The Manchester Guardian printed the first summary in English of these deals on December 13. They set the British nonconformist conscience to stirring.
Printed in America by Villard’s New York Evening Post, they provided encouragement to the socialists and pacifists whose views Woodrow Wilson was coming to hold in low esteem. “What I am opposed to,” he told an A.F. of L. convention in Buffalo, “is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity. My heart is with them, but my mind has contempt for them. I want peace but I know how to get it and they do not. You will notice that I sent a friend of mine, Colonel House, to Europe, who is as great a lover of peace as any man in the world, but I didn’t send him on a peace mission yet. I sent him to take part in a conference on how the war was to be won, and he knows, as I know, that that is the way to get peace.”
Wilson was not the only man in the world who thought he knew how to get peace. Lenin, spinning his webs behind the rifles and machine-guns of his partisans, in the humming dynamo of Smolny Institute, had announced that for the working class the war was at an end. Over the radio and through the propaganda organizations the Bolsheviks were feverishly constructing, they were telling the conscript armies that the way to get peace was to shoot their officers and go home.
To prove that they were as good as their word the Bolshevik leaders were already engaged in negotiations for an armistice with the Germans in the ruined Belorussian town of Brest-Litovsk. Comrades Kamenev and Joffe led the Bolshevik delegation.
Adolf Joffe, particularly, proved an adroit negotiator and propagandist. Like his friend Trotsky he came from a rural family of welltodo Jewish business people. After a somewhat dilettante education in various universities he became attracted by the idealism of the revolutionary movement and made over a considerable fortune to the Social Democratic Party. Lenin picked him for the delegation on account of his air of cosmopolitan culture. A workers’ representative was included, as a matter of course, but it wasn’t until the delegates were already on their way from Smolny to the railroad station that somebody remembered they had forgotten to bring along a peasant. “There’s a peasant,” said Joffe pointing to a broad bearded figure under a streetlamp. They stopped the car, and by threats and blandishments induced a confused and humble old countryman to come along. They never could break him of bowing and scraping and calling everybody “Barin,” which meant “master”; so his collaboration was hardly considered a success.
The German representatives were Foreign Minister von Kuhlmann and Major General Max Hoffmann, Pershing’s old acquaintance from Japanese War days who had won fame through his overall direction of the Riga offensive. Count Czernin represented the Austrian Emperor. There were contingents from Turkey and the Balkan states, four hundred delegates in all.
The proceedings started in an old theatre, one of the few buildings left standing in the town, in an atmosphere of unearthly reasonableness. Czernin, frightened by the strikes and foodriots spreading throughout his crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, genuinely hoped to promote a general armistice. The Germans were biding their time. Possibly they did not want to upset the Bolshevist government which they were bolstering with millions of marks shipped into Petrograd for defeatist propaganda. They allowed Joffe to carry off an initial victory: the proceedings should be public, the participants could broadcast them to all the world. Then Joffe laid down two basic principles. There should be no annexations. Peoples should determine their own governments.
On Christmas Day the Germans produced their reply. They, too, were in favor of the principle of no annexations, particularly in relation to the German colonies the British had taken over, and were for selfdetermination, with some reservations in the case of these same German colonies.
Behind the scenes both sides were busy. The German generals were using the respite to consolidate their military positions and to sort out the units which could be spared for service at the western front. Nor were the Bolsheviks idle. Russian troops were fraternizing with the Germans along the whole length of the lines. Propaganda leaflets calling on the German workingclass to end the imperialist war were being hurried to the front from the printing shops of Petrograd and distributed by the hundreds of thousands.
The first talks ended with a ten day truce during which both sets of negotiators were to consult their governments. The German generals left dismayed. Somehow these despised Bolsheviks had managed to turn Brest-Litovsk into a sounding board for the preaching of their revolutionary apocalypse.
Von Hindenburg described the situation in his memoirs: “On December 15 an armistice had been concluded on the Russian front … Of course it would entirely have corresponded with our desires if the peace bells could have rung. The place of those bells was taken by the inflammatory wild speeches of revolutionary doctrinaires with which the conference room at Brest-Litovsk resounded … Peace on earth was to be assured by the wholesale massacre of the bourgeoisie … It seemed to me that Lenin and Trotzky behaved more like the victors than the vanquished, trying to sow the seeds of political dissolution in the rear as well as in the ranks of the army … I need hardly give any assurance,” ruefully added the Prussian commander in chief, “that to negotiate with a Russian terrorist government was extremely disagreeable to a man of my political views.”
With the coming of the holidays domestic problems piled up on the President’s desk. The country was locked in one of the harshest cold spells on record. Blizzards in the west and zero weather on the eastern seaboard were disrupting railroad traffic, already disorganized by conflicting priorities issued by the commissions, purchasing bureaus and quartermaster’s agencies which proliferated in Washington and around the thirtytwo camps where the draftees were in training. Every army paymaster was putting blue priority tags on the shipments he wanted with the result that priorities lost all meaning.
The railroads had come into the war in bad shape. Management was plagued by the results of past piratical financing, and held in a vice between the demands of skilled labor for wage increases, generally admitted to be long overdue, and the Interstate Commerce Commission’s refusal to allow rates to be raised. The railroads were undermanned. High wages in munitions plants and shipyards were draining off their best employees. The draft boards depleted the rest. The growth of war exports, without compensating imports, tended to fill the railroad yards in the east with empty freightcars waiting for a westerly load. On top of that the prolonged cold spell froze up locomotives, trapped barges on rivers and canals and increased the nationwide demand for coal and petroleum products. The railroad war board appointed by the Council of National Defense tried to unsnarl the tangle through voluntary cooperation but to no avail.
As Christmas approached, news came to Washington daily of plants shutting down for lack of fuel, of finished goods essential to the war effort jammed into warehouses or deteriorating on open docks, of ships tied up in frozen harbors. New York City was facing a coal famine. A hundred and fifty ships were anchored in the bay waiting for coal. In two weeks no mails had left for Europe. Newspapers were claiming that within seven days there would be no coal at all on Manhattan. Criticism of the conduct of war production was mounting in Congress. Somebody had to be put in charge to keep transportation moving.
For the past month whenever the President and his Secretary of the Treasury had a moment together they had talked railroads. Where was the man who could organize the whole network and run it as a continental unit? Wilson’s soninlaw already had the Treasury and four other fulltime jobs. “Mac I wonder if you would do it?” the President asked him one day. No man to underestimate his own powers, McAdoo answered that since he was already deep in railroad finance maybe he had better take the job himself rather than give it to someone he would have trouble cooperating with. Under the authority of a provision of the Army Appropriations Act, the President issued a proclamation taking possession of every railroad in the country and appointing William Gibbs McAdoo, with supreme powers over wages, rates, routing and financing, as director.