Remember the Fifth of November
World War Wednesday: America's Great War Election
Welcome to World War Wednesday, a weekly dive into the continuous, thirty-year epoch of global conflict from 1914 to 1945. Here, I strip away popular myths to analyze the dynamics of industrial warfare, institutional behaviors, and the ideologies that shaped the world we inherited.
REMEMBER THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER
The Great War, now more commonly known as the First World War or World War One, ended on Nov 11, 1918. American units first suffered combat casualties on November 3, 1917, in Bathelémont, France. With combat operations lasting just over one year and with victory achieved, why were Americans frustrated and ready to be done with President Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats?
Americans were tired of Woodrow Wilson’s antics of making everything about him and his supporters during the war. He violated the civil liberties of Americans who questioned the war. He looked the other way as German Americans were targeted for persecution. He continually expanded his mandate from defending the USA from the Germans’ threat of supporting Mexican fantasies of reconquering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, to transforming the political order of Europe. The Democratic Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, but enforcement went far beyond what most Americans were willing to live with, and too many became victims of overzealous prosecutions.
However, the United States has a safeguard that many democracies lack: the Founding Fathers made it impossible for the federal government to cancel elections during wartime.
October 1918, the last campaign of the war raged on, bloody and brutal, and yet across the Atlantic, it was campaign season for the midterm Congressional elections scheduled for November 5.
The Democrats had controlled Congress since 1912, and with victory in the war an almost sure thing, it looked like nothing could stop them from riding a patriotic wave.
The Republicans had a plan: give the American people a clear choice. While the troops were in combat and driving the Germans back across the Rhine, the Republicans offered the American people the chance to say no.
No to the League of Nations.
No to the Wilsonian paranoid national security state.
No to the Fourteen Points rather than total victory over Germany.
No to the waste and mismanagement of the wartime economy.
After being very cautious about attacking Wilson—because he was a wartime leader and they feared appearing to undermine the commander-in-chief during a declared war—the GOP capitalized on Wilson’s inability to stop making everything about his personal agenda.
On October 25, 1918, Wilson exposed himself to the American people.
Wilson attempted to gaslight the American people into voting for a Democratic Congress by attacking a vote for the Republicans as undermining the war effort without claiming that doing so was unpatriotic, while definitely implying that doing so was unpatriotic.
The Congressional elections are at hand. They occur in the most critical period our country has ever faced or is likely to face in our time. If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you will express yourself unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives…
I have no thought of suggesting that any political party is paramount in matters of patriotism. I feel too keenly the sacrifices which have been made in this war by all our citizens, irrespective of party affiliations, to harbor such an idea. I mean only that the difficulties and delicacies of our present task are of a sort that makes it imperatively necessary that the nation should give its undivided support to the Government under a unified leadership, and that a Republican Congress would divide the leadership…
The return of a Republican majority to either House of the Congress would, moreover, certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership. Spokesmen of the Republican party are urging you to elect a Republican Congress in order to back up and support the President, but even if they should in this way impose upon some credulous voters on this side of the water, they would impose on no one on the other side. It is well understood there as well as here that the Republican leaders desire not so much to support the President as to control him. The peoples of the Allied countries with whom we are associated against Germany are quite familiar with the significance of elections. They would find it very difficult to believe that the voters of the United States had chosen to support their President by electing to the Congress a majority controlled by those who are not in fact in sympathy with the attitude and action of the Administration.
I need not tell you, my fellow countrymen, that I am asking your support not for my own sake or for the sake of a political party, but for the sake of the nation itself, in order that its inward unity of purpose may be evident to all the world…
It was the opening the Republicans needed to be bold in their alternative plan. With ten days until the election, they could do what an opposition party should do: offer the people a clear and honest alternative. The American people were swayed by the idea that the French and British Empires or the Germans would change their response to American firepower due to the Democrats losing control of Congress. And they were not convinced that divided government would interfere with the constitutional separation of powers. They were convinced, however, that the Republicans would restrain Wilson’s narcissistic impulses to put himself and America at the center of problems they did not want.
There were early signs to be concerned about the peace. The wartime economic boom had just started and would be over after only one year. The Democrats had no plan for how to handle the transition back to a peacetime economy and the industrial job contraction. The GOP reminded people that Wilson had run in 1916 on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” But it was Wilson’s meddling in Mexico in 1914 and 1916 that made the Zimmermann Telegram a plausible threat to begin with. “Unprepared” was the Republican accusation: Wilson and the Democrats were unprepared for the war and were unprepared for the peace. The American people needed to return power to the natural party of government since the Civil War: the party of Lincoln.
They did.
And in 1920, the Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding went a step further and promised the voters a return to pre-Wilsonian “normalcy.”
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