Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (27 page)

W
ILSON, AFTER RETURNING
to Paris, got his League incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles, signed in that suburb of the French capital in June 1919. The compromises the president made to win the support of Britain, France, and Italy for the League disconcerted some Americans, who wondered what had happened to self-determination and other principles Wilson had championed before and during the war. The charter of the League, in particular the war-triggering clauses of article 10, which pledged the United States to defend the sovereignty and security of fellow League members, by military force if necessary, disturbed many others, who feared that America’s independence would thereby be infringed. But Wilson was proud of his handiwork, and he brought the treaty home and personally delivered it to the Senate in July. Lodge met him at the door of the upper chamber and asked if he could carry the document inside. Wilson clutched it tightly, glared at Lodge, and said, “Not on your life.”

The treaty might have provoked a searching debate over the role of the United States in world affairs. For brief moments it did elicit serious discussion. But it became so entangled in the partisan wrangling of Republicans and Democrats, and so enmeshed in the private animosity of Wilson and Lodge, that the larger issues often faded from view. Lodge insisted on reading all eighty thousand words of the treaty aloud, with stentorian slowness, reckoning that American interest in Europe would diminish the farther the war slipped into the past. The greater part of a year already separated the armistice from the present; Lodge could reasonably expect to delay a final vote on the treaty till the peace had lasted longer than the war itself—at least the part of the war Americans participated in. It wasn’t inconceivable that the elections of 1920 would be fought over Wilson’s precious League. Lodge certainly hoped so. The foreign relations chairman scheduled hearings; everyone, it seemed, with an interest or an opinion was invited to testify.

Wilson endured Lodge’s siege for two months before mounting a counteroffensive. The Republicans controlled Congress, but the president might appeal to the American people. In 1919 radio remained a wireless substitute for telegraphy; it had yet to become a broadcast medium. Consequently, for Wilson to reach the American people required that he travel to where they lived. He left Washington in September, intending to circle the country by train. He started preaching the League gospel in Ohio, then continued across Indiana to Missouri. He warned of the day of judgment should the Senate reject the treaty and the League. “There will come some time,” he said in St. Louis, “in the vengeful Providence of God, another struggle in which not a few hundred thousand fine men from America will have to die, but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish the final freedom of the world.” He spoke in Montana and Idaho and Washington and drew crowds at every stop. A reporter traveling with Wilson thought the tour was going quite well for the president. “It seems a safe assertion that the ten states through which he has passed believe with him that the Treaty of Peace should be ratified without delay,” the newsman wrote, “and that they are willing to have the United States enter a League of Nations.”

Wilson swung south into Oregon and California, and then east to Colorado. At Pueblo, he gave the speech of his life. “There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace,” he said. “We have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.”

He might have won the country to his cause. But on the threshold of victory, Wilson fell silent. The Pueblo speech, after weeks on the road, wore him out. He suffered from chronic hypertension, and the stress of the tour triggered what seems to have been a minor stroke. His doctor, traveling with him, had feared such an attack, and he immediately canceled the rest of the tour. The president’s train sped east to Washington, where Wilson summoned the strength to walk through Union Station and smile at the supporters who greeted him there. But a major stroke felled him at the White House. “He looked as if he were dead,” the White House usher recalled. “There was not a sign of life.”

For weeks he lay in a sickroom, shielded from the outside world by his wife, his doctor, and his secretary, who together conspired to conceal the extent of his disability. The administration drifted rudderless; not even Wilson’s cabinet secretaries knew his true condition.

T
HE ASSISTANT SECRETARIES
knew even less. Having decided, before Wilson told him of the impending armistice, to leave the Navy Department, Roosevelt had difficulty summoning enthusiasm for his old job, which grew dreary in the aftermath of the war. “Things have been so quiet here as to be almost terrifying,” he wrote Josephus Daniels in April 1919. “Literally nothing has happened outside of the routine work.” The routine was painful when it wasn’t boring. Roosevelt battled with bureau chiefs over the disposition of a shrinking budget, chose which thousands of workers to lay off from navy yards, determined which hundreds of ships to mothball or scrap, and explained to a hostile Congress how the navy had spent its wartime millions. A controversy developed over the award of contracts to supply the navy with oil; political allies of those who did not receive contracts alleged favoritism toward those who did. Another row resulted from the refusal of Secretary Daniels to approve all the ribbons and medals Admiral Sims thought his men deserved; Sims responded by blasting the Navy Department for criminal negligence in the prosecution of the war. The Republican Senate happily probed the charges, conducting three months of hearings in the spring of 1920. The indictment didn’t stick, but the investigation exhausted the civilian personnel of the Navy Department, including Roosevelt, who in the process found more reason to admire Daniels and less to respect Sims and the admirals.

He pondered how to get out of office gracefully. The Wilson administration was hemorrhaging talent as its end approached, with cabinet secretaries and their underlings leaving for law firms, investment banks, corporate boards, and the other posts in the private sector where public servants recouped—or simply couped—their fortunes following stints in Washington. Some of the incorrigibly political plotted campaigns for elective office in 1920, but sober Democrats estimated their party’s chances that year as slim to minuscule. Prudence counseled letting the Republicans have their day.

Wilson’s stroke and the consequent paralysis of the administration accelerated the rush to the door. In November 1919 the Versailles treaty came up for a vote in the Senate. Lodge had attached several reservations to the treaty. These were either honest attempts to fix what Lodge and other critics considered wrong with the treaty or cynical efforts to sabotage it; Lodge let senators draw their own conclusions. When Wilson, communicating uncertainly through his wife, ordered the Senate Democrats to reject the treaty-plus-reservations, it fell short of even a simple majority, with Democrats supplying most of the negative votes. Lodge then allowed a vote on the unencumbered treaty. It failed by a similar margin, although now the Republicans were mostly responsible. Lodge might thereupon have declared the treaty rejected. But he liked the issue enough to let it linger over the winter. In March 1920 the treaty came to a final vote. Reservations had been reattached, and Wilson, more feeble than ever, again attempted a veto. This time several Democrats disobeyed the president and voted in favor. Yet it still fell seven votes shy of the necessary margin, with 49 in favor, 35 against.

The failure of the treaty left the administration dead in the water, and more of Roosevelt’s colleagues clambered off. For months he himself had been plotting his escape. “I wish it were possible for me, now that the war is over, to return to something a little more lucrative than this position,” he told an acquaintance. He sounded out two attorney friends, Grenville Emmet and Langdon Marvin, about opening a New York law practice. The three agreed on terms of a partnership, to be called Emmet, Marvin & Roosevelt. Emmet and Marvin laid the groundwork; Roosevelt would join them at his first opportunity to leave the administration without embarrassing either himself or the president.

12.

B
Y THE SUMMER OF THEIR EIGHTH YEAR IN OCCUPANCY OF THE
White House, the Democrats held no hope of extending their lease beyond March 1921. A whole litany of issues, besides the Treaty of Versailles, split the country in the wake of the war. The economic readjustment was wrenching, as strikes idled hundreds of factories and hundreds of thousands of workers, price rises pinched tens of millions of households, and markets in stocks, bonds, and commodities alternately sizzled and fizzled as the global economy reintegrated the recently warring national economies. The war had commenced a transformation of American race relations, with African Americans migrating from the farms of the South to the cities and factories of the North. The migrants encountered suspicion and hostility, which turned bloody during and after the war in Chicago, New York, Omaha, and East St. Louis, Illinois. But the migrants kept coming, intent on sharing some of the prosperity and personal freedom that had long eluded them in the segregated South. Though the Wilson administration didn’t overtly encourage the violence, it implicitly legitimated the hostility by extending the Jim Crow system to the federal workforce. Since the end of Reconstruction, the federal government had stood by while the states gutted the Constitution’s ostensible guarantees of equal rights for African Americans; now Washington joined the evisceration.

Other issues bled the country metaphorically. Decades of preaching, praying, keg smashing, and still wrecking culminated in the 1919 ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the production and distribution of intoxicating beverages. The drys hadn’t won over the wets, and it wasn’t even clear they outnumbered them. But because the wets were concentrated in the cities, which were underrepresented in the politics of ratification (as in state and national politics generally), the drys dictated policy. The Eighteenth Amendment split the country not merely in terms of taste in beverages but also along lines of class and wealth. The amendment said nothing about possession of alcohol or its personal consumption; those persons rich enough to stock wine cellars and liquor closets ahead of January 16, 1920, the day on which the Volstead Act, the enforcing statute, took effect, could tipple to their gullets’ content.

Another amendment promised, or threatened, to be no less revolutionary. For three-quarters of a century—or about as long as Susan B. Anthony lived—feminists had agitated for the vote for women. Their efforts finally paid off during the Progressive era, in part because the progressives assumed that old-stock middle-class—and presumptively progressive-minded—women would vote in larger numbers than their ethnic working-class sisters. But until the experiment actually took place—that is, before the federal elections of 1920, the first to which the Nineteenth Amendment applied—no one could say for sure. The only certain thing was that for every statistical person (not always a woman) convinced that female voting was a boon to democracy, there was some substantial fraction of another person (not always a man) who remained skeptical, if not flatly opposed. The professional pols, those who prided themselves on heeding experience rather than theory, were at a particular loss, as their experience encompassed nothing quite like this radical expansion of the electorate.

Beyond the realm of constitutionalism were persons and groups who defined radicalism rather differently. The Russian revolution, which had proceeded from its moderate first stage of early 1917 to the Bolshevik triumph of the following autumn, had invigorated socialists, communists, syndicalists, anarchists, and nihilists around the world. Not many of any of these groups but the socialists inhabited the United States, yet the specter of communism frightened American officials and voters—the former anticipating a favorable response from the latter—into undertaking a campaign of suppression of radical thought and practice. The wartime Espionage and Sedition Acts remained in force after the armistice, and Wilson’s Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, launched a series of raids on leftist organizations during the winter of 1919–20. The Palmer raids and the ensuing “red scare” turned up a modest number of actual communists, a larger number of sympathizers, and an undetermined collection of hapless drop-ins who suffered from bad timing in being present when the G-men swooped through. Thousands were jailed; hundreds of immigrants were deported. The Palmer raids encouraged private vigilante action against labor organizers, particularly the “Wobblies” of the Industrial Workers of the World, some of whom suffered gruesome treatment at the hands of self-appointed defenders of American security and respectability.