The Illusion of Victory by Thomas Fleming Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Elsewhere in the United States, officials and ordinary citizens braced themselves for a wave of German sabotage. In New York, the police commissioner mobilized no less than 12,000 men equipped with machine guns and rifles to deal with an assault by German army reservists who had supposedly been waiting undercover for hostilities to begin. Armed guards patrolled bridges, railroad yards and other likely targets. The National Guard was already protecting the upstate reservoirs, on the apparent assumption that Berlin was not above ecoterrorism.
    More worrisome, according to the New York Tribune , were reports of a German plot to trigger a huge uprising among the South’s African Americans, a largely disenfranchised group who might wonder about joining a crusade to make the world safe for democracy. (The Tribune , of course, did not allude to this somewhat glaring fact—or to the way the Southern-born Wilson had permitted his mostly Southern cabinet to extend racial segregation to all parts of the U.S. government.) The shocking goal of the putative plotters was to seize Texas and turn it into a black republic in which “Mexicans and Japanese were to have equal rights with the Negro.” In San Francisco, gentlemen in the lounges of the exclusive Bohemian Club were discussing an even scarier possibility: A German-led army invading from Mexico, with cadres of “armed Negroes” in their ranks. 60
    Elsewhere, many people were ignoring Wilson’s claim that Americans would prove their friendship with the German people by being nice to the millions of German-Americans in their midst. Men and women with obviously German names were being harassed by superpatriots, investigated for presumed disloyalty and arrested as probable spies and saboteurs. In a Wichita Falls, Texas, exhibition game, Detroit Tigers outfielder Ty Cobb, arguably the greatest baseball player of the day (or any other day), slid into second base with spikes high and badly slashed Charles Lincoln “Buck” Herzog of the New York Giants. Cobb leaped on top of the bleeding Herzog and pounded him with his fists, screaming,“German!” 61

XVII
    On April 4, the Senate reconvened at 10 A.M. in an angry mood. La Follette was the main target of their wrath, which was reflected in numerous newspapers. During the Wisconsin senator’s filibuster on the armed-ship bill, New York World cartoonist Rollin Kirby had portrayed La Follette at the head of his little column of filibusterers, receiving the Iron Cross. The New York Times had assembled thirty-three editorials from around the nation, two-thirds of them denunciations. La Follette had been compared to Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot.
    Toward the end of the filibuster, Senator Ollie James of Kentucky had rushed at La Follette carrying a gun concealed under his coattails. One of Fighting Bob’s allies, Senator Harry Lane of Oregon, spotted the gun and drew a steel file long enough, he later said, to slip under James’s left collar bone and “reach his heart with one thrust.” Fortunately, several other senators wrestled the berserk Kentuckian back to his seat. 62
    Outrage over the way La Follette had forced the Senate to adjourn without declaring war was even more intense. Students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology burned him in effigy. At a pro-war lecture by a distinguished sociologist in New York, La Follette’s name was greeted with hisses. The Madison, Wisconsin, Democrat declared that the senator’s home state was “disappointed, chagrinned, indignant,” and wondered: “Is La Follette mad?” 63
    Although his Senate supporters had dwindled from eleven to five, La Follette remained undaunted. He had stayed up most of the night working on a speech. Now he waited expectantly while Senator Hitchcock reintroduced the war resolution with the admission that he had “bitterly opposed” the war but had decided that to cast his vote against the resolution would be “doing a vain and foolish