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| by David H. Lippman |
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At 3 p.m. on June 28, 1919 - the same day Harry S. Truman marries Bess Wallace in Missouri - the fifth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination that started World War I, the 27 "Principal Allied and Associated Powers" sign the 230-page Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors. In that chamber, Bismarck proclaimed the German Empire in 1871. Now it is signed away at a horseshoe-shaped table in that same glittering hall.
The Principal Allied Powers are the United States (although she considers herself a Principal Associated Power) the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan. The Associated Powers are Belgium, Portugal, Rumania, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, the Hedjaz, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Poland, Yugoslavia, Siam, Czechoslovakia, and Uruguay. The Chinese do not sign, protesting the treaty's territorial awards to Japan.
The German signers, Dr. Hermann Mueller and Dr. Johannes Bell, are led past mutilated Allied soldiers to sign the treaty. To American Secretary of State Robert Lansing, they look as if "called upon to sign their own death warrants."
The Germans sign the paper at 3:50 p.m. Immediately French artillery batteries around Versailles open up in a thunder of blanks and smoke to salute the peace. That in turn sets church bells ringing across France. Cannon boom out the news in London, and King George V tells the Empire, "I join you in thanking God."
At 4 p.m., Clemenceau brings the proceedings to a close. The Big Four walk out onto a terrace to watch the fountains and are swamped by celebrating crowds who break through the lines of police and soldiers.
To American Peace Commissioner Tasker Bliss, the treaty is a "wretched mess." To Lloyd George, it is all "a great pity. We shall have to do the same thing all over again (fight a world war) in 25 years at three times the cost." The growing Allied sense of guilt will make it impossible for their statesmen to enforce the treaty's provisions when Hitler and his gang start to defy them.
Wilson heads straight to the railroad station, and by 9:30 his private train is en route to Brest and America. Now he has to convince the recalcitrant Senate to ratify the treaty. The Americans left behind in Paris are told to stay out of the future treaty negotiations - those with Turkey and Austria - until Versailles is ratified.
Wilson takes his case first on July 10 to the Senate, all 264 pages of the Treaty of Versailles. "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?" Wilson asks the lawmakers.
Unfortunately for Wilson, the treaty has many opponents on both sides. German-Americans hate its punitive provisions to Germany. Irish-Americans dislike its concessions to Britain - Britain and her dominions have six votes in the League to America's one. Anglophobes suggest that if the British Empire has six votes, shouldn't the United States get 48?
Italian-Americans resent the treaty's failure to give Fiume to Italy. Liberals and progressives oppose the treaty for its concessions. Conservatives oppose it for placing American foreign policy subject to international veto. And Senator Hiram Johnson of California blasts the whole war for the secret treaties that expand the British and French Empires. All America has gained, he says, is influenza and Prohibition.
Lodge, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, demands changes and amendments, his "Fourteen Reservations." Wilson refuses. The situation is deadlocked. During the summer of 1919, the Senate holds hearings on the treaty, and 60 witnesses testify for or against the League, providing stenographers with 1,297 pages of written testimony. All are American, which leads to absurdities, like a man who speaks no Swedish representing Sweden - a wartime neutral - and a woman with an Irish name who attacks Italy to support Yugoslavia's claims to Fiume. Despite these bizarre scenes, public opinion starts to turn against the Treaty.
While the Americans debate the Treaty, the British focus on civil war breaking out in Ireland, where Sinn Fein members are refusing to take seats in Westminster, forming their own parliament, the Dail Eireann, in Dublin, instead, and Wimbledon and Henley. The Illustrated London News calls the latter "not quite itself this year."
But the French celebrate the Third Republic's finest hour. By 3 a.m. on the morning of July 13, 1919, more than 100,000 people have jammed the Champs-Elysees to watch the Victory Parade on Bastille Day. French troops stand guard over a temporary cenotaph beneath the Arc de Triomphe - the nameless occupant who will symbolize France's war dead will receive his vaulted tomb and eternal flame later. France's Via Triumphalis is guarded with the flags of the Allied nations.
On Quatorze Juillet, Clemenceau, followed by his serious and pasty-faced aide, Georges Mandel, strides up the official stand at 7:45 a.m. Joined by Joffre and Foch, President Poincaré places a wreath at the Cenotaph, then take their position in the reviewing stand. At 9 a.m., the order "Avancez" is given, and the Victory Parade begins. The first men to march are almost unable to. The grands mutiles, the worst wounded, lead the parade, lacking eyes and limbs, shuffling along with canes or in wheelchairs. Many of them are covered with bandages from ghastly head wounds, or are still green from gas. Among them is Army Sergeant turned Assemblyman Andre Maginot, who lost his arm at Verdun.
Their condition draws gasps and tears. Their condition matches that of France. The Third Republic has sacrificed 1.3 million men to stop the Kaiser's troops, 27 percent of all Frenchmen aged 18 to 27, a higher mortality rate than Germany or Russia.
France has also taken an economic beating - spending 25 percent of her national fortune to fight a war that blasted seven percent of her territory, including most of her industrial regions. 12,000 square miles of soil have been ravaged, 3,500 miles of railways torn up, 30,000 miles of roads destroyed. Coal production is down 37 percent from 1914, steel by 60 percent, the trade deficit from 1.5 million to 17.5 million francs.
To pay for the war, France has issued paper money, which has led to massive inflation: 51 Francs to the Pound Sterling. France estimates her war damages at 209,000 million gold Francs.
The grands mutiles shuffling past Poincaré and Clemenceau are not the only burden facing France's political leaders. A generation of troops returning from the trenches are demanding jobs and blaming the political leadership for the four years of ceaseless slaughter. And the leadership isn't able to answer the cries. Poincaré, Foch, Clemenceau, are all exhausted figures from the past. The latter two will both die in 1929. Those in power are exhausted. Those who would normally provide the youth and energy to take power are lying dead at Verdun or among the grands mutiles marching past. Soon French government will fall into an endless game of musical chairs, revolving prime ministers, and unstable governments, who will have one common thread - the determination to make Germany pay for the war.
But all these issues must wait on this July 14 for the Victory Parade. After the wounded men shuffle by, the Republican Guards, in dress uniform, trot along, escorting Joffre and Foch. The first symbolizes France's defense of 1914, the latter France's offensive of 1918. A few paces behind Foch rides his dapper, neat, chef de cabinet, General Maxime Weygand.
Then come the Allies and Associated Powers, in alphabetical order. France's spellings of nations results in the United States coming first, and "Les Americaines" are led by General John J. Pershing, the Iron Commander, and his doughboys, playing "Over There."
Next come the Belgians, and then the British, their bandsmen playing "Tipperary," massed regimental banners flapping under the cobalt sky. After them come Italians in slate, Japanese troops in khaki, Portuguese, Rumanians, Serbs, Siamese, and two new nations: Czechoslovakia and Poland, their men in French horizon bleu. Only Russia - Imperial or Bolshevik - is missing.
All the contingents draw cheers, but the biggest are naturally for the home team, which brings up the rear. Leading them is the Commander-in-Chief, the hero of Verdun, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain. Under his dour, defensive command, the French Army re-organized after the disasters and mutinies of 1917. Now the austere, pale Marshal rides on his white horse, majestic, tall, and magnificent in dress uniform, alone.
Behind Pétain march men from all of France's 21 army corps, their bands playing "Sambre-et-Meuse" and "Marche Lorraine," the two battle hymns of France's war.
On and on come the hordes of poilus, including trotting chasseurs in berets, cavalrymen in glittering breastplates, Foreign Legionnaires in white kepis, Moroccan goumiers in turbans, immense Senegalese, Algerian and Indo-Chinese tirailleurs, the colorful panoply of Europe's most powerful army, the heirs to Napoleon.
Behind the infantry and cavalry come the other arms…artillerymen towing the famed and reliable 75mm guns, airman René Fonck, Chasseurs Marins from the Navy, all of them holding high their shot-up battle colors.
The crowd goes into a delirium of joy and thanks, spontaneously singing the battle songs. At the Place de la Concorde, the mourning crepe is formally removed from the statue of Strasbourg, welcoming Alsace-Lorraine back to France. For an hour the French army marches down the Champs-Elysées.
Finally, at the very end of the parade, after the glitter of breastplates, the splash of dress uniforms, and the trumpets of the bands, comes nine FT 17 tanks, clanking under the Arc de Triomphe, spewing noise and exhaust as they pass. The tanks are last in line. Despite their success in battle and importance in war, they bring up the rear of France's parade. They are no longer important to the swashbuckling constables of France, or most of Europe's generals and politicians, either. For as an onlooker says, "A sight like this will never be seen again. Because there will never again be a war."
Britain is also facing its vast casualty and financial bills by hoping for an end to war. The British budget is running at a 24 percent deficit, worsened by the vast debts owed to the United States, Canada, and even India, for the war. Stringent cuts must be made to hold together the bankrupt British Empire. On August 11th, the Finance Committee of the War Cabinet agrees that the Armed Services must make massive cuts and frame future budgetary requests on the rule that there will not be a major war for at least 10 years. Even War Secretary Winston Churchill favors this measure.
The "Ten Year Rule" is made official on October 15, saying, "It should be assumed, for framing the revised estimates, that the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war for the next 10 years, and that no expeditionary force is required for this purpose." With that, the Armed Services make massive cuts. The Royal Air Force is the world's biggest, with 47 fighter squadrons at home. By next year, it will have three. The Royal Navy, the world's largest and most powerful, cancels construction programs en masse. Among the ships deleted are the sisters of the massive HMS Hood. The Army amalgamates regiments and limits tanks to the wartime models that can clank alongside the infantry at five miles per hour. This rule, intended as a temporary measure to balance the budget, like all government policies, takes on a life of its own, and becomes permanent.
Other voyagers are making journeys this summer. On July 28 and 31, 1919, Prince Albert makes his Category A test in an Avro bomber as an RAF pilot, and passes it. The instructor later presents the plane's joystick to Prince Albert when he is King.
Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, shuffling paper at the Tank Corps' headquarters at Camp Meade, is assigned to an important public relations mission. The War Department decides to send a convoy of 81 US Army vehicles and 280 officers and enlisted men across the United States, and Ike will go along as Tank Corps observer, "partly for a lark and partly to learn."
To a modern viewer, sending a convoy of 81 US Army vehicles across America may not seem a major operation, but the United States of 1919 lacks any kind of national highway system…most roads beyond city borders and trolley terminals are still made of dirt. The convoy includes staff cars, vans, two motorized kitchens, more than a dozen motorcycles, a wrecker, a water truck, gasoline truck, caterpillar tractor, two rolling machine shops, and a small Renault FT17 tank lashed to a flatbed trailer. Also along are prototype cars from Packard, Mack, General Motors, and Willys. A team of 24 officers, 258 enlisted men, two dozen War Department observers and a gaggle of reporters and car manufacturers' representatives make the trip.
The column departs Washington, D.C. on July 7, 1919, the day before President Wilson returns home from Versailles, with a full-dress send-off from Secretary of War Newton Baker and Army Chief of Staff Peyton C. March. Ike misses the oratory, much to his pleasure, joining the parade in Frederick, Maryland. The lead truck bears a banner, "We're off to Frisco!"
The convoy makes the 3,251-mile trip under simulated wartime conditions…as if it was making a motorized advance through enemy territory, with all bridges blown. The course the convoy takes prefigures what becomes Interstate 80.
At every town, the convoy gets a royal reception, free food and drink (despite Prohibition), dances, banquets, and even outdoor movies. The YMCA provides baths and showers. At every stop, politicians provide speeches, which weary Eisenhower.
With motorcycle scouts leading the column to determine road conditions, the convoy averages 58 miles per day at a speed of six miles an hour, battling rain, mud, heat, deserts, dust, quicksand, and mountains. Vehicles break down from mud, quickens, or when roads collapse beneath them, or from choking dust. A truck speeds out of control down a Pennsylvania mountain. Vehicles tumble into ditches and gullies. Tires shred, brakes are worn down, and ignitions fail.
When the convoy hits Wyoming, they find the bridges are too light for their heavy vehicles, and have to be replaced. Roads have to be constructed or rebuilt. The engineers rebuild or modify 62 bridges between Washington and San Francisco.
The convoy stops off in North Platte, Nebraska, where Ike's wife Mamie and son Doud Dwight "Icky" Eisenhower drive up from Denver for a reunion - the first time Eisenhower has seen his family in nine months.
On Labor Day, the convoy rolls into San Francisco in a massive parade, having taken 62 days to traverse the nation, arriving in San Francisco only five days behind schedule. This despite 230 road accidents. More than 3.25 million people have seen the convoy, and state legislatures react to the convoy's difficulties by passing highway improvement and construction bills.
Eisenhower himself is impressed by the difficulties of his "journey through darkest America." He sees firsthand the importance of roads in supplying and moving a modern army, the difficulties of supply and maintenance, and the importance of coordination.
After the convoy, Ike returns to Camp Meade to serve as second-in-command of the 305th Tank Brigade, while Col. George S. Patton Jr. commands the 304th Tank Brigade on the same camp.
They form an unlikely friendship. Patton is nine years' Ike's senior, a polo-playing, egotistical, wealthy, brash cavalryman. Eisenhower's roots are in the infantry, and he is self-effacing, quiet, and poor. Patton, married to Massachusetts textile wealth, orders his uniforms from Savile Row, and often forgets to collect his Army pay. Ike has to supplement his thin salary with poker winnings. Patton's sharp tongue and sharper views, expressed in his squeaky voice, get him in trouble. But Patton is marked for high command, and Eisenhower is not seen as achieving much. Patton is a decorated and wounded combat veteran, while Eisenhower has never seen a battlefield.
As Merle Miller writes in "Ike the Soldier," "Everybody thought from the beginning of Georgie's career that there were no limits to the heights he might achieve. For most of his life very few people thought that Eisenhower would achieve anything much."
Yet the two forge an enduring friendship. Together, they take apart a new Mark VIII tank and put it back together. When they are done, the tank is in perfect working order. Their superior officers are not impressed, and tell Ike and Georgie they are wasting their time. The tank has no future.
With little to do, Ike and Patton play poker, brew their own gin and beer in defiance of Prohibition, and remodel the barracks they are assigned, converting the rundown building into family quarters. Beatrice Patton plants trailing ivy in the urinals. Mamie Eisenhower, less well-off, uses orange crates for a dressing table.
They write articles suggesting that tanks need to be armed in the future with two machine-guns and a 57mm (6-lb.) main gun, capable of crossing nine-foot trenches and clattering across the ground at 12 miles per hour. "They should be capable of swift movement and great power…against the flanks of attacking forces," Ike writes. Both argue that tanks can outflank enemy positions, or tear gaping holes in an enemy line and rip apart the entire front. Tanks are the decisive weapon, they believe. Everyone outside the tank corps is furious.
While Patton and Eisenhower play with tanks - and narrowly avoid twice being killed in accidents - Col. George C. Marshall, on Pershing's staff, sails from Brest on the liner Leviathan for New York. With Pershing assigned to Washington, the Marshalls live at 2400 16th Street, Northwest, a club-like residential hotel, for comfortable days of carriage rides.
Other officers are having an easy summer and fall in 1919. Lord Louis Mountbatten goes off in October to Cambridge, where he chases girls, dines with his royal cousins, and writes essays for class. Flt. Lt. Keith Park counts supplies, commanding a store of Handley Page aircraft at Hawkinge in Kent. Major Bernard Law Montgomery is promoted to Lt. Colonel, and spends three months in command of the 17th Royal Fusiliers, before the battalion is disbanded. Prince Albert shoots a 23-stone stag at Balmoral, the largest killed there in 13 years.
A lesser-ranking officer, Capt. Harry S. Truman, get his discharge at Camp Funston, Kansas, on May 6. Two days later, he and his fiancée, Bess Wallace, have what he refers to 30 years later as their "final" argument, over Bess's mother's insistence that they live with her. In early June, Truman and Eddie Jacobson, wartime colleagues, take a lease on a downtown Kansas City store, to open a haberdashery.
Truman marries Bess Wallace on June 28, 1919, the same day the Germans sign the Treaty of Versailles, at 4 p.m. in Trinity Episcopal Church on North Liberty Street in Independence. Truman comes down the aisle, looking radiant. After a honeymoon on Lake Huron in Michigan, they move into the upper floor of 219 North Delaware Street in Independence, with Harry's clothes, books, and Army things - nearly all he owns.
But another officer is enduring a harsh autumn. Brian Horrocks, still trying to train White Russians 700 miles east of Omsk, watches his best efforts to go to nothing as the men he trains desert en bloc. With the Reds advancing, Horrocks gets orders to withdraw 3,000 miles back to Vladivostok and safety, along with Polish and Czech troops.
Horrocks and his colleague, George Hayes, make it back to Omsk, amid the mass retreat and hordes of destitute people, fleeing on sleigh or train. He sees one pathetic message scrawled on a wall: "If Maria Ivanova should see this, her parents passed here on 10th October, making for Irkutsk."
In Omsk, Horrocks hooks up with the other 13 members of the British Military Mission, all trying to flee the chaos. Maj. Vining paints a Union Jack on two freight wagons, and everyone who can claim a connection, no matter how tenuous, to Britain's far-flung Empire, pleads to board the train. On November 13, the same day Adolf Hitler gives one of his first major political addresses in Munich, Horrocks and his crew withdraws from Omsk along with a batch of Polish soldiers, in one of the last trains. A week later, the train reaches Novosibirsk, 550 miles down the track. After that, progress is slow. There is no water for the engines, so everyone forms a human chain to put baskets of snow in the tanks. Alongside, people continue to flee on sleighs, sick people falling out of them and dying in the snow.
When Horrocks gets 150 miles down the track to Tiaga, the situation is collapsing further. Machine-gun fire can be heard as Czechs, Poles, and Russians fight for trains, and the stationmaster hands Horrocks a message from Vladivostok. It reads: "If the situation seems to warrant it, do not hesitate to take complete control."
Horrocks acidly remarks in his memoirs years later that it would take "at least a division of well-trained British troops to have sorted out the situation. But the messages did serve a useful purpose: it caused great amusement."
Horrocks' engine, however, is finished, and the Reds are 30 miles away. He manages to get the women and children in his motley party into another train, but the men decide to flee on sleigh, setting out on December 15. Horrocks and his 18-man crew hurl their gear onto sleighs, and head off in the cold, exhausted from 72 hours without sleep. Often Horrocks is flung into the snow, and forced to run in his Russian felt boots to catch up.
"And so the journey went on, riding, walking, falling off, running, hour after hour and day after day." After five days, they cross the railway again and find their women and children in a freight wagon, no closer to home. So everyone gets back on board the freight wagon and takes the train again.
At summer's end, US President Woodrow Wilson boards a vastly different train from Horrocks, a seven-car special at Washington's Union Station, and crosses the United States on a 10,000-mile trip, seeking to make his dream of the League of Nations a reality by taking his case to his people.
"If the treaty is not ratified by the Senate, the war will have been fought in vain, and the world will be thrown into chaos. I promised our soldiers, when I asked them to take up arms, that it was a war to end wars. If I do not do all in my power to put the Treaty in effect, I will be a slacker and never be able to look those boys in the eye. I must go," he tells his amazed Cabinet.
For two weeks, Wilson rides America's rails, delivering his message, in Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Omaha, and Spokane. In San Francisco alone he makes five speeches, urging the voters to send a message to their Senators to support the League. He is most effective in west of the Rockies…the heartland of his opponents.
Along the way, the frail president's health deteriorates…Insomnia, headaches, trembling, and double vision plague Wilson. But he fights on, determined to make America a leader of the League of Nations and prevent future wars.
His wife Edith begs Wilson to rest, but he refuses. They'll take a vacation when the train gets back to Washington, he says.
On September 15, 1919, Boston officials begin hiring police officers to replace the 1,500 cops who have been fired for going on strike. The four-day walkout has led to mobs, looting and Governor Calvin Coolidge hurling National Guardsmen onto the Hub's streets to restore order. Union leaders beg Coolidge to allow their men to get their jobs back. Coolidge refuses. "There is no right to strike against public safety by anyone, anywhere, any time," he telegrams back in typical blunt fashion.
That same day, Wilson is in Pueblo, Colorado. He tells reporters, "This will be a pretty short speech. Aren't you fellows getting pretty sick of this?"
Wilson faces the audience, launches his speech, and stumbles over the sentence, "The world will not allow Germany…" This has never happened before in Wilson's long career as schoolmaster, professor, college president, governor, and Chief Executive.
Wilson looks like he will pitch forward and collapse. He is visibly crying. He struggles and continues his speech in a weak voice, finishing: "I believe that men will see the truth, eye to eye and face to face. 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. 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 the pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before."
Then he disappears back into his train, barely able to eat his dinner. Next morning Wilson is suffering a splitting headache and is unable to rise from his bed. When he finally does, the left side of his face is immobile. His words are mumbled and indistinct. He can't move his left arm and leg, or dress himself. The trip is cancelled. "The President has suffered a complete nervous breakdown," Dr. Cary Grayson tells the press.
Wilson heads straight back to Washington. Back in the White House, Wilson cannot work because of the headaches. He finds enough energy to veto the Volstead Act (Prohibition), but Congress overrides his veto.
Meanwhile, the Senate fires back its official answer to Wilson: 45 amendments to the Treaty and four reservations, to safeguard American sovereignty and Freedom of Action. The Senate says that the Monroe Doctrine is beyond the League's jurisdiction. And that America will not be bound by any League decision in which any one member casts more than one vote. That is designed to prevent the British Empire from ordering American troops into battle again.
Most objectionable to Lodge and his Senate colleagues is League Article 10, which obligates the members to guarantee the territorial integrity of any other member against "external aggression." In other words, if a member is invaded, American bayonets must defend that nation.
Lodge says that Congress must keep the power to send troops abroad. Wilson calls Chapter 10 the heart of the League. Had it existed in 1914, there would have been no war.
On October 2nd, Chicago White Sox ace pitcher Lefty Williams walks three Cincinnati Reds in the fourth inning of the second game of the World Series, followed by a bases-clearing triple, to "dump" the game, at the behest of two groups of gamblers. The Sox will go on to lose the Series, five games to three. Williams becomes the first man to lose three games in a World Series, and becomes one of the eight "Black Sox" banned from baseball for life.
While heading back to Fort Meade from his transcontinental motor convoy, Dwight D. Eisenhower spends a week in Lawton, Oklahoma, where he reads every report about the 1919 World Series, which express bafflement that the all-powerful Chicago White Sox lose to the weaker Cincinnati Reds. The stories, Ike notes, are "strictly objective. But stark facts and objective reports could not give the whole story."
When Eisenhower learns next year that the White Sox have "thrown" the series at the behest of gamblers, he learns a lesson that he takes with him throughout his military career: "In the passage of years, whether because of the Black Sox scandal or not, I grew increasingly cautious about making judgments based solely on reports. Behind every human action, the truth may be hidden. But the truth may also lie behind some other action or arrangement, far off in time or place. Unless circumstances and responsibility demanded an instant judgment, I learned to reserve mine until the last proper moment. This was not always popular."
The same day, the French Chamber of Deputies ratifies Versailles, 372 to 53. In Washington, Wilson suffers another stroke, paralyzing the left side of his body. He is now prone to weeping spells. Edith Wilson censors her husband's mail, screens his visitors, and conceals his infirmities from them.
With Wilson enfeebled and Congress deadlocked, the Treaty stands stalled. Worse, the American national mood is shifting daily, even hourly.
By October 1919, despite Wilson's veto, the Volstead Act is in place. By January 1920, Al Capone is in place in Chicago, starting that city's gangland wars.
In June 1919, Congress passes the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, making the female view critical in the 1920 presidential election. And women voters have numerous issues to address.
Other groups are angry, too. Black soldiers who have earned combat decorations in France with the 92nd Infantry Division return to their homes, no longer tolerating segregation and racism. Race riots follow in the summer of 1919, overshadowing Wilson's voyage. Thirteen days of shooting and burning in Chicago leave 38 dead and 500 wounded. Aircraft bomb black neighborhoods in Oklahoma. 1919 sees a recorded 83 lynchings.
Angry workers are striking everywhere, even Boston police officers, who have walked off the job. More than 300,000 steelworkers down tools. More than 425,000 coal miners abandon their pits. National Guardsmen are sent in to crush the strikes in West Virginia.
Federal troops, too. On October 29, returning doughboys of the 4th Infantry Division march into the grimy industrial city of Gary, Indiana, with Springfield rifles and 75mm cannon, after 2,000 striking steelworkers - many of them also former doughboys - hold a parade and rally in defiance of officials' orders. That parade is to demand the release of 50 strikers who have been arrested after a riot between strikers and strikebreakers that left 50 persons injured.
With violence sweeping the streets of Gary, troops deploy with machine-guns to restore order. Labor leaders denounce the move.
Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, hoping to become president, fans flames of hysteria about Bolsheviks and Reds, whom he links to the strikes. Federal authorities round up the "Wobblies," the International Workers of the World leaders, including Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and Emma Goldman. Even Helen Keller, despite her infirmities, comes under attack for her Socialist writings.
A Connecticut salesman draws six months in jail for calling Lenin one of the "brainiest" of the world's political leaders. In February a man is shot dead in Hammond, Indiana, for shouting, "To hell with the United States." It takes the jury two minutes to acquit the killer. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina calls for federal aid to prevent a Communist-led rising of Palmetto State blacks. Thirty states enact peacetime sedition laws against Communism.
On November 25, New York cops raid the Union of Russian Workers' headquarters in Manhattan, and find TNT, chemicals, and acids in a secret room behind a parlor, along with membership lists and ledgers.
Before Christmas, the "Soviet Ark" of 249 deportees, most of them members of the Union of Russian Workers, are sent to the new Soviet Union. Some 300 more aliens are deported later.
But at the same time, there are real attacks by real terrorists on American soil: an April 1919 bomb goes to Seattle's mayor…the next day a parcel to a former Georgia senator known for his anti-alien rhetoric. The latter bomb kills his maid. The postal service investigates and intercepts 34 more bombs, addressed to John D. Rockefeller, Attorney General Palmer, J.P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who has sent more suspected Bolsheviks to jail than any other federal justice. The bombs are apparently to go off all together on May 1.
While this plot fails, a month later, anarchist bombs explode in the homes of eight mayors, judges, and businessmen in eight different cities, including Palmer's home in Washington. He and his family are unhurt, but the home is badly damaged. Found in the debris are the remains of the bomber - it apparently goes off prematurely - and his anarchist pamphlets.
The furious Quaker Palmer hurls the new Bureau of Investigation and its top investigators, J. Edgar Hoover and his card-index of radicals, against this menace. In November 1919, Hoover's agents round up 1,000 suspected aliens, most of whom are deported. Seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Palmer fills the newspapers with anti-Communist rhetoric, and xenophobia whipcracks around the United States in a fever of witch-hunting. This is no time for internationalism in America.
Yet other Americans are unconcerned with great politics. In November 1919, Truman and his business partner, Eddie Jacobson, open the Truman & Jacobson Haberdashery at 104 West 12th Street in Kansas City. Truman's stake is $15,000, which comes from selling off livestock and machinery at his family farm. The store, which sells "Marwyn collars," silk neckties, leather gloves, belts, underwear, socks, collar pins, cuff links, and shirts, is described as friend and patrons as being "right up to snuff" and "a sharp place." Everything is where it should be, including a silver loving cup presented to Truman from the boys of Battery D, along with the five flags of the Allied nations.
With shirts selling at $16, all cash, no credit, the place is a popular hangout for Truman's wartime pals, and by year's end, sells $70,000 worth of goods.
That same month, with the political atmosphere tense, Senator Hitchcock of Nebraska, chief spokesman for Senate Democrats, visits the White House to beg the president to compromise. "Let Lodge compromise," Wilson bellows from his wheelchair, summoning up all his remaining energy.
"Well, of course, he must compromise also," Hitchcock replies. "But we might well hold out the olive branch."
"Let Lodge hold out the olive branch," Wilson retorts.
Hitchcock is obedient to his president and party chief. Others try to move Wilson. Herbert Hoover fires a telegram at Wilson, saying Lodge's reservations are insignificant compared with the need of peace and the League. Bernard Baruch says "half a loaf is better than no bread." A bitter Wilson says, "And Baruch too," when he reads that telegram.
Edith begs, "For my sake, won't you accept these reservations and get this awful thing settled?"
"Little girl," the white-bearded Wilson answers, "don't you desert me; that I cannot stand. Better a thousand times to go down fighting than to dip your colors to dishonorable compromise."
When the Versailles vote comes up in the Senate on November 19, 1919, Hitchcock and his crew vote down the Lodge amendments, after five hours of debate. Then Lodge and his crew vote down the treaty itself. Both votes fail to gain two-thirds majorities.
The Senate leaders meet again in December, and by January 1920 Lodge and the Democrats have reached a compromise. But Borah and his "Irreconcilables" are adamant: no support of the Treaty, no support of the League. 1920 is an election year. Borah threatens to bolt the Republican Party if Lodge does not accede. Lodge agrees to drop his reservations and oppose the treaty.
On March 15, 1920, the Senate, with many Democrats voting against Wilson, finally rejects the Treaty of Versailles, 49-35. The Treaty of Versailles fails, seven votes short of ratification. Next morning the Secretary of the Senate delivers the Treaty to the White House, officially returned. The volume is tied up in brown paper and wrapped in an enormous amount of red tape. Wilson reads the voting results and comments, "They have shamed us in the eyes of the world."
Wilson is right. The European nations are enraged. The United States has imposed the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations upon them and then abandoned both. Having just taken up the baton of world leadership, the United States has thrown it down just as fast. However, the Americans remain insistent on being repaid their massive war loans, and claim to have won the war single-handedly.
The British and French are not impressed: they know that the Americans fought in Europe with British and French airplanes, guns, helmets, vehicles, and horses. The only American weapons brought to Europe were Springfield rifles, and many American troops used French Chauchats and British Lee-Enfields. American wartime production has been less than impressive, and disorganization in operating its railroads has resulted in vast quantities of American military supplies sitting uselessly in freight cars on the Hoboken and Norfolk piers well after the Armistice.
The British and French start calling America "Uncle Shylock" and sneer at its pretensions of great power status.
More importantly, with the United States out of the League of Nations, the world body lacks moral authority and power. Most nations regard the league as a mere talking shop, an unwanted outcome of the equally unwanted Treaty of Versailles. While the League of Nations will make great headway against drug smuggling, slave trading, and child labor, it will fail in its primary purpose: to prevent a second World War.
Britain's Harold Nicolson snarls in 1933 that the "whole Treaty had been constructed on the assumption that the United States would be not merely a contracting but an actively executant party. France had been persuaded to abandon her claim to a buffer state between herself and Germany in return for a guarantee of armed support from the United States. The whole Reparations settlement was dependent for its execution on the presence of the Reparation Commission of a representative of the main creditor of Europe. The whole Treaty had been deliberately, and ingenuously, framed by Mr. Wilson himself to render American co-operation essential."
Clemenceau is equally hard in 1929, writing, "Your intervention in the War, which you came out of lightly, since it cost you 56,000 human lives instead of our 1,364,000 killed, had appeared to you, nevertheless, as an excessive display of solidarity. And either by organizing a League of Nations, which was to furnish the solution to all the problems of international security by magic, or by simply withdrawing from the European schemes, you found yourselves freed from all difficulties by means of a 'separate peace.' But all this is not so simple as it might appear. The nations of the world, although separated by natural or artificial frontiers, have but one planet at their disposal, a planet all the elements of which are in a state of solidarity, and, far from man being the exception to the rule, he finds, even in his innermost activities, that he is the supreme witness to universal solidarity. Behind your barriers of sea, of ice, and of sun you may be able perhaps for a time to isolate yourself from your planetary fellow-citizens…It was not enthusiasm that flung you into our firing lines; it was the alarming persistence of German aggressions."
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