The Illusion of Victory by Thomas Fleming Read Free Book Online

vote and declining to submit the resolution to the full Senate. At any other time, this defection would have been major news. Stone had played a vital role in winning Wilson the Democratic nomination in 1912 and had worked closely with him in the Senate to pass important domestic reforms. He had wholeheartedly endorsed the president’s attempts to mediate the conflict as a neutral.
    Wilson’s switch to a belligerent posture had dismayed Stone. In February, the senator had issued a statement charging that a “cabal of great newspapers” in the United States was “coercing the government into an attitude of hostility” to Germany. Friends had warned Stone that he was risking political extinction. In deep background, a partner in J.P. Morgan’s bank, which had loaned billions to the British, cabled London that he could supply evidence that Stone was “intimate” with the German government. 51
    In place of Stone, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, once a strenuous opponent of war, undertook the task of presenting the resolution to the Senate. He read the brief document in a matter-of-fact style, obviously assuming that the task was a mere formality. The senator asked his fellow legislators for unanimous consent to consider and approve the resolution. In addition to Wilson’s triumphant speech, this sense of foregone conclusion was bolstered by the morning’s newspapers, which carried a report of the torpedoing of the armed U.S. merchantman Aztec , with the loss of twelve lives. In the press gallery, reporters were poised to scribble news flashes that the United States was practically at war.
    A lone voice punctured these assumptions:“I object to the request for unanimous consideration!” Senator La Follette was on his feet, defiance personified. Consternation swept the chamber. Those who understood Senate rules knew this meant that a vote would be postponed for at least a full day. The rule had been created to prevent hasty votes on important topics and to add substance to the claim that the Senate was the world’s greatest deliberative body. La Follette asked a startled Vice President Marshall to rule on his request. In a rage, the pro-war senators could do nothing but adjourn. In the cloakroom, they agitatedly conferred, wondering if La Follette would dare to launch a filibuster against the war resolution. 52
    A month before, La Follette’s stalling tactics had succeeded when President Wilson had asked Congress for the authority to arm merchant ships as a final attempt to keep the United States out of the war. The Wisconsin liberal and eleven other senators had filibustered until the Sixty-Fourth Congress expired without getting a chance to vote on the proposal.“Fighting Bob” had argued that the proviso would give Wilson the right to declare war—a privilege reserved for Congress—and was a bad idea in the first place. A few guns on a merchant ship were no defense against submarines. The president had denounced the filibusterers as “a little group of willful men” and released the Zimmermann telegram (which he had been sitting on for almost a week) to the press. La Follette and his antiwar colleagues had been roasted in almost every newspaper in the nation. But he stubbornly continued his filibuster, forcing Wilson to arm the merchant ships by executive order. 53

XVI
    While the Senate fumed impotently, other parts of the U.S. government were preparing for war—sort of. At his desk in the State, War and Navy Building, Army Chief of Staff Major General Hugh L. Scott was confronting a threat he considered far more dangerous than the German army: former president Theodore Roosevelt. The large, slow-moving Scott was deaf and frequently fell asleep in his chair; he had a penchant for answering questions using Native American sign language. But Roosevelt had galvanized him into uncharacteristic action.
    After maligning Wilson as everything from a coward to a Byzantine logothete for his refusal to go to