Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Those words—“Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it”—would come back to haunt Wilson. In the coming months and in later years, a profound disillusionment and sense of betrayal would cause many people to hurl those words back in his face. This may have been another instance of Wilson’s eloquence appearing to promise too much. In fact, he voiced grave doubts about how much he could accomplish. The next day, Bullitt said that Raymond Fosdick, Wilson’s friend and protégé from Princeton, told him, “The President replied that it frightened him to think how much the common people of the world expect of him.” George Creel, who was also part of the mission, later remembered that as they walked on the deck one evening, Wilson told him, “[Y]ou know, and I know, that these ancient wrongs, these present unhappinesses, are not to be remedied in a day or with the wave of a hand. What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment.”17

  The urgency of expectations struck Wilson from the moment he was in Europe. The George Washington landed at Brest, on France’s Atlantic coast, on December 13. The vessel’s most distinguished passenger regarded that as a good omen since he thought of thirteen as his lucky number—the number of letters in his name. As soon as he set foot on French soil, an explosion of celebrations began. French and American soldiers lined the streets of Brest as the Wilsons rode in an open car under triumphal arches of flowers. Throngs packed the sidewalks and leaned out windows, many of them in the folk costumes of Brittany, shouting, “Vivel’ Amérique!” and “Vive Vilson!” His arrival in Paris the following day was spectacular. After ceremonial greetings at the railroad station by President Raymond Poincaré, Premier Clemenceau, and the French cabinet, a mounted contingent of breast-armored Gardes républicaines escorted the two presidents, who rode together in an open horse-drawn carriage down the Champs Élysées to la place de la Concorde and on to the Murat Palace, where the Wilsons would be living. Hordes of cheering people packed the sidewalks and hung out every window. “The French think that with almost a magic touch he will bring about the day of political and industrial justice,” Raymond Fosdick noted. “Will he? Can he?”18

  For Edith Wilson, the cheers of the crowds in Brest were enthralling, and the next seven months would mark the high point of her years as First Lady. She luxuriated in the splendor of their accommodations at Murat Palace, and, best of all, she could shed her wartime austerity wardrobe. In the coming months, she would revel in the rounds of official entertaining, and she would seize the opportunity that the extended time in Paris offered her to order new dresses, coats, hats, and shoes, particularly from her favorite, the leading fashion house of Worth. Still, she recognized that ceremony, entertaining, and fashion were not the reasons why she and her husband were in Paris. “Woodrow is busy here every moment,” she wrote to her family, “& feels he must put through the big thing he came to do first.”19

  On the first day in Paris, he talked with House for two hours, going over plans for the peace conference. They agreed to make the League the first order of business; House thought this move might keep Wilson out of the negotiations and allow the president to go home after a month. On his second day in Paris, Wilson had his first talk with Clemenceau. The seventy-seven-year-old premier had lived as a political exile in the United States during the Civil War and spoke English, and House had coached him before he visited Wilson at Murat Palace. Their encounter went smoothly, and they had another pleasant meeting the next day, when Wilson called on Clemenceau, who told House afterward that meeting Wilson had made him change his mind and want him to be at the peace conference. For his part, Wilson did not let public or private charm turn his head. “I have not been deceived by the acclaim which I have received,” he told a journalist friend. “It is based upon the trust that I will stand fast to the principles and purpose which I have avowed.”20

  Wilson had hoped that the peace conference could begin as soon as he arrived. With leaders from all over the world and representatives of racial and ethnic groups and subject peoples descending on Paris, however, a host of logistic problems had arisen. Wilson also suspected that the Allied leaders were in no hurry to sit down with him at the bargaining table, and there were entreaties that he visit the other main Allied capitals. As a result, he and Edith spent the last five days of December in England and the first week of January 1919 going to and from Rome, with stops on the return trip in Genoa, Milan, and Turin. Before he embarked on those journeys, Wilson received a steady stream of visitors at Murat Palace, laid a wreath on the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette, visited an American military hospital and cemetery, spent Christmas with General Pershing and the troops, and gave a few brief talks. He and Edith also took a few automobile rides but were not able to play golf until the first day of the new year.

  Wilson decided to use this interlude before the conference to pave the way for the kind of peace he wanted. He pursued this strategy both openly and behind the scenes. While in Paris, he issued a statement to the press on December 18 denying reports that he had endorsed the program of the League to Enforce Peace but also declaring, “I am, as every one knows, not only in favor of a League of Nations, but believe the formation of such a League absolutely indispensable to the maintenance of peace.” In a private talk, the British ambassador, Lord Derby, found his ideas for a league “of the haziest description … apparently to be a sort of general parliament of Ambassadors.” Equality of nations was the one point on which Derby found him “very definite.” Wilson also “rather horrified” him by stating that the League should take control of Germany’s colonies. House reassured Derby a bit by saying that he “need pay no attention to what the President said … about each of the Nations having the same representation.”21

  On December 26, the Wilsons crossed the English Channel and arrived at midafternoon in London, where the king and queen met them at Charing Cross Station. The two heads of state then rode in an open carriage to Buckingham Palace, over a route packed with spectators on sidewalks, in windows, and on rooftops. In the afternoon, the president and Grayson called on the Queen Mother, and in the evening there was an informal dinner at the palace, which Grayson described as “entirely without stiffness,” as the king and Wilson swapped stories. The next day, he met Lloyd George for the first time when the prime minister and Balfour came to Buckingham Palace for a three-hour discussion. The two men seemed to hit it off well and discussed a variety of subjects. According to Lloyd George, Wilson gave the impression that the League was all he really cared much about, and the prime minister was inclined to let him make it the first order of business and thereby take pressure off such matters as freedom of the seas and colonial claims. Lloyd George also thought Wilson would not stay long at the peace conference. After that meeting, they went to lunch at 10 Downing Street, where Wilson met other British leaders for the first time, including Winston Churchill. He brought off the rare feat of leaving Churchill speechless by teasing him about his recent aspersions on the role of the U.S. Navy in winning the war.22

  Wilson gave more speeches in England and talked more confidentially with his hosts than he had done in France. On his birthday, he responded to a resolution of support presented by British Methodist and Baptist leaders: “I think one would go crazy if he did not believe in Providence. It would be a maze without a clue. Unless there were some supreme guidance we would despair of the results of human counsel.” The same day, in the City of London, he maintained that what was essential was a guarantee of the terms of peace, a permanent concert of power for their maintenance, and he pledged to remain as steadfast in pursuing that goal as were his Scottish forbears in pursuing theirs: “The stern Covenanter tradition that is behind me sends many an echo down the years.” In the evening, before he boarded the train for Carlisle, he warned a top British intelligence officer against thinking of Americans “as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the peoples of the United States.” About
Bolshevism, he professed no fear of it in America and said Russians should be free to settle their own affairs as long as they did not menace anyone else. The following day, he kept the Sabbath by giving no speeches except for the impromptu remarks at his grandfather’s church and a brief talk in Manchester, but he privately reiterated to the editor of The Manchester Guardian that the most important thing about the peace settlement was its ability to evolve and change through “a machinery of adjustment.”23

  The Wilsons spent the last day of 1918 traveling back to France. They greeted the new year by playing their first round of golf in Europe, on the links at St.-Cloud. At lunch with House, who had not gone across the Channel with them, Wilson read from Smuts’s draft of a league of nations and then went to the Hôtel de Crillon, the headquarters of the American delegation, to brief the other delegates on his trip and Smuts’s draft, which he studied again the next day as his train traveled toward Rome. On the Wilsons’ arrival on the morning of January 3, the king and queen and the Italian cabinet met the Wilsons at the station, and a splendidly uniformed troop of cavalry escorted the open carriages that transported the party to the Quirinal Palace. Banners festooned buildings along the route, and sidewalks and windows were again packed with people. That evening, there was another state dinner hosted by royalty, and afterward the president visited Capitoline Hill. Between ceremonial events, Wilson spoke to the Italian parliament, using the occasion to declare that the peacemakers must “organize the friendship of the world, to see to it that all the moral forces that make for right and justice are united and given a vital organization … [to be] substituted for the balance of power.”24

  The Wilsons’ second day in Rome included a visit fraught with significance and delicacy. At midafternoon, the president, First Lady, and Dr. Grayson called on Pope Benedict XV at the Vatican. Wilson knew well the extent of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, but he was nevertheless determined to be the first president to visit the pope. Swiss Guards lined the corridors as the party walked to the papal throne room. Pope Benedict led the president alone into his study before inviting Grayson and a military aide to join them. They then returned to the throne room, where the pope blessed everyone with the sign of the cross. “It is for you, your family and your dear ones,” Grayson recorded him saying. Later in the day, Wilson attended a reception given at St. Paul’s Within the Walls, the American Episcopal church serving the Protestant community of Rome. In the evening, before the presidential train left Rome, Wilson talked with Leonida Bissolati, a liberal Italian leader who had recently resigned from the cabinet in protest over the demands for the port city of Fiume and the Dalmatian coast. Bissolati urged Wilson to resist those demands, as well as “the excessive pretensions of French and English nationalism.”25

  The next day was a Sunday, but Wilson bent his Sabbatarian scruples to make public appearances and speeches and attend a performance at Milan’s famed La Scala, where a cast of 400 performed one act of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda. On Monday, after a stop for a speech in Turin, a telegram from Tumulty informed Wilson that Roosevelt had died. The president sent a telegram of condolence to Mrs. Roosevelt and rewrote the proclamation prepared by the State Department, adding, “As President he awoke the Nation to the dangers of private control which lurked in our financial and industrial systems. It was by thus arresting the attention and stimulating the purpose of the country that he opened the way for subsequent necessary and beneficent reforms.” The ex-president stayed on the president’s mind; the following evening, Wilson read aloud to Edith and her secretary an essay about Roosevelt.26

  Wilson would have been less than human if he had not wondered to himself how the death of this man, his greatest adversary, might affect his own political fortunes and his programs. By nearly everyone’s reckoning, Roosevelt was going to be the Republican candidate for president in 1920. The war had wrought an astounding resurrection of his standing with the public and the Republican Party, and old foes as well as erstwhile followers were jumping aboard the bandwagon for his nomination. He had been acting like a president-in-waiting, and some foreign leaders wanted to treat him as such. Roosevelt had meant to bolster other powers’ intentions to impose a harsh victors’ peace on Germany and give a lower priority to a league of nations. Now, Roosevelt’s death relieved Wilson of some of that pressure, although Lodge would guide much of his own conduct in the coming months according to what he believed his fallen friend would have done. On the other hand, the possibility of Roosevelt’s becoming the next president had guaranteed greater Republican receptivity to a league or some kind of alliance and certainly to a greater American role in world politics. The death of this adversary was not necessarily a gain for Wilson.27

  Uppermost in his mind during the trip to Italy was the League of Nations. On the night he learned of Roosevelt’s death, he told some American reporters off the record that he had a definite program in mind and was going to rely on Smuts’s draft in order to give the British a sense of authorship. As soon as he got back to Paris, he typed another “Covenant” on twenty-two sheets of paper, adding handwritten emendations. He gave this document to House in the afternoon on January 8, and the two men discussed it at Murat Palace that evening. This document, which later became known as the First Paris Draft, contained thirteen articles and six supplementary provisions. It sketched out the organization’s structure, calling for a “Body of Delegates” to include all members and an “Executive Council” made up of the “Great Powers,” with other countries rotating on and off. It called for arms reduction, laid down procedures to settle disputes, and stipulated that any member not following those procedures would be subject to an economic and financial boycott; the council could also recommend use of military or naval force by the members of the League. The draft likewise provided for blockades of offending nations, asserted the League’s concern in all threats of war, and outlined procedures to admit new members. The supplementary provisions dealt with former German colonies and Austro-Hungarian and Turkish territories, over some of which the League might assume “mandatory” authority.28

  For Wilson, the essence of the League in this draft lay in Article III: “The Contracting Powers unite in guaranteeing to each other political independence and territorial integrity.” He added that territorial readjustments “pursuant to the principle of self-determination” could be effected by a three-fourths vote of the members. Finally, he affirmed, “The Contracting Powers accept without reservation the principle that the peace of the world is superior in importance to every question of political jurisdiction or boundary.”29 Some of the ideas and language in this draft drew upon Smuts’s draft, but its overall tone and phrasing were distinctly Wilson’s, as was its central tenet, Article III. This commitment to independence and territorial integrity and the pledge to boycott or even resort to military force to punish violators showed that Wilson intended his league of nations to be essentially a political, not a judicial or consultative, organization. That was where he parted company with Root, Taft, and the League to Enforce Peace, who wanted a peace-enforcing organization to follow set rules and conduct judicial proceedings. By contrast, Wilson wanted the experience and deliberations of the members to guide the organization in responding to changing circumstances.

  He sent copies of his Paris draft to the other members of the American delegation and discussed it with them on January 10. Lansing privately scoffed that Wilson “rejoices in catchy phrases” and deplored the president’s vain, curt “manner of refuting valid objections to the document which he has drawn. House says that he must have been feeling unwell.” Soon afterward, General Bliss suggested softening the implied commitment in the preamble to maintaining existing regimes and using the word covenant throughout the document, and he recommended that the guarantee of territorial integrity in Article III should read “as against external aggression.” He also cautioned against identifying the League too closely with the settlement of the war, so as to avoid “the appearance of being a new form of
the old Holy Alliance.” Contradicting Lansing’s aspersion on Wilson’s presumed vanity, the president gladly accepted nearly all of Bliss’s suggestions and produced a new version on January 18, which became known as the Second Paris Draft. This would become his outline in upcoming negotiations, but it could be only an outline. In an interview with the president of Switzerland, he affirmed that “only the essential lines could be immediately traced and that the rest will be the fruit of long labor and repeated experiences.”30 The scholar in politics had not forgotten what he had learned from Edmund Burke.

  Much as Wilson might have liked to devote all his attention to the League of Nations project, he knew he must deal with the pressing problems of the peace settlement. In fact, he was eager for negotiations to begin and for those problems to be addressed. To Edith and her secretary, he vented his “contempt for [Allied leaders] and the things for which they stood. … [Their] people are eager for peace and are resenting bitterly this delay.” Not surprisingly, Wilson did not enjoy his first discussions with the assembled Allied leaders. Although the peace conference had not yet convened, he attended meetings of the Supreme War Council on January 12 and 13 in the main conference room of the Quai d’Orsay, the headquarters of the French Foreign Ministry. Grayson wrote that Wilson found the atmosphere “exotic,” both because the attendees included Indians in turbans and the Arab leader Emir Faisal “in picturesque costume” and because liveried servants came in to serve tea. “The President remarked to me afterward that it was with a little difficulty that he restrained himself from voicing his surprise, that with the great affairs and future of the world under discussion, this conference should be interrupted by what he considered a tea party.”31