If Cecil faulted Wilson for not sticking up for racial inequality, nearly everyone else afterward would fault him for not striking a blow against it. He wanted to avoid giving offense to the Japanese and smaller nations, but he knew that any statement hinting at racial equality would bring outcries not just from the British and their dominions but from his own countrymen as well. He told the League Commission that he wanted “to quiet discussion that raises national differences and racial prejudices” and see such matters “forced as much as possible into the background.” He had dealt with, or ignored, race relations at home in this manner, and his approach was not working any better now in the international arena. He tried to reassure the Japanese by affirming, “The League is obviously based upon the principle of the equality of nations.”33 For the moment, they accepted his decision, but they would soon exact a stiff price from him. This was not one of his finer hours, but he did come out of the meeting with a revised version of the Covenant, which he hoped would mollify critics at home.
The next few days brought him no respite. After meeting again with his financial advisers, Baruch and Thomas Lamont, he decided that no fixed sum of reparations should be stated but that a commission set up under the peace treaty should work out the amount, schedule, and kinds of payments. This decision soon drew particularly harsh condemnation from John Maynard Keynes, who would resign from the British delegation in May. Keynes then spent the summer furiously writing his excoriation of the settlement and the president’s role in it, which would be published in December 1919 as The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Failure to set a sum for reparations may have been a mistake, but Wilson’s reliance on a reparations commission did reflect his preference for processes over fixed terms, not only in peacemaking but in politics generally. Much of the blame for the way wrangling over reparations would poison the post-war environment would lie in American nonparticipation in those deliberations, something neither Wilson nor anyone else could have foreseen.34
Monday, April 14, was a rare day off for the council, but not for Wilson, who spent much of his time in other meetings. Orlando came to press Italy’s claims in the Adriatic once more. Taking his stand on the Fourteen Points, Wilson did not relent in his opposition. “I do not feel at liberty to suggest one basis of peace with Germany and another for peace with Austria,” he stated in a memorandum that he gave to Orlando. Yet he also made an important concession in that memorandum. He said he was willing for Italy to have the South Tirol up to the Brenner Pass, a region populated by German-speaking Austrians. He was violating the same principle that he was upholding in resisting Italy’s demands for Fiume and the Dalmatian coast, something for which he would soon be roundly condemned. Several weeks later, when Baker asked him about the South Tirol, he regretted the move: “I was ignorant of the situation when the decision was made.” He was also tired and wanted to show sympathy toward Italy.35
In the afternoon on April 14, Wilson dealt with the home front of peacemaking. Frank Hitchcock, who had been postmaster general under Taft, came to assure the president of his support. Wilson thanked Hitchcock but told him that Taft and Lowell were objecting to the wording of the Monroe Doctrine amendment; Hitchcock said he would work on them. Meanwhile, House was receiving a visit from Clemenceau, who said he would agree to Wilson’s terms for the protection of France and the west bank of the Rhine: “It was not what he wanted but with the [guarantee] of the United States he thought it sufficient.” It was interesting that Clemenceau chose to tell House first. “Colonel House is practical, I can understand him,” the colonel recorded Clemenceau saying to someone else, “but when I talk with President Wilson, I feel as if I am talking to Jesus Christ.” Clemenceau added, “The Almighty gave us Ten Commandments, but Wilson has given us Fourteen.”36 Despite such cracks, it was clear that the president’s firm stand and possibly his implied threat to withdraw from the conference were what had brought the Tiger of France to heel. This French concession would ease relations between Wilson and Clemenceau during the rest of the conference.
The Council of Four now moved with dispatch through the Saar and Rhineland arrangements. Wilson, Clemenceau, and Balfour, who was substituting temporarily for Lloyd George, felt confident enough to lay plans for inviting the Germans to come to Paris to receive preliminary terms later in the month. Other areas, however, continued to be worrisome: Italy, Russia, eastern Europe, Syria and Mesopotamia, and East Asia. The Japanese were pressing for cession of the German possessions in China that they had conquered and now occupied: the port of Kiaochow and the Shantung Peninsula. The Chinese delegation, led by the young Columbia-educated V. K. Wellington Koo, had already made representations to Lansing and Wilson for the return of those territories. “My sympathies are on the side of China,” Wilson declared in the council on April 15, “and we must not forget that in the future the greatest dangers for the world can arise in the Pacific.” Two days later, he received a visit from Koo and the Chinese delegation, who presented him with an eighty-seven-page memorandum stating their nation’s case for the restoration of Shantung.37
The Chinese were not the president’s only visitors on April 17, which Grayson called “the busiest day which he has put in since he left Washington, having approximately eighteen engagements, which covered every conceivable problem dealing with the Peace situation.” The doctor did not exaggerate. The Big Four did not meet, but Wilson’s foreign visitors that day included officials from Syria, Dalmatia, Albania, Greece, Portugal, Serbia, and Armenia, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, and an English journalist. From home, a delegation of Irish Americans urged the president to push for an independent Ireland, something a group of Democratic senators had also just written to him to advocate. Secretary of War Newton Baker came to lunch and shared his assessment of League support at home, prohibition enforcement, and small matters, such as repainting the White House and the lonesomeness of the sheep on the grounds. When Baker asked how he was handling the workload, Wilson smiled and said, “After all this ocean of talk has rolled over me, I feel that I would like to return to America and go back into some great forest, amid the silence, and not hear any argument or speeches for a month.”38
Starting on April 19, Orlando and Italy’s foreign minister, Baron Giorgio Sidney Sonnino, argued and re-argued their case for Fiume for six days. “Orlando finally broke down and wept copiously,” Wilson told House. Wilson did not budge, but House suggested to the Italians that Fiume and Dalmatia might be set aside for future negotiations. The suggestion backfired. Ray Stannard Baker noted in his diary, “The rift between the President & Col. House seems to be widening. The Colonel compromises everything away.” Baker thought House had “such immature ideas, not thought out, poorly considered,” and his suggestion “served to fan the flame of Italian nationalism & make it harder for Wilson.” Baker did not present these remarks as Wilson’s views, but it seems certain that he picked them up in the house on la place des États-Unis. Edith later recalled that around this time she had exploded to her husband, “Oh, if Colonel House had only stood firm while you were away none of this would have to be done over. I think he is a perfect jellyfish.” To this, she said he replied, “Well, God made jellyfish, so, as Shakespeare said about a man, therefore to let him pass, and don’t be too hard on House.”39 That sounds like a gentler version of what Baker was writing in his diary.
Wilson got some rest during the Easter weekend. On Saturday night, he and Edith saw a play, and on Sunday afternoon they took a ride in the countryside. The following morning, he stayed in his study to draft a public statement about the Adriatic dispute. Although he repeatedly expressed profound sympathy for Italy’s sacrifices in the war, he asserted that Fiume was necessary as a seaport for “the states of the new Jugo-Slav group.”40 Before he released the statement to the press, he consulted with Clemenceau and Lloyd George, who told him that they felt obliged to stand by their treaty obligations to Italy. He nevertheless issued the statement on April 23. Orlando and Sonnino in tu
rn made good on their earlier privately aired threats to withdraw from the conference, and after an emotional meeting of the council they left Paris the following day. This was the first public break among the leaders at the conference.
The day after the Italians left, what some observers now called the Big Three took up the Shantung question. In the morning, the Japanese delegates made their case, and in the afternoon the Chinese delegates made theirs. To the Japanese, Wilson said there was “a lot of combustible material in China” and warned them against inflaming it. Baron Makino answered that it would be a very grave matter if his country’s claims were not met. To the Chinese, Wilson maintained that he had presented their case forcefully. Koo answered that with regard to the peace commission, his people were “now at the parting of the ways.” After the Chinese left, Wilson admitted to Lloyd George and Clemenceau that he might have to seem to contradict his resistance to Italy’s claims because having Japan join the League was of paramount importance. Lloyd George, who had told the Japanese that he would stand by Britain’s treaty obligations to them, now called this “one of the most unscrupulous proceedings in all history, especially against a gentle and defenseless people.” Wilson agreed but said he did not want a rift with the Japanese.41
Shantung confronted him with the most anguished choice of the whole peace conference. He told Grayson that if he followed “the principles of what is just and right,” the Japanese would refuse to sign the peace treaty. When Baker pointed out to him the similarity between the Adriatic and Shantung, he replied, “[W]hen you lay down a general truth it may cut anywhere,” adding that “he could not see clearly just where his principles applied.” Baker reminded him that public opinion at home and abroad favored China, and Wilson asked, if the Italians and Japanese pull out, “what becomes of the League of Nations?” As Baker put it, “He is at Gethsemane.” On April 30, after wrestling with this dilemma for more than a week and suffering at least one sleepless night, he decided in favor of Japan. He told Baker he knew the decision would be unpopular and that he would “be accused of violating his own principles—but never-the-less he must work for world order & organization against anarchy & a return to the old [unilateralism].”42
Wilson did suffer for this decision. Shantung would hurt his campaign to gain support in America for the treaty and the League more than any other single issue, with the possible exception of Ireland. In the longer run, this decision would open him to the charge that he placed too much faith in the League of Nations. When the preliminary terms of the peace treaty became known two weeks later, critics would maintain that he had given away too much on territorial, colonial, and financial matters in order to gain support for the League. Those charges would be wrong. Shantung offered the sole example of Wilson’s consciously making a concession for the League, and he also decided as he did because of the realistic calculation that he could not force the Japanese out. He did compromise on other matters but, except for this one time, never for the sake of his new institution for maintaining peace.
Unfortunately for Wilson, the Shantung decision overshadowed the unveiling of the final version of the League Covenant on April 28. This document incorporated the revisions intended to appease critics at home: a clearly specified procedure for withdrawal, exemption of the Monroe Doctrine, and the right to declare domestic questions off-limits. In presenting this Covenant to the full conference, the president confined himself to a drab recital of those and a few other changes, and he made some factual slips in discussing them, which caused him to backtrack. Those slips were not like Wilson, nor were his abrupt delivery and his failure to toss out even a morsel of eloquence, as he had done with the Draft Covenant. The omission of eloquence was doubly curious because just the week before, he had said at a Big Three meeting, “The central idea of the League of Nations was that States must support each other even when their interests were not involved. When the League of Nations was formed then there would be established a body of partners covenanted to stand up for each other’s rights.” Some interpreters would later speculate that Wilson’s slip and omissions in presenting the Covenant stemmed from his having suffered a small stroke.43
The beginning of May brought no relief. Although May Day was a holiday in Paris, the Big Three met to discuss some difficult questions. They considered the rights of minorities in eastern Europe, with Wilson expressing concern about Germans and Jews who would be living in Poland. When Lloyd George remarked on Jews’ reported lack of loyalty to Poland, Wilson shot back, “It is the result of a long persecution. The Jews of the United States are good citizens.”44 They also discussed the Italians and the Germans, and Lloyd George’s erratic behavior particularly irked Wilson. All the wrangling wore on him, and Grayson persuaded him not to attend services the next day in the cold, damp Scottish church in Paris. Instead, after sleeping late, he joined Edith, Grayson, and Baker for a long ride in the country and went to bed early.
Wilson needed to be well rested because the inner circle was again about to be the Big Four, and the Germans were coming to receive the preliminary peace terms. Public opinion in Italy appeared to support Orlando and Sonnino’s walkout, and, having said they felt vindicated, they were returning to Paris. The real reason the Italians came back was that they wanted to be present for the appearance of the Germans. How the Germans would react worried Wilson. He admitted to Grayson that the terms were harsh, “but I have striven my level best to make them fair.”
He told Baker, “If I were a German I think I should never sign [the treaty].”45 He tried and failed to get reporters admitted to the session at which they received the terms.
The presentation occurred on May 7, on a beautiful spring afternoon, with chestnut trees and lilacs blooming in the gardens of the Trianon Palace at Versailles; by coincidence, not design, this was the fourth anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania. The German delegation took seats in the middle of a horseshoe arrangement of tables, which they later claimed made them feel like prisoners in the dock. Clemenceau stood and crisply outlined the terms, giving the Germans two weeks to respond. The German foreign minister, Count Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, a slender, haughty Prussian aristocrat, replied, “We know the force of the hatred which confronts us here. … We are required to admit that we alone are war-guilty; such an admission on my lips would be a lie.” This demonstration of defiance made a bad impression, as did the rest of the speech and, especially, Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau’s remaining seated while he spoke. Some observers thought—correctly—that this was a deliberate insult; others noted—also correctly—that he gripped the table tightly and his knees trembled the whole time. Despite the lovely setting, this first encounter between victors and vanquished set an ugly tone for the last phase of peacemaking in Paris.46
Some on the American delegation recoiled at the preliminary terms. Baker called it “a document of retribution to the verge of revenge.” Herbert Hoover was so upset when he read an advance copy early in the morning on May 7 that he went out for a walk, on which he met up with Keynes and Smuts, who reacted the same way he did to the terms. A dozen younger members of the staff, some of whom remembered Wilson’s promises on board the George Washington, resigned in protest. Most kept their disagreements private, but not the irrepressible William Bullitt, who was back from his abortive mission to Moscow and now gave a letter to reporters in which he charged the president with having “consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections and dismemberments—a new century of war.” Some reactions in America echoed those sentiments. The Nation had already accused Wilson of dealing in “intrigue, selfish aggression, and imperialism.” The New Republic had condemned Article X of the Draft Covenant as a pledge “to uphold injustices.” When the preliminary terms were published, The Nation issued a series of we-told-you-so editorials, while The New Republic emblazoned the cover of its May 24 issue with the headline THIS IS NOT PEACE. Those magazines’ reactions did not reflect wider editorial sentiment, mo
st of which approved of these peace terms, but they revealed an erosion of support in quarters where Wilson had formerly enjoyed enthusiastic backing, and their defection would add intellectual firepower to the opponents of the League in the upcoming debate at home.47
Wilson could have anticipated those reactions. He had worried about excessive expectations, and he had largely refrained from appearing to promise a brave new world; yet his wartime rhetoric and moral standing had fed high hopes, and he had played upon those hopes. Baker had tried to forestall disillusionment by urging Wilson to negotiate more openly and take reporters into his confidence. The president had responded not only by pointing to the other leaders’ insistence on secrecy but also by arguing that such delicate matters as the Japanese push for a racial-equality clause could not be discussed in public. He was following the same instinct that had led him to cancel press conferences after the sinking of the Lusitania. Whether greater publicity would have arrested the loss of support from progressives and idealists is an open question, but there was no doubt that Wilson was once more passing up an opportunity to educate the public about his programs and the obstacles he faced—omissions that would hurt him on the domestic front of peacemaking.
Disillusionment with Wilson for infidelity to the Fourteen Points and hopes for a peace of forgiveness would shape future views of what he and the other leaders had wrought at Paris in 1919. Their negative model, and Wilson’s, was the Congress of Vienna—an example of how not to make peace—yet those perfumed aristocrats and reactionaries of the preceding century had crafted a settlement that lasted for many decades. By contrast, the handiwork of these men would crumble in little more than one decade and give way to another world war exactly twenty years later. Their settlement would come to bear the stigma of “the peace that failed.” In the eyes of many future interpreters, much of the blame for the failure would fall on Wilson’s head: he had not prevented the Allies from exacting vengeance and dividing the spoils, and he had compounded these iniquities with lofty rhetoric and excessive reliance on the feeble, doomed instrument of the League of Nations.
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