Authors: Larry Schweikart,Michael Allen
Where the treaty was not self-contradictory, it was mean, vindictive, and, at the same time, ambiguous. The phrases avoided specifics, falling back on the reformist language of freedom, respect, and observing the rights of nations. Which were? Wilson could not, or at least did not, say. Nations had to be respected, except for Germany, which had to be taught a lesson. In that regard, the French were much more pragmatic, seeking a mutual security pact with the United States and Britain. Instead, Wilson pressed for universal participation in the League of Nations, which, the French knew, would soon include France’s enemies. More damaging (at least in the eyes of U.S. Senate critics of the treaty), the League threatened to draw the United States into colonial conflicts to maintain the Europeans’ grip in Africa and Asia—a concept fundamentally at odds with America’s heritage of revolution and independence.
Satisfied they had emasculated the Central Powers and at the same time made the world safe for democracy, Great Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and other participants signed the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. Within ten years, its provisions would accelerate German economic chaos, European unemployment, and at least indirectly, the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Returning to the United States with the treaty in hand, Wilson faced a skeptical Senate—now in the hands of the Republicans, who had won both houses in the 1918 off-year elections (despite Wilson’s claim that a Republican election would embarrass the nation). Opposition to the treaty in the Senate was led by Henry Cabot Lodge (Massachusetts) and William Borah (Idaho). Lodge, chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, disagreed less with the intent of the treaty or its likelihood to involve the nation in foreign conflicts than he did with the imprecision of its wording, which was, in his opinion, too open ended. The public agreed with the general premise of a worldwide peacekeeping body, but needed to be convinced that the League would be feasible and effective. Attempting to add specificity, Lodge introduced his own reservations to the treaty. Other opponents, however, including the Progressive wing of the party led by Robert La Follette, Hiram Johnson, and Borah, had voted against going to war in the first place, and continued to reject any postwar European involvement.
Many Democrats, including Bryan and Colonel House, as well as members of Wilson’s own cabinet, such as Herbert Hoover, echoed the reservations. Some argued that the League of Nations committed American boys to dying for nebulous and ill-defined international causes. This in itself violated the Constitution, and no American sailor, soldier, or marine had ever taken a vow to defend the League of Nations. Since virtually none of the opponents had been present at Versailles when Wilson had negotiated the final points, they didn’t realize that he had already traded away the substance of any legitimate leverage the United States might have had in return for the shadow of a peace enforced by international means.
Lodge rightly recognized that the notion that every separate ethnic group should have its own nation was hopelessly naïve. Was French Quebec to declare independence from English Canada? Should the Mexican-dominated American Southwest attempt to create Aztlan? Branded an obstructionist, Lodge in fact controlled only 49 votes, some of which could have been swung by reasonable negotiations by Wilson. Instead, the stubborn president sought to go over the heads of the senators, making a whistle-stop tour touting the treaty. Speaking on behalf of the treaty, Wilson covered a remarkable eight thousand miles in three weeks, often from the back of his train at thirty-seven different locations. Occasionally he spoke four times a day, sometimes an hour at a time. Yet even in our age of instantaneous mass communication, such a strategy would involve great risk: presidents are important, but not supreme. Wilson could count on reaching only a small handful of the population, and certainly not with the effect needed to shift entire blocs of votes in the Senate.
Wilson was already in poor health, having suffered a stroke in April 1919 while still in Paris, and concealing it from the public. In September he had another stroke, then, on October second, yet another. After the final stroke, Wilson remained debilitated and bedridden, out of touch with the American voter. Mrs. Edith Wilson thus became, in a manner of speaking, the first female president of the United States, though her role, again, was unknown to the general public. For more than a year she determined who Wilson saw, what he said, and what he wanted through notes that she crafted in a clumsy hand. When he was lucid, Edith arranged for Wilson to meet with staff and members of Congress, but most of the time he looked distant and dull. His speech was slurred, and he remained partly paralyzed, especially on his left side. Whether the stroke accounted for his unwillingness to negotiate any of the Lodge criticisms is uncertain, but whatever the cause, his cadre of supporters in the Senate failed to persuade a single vote to switch, sending the treaty down to defeat. And because Wilson would not entertain any of the Lodge reservations, indeed had ordered his loyal senators to vote against the Lodge version, in March 1920 the amended treaty also failed to pass. The defeated treaty symbolized the high water mark of international Progressivism. Although it would take several years, a new, more realistic foreign policy would set in at the end of the Coolidge administration. If the Progressives had failed in foreign policy, they were just getting started in areas of social reform, especially when it came to public health and women’s suffrage.
Progressive Fervor and the Real Thing
America’s war against alcohol began, oddly enough, with an attack on Coca-Cola. One of the first products challenged under the 1906 Food and Drug Act, Coke had eliminated even the minute portions of cocaine it had once used in the cooking process years before.
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The drink had originated with an Atlanta pharmacist, Dr. John Pemberton, and his Yankee advertiser, Frank Robinson, from a desire to create a cold drink that could be served over ice in the South to compete with hot coffee and tea. Pemberton had concocted the mixture from kola nuts, sugar, caffeine, caramel, citric acid, and a fluid extract of cocaine for a little euphoria. After Pemberton fell ill—one biographer claims of a cocaine addiction—Asa Griggs Candler, another pharmacist who suffered from frequent headaches, took over after discovering that Coke alleviated his pain. By that time, pharmaceutical tests had showed that Coca-Cola contained about one thirtieth of a
grain
of cocaine, or so little that even the most sensitive person would not feel any effects short of a half dozen drinks. Candler thought it unethical to advertise a product as Coca-Cola without any cocaine in the contents, but he realized that the growing public clamor for drug regulation could destroy the company. He therefore arrived at a secret formula that began with a tiny portion of cocaine that through the process of cooking and distilling was ultimately removed.
Since the late 1890s, Coke had been the subject of attacks by health activists and temperance advocates. Many Progressives, especially Dr. Harvey Wiley, the leader of the government’s case brought by the Food and Drug Administration in 1909–10, recklessly endorsed some products and condemned others. Wiley sought to expand his domain as much as possible and initiated a highly publicized case against Coke that culminated in a 1911 Chattanooga trial. By that time, there were no trace elements of cocaine in the drink at all, and the government’s own tests had proved it.
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This prompted Wiley to switch strategies by claiming that Coke’s advertising was fraudulent because Coca-Cola did
not
contain cocaine!
The effort to prosecute Coke went flat, but convinced Progressive reformers that government could successfully litigate against products with “proven” health risks. Wiley’s effort to get Coke was a test run for the Eighteenth Amendment, or the “noble experiment” of Prohibition, which involved the direct intervention of government against both social mores and market forces and, more than any other movement, epitomized the reform tradition.
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Temperance had a long history in American politics. Maine passed the first state law banning the sale of alcohol in 1851, based on the studies of Neal Dow, a Portland businessman who claimed to have found a link between booze and family violence, crime, and poverty.
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Abraham Lincoln had run on a platform of temperance. For a while, eliminating alcohol seemed a necessary component of the women’s movement as a means to rescue wives from drunken abuse and to keep the family wages from the saloon keeper. Alcohol, by way of the saloons, was linked to prostitution, and prostitution to the epidemic of venereal disease. “Today,” declared Dr. Prince Morrow, a specialist on sexually transmitted diseases, “we recognize [gonorrhea] not only as the most widespread but also one of the most serious of infective diseases; it has risen to the dignity of a public peril.”
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Convinced that unfaithful husbands were bringing home syphilis, doctors warned of the “syphilis of the innocent”—infected wives and children. Then there was the alcohol-related problem of white slavery, brought before the public eye in the 1913 play
Damaged
.
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At that point a public clamor arose, and Congress reacted by passing the Mann Act of 1910, which prohibited the transport of women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.
When Prince Morrow died, groups such as the American Social Hygiene Association persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Grace Dodge to take over the leadership of the movement. Rockefeller, who had given thousands of dollars for studies and provided much of the annual budget, had served on special grand juries in New York investigating the white-slave trade. Although the juries found no evidence of a syndicate, the experience convinced Rockefeller that there were responsible concerns about the damage done to society by venereal disease. He thus joined the thousands of other moral crusaders of the day, further cementing the relationship between planning, professionalism, and social reform. As one press release aptly put it, “The name Rockefeller stands for a type of efficiency and thoroughness of work.”
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All of these streams of reform and the application of science and professional solutions came to a confluence over alcohol, particularly because the saloon was perceived as the hotbed of prostitution. Even the direct democracy movement played a significant role in eliminating booze. At the elementary school level, thanks to Massachusetts housewife Mary Hunt, a movement called Scientific Temperance Instruction swept the nation in the 1880s, providing a forerunner to Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” antidrug campaign a century later.
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Enlisting antialcohol crusaders from Connecticut to California, Scientific Temperance Instruction in classrooms introduced scientific experts to support its Prohibition position, leading a popular democratic movement to influence curricula. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in the 1890s, joined with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to use local laws to excise saloons within city boundaries, isolating them in wet areas. More than 40 percent of the population lived in dry communities by 1906, thanks to such local legislation, and within three years the dry movement had spread to a dozen states, again through grassroots activism.
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Prohibition puts modern liberal historians in a quandry: on the one hand, they have approved of its use of federal power for social engineering for a purpose they deem desirable; but on the other hand, it ran counter to their unwillingness to pursue any policies based on morals or values. Consequently, historians have mischaracterized Prohibition as “cultural and class legislation,” wherein Progressive upper classes and Anglo-Saxons “imposed their Puritanical will on benign but besotted immigrants to mold an America that reflected their values,” as one text described the Progressives’ efforts.
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Historian Richard Hofstadter called Prohibition a “parochial substitute for genuine reform, carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus.”
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Such a view erred by lumping together two substantially different groups, the Progressives and the rural Populists. A stronger correlation existed with women and Prohibition, leading dry counties to also permit universal suffrage. Only after Prohibition failed was there a deliberate effort to reinterpret the essentially Progressive flavor of Prohibition as the work of wild-eyed Christian evangelists and Populists or, as H. L. Mencken sneeringly put it, “ignorant bumpkins of the cow states.”
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The amendment gained broad supermajority support from a wide range of groups, as was obvious by the fact that it was an amendment and not a statutory law. As Prohibition historian Norman Clark wrote, “A majority of the people in a majority of the states wanted this truly national effort to influence national morality.”
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Doctors, teachers, upper-class reformers, rural preachers, labor leaders, and businessmen of all sorts supported Prohibition.
Under the amendment, the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors (consisting of any beverage with more than .5 percent alcohol) was prohibited. Unlike later laws against drug use, actually consuming alcohol was not a crime, and had enforcement been even remotely possible, Prohibition may not have passed. Although a large majority of Americans (for a variety of motivations) supported the concept, it was not clear how many wished to provide the government with the means and the license to ensure compliance.
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A revealing look at the Janus-faced nature of Progressive policy can be gleaned from the approach to enforcement of the antialcohol campaign. The Volstead Act, passed in 1919 over Wilson’s veto, provided an enforcement mechanism, but instead of placing the Prohibition Bureau inside the Justice Department, where it belonged, Volstead made it a part of the Treasury Department. “Revenooers” broke up illegal stills, and agents crashed into speakeasies; and when the government had no other evidence, it charged mobsters with income tax evasion, which was what finally put Al Capone behind bars.