Savage Peace

Hope and Fear in America, 1919

Ann Hagedorn

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781416539711
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Written with the sweep of an epic novel and grounded in extensive research into contemporary documents, Savage Peace is a striking portrait of American democracy under stress. It is the surprising story of America in the year 1919.

In the aftermath of an unprecedented worldwide war and a flu pandemic, Americans began the year full of hope, expecting to reap the benefits of peace. But instead, the fear of terrorism filled their days. Bolshevism was the new menace, and the federal government, utilizing a vast network of domestic spies, began to watch anyone deemed suspicious. A young lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover headed a brand-new intelligence division of the Bureau of Investigation (later to become the FBI). Bombs exploded on the doorstep of the attorney general's home in Washington, D.C., and thirty-six parcels containing bombs were discovered at post offices across the country. Poet and journalist Carl Sandburg, recently returned from abroad with a trunk full of Bolshevik literature, was detained in New York, his trunk seized. A twenty-one-year-old Russian girl living in New York was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for protesting U.S. intervention in Arctic Russia, where thousands of American soldiers remained after the Armistice, ostensibly to guard supplies but in reality to join a British force meant to be a warning to the new Bolshevik government.

In 1919, wartime legislation intended to curb criticism of the government was extended and even strengthened. Labor strife was a daily occurrence. And decorated African-American soldiers, returning home to claim the democracy for which they had risked their lives, were badly disappointed. Lynchings continued, race riots would erupt in twenty-six cities before the year ended, and secret agents from the government's "Negro Subversion" unit routinely shadowed outspoken African-Americans.

Adding a vivid human drama to the greater historical narrative, Savage Peace brings 1919 alive through the people who played a major role in making the year so remarkable. Among them are William Monroe Trotter, who tried to put democracy for African-Americans on the agenda at the Paris peace talks; Supreme Court associate justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who struggled to find a balance between free speech and legitimate government restrictions for reasons of national security, producing a memorable decision for the future of free speech in America; and journalist Ray Stannard Baker, confidant of President Woodrow Wilson, who watched carefully as Wilson's idealism crumbled and wrote the best accounts we have of the president's frustration and disappointment.

Weaving together the stories of a panoramic cast of characters, from Albert Einstein to Helen Keller, Ann Hagedorn brilliantly illuminates America at a pivotal moment.

PART I

Winter: Jubilation and Hope

I learned by experience that democracy lives on the exercise and functioning of democracy. As a child learns and grows by doing, a people learn democracy by acting in democratic ways. I knew from the history of other countries that even the best democratic constitutions did not prevent dictatorships unless the people were trained in democracy and held themselves eternally vigilant and ready to oppose all infringements on liberty.

—HARRY WEINBERGER, MARCH 1919

We have learned during the war that the Constitution is a very elastic instrument and that the Federal Government can do anything that it wants to do which it considers for the good of the country. That it can say how much sugar we may put into our coffee, how much coal we may put on our fires, when we must go to bed and when we must get up. Then it is absurd to think if the Federal Government really wanted to put a stop to the shooting and hanging and burning alive of citizens of the United States by mobs that it could not find sufficient authority in the Constitution to do it.

—JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, DECEMBER 1918

CHAPTER 1

Gods of War and Peace

On December 4, 1918, three weeks after the Armistice, Woodrow Wilson boarded the USS George Washington bound for the Paris Peace Conference with the grand mission of cutting through the darkness at the center of the universe to release a light of peace. That morning, President Wilson departed Washington on a train bound for Hoboken, New Jersey, where the ship was docked and where more than a thousand men and women would join him for the voyage. The president’s train, drawn by a flag-decked locomotive, was a special one, running as a second section of the regular Pennsylvania Railroad express between Washington and New York City and consisting of seven Pullman cars and two baggage coaches. The president and first lady traveled in the middle car, which was called the Ideal. In two other cars were the French and Italian ambassadors, the Belgian minister, and members of their families, traveling to France as guests by invitation of the president. Among others were the American ambassador to England and his wife; the president’s private secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty; Mrs. Wilson’s private secretary; the secretary of state and his wife; the president’s private physician; a member of the American Peace Mission, Henry White; Secretary of War Newton D. Baker; and a scattering of White House staffers, Secret Service men, agents of the army and naval intelligence services, and State Department attachés. With the exception of Baker and Tumulty, all would accompany Wilson on his transatlantic voyage.

The special train arrived at the Hoboken pier at 7:20 A.M. on the shoreline tracks normally used for freight cars, allowing Wilson’s middle car to pull right up to the entrance to Pier 4. Thousands of soldiers, policemen, and agents of military intelligence and the Secret Service surrounded the train as it stopped. A band played the national anthem. The president left the train, walked to the pier entrance, which was draped with palms and flags, took an elevator to the upper level, where a breeze fluttered hundreds of Allied banners, and then boarded the ship.

Reporters and photographers hovered nearby as did 325 Army Transport girls in their freshly pressed khakis. Ferryboats, tugs, and other small craft, though kept at a distance, moved onto the Hudson River as close to the spectacle as possible. Across the river in Manhattan at least ten thousand New Yorkers stood shoulder to shoulder, chests to backs, to bid farewell to the first president in U.S. history to travel beyond the shores of North America while in office. And on Staten Island, five hundred children waited, with restless anticipation, for the moment when the ship passed the Statue of Liberty, their cue for hoisting one thousand tiny flags into the air, waving them vigorously like wings in a flock of red, white, and blue birds.

Two by two, the passengers from the special train followed Wilson and boarded the 699-foot-long George Washington, a former German luxury liner selected to transport the president to France by the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were followed by dozens more, including members of the American Peace Commission; experts in economics, cartography, the Balkans, Russia, Turkey, and Alsace-Lorraine; assistants to the experts; War Department personnel, such as the head of the Military Intelligence Division, Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill; George Creel, chairman of the Committee on Public Information; Red Cross nurses; and YMCA workers. Already on board were the crew of seventy-five officers and 1,049 men of the navy and Marine Corps, the chef of New York’s Hotel Biltmore and his staff, six thousand sacks of mail, 3,500 tons of cargo, and hundreds of Christmas parcels for the soldiers still in France.

At 10:15 A.M. the George Washington steamed out of her berth, escorted down the harbor by five destroyers, joined at Staten Island by a dozen more and led by the super-dreadnought USS Pennsylvania. Zeppelins circled overhead and two army planes performed aerial feats, looping and swooping, while thousands of spectators gasped and cheered. As the destroyers thundered out the presidential salute of twenty-one guns and small craft blew continuous blasts of whistles and toots, the president and Mrs. Wilson stood on the bridge of their ship and waved. And, as the ship slowly moved out of the harbor, it passed within fifty yards of another transport whose decks were crowded with returning soldiers waving and cheering. On its ten-day voyage, Wilson’s ark of experts would take the southern route through the Azores, avoiding storms further north. “I anticipate no trouble,” the ship’s commander told the press that day, “with the faintly possible exception of a stray floating mine which might be encountered these days anywhere in the Atlantic lanes.”

The unprecedented voyage of the president across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe was risky indeed, but for more reasons than weather and mines. According to the politicians who disagreed with his decision to go—both Democrats and Republicans—Wilson was risking his presidency and jeopardizing the success of the peace talks. Some claimed that by attending the conference and sitting down with foreign secretaries and prime ministers to negotiate, he would diminish what was now a messianic image worldwide. Instead of the arbiter of the future of humankind, he would be just another negotiator. Distance and aloofness enhanced his power, they said.

On the morning of the departure, former president Teddy Roosevelt—Wilson’s longtime nemesis—told the press from his hospital bed in New York, “President Wilson has not given the slightest explanation for his trip abroad.” Other Republicans accused Wilson of betrayal for leaving the country and labeled him “un-American.” How, they asked, could the president do his job if he were on the other side of the Atlantic? How could he make civil appointments, meet privately with legislators, speak to citizen groups, pardon offenders, or receive ambassadors, if he was occupying an office in Paris? How could he listen to the pulse of the nation from such a distance? And, they said, if he were compelled by necessity or worry to return home, it would take him nearly two weeks.

One Republican senator, Lawrence Sherman from Illinois, went so far as to introduce a resolution on December 3 calling upon the Senate to declare Wilson “out of office” if he dared to leave the country, which, of course, he was scheduled to do the next morning. In the hope of stripping the president of his power to perform the duties of his office while abroad, the senator claimed that the president’s absence was a “palpable violation” of the Constitution. Wilson’s absence when Congress was in session and when domestic conditions were insecure, as they were then in the months following the war, was an act of “legislative and executive sabotage against the Government,” Sherman said. “The President of the United States is not its President in France; he is an alien there, a mere citizen of this Republic, shorn of all his sovereign powers.”

Still others attacked Wilson’s daring belief that his new League of Nations could be the “indispensable instrumentality” of world peace and justice and that it was an absolutely necessary component of the peace treaty. They feared his focus on a “peace without victory,” as Wilson had said. Instead they favored a crushing victory, which meant harsh terms for Germany and which would reinvigorate the old order of military rivalries that had led to the Great War.

Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge from Massachusetts was resolute in his own view that Wilson’s vision of peace not only misrepresented the people of the United States but also endangered a speedy, effective peace. Lodge advocated the harshest possible terms for Germany. “The first and controlling purpose of the peace must be to put Germany in such a position that it will be physically impossible for her to break out again upon other nations with a war for world conquest,” he wrote in a memo to Henry White, the only Republican in Wilson’s peace mission. To Lodge, crippling Germany was the only way to prevent future wars.

Lodge was so eager for his point of view to be heard in Paris that the day before the voyage, he visited White while the diplomat was packing for the trip and expressed his concerns. Then a few hours before White boarded the special presidential train to Hoboken, Lodge delivered to him a nine-page memorandum outlining his views—and undermining his president. He asked White to secretly show the memo to French premier Georges Clemenceau and other European statesmen so that they would know, Lodge said, that Wilson’s visions were not backed by the majority of Americans.

But none of this would deter Wilson. His potent purpose blinded him to the risks of going to France and blocked out the shouting naysayers. He was determined to create a new world order, one no longer based on force and fear, jealousy and self-interest, and the endless antagonisms threatening to erupt into wars. These were conflicts endemic to a system of powerful nations vying for more power, overpowering smaller nations in the quest for hegemony. Wilson’s world would be based on cooperation through what he described as a “single overwhelming, powerful group of nations who shall be the trustee of the peace of the world.” Nothing of this magnitude had ever been attempted before: a fantastic plan for world peace in the aftermath of an equally unparalleled war. If such a war could occur, why shouldn’t there be a peace to prevent such a war from ever occurring again?

At sixty-three, in delicate health, Wilson, who had never lost an election, went to Paris because he believed he must personally present—and protect—his plan for world peace. He may have believed what he promoted: that nations, small and large, had a right to determine their own governments and policies; and that, if given a chance, the spirit of brotherhood could be just as powerful as military might, capable of mending a broken world and achieving a permanent peace. “To conquer with arms is to make only a temporary conquest,” Wilson once said. “To conquer the world by earning its esteem is to make permanent conquest.” Wilson also said that he felt responsible for the 110,051 American soldiers who had died in the war. Two days before his departure to France, he told Congress: “It is now my duty to play my full part in making good what they offered their life’s blood to obtain.”

In a groping world anxious to begin anew, Wilson’s enthusiastic supporters far outnumbered his critics at this point simply because they wanted to believe what he said. They wanted to know that their sacrifices in wartime would result in a better world, that Wilson was indeed the alchemist of the world, capable of turning lead into gold. In France, they would hail him as “the Champion of the Rights of Man”; in Rome, the “God of Peace”; and in Milan “the Moses from Across the Atlantic” and the “Savior of Humanity.” In Paris, where two million people would greet him, he was “Wilson the Just.” The editor of the London Daily News wrote, “I know how grave things are, but I rely on the stiff jaw of one great man.”

Early in the morning of December 4, on the ferry from Manhattan to Hoboken, a young man on Wilson’s France-bound staff started up a conversation with a sweatshop worker. How many hours do you work? the staffer asked. The worker told him, “Fourteen.” And then the worker said, “Do you see that boat?” pointing to the grand transport docked across the river in the Hoboken port. “There’s a man aboard her [who] is going to Europe to change all that.”

“For a brief interval, Wilson alone stood for mankind,” H. G. Wells would later write.

CHAPTER 2

Spies Are Everywhere

Perhaps the most common myth about war is that it ends when the textbooks say it does, when the cease-fires begin and the documents are signed. Ostensibly, by the time the George Washington left New York harbor, the European war had ended and the American president was embarking on his dramatic experiment to end all wars. But a world accustomed to conflict cannot with a mere pen stroke shut down the machinery of war or change the mentality of measuring the world in Manichaean terms of good and evil.

In Europe, in the weeks after the Armistice, bombs exploded in train stations; railways were often too unsafe for Allied troops to use; local skirmishes abounded; two hundred prisoners of war were found dead at a Belgian rail station; and military intelligence officers reported a plague of distrust regarding the Armistice, with troops believing it to be a German ruse to demobilize the Allies. In northern Russia, American soldiers continued to fight in icy swamps and snowfields while influenza and pneumonia swept through the outposts. And in America, “the shadow war” was far from over. This was the war behind the war, in which a vast network of secret agents spied on American civilians in the name of national security, reporting on the private lives of men and women who behaved in a way that was thought to threaten America’s ability to win the war.

In the days immediately following the Armistice, the U.S. government, most specifically the Justice Department, made it clear to every domestic spy, whether paid or volunteer, that the job of securing the nation against Prussian deceptions wasn’t over. There would be no war’s-end relaxation for those who protected the nation at home. Now the task was to stop the propagandists who favored leniency for Germany at the peace table and to keep a “vigilant watch over anarchists, plotters and aliens,” as the Justice Department told the Washington Post on Armistice Day. Seth Wheeler, Jr., a volunteer spy in Albany, New York, told his local paper on November 18, “I’m as busy in my patriotic work as at any time since assuming the post.”

Espionage was hardly new to America. By 1917, when America entered the war, the private investigation business was thriving, with thousands of agents at more than three hundred firms, such as Pinkerton’s, and in the intelligence departments of numerous corporations. What happened to domestic intelligence during the war, however, was far more extensive: it was, in fact, revolutionary.

By the time of the signing of the Armistice, a massive, highly organized intelligence community had evolved in the United States, composed of agents from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the army’s Military Intelligence Division (typically referred to as the MID), the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (the BI), the Treasury Department’s Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Service, and other agencies, including the U.S. Railroad Administration and the U.S. Food Administration. In addition, police departments in big cities had their own intelligence forces that coordinated with the army’s MID. Even the YMCA had a battalion of spies.

The largest of all such groups was the MID, whose manpower was far greater than the navy’s intelligence force or the Secret Service. The MID was even larger, in 1917 and 1918, than the Bureau of Investigation, and by the end of the war it had become the main clearinghouse for other agencies’ reports on civilians. The MID also worked with the State Department on the sensitive work of screening passports. Modeled after the British counterespionage system, it named its branches MI1 through MI8. Domestic spies worked out of MI4.

Even more vast in numbers, however, than any of the federal intelligence staffs was a mammoth web of patriotic organizations enlisting thousands of volunteer spies, all of whom reported their findings to Naval Intelligence, the MID, or the Bureau of Investigation. As one historian later wrote, by November of 1918, “the U.S. had fielded a corps of sleuths larger than any country had done in all of history.” Among them were the Liberty League, the American Defense Society, the Home Defense League, the National Security League, the Anti–Yellow Dog League, the All-Allied Anti-German League, the Knights of Liberty, the Boy Spies of America, the American Anti-Anarchy Association, and the Sedition Slammers. The most powerful was the American Protective League, or APL, a clandestine “club” of volunteers that was a major force behind the shadow war.

The APL began in the early spring of 1917 in Chicago, where the large German population was a matter of grave concern to advertising executive A.M. Briggs, who volunteered to help the regional office of the Justice Department investigate leads on German agents. President Wilson had just severed relations with Germany, war was imminent, and the Justice Department had only fifteen agents to cover all of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It also had no motor cars. Briggs first offered himself and several of his friends as drivers, chauffeuring the small squadron of federal agents. Then he organized a group of wealthy men to buy several dozen motor cars for the Justice Department...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• ALSO BY ANN HAGEDORN
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PROLOGUE Armistice Day 1918
• PART I • WINTER: JUBILATION AND HOPE
• PART II • SPRING: FEAR
• PART III • SUMMER: PASSION
• PART IV • AUTUMN: STRUGGLE