A year later, when the time for decision arrived, Wilson was determined to go to Paris himself, even though there were real questions as to whether his leaving the country was legal (a statute enacted in 1913 forbade it), let alone wise. Not merely would he go, but his notion was that in meeting overseas with the Allied prime ministers, “I assume also that I shall be selected to preside.”
House, already in Europe as the President’s plenipotentiary, became aware of some of the problems that might arise were Wilson to spend any considerable time at the peace conference, and cabled him November 14 in search of a compromise. Putting the blame for the unwelcome advice on others, House claimed that British and French leaders were worried that Wilson, as head of state, would outrank their prime ministers, who were merely heads of government; they therefore suggested that Wilson spend only a short time in Europe at a preliminary meeting that would set the main lines of the peace agreement, leaving it to others to work out the details in the lengthy peace conference that would follow.
Wilson was put out of humor by the cable, and replied that he would not allow his superior rank to become a problem. No point of dignity, cabled the President, “must prevent our obtaining the results we have set our hearts upon and must have.” Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the considerable resistance to his proposed voyage, Wilson told House that “it is universally expected and generally desired here that I should attend the conference.”
Wilson’s son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, proposed that he himself should go but that the President should not. Both of his suggestions were rejected, and he resigned from the cabinet.
The President’s face turned grim when Secretary of State Lansing, too, advised him not to go. Wilson never forgave him. But it would have been awkward to have left the secretary of state behind, so Wilson appointed Lansing a peace commissioner, along with himself and House.
General Tasker Bliss, the U.S. military representative on the Supreme War Council, sent message after message to Wilson telling him that it was essential that the President personally come to Europe to push the American peace program. Wilson happily made Bliss a peace commissioner in place of (and at the suggestion of) Secretary of War Baker, who felt duty bound to remain in Washington.
For the fifth and final place on the American Peace Commission, Wilson sought a token Republican. But he wanted one whose support he could count on, which ruled out the obvious choices: ex-President Taft, former Secretary of State Elihu Root, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Having rejected several nominees, he and Lansing chose a retired diplomat named Henry White, who carried no weight in the Republican party but whose views the President found congenial.
So long as he was the solitary commissioner in Europe, House had been happy to have Wilson stay at home. But he was glad the President was coming to Europe now that there were to be more commissioners. The other three might not have let House have his way were the President not there. As explained in a diary entry by Willard Straight, who was in House’s confidence: “I think he [Wilson] wants to come. It’s obvious the others don’t want him to. They’re afraid of him. House is afraid of the rest of the American mission.”
Wilson planned to make decisions not only for the American mission, but for the peace conference as a whole. He told a Swiss scholar that he intended to “run it all” at Versailles, but would do so without hurting the feelings of the leaders of the Allies.
But the President was obliged to delay his departure until December 2, 1918, when he was scheduled to deliver the annual State of the Union speech on Capitol Hill. At midnight on December 2–3, only hours after addressing the Congress, Wilson boarded a train for Hoboken, New Jersey, where he was awaited by the George Washington, the liner that would bring him and America’s message to the Old World.
The brother of Elly Axson (Wilson’s deceased first wife) wrote the President that “you carry overseas with you the hearts and hopes and dreams and desires of your fellow Americans. Your vision of the new world that should spring from the ashes of the old is all that has made the war tolerable to many of us.… Nothing but a new world is worth the purchase price of the war.…”
Wilson himself claimed that his showdown in Paris with the leaders of Europe would prove to be “the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history.”
WHEN HE BOARDED THE OCEAN LINER, the President, evidently exhausted, was suffering from a cold and a cough. His doctor and constant companion, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, was by his side. The ship’s commander plotted a southerly route to give the President a more pleasant crossing. The Wilson suite was comfortable and the President’s schedule was leisurely: he went to bed early, slept till noon, was served meals in his rooms, and took restorative walks on deck. After a couple of days at sea, he was back to normal.
The State Department, relegated by the President to the role of arranging the details of the American expedition to Paris, took full advantage of its position and assigned to itself the best staterooms aboard ship as well as a private dining room and bar, where Lansing, Bullitt, and other of its officials congregated to be served by a staff taken from a New York hotel. Meanwhile, members of the President’s entourage, including the outside experts on the staff of the Inquiry, were herded into cabins on “D” deck that had been used for troop transport.
Bullitt, who maintained contact with the Inquiry people, became aware that for them this was the final blow. They had been allowed little or no contact with those who were to make the decisions, and they felt unappreciated. They invited Henry White to tea, and he brought Lansing along, but it was the President they really wanted to meet. Bullitt contrived to speak to Wilson and “explained that everybody on board was in a thoroughly skeptical and cynical mood” and suggested that he talk to them so they would not feel ignored.
Though surprised, the President adopted the suggestion and spoke informally to some of the assembled scholars for about an hour. He discussed the establishment of a new world order. He said that the traditional European balance, in which the peace was kept by countervailing power, with each alliance checked and balanced by a rival alliance of roughly equal power, was a system inherently flawed. An alternative that he also rejected was an alliance of the victorious powers to uphold the peace settlement, such as was done in 1815 after the Napoleonic wars and such as TR urged now; but, Wilson argued, such an arrangement brought repression rather than stability.
What he had in mind (he said) was a broad general agreement by the countries of the world to join together in a league that would guarantee to each its independence and its present frontiers. Of course, existing frontiers might be—or because of changing conditions, might become—unjust; if so, the league would change them. He was not prepared to say how this would be accomplished; indeed, his point was that the specific procedures and machinery of the league should not be detailed in advance but should, like the Common Law of England, grow through experience.
The United States was qualified to lead the countries of the world into a new system of international relations because it had proven itself in peace and in war. Claiming that “at Château Thierry we saved the world,” the President said that he had it from Pershing that the marines thrown into combat in that battle had stopped a German thrust at Paris that otherwise would have lost the war for the Allies. America’s historic diplomacy, as exemplified by the Open Door policy in China, showed the country to be—unlike other countries—disinterested, and concerned only to do what is fair. The other nations, he said, could bring their disputes to the league of nations and trust the United States to be an impartial umpire of their claims.
Wilson encouraged the scholars to come to him during the peace conference if there were something vital they felt he had to know. “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it,” he promised.
BULLITT HAD TRAVELED on the first American peace boat to Europe—Henry Ford’s—and in his newspaper dispatches had ridiculed it. Ford’s notion had been that the Eu
ropean powers could and would settle their disputes by allowing Americans to referee them. That was Wilson’s theory, too.
On his second peace-boat voyage, Bullitt took such claims more seriously. Only later, when embittered, did he poke fun at the idea of the President sailing off with a boat full of professors to cure the world’s ills. The voyage of the academics provided an easy target. It was something out of a medieval allegory: the voyage of a ship of fools. Not unnaturally, Bullitt did not see the humor of it until after he ceased serving as one of the President’s learned doctors.
What did bother him, he claimed, was that the President was ill informed about the issues that would be raised at the peace conference. Wilson championed the right of national self-determination, which meant that each group—Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, Germans, Magyars, or whatever—should be free to choose its own political destiny and identity. In, for example, merging Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia into Tomáš Masaryk’s new “Czechoslovakia,” it therefore behooved the President to learn which national groups lived in those three provinces in order (according to his own principles) to consult them as to their wishes. But according to Bullitt, the following conversation took place:
WILSON: “Bohemia will be a part of Czechoslovakia.”
BULLITT: “But Mr. President, there are three million Germans in Bohemia.”
WILSON (puzzled): “President Masaryk never told me that.”
A FEW DAYS INTO THE VOYAGE, the ship’s newspaper, the Hatchet, carried a misleading news item. The British election campaign was in full swing, and on November 26 Winston Churchill, the colorful cabinet minister and Liberal member of parliament, had delivered a typically eloquent speech to his constituents in seeking reelection to the House of Commons. It was this speech that was the subject of the news item.
Churchill had begun by arguing that the war had been won by Liberal ideals—justice, freedom, tolerance, and humanity—as much as by the force of arms. He urged his audience to continue supporting constitutional and parliamentary government as against the antidemocratic doctrines of the new radical revolutionary movements in Germany and elsewhere. He also urged moderation in Allied treatment of defeated Germany.
He went on to ask: “Why should war be the only cause large enough to call forth really great and fine sacrifices?” and “Why is war to have all the splendors, all the nobleness, all the courage and loyalty?” He asked, “Why cannot we have some of it for peace?” The British people had given their all to the war for the past five years; now he urged them to pledge themselves to bringing the same effort and courage and national unity over the next five years to accomplishing constructive rather than destructive goals. “Five years of concerted effort by all … would create an abundance and prosperity in this land, aye, throughout the world, such as has never yet been known or dreamt of.
“There is enough for all,” he said. “The earth is a generous mother.” Pointing to the miracles made possible by modern science, he concluded with the lines: “Repair the waste. Rebuild the ruins. Heal the wounds. Crown the victors. Comfort the broken and brokenhearted. There is the battle we have now to fight. There is the victory we have now to win. Let us go forward together.”
In the course of his speech, Churchill reminded his listeners that the world remained dangerous and unsettled, and that even though peace was at hand, it was only prudent to maintain the strength of the Royal Navy. It was this, reported in alarming fashion by the George Washington’s newspaper, to which President Wilson, taking it as a military threat, responded with tirades against England and the Allies in conversations with the three journalists who accompanied his party.
It was American ships and American troops that had won the war, he claimed. By proposing an ambitious new shipbuilding program for the American navy, Wilson indicated, he could challenge Britain to an arms race that the wealthy United States could afford and the impoverished British empire could not. He would use this threat to get his way at the peace conference on the adoption of his program.
He said the Allied leaders “are evidently planning to take what they can get frankly as a matter of spoils.…” He was not going to let them do it. He would insist on a peace with justice—a peace, therefore, without victory. He regarded colonial empires such as those of Britain and France as inherently vicious, and saw in the Allied approach to peace terms a greediness and disregard of ethical principles that were the product of a corrupting political system.
In the course of his conversations aboard ship, Wilson touched on a number of other points, too, that were part of his American program for remaking world politics. Implied or stated, these were some of his goals: (1) the seas no longer to be dominated by Great Britain, but rather to be free, with American vessels always at liberty to go anywhere; (2) the European powers no longer to have colonial empires; (3) defeated Germany not to be destroyed, but rather reformed and given another chance; (4) the European powers to work together in unity rather than to balance against one another in rival blocs; (5) all countries to join a league that would keep boundaries from being changed by force; (6) diplomacy, including negotiation and conclusion of agreements between countries, to take place in public; (7) disarmament by all; and (8) foreign policies to be aimed at seeking achievement of ethical principles rather than pursuing the national interest or safeguarding national security.
At no time in history would such a program have had a chance of being accepted, let alone actually adhered to, by an imperfect human race. It was the stuff of dreams; it was too good for this world. Of course, the world war had brought about profound changes. Wilson was right to believe that politics in the winter of 1918–19 were in important ways different from what they had been in the past. But had the world changed so much as that? Even in the altered political circumstances of 1918–19, it was difficult to conceive of any way in which the United States could persuade or force victorious Britain, France, and Italy to accept such a program. The Allies looked forward to gaining, rather than losing, by winning the war. They intended to expand their empires, not surrender them.
At one time or another, Wilson had believed he would have in hand several levers with which to budge the Allies. But by the time he was aboard the George Washington, it should have been clear to him that none of those levers was available:
• Had the war lasted until 1919 or 1920, in all likelihood the exhausted Allies would have fallen by the way, the AEF would have entered the war in full force and with its own equipment, and Pershing could have imposed America’s will by force of arms on Allies and enemies alike. But that did not happen.
• Wilson often spoke of cutting off credits and loans to the Allies, but for reasons of domestic politics he could not carry out such threats, as these credits and loans went to purchase American goods and farm products.
• As he so often did, Wilson spoke of going over the heads of the Allied leaders to public opinion; but it would have done him no good, for public opinion was against him, too. On such issues as whether to punish Germany and whether to expand their empires, the peoples of the Allied countries were on the side of their leaders, not on Wilson’s. Even in the United States, opinion favored harsh peace terms for Germany, not the benign ones that Wilson seemed to have in mind.
The brilliant young liberals who had left off idolizing TR in order to rally to Wilson had therefore begun to reproach the President for having articulated a political program without having thought through how it could be achieved. According to Willard Straight,* whose views were generally shared by Lippmann and Bullitt, Wilson should have gotten the Allies to agree to America’s terms early in the war, at a time when they needed help desperately. But even earlier in the war, America had helped the Allies only as an incidental by-product of helping herself; so she could have brought pressure to bear on the Allies only by threatening to harm herself—hardly a convincing threat. Besides, even if the Allies, under duress, had agreed to America’s terms, they could (and probably would) have walked away fr
om their concurrence once the war was over.
A more convincing explanation of why Wilson in 1918–19 was not in a position to achieve his American program was that it was unachievable—at least at the time. Only decades later, in the aftermath of the Second World War, would Western Europe finally be so helpless and desperate as to be ready to accept some of the terms of his program.
In those later years mature men who had served Wilson in their youth would find his program there where he had put it down, waiting to be picked up and used, and would marvel at his foresight in understanding what their needs would be. So it would be said that Wilson was a prophet. But he was not: not, that is, in the sense of being clairvoyant. He did not foresee the events that led some of his program to become practical politics in 1945–60, any more than he understood why none of it was practical politics in 1918–19. He believed that with God’s help he would see his program adopted at the peace conference in Paris in 1919. Repeatedly he spoke of the coming conference in apocalyptic terms, and was not hopeful of a second chance if the conference failed. For him it was a matter of now or never. He believed, and was not alone in believing, that the peace conference in Paris was going to be the big event in human history.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT was determined to be there. He had missed serving in the war, he had been blackballed from the Porcellian Club at Harvard, and he had made up his mind that he was not going to lose out a third time. As always of late, his health was in poor condition, as was his marriage, but his thoughts were focused not on them, but on getting himself to Paris; and his plausible theory was that he was needed in France to deal with naval demobilization overseas. But Josephus Daniels refused to give permission and remained adamant.
In the Time of the Americans Page 28
