The Untold History of the United States

Having admitted to Lloyd George before the proceedings began that he was less interested in the details of the settlement than in the League of Nations—which he considered crucial to preventing future war—Wilson’s attempt to secure the kind of nonpunitive treaty he publicly advocated failed miserably. The treaty dealt very harshly with Germany. It included a “war guilt clause,” drafted by future secretary of state John Foster Dulles, that placed the entire blame on Germany for starting the war and required Germany to pay extremely heavy reparations. Wilson, intently focused on the League, repeatedly compromised on these and other crucial matters, disappointing even his strongest supporters. Clemenceau snidely remarked that Wilson “talked like Jesus Christ but acted like Lloyd George.”¹¹⁹ Economist John Maynard Keynes condemned Wilson’s capitulation to this “Carthagenian Peace”—a tragic repudiation of his Fourteen Points—and predicted that it would lead to another European war.¹²⁰

^{Ho Chi Minh rented a tuxedo and bowler hat and visited Wilson and the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, carrying a petition demanding Vietnamese independence. Like most of the other non-Western world leaders in attendance, Ho would learn that liberation would come through armed struggle, not the colonizers’ largesse.}

Although Lenin wasn’t invited to Paris, Russia’s presence cast a pall over the meetings, like “the Banquo’s ghost sitting at every Council table,” according to Herbert Hoover.¹²¹ Lenin had dismissed Wilson’s Fourteen Points as empty rhetoric and said that the capitalist powers would never abandon their colonies or accept the Wilsonian vision of peacefully adjudicating conflicts. His call for worldwide revolution to overthrow the entire imperialist system was finding a receptive audience. Colonel House wrote in his diary in March, “From the look of things the crisis will soon be here. Rumblings of discontent every day. The people want peace. Bolshevism is gaining ground everywhere. Hungary has just succumbed. We are sitting upon an open powder magazine and some day a spark may ignite it.”¹²² The Allies were so worried about Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe that they inserted a clause in the armistice agreement forbidding the German army to evacuate the countries on its eastern frontier until “the Allies think the moment suitable.”¹²³ Though Béla Kun’s Communist government in Hungary would soon be toppled by invading Romanian forces and an attempt to seize power by the Communists in Germany failed, House and Wilson had reason to be alarmed at the radical tide sweeping Europe and beyond.

American workers also participated in the radical upsurge; 365,000 striking steelworkers led the way, followed by 450,000 miners and 120,000 textile workers. In Boston, police voted 1,134–2 to strike, leading the Wall Street Journal to warn, “Lenin and Trotsky are on their way.” Wilson called the strike “a crime against civilization.”¹²⁴ And a general strike in Seattle was led by a Soldiers’, Sailors’, and Workmen’s Council modeled on the Russian Revolution. Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson denounced it as “an attempted revolution.” The strikers, he charged, “want to take possession of our American Government and try to duplicate the anarchy of Russia.”¹²⁵ Over 5 million workers struck that year alone. When strikebreakers, protected by armed guards, local police, and newly sworn in deputies, were not sufficient to defeat the strikes, state militias and even federal troops were called in to finish the job, sending the labor movement into a tailspin from which it would not recover for well over a decade. Though the use of federal troops on behalf of powerful capitalists had been highly controversial in 1877, workers had increasingly learned that police, courts, troops, and the entire apparatus of the state would be arrayed against them when they struggled for higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to join unions.

Having badly weakened the Left during the war, government officials now tried to finish it off. In November 1919 and January 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used a spate of largely ineffectual anarchist bombings as an excuse to unleash federal agents to raid radical groups and labor organizations across the country. Though called the Palmer Raids, the operation was actually run by the twenty-four-year-old director of the Justice Department’s Radical Division, J. Edgar Hoover. Over five thousand alleged radicals were arrested, many incarcerated without charges for months. Russian-born Emma Goldman and hundreds of other foreign-born activists were deported. This flagrant abuse of civil liberties not only devastated the progressive movement, it deliberately identified dissent with un-Americanism. But for Hoover, it was just the beginning. By 1921, his index-card system, cataloguing all potentially subversive individuals, groups, and publications, contained 450,000 entries.¹²⁶

^{From left to right: British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. At the conference, most of the lofty rhetoric of Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” was rejected by the other Allies, who were out for revenge, new colonies, and naval dominance in the postwar world.}

^{In 1919, over 4 million U.S. workers struck for higher wages, better conditions, and organizing rights. As illustrated by this leaflet from the Seattle General Strike, the Russian Revolution helped inspire this intensified labor militancy.}

After the Paris conference, Wilson gushed, “At last the world knows America as the savior of the world!”¹²⁷ Back in the United States, Wilson was greeted like anything but a savior by treaty opponents, who attacked from both the left and the right. Wilson fought back, touring the country. He argued that the United States needed to ratify the treaty so it could join the League of Nations, which was the only way it could rectify the problems created by the treaty. Senator Borah, leading the opposition among progressives like Senators La Follette, Norris, and Johnson, denounced Wilson’s proposed international body as a league of “imperialists” bent upon defeating revolutions and defending their own imperial designs. Borah thought the treaty, despite Wilson’s efforts to soften it, was “a cruel, destructive, brutal document” that had produced “a league to guarantee the integrity of the British empire.”¹²⁸ Norris condemned the treaty provision handing Shandong, the birthplace of Confucius, to Japan as “the disgraceful rape of an innocent people.”¹²⁹ They were joined by isolationists and others who wanted guarantees that the United States wouldn’t be drawn into military actions without authorization by Congress.

Ironically, Wilson’s own wartime policy had deprived him of many of his best allies. CPI head Creel pointed this out to the beleaguered president in late 1918, telling him “All the radical, or liberal friends of your anti-imperialist war policy were either silenced or intimidated. The Department of Justice and the Post Office were allowed to silence and intimidate them. There was no voice left to argue for your sort of peace. The Nation and the Public got nipped. All the radical and socialist press was dumb.”¹³⁰ Wilson’s obstinacy made a bad situation worse. Rather than compromise on proposed treaty modifications, Wilson watched the treaty and the League go down to defeat, finally falling seven votes short of ratification.