Even after his return to Washington, Roosevelt was too weak to resume his duties. His exhaustion from his European trip, combined with the lingering effects of his pneumonia, now supplanted by the Spanish flu, along with the emotional storm over his personal life, was enough to keep him bedridden until the end of the month. By that time, events had so piled up in his absence as to make meaningless all his well-laid plans for the future.
His first move upon his return to the office was to meet with Josephus Daniels, tell him about his agreement with Admiral Plunkett, and repeat his plea to resign his job and join the Navy as a commissioned officer. Daniels was finally willing to grant Roosevelt’s wish, and gave him permission to present his case to Wilson himself.
“I went to see the President,” Roosevelt recalled later, “and the President told me that in his judgment I was too late—that he had received the first suggestion of an armistice from Prince Max of Baden, and that he hoped the war would be over very soon.”
This was a stunning turn of events. Only weeks earlier, Roosevelt had been in Europe talking directly with all the top political and military commanders, and every one of them expected the war to last at least another year. What had brought about this sudden change? It was common knowledge that German troops had suffered some setbacks, but nothing all that serious. The German Army was still fighting on foreign soil, which clearly implied that they were still the aggressor, bringing the fight to their enemies.
But the German General Staff understood what was hidden from the rest of the world—the increased political unrest at home, the shortage of supplies, the serious problems facing the country and its war machine—and they realized that Germany no longer had a chance for victory. It was months before the full story would come out, but when it did, most accounts traced the turnabout in Germany’s fortunes to the evening of September 28, 1918, when General Quartermaster Ludendorff, the de facto dictator of Germany, lost all control of himself in a meeting with his staff. Overcome with nervous exhaustion, he fell to the floor, foaming at the mouth and shouting curses at all those who would betray the fatherland through their cowardice and stupidity.
Later that night, after recovering himself, he met with Paul von Hindenburg, Chief of the General Staff, and told him that in his opinion Germany had lost the war and even a military stalemate was no longer possible. Germany must sue for peace immediately, while the country still retained the appearance of being able to keep fighting. Hindenburg agreed.
Prince Max of Baden, a liberal, was hastily named German chancellor and foreign minister. Within hours, he put together a peace proposal; but, rather than address it to the Allies, as the generals had specified, he addressed it, on October 6, 1918, specifically to the President of the United States. The British and French, Prince Max reasoned, would almost certainly demand crushing terms, while Woodrow Wilson had gone out of his way to make clear he wanted a “peace without victory.”
In his note to the president, the chancellor called for “the immediate conclusion of an armistice on land, water, and in the air” in order “to avoid further bloodshed,” and he accepted “as a basis for the peace negotiations the program set forth by the President … in his message to Congress on January 8, 1918.” Thus were Wilson’s Fourteen Points introduced into the peace process by the losing side.
It was a brilliant strategic move by Prince Max. He knew that Germany must eventually come to terms with the British, French, and Italians who had suffered so much from Germany and would have every reason to seek revenge and compensation for their great losses; but by initiating the proposal with the idealistic Wilson, he could be sure that Germany would at least have the assurance that the Americans would have a leading role in the negotiations.
Wilson was energized by Prince Max’s message and saw it as an opportunity to shape the international world to his own design. His response was to treat it as a private, personal communication, which he initially kept secret from the Allies and even from his own military leaders. Through his secretary of state, he addressed himself directly to the chancellor and sought clarification of terms for an armistice.
A few days later, on October 10, news came of two particularly brutal U-boat torpedoings in which more than eight hundred died, many of them women and children. Wilson was furious and sent off an angry message to the German chancellor. Prince Max, terrified that he might have lost his last chance to give Wilson the decisive role in the armistice negotiations, hastily apologized, and on October 20 announced the end of unrestricted submarine warfare. Three days later, Wilson at last officially disclosed to the Allies what he had been up to.
The Allied leaders had been unofficially aware of what was happening, and by the time Wilson’s personal agent, Colonel Edward House, arrived in France to work directly with the British and French on details of an armistice agreement, he quickly discovered that they had already decided on what they considered appropriate terms for an armistice, and were not going to accept their American colleague’s diplomatic efforts without significant changes. Bickering broke out immediately between the Europeans and the Americans. The main stumbling block was Woodrow Wilson’s determination to make sure that his Fourteen Points would form the basis for the peace and the postwar world to come. Clemenceau would comment that Wilson’s Fourteen Points were being presented to the Allies as if they were Fourteen Commandments, which seemed to him a little excessive, since the Good Lord had made do with ten.
Woodrow Wilson had overplayed his hand, and Franklin Roosevelt, picking up rumors from his office in the Navy Department and from dinner-table gossip in Washington society, watched and learned with a sense of detached interest. Here was a president who, in addition to leading his country, wanted to use his office to lead the world. Here was a man who kept a copy of Kipling’s “If—” on his desk and who was determined to live up to its deceptively simple code. He had demonstrated many times that he trusted himself when all men doubted him. Now it was time to see if he could live up to Kipling’s corollary and “make allowance for their doubting too.” The whole world would soon be asking that question of the cool, self-confident idealist, and none would be assessing him more keenly, or at a closer range, than his assistant secretary of the Navy.
Then on October 25, almost three weeks after the first tentative feelers from Prince Max, Woodrow Wilson chose to release a statement to the American public that was at best foolhardy, and at worst almost criminally inappropriate. It concerned the upcoming congressional election in November. At a time when it was vital to bring the country together, he chose to send a deliberately divisive political message. The elections, he said, “occur in the most critical period our country has ever faced, or is likely to face in our time. 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 yourself unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and House of Representatives … the difficulties and delicacies of our present task are of a sort that makes it imperatively necessary that the nation would give its undivided support to the Government under a unified leadership, and that a Republican Congress would divide the leadership.… The return of a Republican majority to either House of Congress would, moreover, certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.”
The public reaction to the statement was a firestorm of anger. Even those independent voters leaning toward the Democrats were outraged by the clear implication that the Republicans were somehow unpatriotic and untrustworthy. That the man who made this claim had been reelected in 1916 because “he kept us out of the war,” only to lead the country into that very war within weeks of his second inaugural, was seen as brazenly manipulative and duplicitous. Eleven days later, on Election Day, with the armistice still only a vague future possibility, the American public resoundingly voted the Republican Party into control of both houses of Congress. In consequence, as Wilson had predicted, the world leaders now saw him as a seriously weakened head of state. Theodore Roosevelt, who had been angered and at the same time delighted by Wilson’s gaffe, issued a statement that “our allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people at this time,” he stated. “His leadership has just been dramatically repudiated by them.… Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of a right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.”
Franklin Roosevelt continued to watch. And learn.