Instead of intervening in the war to help France (which is what Frenchmen had supposed that the Americans, however tardily, had come to Europe to do), it now appeared that America had other objects in view. The President instead intended to protect Germany from mistreatment; he had come to Paris to prevent Clemenceau and Foch from doing what had to be done to safeguard France against future German invasions. In place of the concrete measures the French planned to take to defend themselves, Wilson asked them to entrust their safety to a League of Nations that had no force behind it—and therefore no reality to it. That was bad enough, but there was worse: it was known in Paris that Wilson might not have enough votes in the Senate to ratify whatever treaties he signed in Paris. So the President, if he had his way, would force France to leave herself undefended in return for a mere piece of paper—the Covenant—which the United States then would not sign, and this would leave France, not America, to pay for Wilson’s folly.
Writing home on February 10, 1919, Joseph Grew reported that “the French press is complaining that we came into the war at the last moment … and now want to boss the whole show and rob them of their fruits of victory by helping Germany.… Furthermore the papers say that our only interest is to establish a League of Nations, impose our ideas on the Allies and then go home, leaving them to bear the brunt and shoulder the responsibility if anything goes wrong.”
And, wrote Grew, there was ill will between the French and American armies in the areas in Germany they now policed (and in which Douglas MacArthur and others were now stationed). “The Americans … have angered the French by their friendly attitude towards the Germans in the occupied territories.… The Americans compare the neatness of the German towns, their cleanliness, their love of music, their morality … to the disfavor of the French.”
WHEN PRESIDENT WILSON RETURNED to Paris from Washington in mid-March for his second and final session at the peace conference, there was considerably less fanfare than there had been on his first coming ninety days earlier. The French government assigned him new and less imposing (though perhaps more comfortable) quarters: the private residence—the hôtel—of Prince Roland Bonaparte on the Place des États-Unis, halfway between the Trocadéro and the Étoile.
Clemenceau, having recovered from an assassination attempt, led the French government in a barrage of territorial and economic demands against Germany that Wilson fought against but found hard to resist. For, as the conference knew, Wilson had learned in Washington that it was politically essential for him to obtain certain amendments to the proposed Covenant of the League of Nations—amendments, moreover, that exposed to the mercilessly logical and mocking French the wide gulf that separated what America preached from what she practiced. According to the young British diplomat Harold Nicolson, this was a less humiliating experience for Wilson (“He and his conscience were oh terms of such incessant intimacy that any little difference between them could easily be arranged”) than it was for other members of the delegation, on whom “the suspicion that America was asking Europe to make sacrifices to righteousness that America would never make, and had never made, herself, produced a mood of … increasing despair.”
Three principal amendments that the President was obliged to move were: that states should have the right to secede from the League (a right that the American Union had denied to South Carolina and the other confederated states of the South); that the League should have no right to probe into matters that are a state’s internal affairs (so that race prejudice in the United States, especially anti-Japanese legislation, could not be questioned); and that the validity of the Monroe Doctrine should be affirmed (so that the United States could maintain its exclusive sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, while continuing to deny to other countries the right to have spheres of influence anywhere).
In the end the French government allowed the President to have his way on these matters—and on others too, for House reported on April 14 that the French had permitted Wilson, in all, thirteen changes. But in doing so, it allowed him also to dramatize the extent to which political morality was something that Americans demanded mostly of others, seemingly having given themselves a dispensation from it.
IN PARIS DURING THE SPRING OF 1919, the President, his relationship with Colonel House, and the American program for world peace and reconstruction all collapsed. It remains a subject for speculation whether—and if so, how—these collapses were interrelated. Young Americans whose hearts were broken by the tragedy of Versailles and who were passionately concerned to discover why it had happened were driven to inquire, too, whether these events occurred there and then, or whether they merely manifested or were the culmination of processes that had originated earlier and elsewhere.
Did Wilson start to break with House because, on returning to Paris in mid-March, he found that his adviser had made too many compromises in the President’s absence? That is the story related in her memoirs by the second Mrs. Wilson: “Woodrow … seemed to have aged ten years,”* she wrote, and he had told her at the time that “House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris. He has compromised on every side.…” Or since Wilson, during his absence, had been kept informed by cable of what House was doing, and had approved, was the President unwilling to admit even to himself how extensive were the compromises he himself had made—and was he trying to shift the blame to House?
Did the issue of compromises in Paris merely bring to the surface earlier grudges: House’s opposition to the President’s remarriage, or House’s nepotism in giving jobs to his son-in-law and his wife’s brother-in-law, or his friendship with newspaper editors who glorified him at the expense of the President? The last was a point picked up by Harry Truman, who could identify with Wilson, and who wrote decades later, after leaving the presidency, that “… when House got to the point where he thought he was greater than the president, where he thought he was the president, why, then Wilson had to pull out the rug from under him and let him go, just like every president has had to do with some of his confidants.”
Yet the political friendship with House had been supremely valuable to the President—had been, in many ways, the making of him. In destroying the relationship, Wilson damaged himself. The aspects of the inflexible twenty-eighth President that were entirely his own—the stubborn and illiberal sides of his mind and temperament—were increasingly troubling to the young progressives and liberals who once had rallied to his banner; while the large-minded, forward-looking aspects of him that so attracted Lippmann, Bullitt, and other luminaries of their generation were represented by, shared by, and in some measure a creation of, House. Knowing the President only through the colonel, they were dismayed, disappointed, and surprised by the Wilson who emerged in Paris after his quick trip to Washington. In the spring of 1919, as they watched the steady distancing of the President from House, what they saw was Wilson turning against what they had supposed to be himself.
Was it the illness clouding his mind that drove the President to do it? On the afternoon of April 3, while meeting with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando to hear Yugoslavia present its case against Italy, the President suddenly was stricken. He returned to his residence in the grip of intense pain in the stomach, back, and head, in paroxysms of coughing, and with a fever of 103 degrees. Medical authorities ever since have disagreed as to what it was: influenza, a stroke, acute respiratory disease, or something else.
Though he recovered in a few days, the effects of the attack lingered on. His massive stroke six months later in the United States, causing physical breakdown and partial paralysis, led to the question of whether his collapse in Paris might not have been a precursor. Evidence now available enables historians to trace the breakdown of the President’s health even further back: to a supposed neuralgia attack in 1896, with loss of use (for a time) of his right arm; to a then undiagnosed stroke in 1906 that destroyed central vision in his left eye; to a series of small strokes suffered after that; and to continuing hypertension�
��high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis. Those inclined (as so many have been through the years) to blame Wilson’s failings after a certain date on his physical impairment now have an embarrassment of dates from which to choose, for his entire political career had been lived under the shadow of strokes and physical collapses.
It may be the opposite that is more true; it may well have been political failure that led to the April 3 attack. Wilson had been in frail health all his life, easily tired, not able to work more than about five hours a day, and unable to cope with stress. In student days the strain of study had been too much for him; severe indigestion had forced him to drop out of college and out of law school, and headaches and nerves caused breakdowns in graduate school.
So in the dark days of March 1919, as his American program for remaking the world collapsed in the face of stubborn political realities in Paris, it is possible that it was the political breakdown, with the ravages it worked on Wilson’s nerves and emotions, that led to, or at least contributed to, his physical breakdown.
AMONG THE PRESSURES to which the President was sensitive, and which he felt with increasing force in returning to Europe for his second and final session, was the clamor in the United States and elsewhere for finally bringing matters in Paris to a conclusion.
“Wilson very impatient with the slow progress of the deliberations,” Ray Stannard Baker, his Paris press secretary, noted on March 27. “Says Clemenceau is the chief obstacle.…” Two days later Baker wrote that House “now begins to be worried; blames the ‘Four’ for not getting down to business.…” Baker was one of the many who worried that anarchy or Bolshevism would prevail in central and eastern Europe if decisions were not reached promptly at the peace conference; on March 31 he “talked with the President about the feeling everywhere of the danger of the situation. ‘I know it,’ he said.”
There was a widespread feeling that what was holding matters up was the President’s insistence on dealing with the League of Nations first, and in the same conversation of March 31, Baker told Wilson that he was being blamed on all sides for the delay. “I know that, too,” Wilson said, according to Baker’s diary.
On April 2, the day before the President was stricken, Baker recorded that “I found the President tonight again much discouraged.… I suggested that the time might come soon when he would have to speak out”; to which Wilson replied, “If I speak out … I should have to tell the truth and place the blame exactly where it belongs—upon the French.”
The President supposed that if he revealed to the world what the French leaders were doing—digging in their heels and insisting on harsh terms for Germany—their government would be overthrown. But even Wilson, according to Baker’s diary, knew that “a new premier would probably be no better than Clemenceau.”
For the obstacle facing Wilson was not just the French government; it was the French people. France was hostile to Germany and afraid of Germany—and what is more, had reason to be. To overcome the arguments of Clemenceau, Wilson would have had to address the real concerns of France and would have had to show her people as well as her government that they were mistaken in believing that harsh peace terms would achieve France’s objectives.
IN HIS APPARENT SURPRISE that it was France that proved to be the obstacle to his peacemaking, Wilson reflected a thoroughly American prejudice. The defining issue in foreign policy for the United States had been opposition to British imperialism, and ever since the Revolutionary War, England had seemed to be America’s principal world enemy.† Even in bringing the United States into the war, Wilson had focused on America’s objection to British naval supremacy as a chief stumbling block to American unity of purpose with the Allies. Americans therefore tended to sympathize with Britain’s rivals; within the Allied side, that was France.
Yet as Harold Nicolson observed on first meeting the American Inquiry experts in Paris: “Nice people.… A feeling … that our general views are identical.” But the usually similar and often shared outlook of Americans and Britons was something that Americans in their anti-imperialism did not always notice.
CENTRAL TO THE PRESIDENT’S CONCEPTION of a new world order was universal disarmament. That was to be the guarantee that there would be no more war. If nations had no weapons, they would be unable to wage war. In place of trial by combat, disputes between countries would be settled not by the arms that they no longer would have, but by the judgment of their assembled peers: representatives of the countries of the world seated together in one room as a planetary council called the League of Nations.
Lord Robert Cecil, at the Foreign Office, and others among the British delegates had arrived at a similar conception. But France refused to entertain that notion, which in French eyes looked not merely impractical and utopian but dangerous and hypocritical. The United States and Britain proposed to retain their navies, which were all they needed to protect an Atlantic frontier. Unlike them, France required land forces, for her frontier with Germany was on land, not water.
The French government insisted on maintaining a powerful army to provide national security. If France did, so would others: yet if countries continued to command armed forces capable of winning wars, the likelihood dropped to zero that all nations, in cases when the League ruled against them, would always forgo the opportunity of winning on the field of battle—the claims the League denied them, but to which they considered themselves entitled. So the League could not guarantee against war.
Without armies of its own, the League could not provide France with a guarantee of national security in case of such a war. Unable to dispute the point, Wilson bowed to the French view in the March–April negotiations to the extent of agreeing to the permanent demilitarization of Germany’s Rhine frontier, limitations on Germany’s armed forces, and a French occupation of the Rhineland for fifteen years. Wilson refused to let France separate the Rhineland from Germany permanently, but in return agreed to sign a treaty binding the United States (and Britain) to come to France’s aid if she were attacked by Germany.‡
Between January and April 1919 the terms to which Wilson agreed meant (whether he recognized it or not) that in the postwar world, as before, there were to be political alliances and therefore rival blocs; there would be combat-ready armed forces, and wars; and there would be empires and colonies. The only sign of a new world order was the flawed Covenant of the League, and during his second session in Paris, in order to obtain Japan’s adherence to the League (the Japanese “will go home,” said Wilson, “unless we give them what they should not have”), the President promised that Japan could take over the German concession in China’s province of Shantung—a bargain that was regarded as odious not only by Wilson’s enemies in Washington but also by his friends everywhere.
Forgotten was the promise of a peace without victory. The Allies took over Germany’s overseas colonies and her merchant marine, occupied some of her territory and gave away parts to Poland and others, and seized ownership of her coal-, iron-, and steel-producing industrial heartland in the Saar basin.
The most outrageous of the Allied demands was so obviously unreasonable that historians such as Arthur Link, Wilson’s chief champion in the academic world, believe that if the Americans had dug in and made a stand, the Europeans would have backed down. The Allied demand was that the reparations bill due from Germany should be computed and assessed without regard to whether Germany could pay it. The issue was joined the morning of April 5 at Wilson’s residence in the Hôtel Bonaparte. The stricken President lay in bed. The Allied prime ministers were seated in the salon. Through a bookcase that doubled as a secret door, House went back and forth between the bedchamber and the salon repeating to each side what the other had said. Wilson and House were in despair when they discovered that not even Lloyd George would agree to limit Germany’s liability to what she could afford. A soul-sick House advised the bedridden President to surrender—and Wilson did.
* Decades later, Bullitt recalled that Dr. Grayson, Wilson’s ph
ysician, said at the time that after Wilson talked to House in mid-March on the Brest–Paris train to receive House’s report, the President “was hysterical.”
† TR had seen that this no longer was the case. But when it came to foreign policy, his views were not those of the majority of his countrymen.
‡ This was the sort of alliance treaty that Wilson had always deplored and that in the past the United States had rejected. As it turned out, the votes were not there in the Senate to ratify it, so the American guarantee of France’s frontier never came into effect.
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BLOOD MONEY
THE WAR HAD RUINED Europe financially. The Allies had spent all their cash and borrowed the rest from the Americans, to whom they now were deeply in debt. The essence of the reparations issue was that driven by domestic public opinion, the politicians of France and Great Britain insisted that Germany should make their countries whole.
Wilson, House, and such economic advisers as Bernard Baruch saw that imposing reparations on so vast a scale would be self-defeating for the Allies. Baruch predicted “that if Germany were left economically prostrate, all Europe would suffer.”
Not even Baruch could have foreseen the scorched-earth policy to which the desperate Germans would be driven. In the early 1920s they would run money off their printing presses in order to pay reparations in worthless paper currency: one German mark in July 1914 became one trillion marks on November 15, 1923. They would succeed in cheating the Allies, but only by completing their own ruin. The inflation would crush the middle class; the social fabric would be torn, and first steps would be taken on the road to Nazism.
In the Time of the Americans Page 33
