House believed that the world’s major powers would not join a league in which every nation had an equal say in matters of war and peace. The difficulty, House said, was that the world had fifty-odd nations, but only a dozen were capable of contributing large numbers of troops and substantial financing in the event of another world war. And whenever a major issue came to a vote, the forty-odd small nations could easily thwart the wishes of the big ones.
The problem had been publicly pointed out numerous times by Roosevelt, Taft, and others, but from House’s account it appears that Wilson had never before taken it seriously. At first he dissented (“quite warmly,” according to House), saying that such a view contradicted his highly public advocacy for a world order based on the equality of all nations. After seeing the colonel’s point, Wilson wondered if it might be possible to reach equality in a gradual way, forming a league of big nations first and expanding it later. House acquiesced, betting that his view, not Wilson’s, would be sustained by the Great Powers at the peace conference.
The conversation did not speak well of either man. Wilson clearly understood that Republicans would raise objections to U.S. participation in a league of nations, yet he was unwilling to take up the problems with them, and House was all too willing to let the Allies curb Wilson’s lofty ambitions.
• • •
House’s diary entries for their days together at Magnolia are strangely silent on the forthcoming congressional elections. At a meeting of party leaders in June, the Democrats had decided to campaign on the idea that it would be unpatriotic to vote against the president and his party during a war. From “He Kept Us Out of War” the party had moved on to “Win the War with Wilson” and “Stand by the President.” The AEF’s victories at the Marne, suggested that Wilson would indeed win the war and that it would be foolhardy to desert him.
The Republicans immediately took note. In a July 3 fundraising letter, they pointed out that the president’s war legislation had received more support from the GOP than from his own party. They also predicted that the next session of Congress would have to manage the economic transition from war to peace. The nation’s prosperity would hinge on the decisions made by Congress, the letter said, and unless “Republican principles” were adopted, the country was likely to tumble into a recession. The principles they had in mind were a return to the days of high tariffs, minimal regulation of business, and no income tax.
Wilson had gone to Congress in May to ask for tax increases to meet the soaring cost of the war and to make a case for passing them sooner rather than later. He left the details to Congress but suggested that the government’s need could be met with higher taxes on war profits, high incomes, and luxuries. Aware that voters were inclined to punish congressmen and senators who raised taxes on the eve of an election, Wilson appealed to their patriotism. “These are days when duty stands stark and naked and even with closed eyes we know it is there,” he said. The United States was not only in the middle of a war, it was at the peak of it. “There can be no pause or intermission,” he said. The duty of the hour was plain, and it must be met without selfishness or fear. “Politics is adjourned.”
Spokesmen for the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee promised that Congress would do its duty, but it did not. The House did not approve a tax bill until September, and the Senate’s objections to it would delay final passage until three months after the election.
Lodge stayed on the sidelines until late August, when he was elected minority leader of the Senate. The Senate was about to approve a bill authorizing another military draft, and Lodge used the occasion to make a speech that began with an endorsement of the bill and moved on to questions of war and peace. Ever since Wilson’s “peace without victory” speech of January 1917, Lodge had worried that the president would make a premature and overly generous peace. Now that the Germans were losing, the United States would have to decide what it meant by peace, Lodge said. It was insufficient to say that it wanted a just and righteous peace; on that point Americans were agreed. “But what is a just and righteous peace? What are the conditions that would make it so? What is the irreducible minimum? We intend to make the world safe for democracy. But what exactly do we mean by democracy?” The United States and the Allies were fighting for security, independence, self-government, the sanctity of treaties, and general disarmament, but exactly how were these demands to be satisfied? “Broadly speaking,” Lodge said, “there is only one way . . . and that is by reducing Germany to a condition where by no possibility can she precipitate another war for universal conquest.”
Lodge’s list of essentials began with territorial adjustments similar to those in the Fourteen Points, but he omitted the president’s calls for a league of nations, free trade, and freedom of the seas. He also made demands that Wilson had not: financial reparations and a dictated peace rather than a negotiated one. “When Germany is beaten to her knees and the world is made safe by the arrangements which I have suggested, then, and not before, we shall have the just and righteous peace for which we fight.”
Wilson undoubtedly found the speech distasteful, but he did not reply. And at that point, after more than a year of “Kill the Hun” propaganda from George Creel’s office, the American public was feeling no more merciful than Henry Cabot Lodge.
• • •
A day after Lodge delivered his peace program, The New York Times reported a rumor that if the Republicans got behind the idea of a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, he would support the measure. Many of his party’s progressives, including his friend Roosevelt, believed that supporting the amendment would help them win votes in November.
Wilson had reached the same conclusion. Early in 1918, after years of favoring a state-by-state approach to women’s suffrage, he decided to join the drive for an amendment. Wilson described his change of heart as a “conversion” and said it had come to him “with an overwhelming command.” But his timing suggests that the command was less spiritual than political. He declared himself on the eve of a House vote on a resolution endorsing the constitutional amendment that Susan B. Anthony had drawn up forty-three years before: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
On January 9, after conferring with the House suffrage committee, Wilson urged that the resolution be passed “as an act of right and justice to the women of the country and of the world.” The resolution needed 274 votes to pass, and the vote was 274 to 136, the necessary two-thirds majority but without one vote more than necessary. The slim victory in the House lengthened the odds against it in the Senate, and the Democratic senator in charge of the resolution, Andrieus A. Jones of New Mexico, decided not to bring it to the floor until he had the votes. Five months later, when his polling showed that he was close, Wilson began pleading with the undecided as well as the frankly opposed. The American people wanted a suffrage amendment, he said, and if the Democratic-controlled Senate did not give it to them, the people might elect a Republican Congress.
When Jones introduced the suffrage resolution on Thursday, September 26, it set off a five-hour debate that showed the Senate at its least edifying. Duncan U. Fletcher, a Florida Democrat, opined that a constitutional amendment on suffrage would do violence to states’ rights. John Sharp Williams of Mississippi wanted the word “white” inserted before “citizens,” a change that Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia endorsed with more passion than logic. The Negro vote had caused no end of problems in the South, Hardwick said, and giving the vote to Negro women was bound to make things worse. “I predict that after this war the Negro question in this country is going to be one of the most difficult ones. You will have colored soldiers coming home from France, where they have been fighting and you will want them to vote. . . . It is in the hysteria of war that this suffrage amendment has been forced upon us. In other times it would be quickly voted down. Now men are afraid to do it.”
McAdoo telephoned the White House to urge Wilson to go before the Senate and make one last appeal. When Wilson said that the Senate would resent his interference, McAdoo countered that the United States was fighting a war for democracy but denying a fundamental democratic right to women. He also argued that whatever the Senate’s vote, Wilson’s address would make a powerful impression on the American people, who might be moved to elect enough pro-amendment senators to ensure its swift passage in the next session. At five o’clock that afternoon Edith let McAdoo know that Woodrow was writing the speech.
Wilson spoke at one o’clock the next day, September 30. Clearly peeved, he said he had assumed that the Senate would consent to putting a suffrage amendment before the country because no disputable principle was involved. Both parties were pledged to equal suffrage, and the war had rendered the state-by-state method obsolete. If the United States wished to lead the peoples of the world to democracy, it had to behave accordingly. If it did not, he said, the rest of the world “will cease to believe in us.” Enfranchising women as soon as possible was both a necessity and a matter of simple justice, Wilson said. “We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”
On Tuesday, October 1, the resolution was defeated by two votes. “No Vote Changed by Wilson’s Plea,” The Atlanta Constitution gloated. Republicans gloated, too; of the thirty-one votes against the amendment, Republicans had cast only ten. The congressional elections were only a month away, and the vote gave Republicans fresh evidence for their argument that they were the party who stood by the president on every wartime legislative measure he considered important.
A delegation of suffragists from all forty-eight states called at the White House two days after the speech to thank Wilson for all he had done. Still angry with his opponents in the Senate, he told his visitors that some men refused to learn. “I have to restrain myself from intellectual contempt,” he said. “That is a sin, I am afraid, and being a good Presbyterian, I am trying to refrain from it.” He explained that his conversion to their cause had come from “listening to the heart of the world.” In the flood of pleas coming to him from abroad, he said, he felt an undercurrent of democratic longing, “a great voice” that would be dangerous to ignore. Inspired by that voice, Wilson would come to care less and less about the voice of the Senate.
• • •
The illiberal wing of the Democratic Party pained the president, and with world opinion moving in a liberal direction, he thought that Americans would have to form a new political party in order to keep up. But in at least one matter, race, Wilson himself was still ignoring the most progressive opinion of the day. Although he had not authorized the segregation of the civil service that began at the outset of his presidency, he had let it stand. In 1915 he outraged liberal opinion with a White House screening of the virulently racist Birth of a Nation. No explanation or apology followed, although he privately told Tumulty that he considered the film “very unfortunate.”
When the United States entered the war, many black spokesmen exhorted their young followers to join up and do their utmost. As W. E. B. Du Bois of the NAACP put it, “If this is OUR country, then this is OUR war.” Another NAACP official, James Weldon Johnson, framed his counsel as a prediction: the black soldier would do his duty to his country “not stupidly, not led by any silly sentiment, not blindly, but with his eyes wide open.” And then he would demand that his country do its duty by him.
The 370,000 blacks who served in the AEF were treated no better than black civilians. The Army had long practiced segregation, and Secretary Baker decided not to take on the task of arbitrating “the so-called race question.” Blacks and whites served in the same division, but black troops were assigned to black battalions and housed in segregated quarters. And although black soldiers had served in combat since the Civil War, the army’s initial plans for the world war envisioned blacks as stevedores and laborers. Pressed by the NAACP, the War Department created a camp to train black officers and approved the creation of two black divisions, both of which fought in France.
In the violent summer of 1917, a summer filled with lynchings and riots, a clash between black soldiers and police in Houston left four soldiers and twelve civilians dead. In the rush to placate white Southern opinion, the army court-martialed and hanged thirteen of the soldiers arrested in the rioting. Their cases did not reach Washington for review by the army’s judge advocate general until three months after the soldiers had been executed. African Americans across the country were outraged. The army’s provost marshal decreed that no more death sentences would be carried out without presidential review and approval. Of the sixteen additional death sentences meted out to black troops, Wilson let six stand and commuted ten to life imprisonment, explaining that he saw no compelling evidence of their involvement in the civilian deaths. The ten joined fifty-three other black soldiers who had been sent to prison for life after the Houston riot.
Black citizens had little reason to support the Democratic Party in the midterm elections of 1918. Most still lived in the South, where their efforts to vote were routinely obstructed by white supremacists, but between 1910 and 1918, hundreds of thousands of blacks had moved to the North and the West in search of better jobs and, they hoped, less racial prejudice. A report prepared by two black clergymen at Tumulty’s request claimed that there were now 600,000 black voters outside the South and estimated that they could be the deciding factor in at least ten of the congressional contests of 1918.
In July, Wilson issued a public denunciation of lynching, a step no previous president had been bold enough to take. But he seemed to understand that he had failed the black citizens of the United States. When Creel asked him to receive a group of black editors meeting in Washington, he declined, saying that whenever he met such delegations, they went away dissatisfied. On October 1, possibly at the urging of the Democratic campaign committee, he did see a delegation from the National Race Congress of the United States of America in a meeting that was brief and carefully choreographed. The delegates had a long list of concerns for him to consider, but the concerns were not to be part of the discussion. They were put on paper and left with his office. The group’s spokesman was assigned the role of paying a few compliments and asking the president to raise his voice against “un-American, undemocratic” practices.
Wilson asked them to temper their expectations. “We all have to be patient with one another,” he said. “Human nature doesn’t make giant strides in a single generation. . . . I have a very modest estimate of my own power to hasten the process, but you may be sure that everything I can do will be accomplished.” In theory he could have abolished segregation in the civil service with an executive order, but every Southern Democrat in Congress would have turned against him. Had he been willing to weather a smaller storm, he could have found an occasion, perhaps in a speech or one of his State of the Union addresses, to connect black yearnings for political equality with the democratic yearnings he sensed in the rest of the world. He had drawn the parallel when he asked the Senate to support the women’s suffrage amendment, but he never made the same argument on behalf of black America.
• • •
On September 14, after an unbroken and seemingly unbreakable string of victories by the American and Allied armies, the Austrian government sent all the belligerents a request for a preliminary discussion of peace. The cable arrived in Washington at 6:20 p.m. on September 16, and Lansing dispatched Wilson’s rejection twenty-five minutes later. The United States had repeatedly stated its terms for peace, Wilson said, and saw no point in meeting to discuss other proposals. Paris and London also said no.
Wilson had enunciated the American terms on four occasions in 1918. In January he presented his Fourteen Points. In April he said that Germany’s insistence on ending the war by force compelled the United States to fight back with “Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit.” On the Fourth of July he called for the destruction of every militarily aggressive autocracy, an international association to maintain peace, and government with the consent of the governed.
At the end of September he covered the ground once more. To help McAdoo get the fourth Liberty Loan off to a good start, he agreed to speak at the Metropolitan Opera House, but with his first sentence—“I am not here to promote the loan”—he gave himself leave to take up the large questions raised by the war. Were the militarists to be allowed to go on determining the fortunes of peoples they had no right to rule? Were strong nations to be free to wrong weak ones? Would the peace of the world be left to chance and shifting alliances rather than to a permanent community of nations pledged to protect common rights? The war had forced these issues upon the world, he said, and they must be settled for all time “with a full and unequivocal acceptance of the principle that the interest of the weakest is as sacred as the interest of the strongest.” There could be no bargain with the governments of the Central Powers. “They observe no covenants, accept no principle but force and their own interest,” he said. “We cannot ‘come to terms’ with them. They have made it impossible.” Wilson reiterated several of his Fourteen Points, affirming his desire to replace the outsized sway of a handful of Great Powers with a world order in which all nations were equal. What the world required, he said, was a peace that secured all peoples and made another global war impossible.
The audience cheered Wilson’s rebukes of Germany but showed no reaction to his insistence on impartial justice for all. It seemed to House that most of Wilson’s speech at the opera house went over the heads of the crowd, and the New-York Tribune sensed a fair amount of “mist” in the president’s message. But Wilson had an uncharacteristically exuberant reaction to his performance. He was, House wrote, “flushed with excitement and altogether pleased with the day’s effort.”
September 27 had in fact been a memorable day. The Allies had accepted their first surrender, from the government of Bulgaria, and the AEF had just recaptured one hundred square miles of territory for France in the Meuse-Argonne. The drive against the Germans’ last lines of defense had begun. The drive was only a few days old when Ludendorff informed the chief of the German General Staff, Paul von Hindenburg, that the army could not go on. On Sunday, September 29, the two of them met with Wilhelm and Hintze at Spa and demanded an immediate armistice. The kaiser took the news quietly, but Hintze, who had told the German people to expect victory, feared that a sudden announcement of defeat might topple the government. He persuaded the kaiser and the generals to arrange an immediate, orderly transition of power. On Monday, Chancellor Georg von Hertling resigned, and the kaiser announced that the German people would henceforth have a larger say in the national government. On Tuesday, Prince Maximilian von Baden, a liberal, disliked by the military caste, replaced Hertling. On Wednesday, the Reichstag was told that Germany could not win the war. On Thursday, Max dispatched a peace note to Wilson. Asking for an immediate armistice, he vowed that Germany was willing to negotiate on the basis of the Fourteen Points and the president’s subsequent peace addresses. Austria immediately followed Germany’s lead.
Max sent his proposal on October 3, and by the time it reached Wilson, on October 6, the gist of it had appeared in the newspapers. As Wilson pondered his reply, senators of both parties were damning the German request as abhorrent, unthinkable, and preposterous.
Lloyd George and Clemenceau, together at a Supreme War Council meeting when Max’s note came to light, waited anxiously for word of Wilson’s intentions. House suggested that Wilson consult them, but Wilson was determined to proceed on his own. He decided that however long the correspondence went on, the American side of it would hew to one principle: “If the Germans are beaten, they will accept any terms; and if they are not beaten, we don’t want them to accept any terms.” On October 8, Wilson notified Berlin that he could not recommend an armistice to the Allies unless the Central Powers immediately agreed to withdraw their forces from the invaded territories.
Before Berlin made its next move, Wilson learned that his note had displeased the Allies. The armistice they had in mind would require more than withdrawals, and its terms would be devised by Allied military experts, not by the president of the United States. Within hours, Wilson was assuring Ambassador Jusserand that he had no intention of making a proposal for an armistice but made it clear that the United States, after sending an army of two million men to France, must be part of the armistice discussion.
As the notes were being exchanged, Wilson also held talks with Sir William Wiseman and Sir Eric Geddes, a member of the war cabinet who happened to be in Washington. Geddes wrote London that Wilson was cordial and committed to the war but “outstandingly fearful” that the military advisors would draw up an armistice too humiliating for Germany to accept. What he wanted, he said, was for the Allies and Associates “to end this war as finely as we began and show the world that we are the better fellow.”
• • •
The president and first lady spent Columbus Day in New York, where he marched in a Liberty Loan parade. Afterward, as they dined at the Waldorf with Colonel and Mrs. House, Tumulty came in with a message from Military Intelligence: the Germans had accepted the president’s terms. All three men wondered if the message was correct. During the evening, Tumulty confirmed the report with the State Department and The Washington Post, but they had no additional information and there was still no official text. The next day, a Sunday, the Wilsons returned to Washington, taking House with them. On Monday morning, when the president finally received the official text, he saw that Military Intelligence had picked up only half the message. The Germans had indeed affirmed their acceptance of the American terms. But they had also asked Wilson to form a commission with representatives from both sides for a discussion of the withdrawals. “I never saw him more disturbed,” House told his diary. “. . . It reminded him, he said, of a maze. If one went in at the right entrance, he reached the center, but if one took the wrong turning, it was necessary to go out again and do it over.”
Five hundred passengers on an Irish ship had just lost their lives in a U-boat attack, and House suggested a demand for a cessation of all atrocities. With that useful idea in hand, Wilson quickly found his way through the maze. He and House collaborated on a draft, they summoned Lansing, Baker, and Daniels to review it, and then off it went. Wilson told the Germans that the terms of the armistice would be set by the American and Allied military advisors, who would insist on maintaining the present military supremacy of their armies. The United States would not consider an armistice if Germany continued to sink passenger ships or kept up its wanton destruction as it retreated from Belgium and France. On all of these points, he said, he was confident that the Allies would agree with him. In parting he directed the Germans’ attention to his earlier call for the defeat of “every arbitrary power anywhere.”
As House and Wilson were writing the note to the Germans, Wilson decided that the colonel should leave for Europe at once to serve as his representative to the Supreme War Council and elsewhere. When House left for his train, Wilson said he had not given him any instructions, because he believed that the colonel would know what to do for him. In his diary, House reveled in Wilson’s trust: “The president certainly gives me the broadest powers. It virtually puts me in his place in Europe.”
House was at sea when Wilson received the next note from Berlin. The Germans, having nothing else to propose, protested Wilson’s lecture on their inhumanity and assured the world that their new government represented the people. On October 23 Wilson replied that he was forwarding the U.S. and German correspondence to the Allies. But, he added, “it does not appear that the heart of the present difficulty has been reached.” The German people still had no means of controlling their military, and if the United States should have to deal with the previous regime, it would feel obliged to demand “not peace negotiations but surrender.”
Throughout the exchange of notes, Wilson took a firm stand with the Germans, but Republicans told voters that he was on the wrong track. Roosevelt, speaking at a Liberty Loan rally, insisted that the United States had no business discussing peace with anyone but the Allies. He would end the war by fighting, not writing, he said, and the end he wanted was unconditional surrender. Roosevelt stayed on the attack even after Wilson left the armistice to the generals.
• • •
For some time Wilson had been considering the possibility of asking the country to vote Democratic in the congressional elections, which were now only ten days away. Edith was not keen on the idea, fearing that it would simply expose his pique with his Republican critics. But in October, as the Democrats’ electoral prospects flagged and the Republican criticism of Wilson’s leadership grew more vitriolic, he could not resist drafting the appeal he had in mind. He shared it with two trusted members of the Democratic campaign committee on October 20. Both advised him to soften his tone, but neither questioned the wisdom of making such a plea.
A few days later, after dinner with Edith, Woodrow went to his study to type out the final version. Edith came in just as he finished, and he read it aloud. “My Fellow Countrymen,” he began. “The congressional elections are at hand. . . . If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you will express yourselves unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.” A Republican Congress would divide the leadership, he said. “The leaders of the minority in the present Congress have unquestionably been pro-war, but they have been anti-administration. . . . In ordinary times divided counsels can be endured without permanent hurt to the country. But these are not ordinary times.”
“I would not send it out,” Edith said. “It is not a dignified thing to do.” Woodrow said he had to go forward, because he had promised “them” (presumably the Democratic campaign committee) that he would.
Wilson’s appeal for a Democratic Congress was the dumbest, most damaging political blunder he had ever made. It freed the Republicans to tear him to pieces, and they set to work before the day was out. Their leaders in the House and the Senate pointed out that President Wilson was willing to let Republicans buy Liberty bonds, pay higher taxes, and die for their country but unwilling to let them have a hand in governing the country. Who was Woodrow Wilson to say that this was no time for divided counsels? Roosevelt asked his fellow Americans. The Constitution required the president to work with Congress no matter which party had the majority. Heading into the last week of the campaign, the GOP chairman issued his own appeal to the country: “Mr. Wilson forces the Republican Party to lie down or fight. I say fight! Answer with your votes!”
On November 5, the president lost his majorities in both houses of Congress. In a letter written just after the election, Lodge told an English friend that “the feeling that beat him, which was apparent from one end of the country to the other, was that the people did not mean to have a dictatorship.” Few American elections have had more momentous consequences than the congressional elections of 1918. Faced with a Republican Congress for the first time, Wilson would fail at virtually everything he hoped to accomplish during his last two years in office.
“For the political disaster which overtook his party on Election Day Mr. Wilson has only himself to blame,” The Nation declared. “Deep chagrin and humiliation should be his, for the blow to liberalism is grave indeed.” In his desperation to prevent a resurgence of reactionaries and isolationists, Wilson had actually brought it into being. The source of the trouble was Wilson himself, The Nation said. For six long years, he had “imposed his will upon his party and upon Congress as no president has ever imposed it before. The congressional cloak-rooms might murmur and rebel as they pleased, but prior to the war they were powerless before his prestige, his political skill, and his superior ability.” Once the United States was at war, he sought and acquired even more power, and it exacerbated his antipathies, his stubbornness, and his desire to act alone.
