Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 10

  For Lodge, moreover, the personal and political considerations were reinforced by the philosophical. His twenty-six years in the Senate had been twenty-six years of uncompromising advocacy of an assertive, unilateralist foreign policy backed by strong armed forces. He wanted a peace that would strengthen America’s position relative to the European powers. “The thing to do,” he had said during the war, “is to lick Germany and tell her what arrangements we are going to make.” Above all, he believed in the sovereignty and independence of the United States; the international cooperation that was the centerpiece of Wilson’s League he viewed as a menace to America’s need to preserve absolute freedom of action to pursue and protect its own interests.

  And he believed in the sovereignty and independence of the Senate of the United States. He revered the Senate, with a reverence grounded in the same philosophy that had inspired the Founding Fathers to create it. As he was to write in 1921,

  [it] has never been, legally speaking, reorganized. It has been in continuous and organized existence for 132 years, because two-thirds of the Senate being always in office, there has never been such a thing as the Senate requiring reorganization as is the case with each newly elected House…. There may be no House of Representatives, but merely an unorganized body of members elect; there may be no President duly installed in office. But there is always the organized Senate of the United States.

  Never, he felt, had the threat to senatorial sovereignty been greater. A series of strong Presidents had chipped away at it, aiming “at weakening if not breaking down the government as nearly as possible to one which consists of the executive and the voters, the simplest and most rudimentary form of human government which history can show,” he said. And now Wilson was trying to destroy it entirely.

  The very symbol and heart of that sovereignty was, to Lodge, the Senate’s power over treaties. “War can be declared without the assent of the Executive, and peace can be made without the assent of the House,” he had once pointed out. “But neither war nor peace can be made without the assent of the Senate.” A treaty, he emphasized, is not a treaty just because a President has entered into it. A treaty is “still inchoate, a mere project for a treaty, until the consent of the Senate has been given to it.” Therefore, he said, “The responsibility of a Senator in dealing with any question of peace is as great in his sphere as that of the President in his.” Personal malice toward Wilson, political scheming—these were elements in Lodge’s motivation. But, as James MacGregor Burns has written, “at the core of the hostility … lay genuine differences of outlook and principle.”

  Woodrow Wilson’s “faith in representative democracy, in majority rule, in the ultimate wisdom of the people, went,” as Burns put it, “to the very core of his being”—as did his belief in the superiority of his mental processes to those of “pygmy-minded” senators. This feeling was evident in the makeup of the five-member delegation he selected to accompany him to Paris. While President McKinley had included three senators on the five-member delegation negotiating the treaty ending the Spanish-American War, Wilson took no senators with him; he apparently was resolved to have no opposition in his delegation. His announcement that his chief adviser would be his little-known personal confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, caused distress even on the Democratic side of the Senate. “Who is this Colonel House?” Arizona’s Henry Ashurst demanded. “Whence did he come, what has he accomplished, and where is he headed?” Wilson was unmoved. Returning to the United States for necessary bill-signing work in March, he reported that the treaty and the Covenant were linked—and then sailed again for France. When Lodge fired a warning shot across his bow—rising at his desk to read to the Senate just before it adjourned at midnight, March 3, 1919, a “Round Robin” declaring that the League “in the form now proposed” was unacceptable to the United States, a Round Robin bearing the signatures of thirty-seven Republican senators and senators-elect—Wilson reacted with contempt. “Anyone who opposes me … I’ll crush!” he told the French ambassador. “I shall consent to nothing. The Senate must take its medicine.” He had outsmarted the Senate, he felt. He boasted to the world that when the treaty was brought back, “the gentlemen on this side will find the Covenant not only tied into it, but so many threads on the treaty tied to the Covenant that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.” He assumed, in the words of one historian, that “The Senate would not dare to kill the peace treaty outright.” It would have no choice but to consent.

  Which showed that the onetime constitutional scholar had forgotten some of his lessons. Thirty-seven Republicans, more than the thirty-one necessary to block a treaty, had already declared this treaty unacceptable. Even if every Democrat voted to ratify it (and several Democrats had their own reservations about it), it would not be ratified so long as the Republicans remained united.

  And the leader of the Republicans knew how to keep them united; Lodge had, after all, served his apprenticeship under Aldrich and Allison. Now, in 1919, “No one knew better than he the various devices and methods by which a treaty could be killed, nor had anyone more practice in the use of them,” commented the historian W. Stull Holt. More than a dozen Republicans, led by the rigid isolationists Robert La Follette, William E. Borah, and Hiram Johnson, felt even more strongly about the treaty than did Lodge, so strongly that they were dubbed the “irreconcilables.” About a dozen “mild reservationists” approved the League in principle but wanted minor alterations. And a middle bloc of Republicans—“strong reservationists”—were willing to go along with the League only if American sovereignty was guaranteed. In a series of compromises, Lodge bound the three groups together in a solid front behind a series of fourteen reservations (fourteen to match Wilson’s Fourteen Points; newspapermen would dub them the “Lodge Reservations”) so that the Treaty of Versailles could be ratified only if these reservations—which would protect America’s sovereignty and freedom of action (but which would also have made the League a substantially weaker organization than the one Wilson had envisioned)—were added to the treaty. At the height of public enthusiasm for the treaty, Lodge had calmly reassured an ally, “The only people who have votes on the treaty are here in the Senate.” And he, not the President, had the votes.

  Moreover, he had the Senate’s inviolable rules under which a proposed treaty had to be considered by the Foreign Relations Committee before it could be considered by the Senate as a whole—and on the committee, he had a solid majority, for its Republican members were either “irreconcilables” or less ideological skeptics like Warren G. Harding of Ohio. By the time the President of the United States returned from Versailles in his glory, the Senate of the United States was arrayed against him in its might. On July 10, 1919, the day following his return, Woodrow Wilson entered the Senate Chamber with a bulky copy of the treaty under his arm and presented it to the Senate in a speech that enunciated the noble ideals behind it—“Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world? … We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision…. America shall in truth show the way….” But hardly had the President finished and left the Chamber when Senator Lodge rose at his desk to utter a single quiet sentence that had as much significance as all Wilson’s eloquence. He wished to move, the Senator said, to refer the treaty to the Foreign Relations Committee.

  Woodrow Wilson was now to be reminded of the power of the Senate. The President’s eloquence, as Burns puts it, “reverberated through press and public,” a press and public favorable to the idea of a League of Nations. But Lodge and other opponents of the League believed that if the public was educated to the possible sacrifices of American sovereignty to an international body, public opinion would change. Ample funding from Republican bankers was available to finance this education—a massive public relations campaign—but time was needed for the campaign to accomplish its purpose. And the Founding Fathers had created the Senate to provide such tim
e, to be the “cooler” for public opinion, to “refine and enlarge the public views” and produce “the cool and deliberated sense of the community.”

  The proposed treaty was 268 pages long. Lodge began the Foreign Relations Committee hearings by reading the treaty aloud—every page—in a committee room empty except for a single clerk, who took down what he said. That took two weeks. Then the committee called witnesses, scores of witnesses, to testify against the treaty. And while Lodge was thus playing for time, his allies were flooding the country with anti-League advertising and holding anti-League rallies in major cities, rallies at which the speakers were often senators.

  The battle was a throwback to the great senatorial debates of the previous century in which long, closely reasoned Senate speeches had been reported fully in the press and discussed, in town meetings and on street corners, across the country. One speech—two hours long, delivered in August in a steaming hot Chamber by Lodge himself—is all but forgotten today, but whatever the validity of its reasoning, it nonetheless expressed that reasoning with the eloquence and power of that earlier age.

  You may call me selfish, if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life. I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first in an arrangement like this. I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails the best hopes of mankind fail with it. I have never had but one allegiance—I cannot divide it now. I have loved but one flag and I cannot share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for a League.

  For many of the speeches, the galleries were as packed and attentive as they had been for Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. As one historian has written, if Lodge “had wondered whether the campaign to convert the American people to his views was working, on the day he spoke he received ample and gratifying proof from the galleries”—which were packed, not only with representatives of women’s organizations but with a contingent of Marines who had fought at Chateau-Thierry, and who had, in fact, come to the Senate Chamber directly from a parade in which they had passed in review before President Wilson. When Lodge finished, mothers and Marines stood and cheered him before the ushers could quiet them down. And there was another reminder of the Great Triumvirate: hundreds of thousands of copies of Lodge’s speech were printed and distributed across the country.

  Although Wilson fumed at the slow pace of Lodge’s hearings, the President couldn’t persuade the senators to speed up. “Mustering,” in Burns’ words, “all his presidential and personal influence,” he used face-to-face persuasion, “talking to senators individually and in small groups,” writing “private letters” to wavering Republicans. But the Founding Fathers, fearing executive power, had armored the Senate against it. The power of the President may have swept across the country, and indeed across part of Capitol Hill. It came to a halt at the door to the Senate Chamber.

  When Wilson summoned Senator James Watson of Indiana to the White House and asked him, “Where am I on this fight?” Watson replied, “Mr. President, you are licked. There is only one way you can take the United States into the League of Nations.” “Which way is that?” “Accept it with the Lodge reservations.” “Lodge reservations? Never! I’ll never consent to any policy with which that impossible name is so prominently identified.” The President decided to rally public opinion behind the League by going on a cross-country speaking tour, to, he said, “appeal to Caesar”—the people. But Wilson had evidently forgotten what happened to Caesar—and who did it.

  Wilson’s tour of the country was an epic of eloquence. “I have it in my heart that if we do not do this great thing now, every woman ought to weep because of the child in her arms,” he prophesied. “If she has a boy at her breast, she may be sure that when he comes to manhood this terrible task will have to be done once more.” It was an epic of courage and will, as the President fought against mind-numbing headaches that seemed to grow steadily worse until finally he was struck by a premonitory stroke—and even then he tried to fight against returning to Washington, where, after another stroke, he hovered paralyzed and nearly blind for weeks on the edge of death. But eloquence, and the public opinion aroused by it, couldn’t make even a dent in the Senate armor. As Burns summarizes: “By crusading for the League, Wilson had indeed nearly thrown his own life away—yet he had not succeeded in changing a single vote in the Senate.”

  Refusing to compromise, the President instructed the Democrats to vote against Lodge’s fourteen amendments, and they were defeated. But Wilson’s proposed treaty was defeated, too. “For decades,” as Burns puts it, “scholars have asked why Wilson allowed the treaty to go down in defeat, why he did not just swallow hard and accept the Lodge reservations as one more necessary concession.” Many have speculated that the reason was physical, that Wilson’s judgment was clouded, his stubbornness increased, by his stroke. But there was a political reason, too—a definitive one in political terms. There was no necessity for the Republican moderates to compromise. Two-thirds plus one of the Senate was required for passage of a treaty, and Wilson didn’t have two-thirds. Wilson’s last hope—his attempt in 1920 to make the upcoming presidential election “a great and solemn referendum” on the issue of the League—was snuffed out by the election of Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that “We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.”

  The Senate’s victory over the Treaty of Versailles proved again that the powers given that body by the Founding Fathers were strong enough to stand against the power of the executive and the power of public opinion—strong enough to stand, if necessary, against both at once. “Ultimately,” as Burns has written, “Wilson’s League was not killed by him, by the Senate Democrats who voted as Wilson instructed them, by the irreconcilables, or even by Lodge. It was thwarted by a political system…. Lodge, it is true, manipulated that system brilliantly, but he had only inherited it. In the struggle over the Treaty of Versailles, the American system of checks and balances worked as the Founding Fathers intended that it should.” Woodrow Wilson was defeated by a body he considered both unrepresentative and oligarchical. He was right. The Senate was unrepresentative and oligarchical. But it had the power.

  • • •

  BUT WHAT had the Senate done with that power? “If we do not do this great thing now … the terrible task will have to be done once more,” Woodrow Wilson had warned. Was his analysis correct? Would another world war have come—as it came only twenty years later—if the Senate of the United States had ratified the Treaty of Versailles, and the Covenant of Nations?

  No one can be certain of the answer. Even if the United States had joined the League, would the country, with an isolationist spirit still heavy on the land, have been willing, when called upon, to meet its obligations? Would the other great powers have been willing? In the event, of course, when they were challenged by aggressor nations, they proved, despite many pledges, to be unwilling. But there is at least a possibility that America’s participation in the League might have heartened the Western democracies when Hitler and Mussolini began to test their will. There is at least a possibility that if all the democracies had been united, history might have been different. The Senate, which in the previous century, during its Golden Age, had kept alive for forty years—forty vital years—the possibility of peace for the Union, in the twentieth century had struck a great, perhaps mortal, blow at the possibility of peace for the world. In the nineteenth century, the Senate had played a significant—for a considerable portion of that century, a dominant—role in America’s foreign policy. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, it had played a much more minor role in foreign affairs. It had made a single significant decision—and that decision had been a tragedy.

  AND IN DOMESTIC AFFAIRS, the record was—if possible—worse.

  With the dawn of the new century, the public’s deman
d for an end to trusts and to the high protective tariff that was “the mother of trusts,” the tariff that robbed farmers and gouged consumers, and that had now been in place for almost fifty years—the demand, for legislation to ameliorate the injustices of the Industrial Revolution, that had begun to rise during the Gilded Age, only to be thwarted in part by the Senate—began to rise faster, fed by the books of Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens and Theodore Dreiser and a hundred other authors; by the new mass-circulation magazines, which, in the very first years of the twentieth century, educated America about the manipulations of Standard Oil and stirred its conscience to the horrors of sweatshops and child labor (in 1900, almost two million boys and girls were working, often alongside their mothers, all the daylight hours seven days a week in rooms in which there might not be a single window); and by the Populist and Grange movements, which gave farmers insight into the power that railroads and banks had over their lives, and into their helplessness against them. These feelings now crested in a great wave of humanitarian concern, an outraged, impassioned demand for social justice, that became known as the Progressive Movement. That wave swept over city halls. Long-entrenched boss rule was swept aside by reform mayors in a hundred cities. It swept over statehouses; reform governors pushed through child labor laws and laws increasing protection from, and compensation for, on-the-job injuries. And with McKinley’s assassination, there was suddenly, in Theodore Roosevelt, a President who reformers felt was one of their own—their moral leader, in fact: the very embodiment of the popular will, of the spirit of reform, of Progressivism, was in the White House.

  At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue were the Supreme Court, the House, and the Senate. All were far more conservative than the spirit of the age, but the Court could act only in areas in which it was asked to rule, and while the House was a force against Progressivism during a relatively brief period in which Joseph Cannon reigned as Speaker, the rest of the time that still-growing body—it would reach 435 members in 1910—was in its customary disarray, a force against, or for, nothing.