In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  In the Hall of Mirrors on June 28, representatives of more than two dozen victor countries sat at a horseshoe-shaped table along the mirrored side of the hall. Pale and trembling, Dr. Hermann Mueller and Dr. Johannes Bell, the German representatives, were led past mutilated Allied soldiers to sign the treaty—“as if … called upon to sign their own death warrants,” noted Lansing. All the victors signed except the Chinese, who were absent to protest the awards to Japan at their expense. In less than an hour, Clemenceau brought the proceedings to a close.

  House later was sorry the United States had not held out for the sort of settlement President Wilson originally had promised: “I wish we had taken the other road …,” he wrote.

  At the time, some of the other participants put it more pointedly. “To bed, sick of life,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary. “What a wretched mess it is,” American Peace Commissioner Tasker Bliss wrote to his wife. The treaty, according to Lloyd George, was “all a great pity. We shall have to do the same thing all over again”—that is, fight another world war—“in twenty-five years at three times the cost.”

  THE LEADERS DEPARTED for home as soon as they could. The ceremony at Versailles was adjourned just before four o’clock the afternoon of June 28, and at 9:30 that evening Woodrow Wilson was driven to the Paris railroad station, where a private train waited to carry him to the port of Brest. On Sunday June 29 he boarded the George Washington to return to the United States.

  Robert Lansing followed Wilson two weeks later, and his deputy, Frank Polk, who had been in charge in Washington during Lansing’s absence, then crossed the Atlantic to France to take his place there. Grew remained in Paris, heading the secretariat, and two of the American peace commissioners, Bliss and White, also stayed. House left for England to work with Lord Robert Cecil on fleshing out plans for the League of Nations; he did not acknowledge that Wilson had broken with him, and did not know that his onetime most intimate friend would never see him again.

  The peace conference continued after June 1919, and indeed in one venue or another went on with its deliberations until the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, in another town outside Paris, in August 1920. For the Versailles accord was only the first; other treaties, including the one dealing with the Middle East, still remained to be negotiated and much still had to be done in connection with Versailles. Pursuant to Versailles, thirty-five committees or commissions were to be established. The Dulles brothers were charged with leading roles in dealing with these: Allen Dulles served as chairman of the steering committee of the peace conference. John Foster Dulles was responsible for organizing the reparations committee, and was to deal with all matters concerning finance. In addition, as U.S. representative on the commission whose task was to see that the treaty as a whole was executed, he was involved in the appointment of American representatives to each of the thirty-five committees.

  But in the name of Woodrow Wilson, his former teacher at Princeton, John Foster Dulles soon received startling and frustrating instructions: there was to be no American participation in the work of the Versailles treaty committees until the Senate ratified the treaty. There was no response from Washington to pleas from Paris to permit at least temporary appointment of U.S. representatives to the thirty-five committees.

  So while the Allies went ahead with the remaking of the world, the American team was sent to the sidelines. For the United States, political paralysis had set in.

  * Bought recently by Japanese, the hotel has been refurbished and reopened.

  † Frankfurter’s principal role in Paris, assigned to him by Louis Brandeis, had been to aid the cause of Zionism. William Bullitt, whom Brandeis and Frankfurter regarded as a friend, was one of the officials whose support Frankfurter was supposed to enlist. But by the spring of 1919, Bullitt was no longer in any political position to render assistance.

  32

  THE IDOLS FALL

  ON RETURNING FROM EUROPE in July, the President began talking to individual senators about the Versailles treaty and about the Covenant of the League of Nations, which he had made an integral part of it. He found that the senators wanted certain changes made in the Covenant. These proposed alterations have been much debated ever since, but particularly in retrospect, it looks very much as though they would have been acceptable to the Allies, that they would have made no material difference in the way in which the League eventually went about its business, and that it would have been wise of Wilson to accept them.

  Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, became the campaign manager for amendments to the Covenant. Whatever he hoped to accomplish (and it is by no means clear), he threw down his fourteen Reservations to the Covenant as though they were a gauntlet, and the President took them up in the same spirit—as though, regardless of their merits, the proposals had to be beaten because they challenged his authority.

  Since the meetings with senators were not producing the desired results, the President decided, as he so often did (and of late, so wrongly), that he would take his case to the people over the heads of elected officials. He would rely on public opinion. The precedents should have discouraged him: In November 1918 he had appealed to the voters for a Democratic Congress, and they had elected a Republican one. In December 1918 he had appealed to the people of Britain to curb British imperialism, with no noticeable effect. In the spring of 1919, he had urged the people of Italy to disown their leaders and to give up claim to the spoils of victory—and the Italian crowds had shouted, “Down with Wilson!”

  At summer’s end Wilson set out on his courageous but ill-fated whistle-stop trip around the United States. Aboard a special seven-car train—in his own blue car, the Mayflower, which was the last in line of the seven—he set out on a trip of almost 10,000 miles. He traveled to Columbus; to Indianapolis; to St. Louis; to Omaha; to Sioux Falls, South Dakota; to Billings, Montana; to Spokane, Washington; to Portland, Oregon; to Los Angeles.… On and on he went, from one side of the continent to the other, bone tired, often unable to sleep, racked by headaches, hands trembling, seeing double—but not letting on, trying not to let it show, speaking with eloquence of his vision, crusading for his plan to rid the world of war.

  He was on the Pacific coast when he heard that Bullitt had given damaging testimony before the Senate, and despite its impact and his anger, he went on. It was not until the return swing of his trip, at Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25, that he stumbled in a speech, burst into tears when speaking of soldiers who had died in the war, and later collapsed. He could go on no longer.

  The President and his party headed home without stopping for more speeches. After pulling into Union Station in Washington, D.C., they transferred to an automobile: an open touring car. It was a Sunday, and the streets down which they drove toward the White House were practically deserted. Yet as he passed, the President took off his hat and bowed to the empty sidewalks: to phantoms, to the throngs that in his imagination had turned out to greet him. From somewhere—perhaps from behind closed windows—he was observed; and the rumor spread quickly through town that he had gone mad.

  On October 2 Wilson woke up to find his left arm useless. Helped into the bathroom, he fell unconscious. When Dr. Cary Grayson arrived, he found that the entire left side of Wilson’s body was paralyzed. Though later described by historians as a thrombosis, it seems that what Wilson had suffered was an occlusion of the right middle cerebral artery: a massive stroke.

  It was known that Wilson had fallen ill, but to preserve the President’s authority, Edith Wilson and her stricken husband ordered Dr. Grayson, a serving admiral, to keep the nature and seriousness of it a secret. Lansing convened the cabinet to determine whether the chief executive had been incapacitated; and under questioning, Grayson described Wilson’s illness as a combination of nervous breakdown and indigestion.

  The weeks and months that followed were among the strangest in the annals of the presidency. Twenty days passed after the attack before the Presid
ent was able, even guided by his wife’s fingers, to sign his name. But both Wilsons refused to acknowledge that he was disabled and resolutely refused to allow decisions to be made without him. The result was that decisions were not made. Positions fell vacant, but were not filled; letters, memorandums, and state papers arrived, but were neither read nor answered; pardons were prayed for, but fell on deaf ears. A strike broke out in the coal mines; race riots erupted throughout the country—but the executive branch of the American government did nothing. It was paralyzed.

  IN THE THIRD WEEK of October 1919, the Franklin Roosevelts had dinner in Washington with the Harold Butlers. Butler, formerly an official of the British government, now was secretary general of the International Labor Organization (ILO) that Lloyd George, Wilson, and the others had created in Paris at the beginning of the year. He fell under the spell of his dinner companion, and after dinner, unburdened himself to Roosevelt of all his troubles.

  The President had invited the ILO to hold its organizing conference in Washington. Under his patronage, the conference was scheduled to convene October 29. But Wilson had made no preparations and obtained no appropriations, and now he was incommunicado and nobody could do anything. The secretary of labor had gone through the motions of asking Congress for $200,000 to pay for the conference, but did not believe the request would be granted. There was “no money, no offices, no typists, no messengers, no machinery …,” said Butler. With only a week to go before the conference was due to open, he had borrowed $50,000 from Britain, but did not know where else to turn.

  Roosevelt laughed. “Well, we have to do something about this,” he said. “I think I can find you some offices, at any rate. Look in at the Navy Building tomorrow morning.”

  The next day, as Butler later recalled, “the Assistant Secretary received me as if he had known me all his life, and with that characteristic snap of the jaw told me that a set of forty rooms had been put at my disposal. With a broad grin he added that he would have to eject a number of admirals and captains, who were using the most nautical language about him, but … next day everything would be ready.”

  AS IF SURROUNDED by a moat, the White House had become a fortress that had pulled up its drawbridges. Nobody from the outside world could communicate with the President. Mrs. Wilson, a woman with only two years of boarding school by way of formal education, gave instructions from time to time to cabinet and other officials that, she said, came from her husband, and occasionally, in her childish scrawl, she would write letters giving orders that she said came from him.

  In November Wilson revived sufficiently to receive an occasional state visitor. His brain had suffered permanent injury, and Dr. Grayson despaired of full recovery; but he made progress, if slowly—and before long he could be seen outdoors in a wheelchair.

  It was in this invalid state that he exercised command of his political troops in the battle for ratification of the Versailles treaty and of the clauses he had insisted on making inseparable from it for U.S. entry into a league of nations.

  WALTER LIPPMANN SPOKE for many of the outstanding figures of his generation in opposing the Treaty of Versailles. But they were in the minority in the country as a whole. The United States was in the grip of frightening strikes (including a police action in Boston), of terrible fears of communism (fanned into flame by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, who hoped that anticommunism would help elect him President), and of a continuing anti-German hysteria, which all came together: the Germans had aided the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks fomented radical labor unrest, so Germans, communists, and labor agitators were all of a piece. On his nationwide speaking tour President Wilson had warned that “there are apostles of Lenin in our own midst,” and that the only antidote to “the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt” was the ratification by the Senate of the documents he had brought back from Paris, designed to establish a new world order.

  Other than such isolated figures as Senator La Follette of heavily German-American Wisconsin, few were prepared to argue that the treaty was unjust to Germany. The treaty was popular, and almost all senators wanted to vote in favor of ratifying it. The President, foreseeing that, had incorporated the League of Nations provisions into the treaty, so that in order to vote for the treaty, the senators would have to vote for the League.

  Most senators wanted to vote for the League anyway, either in the form Wilson proposed or with some modifications. Only between twelve and sixteen senators (out of ninety-six) were opposed to a league in any form. Their leaders were Progressive Republican senators Hiram Johnson of California and William Borah of Idaho. In the American tradition, they were opposed to contracting permanent alliances with foreign powers. They pictured the League as an instrument of British and French imperialism. They were nicknamed “the irreconcilables”; and it was to them that Lippmann turned in mounting a campaign against Wilson’s foreign policy package. He was taking Wilson up on his double-or-nothing wager, for Johnson and Borah were obliged to defeat the treaty (which is what Lippmann principally wanted to do) in order to prevent U.S. entry into the League (which was the focus of Johnson’s and Borah’s concern).

  On August 17, 1919, Lippmann sent a letter to Johnson outlining at length the specific questions he and the other senators should ask the President. The questions were based on inside information Lippmann had gathered while working for Wilson and House, and were designed to uncover and cast a spotlight on every skeleton in the closet.

  Next, Lippmann arranged for the senators to call William Bullitt as their witness, to appear in a public hearing to supply a behind-the-scenes account of the proceedings of the American Peace Commission in Paris.

  Bullitt appeared before the committee on September 12 in the Senate Office Building. He told at length of his mission to Moscow and of how badly he felt he had been treated. He also testified that at the end of his stay in Paris, he had discussed the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations with House, Lansing, Bliss, and White: in other words, with all the American commissioners except President Wilson. He had taken notes of these conversations. As these conversations were private, the senators did not press Bullitt to reveal what the commissioners had said.

  Nonetheless, Bullitt did volunteer information about one of these conversations, repeating remarks that had been meant for his ears only. He said that Lansing privately had condemned the treaty as unjust, and quoted him as having said: “I consider that the league of nations at present is entirely useless. The great powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves. England and France in particular have gotten out of the treaty everything that they wanted, and the league of nations can do nothing to alter any of the unjust clauses.…”

  RATIFICATION OF THE TREATY required the consent of two-thirds of the Senate. Slightly more than a third followed Senator Henry Cabot Lodge; they were willing to vote in favor of the treaty only as amended—only, in other words, if the fourteen Reservations proposed by Lodge were adopted. That made Lodge master of the situation. Even without the dozen irreconcilables who were opposed to the League on any terms, he had the votes to block ratification if his terms were not met.

  Lodge was careful to obscure his own motives and objectives, for as Republican majority leader, he felt it his duty to provide a tent under which all members of his party could meet. As the last of a dwindling band—Henry Adams, who had been his teacher, and TR, who had been his protégé, had both died within the past twelve months—Lodge felt an emotionally charged duty to do his best to create a Rooseveltian peace: an alliance of the victors in the war to guard against Germany’s resurgence. But the votes were not there for such a program—not in the Senate, not in the country.

  All his life he had wanted the United States to play a larger role on the world stage, but as a realist, he knew that his choice was between Wilson’s League (as he himself had amended it) or no League, between a flawed internationalism or no internationalism at all.

  The game was played out on the Senate flo
or in November 1919, and then was replayed in March 1920. In November Lodge could muster only thirty-five votes for his Reservations (which therefore were defeated), but Wilson could not find enough senators for his unamended treaty either. Newspaper polls suggest that the American public overwhelmingly—by odds of perhaps four to one—wanted to enter some kind of league; and by March everybody except the President was moving toward some kind of accommodation. A broad range of political personalities that included Edward House, William Jennings Bryan, and Herbert Hoover were in favor of accepting the Reservations.

  But when the matter again came up for a vote in the Senate in March 1920, and Lodge assembled forty-nine votes in favor of the League with Reservations (more than were needed, when added to the twenty-three votes controlled by Wilson), Wilson directed his die-hard supporters to vote against the League rather than accept the Lodge Reservations. And that decided it; the United States had rejected membership in the League of Nations.

  The League had been the President’s handiwork; yet it was he who led America to walk away from it at a time when about four out of five Americans and about four out of five senators were in favor of joining.

  FOR THE PRESIDENT, the cause of the League had become a personal crusade. In going to Paris he had said (according to Felix Frankfurter), “If I didn’t feel that I was the personal instrument of God, I couldn’t carry on.” On returning from Paris, he had told the Senate in the summer of 1919 that the League had come about “by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who has led us into this way.”

  Now the stricken leader gathered himself up to do battle for the League. In February 1920 he demanded and obtained the resignation of Lansing, who, claimed Wilson, had convened cabinet meetings without authorization while the President lay ill. Statements streamed out of the White House designed to give the impression that the President now had fully recovered. It was announced that he was back at work at his desk every morning. One of Wilson’s physicians, in an interview in the Baltimore Sun February 10, stated that “in many ways the President is in better shape than before the illness came.”