Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  The appointed day for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles started out overcast but turned sunny and warm by afternoon. Delegates, reporters, photographers, movie cameramen, and spectators holding coveted tickets began to gather in the Hall of Mirrors before two in the afternoon. Of the Big Four, Clemenceau arrived first and shook hands as he made his way to the center seat at the arrangement of tables. Wilson arrived next and jovially made his way through a throng of autograph seekers. Then came the British and the Italian representatives. Taking his place and chatting with people nearby, the president noticed a stir around the entrance as French officers escorted a four-man party of Germans to seats facing the Big Four. Clemenceau stood and spoke briefly, stating that the treaty was ready and the Germans should sign it. After his remarks were translated into English and German, the moment arrived.65

  Two members of the new government, Foreign Minister Hermann Müller and Transportation Minister Johannes Bell, went and sat at the Louis XIV table to affix their signatures to the document. “It was as if men were called upon to sign their own death warrants,” Lansing noted. “With pallid faces and trembling hands they wrote their names quickly and were then conducted back to their places.” In the painting he made of the ceremony, Orpen caught the moment as one of the Germans slumped in a chair with an anxious-looking aide hovering beside him while the Big Four and others stared at them. At a signal, cannons on the palace grounds began booming, followed by guns all over France. The victors then came up to sign the treaty, starting with Wilson. “I did not know I was excited until I found my hand trembling when I wrote my name,” he told Lansing. The delegates spent the better part of an hour taking their turn signing while the rest milled around and chatted. The painter Orpen for one found the scene repellent; using a figure of speech he had picked up from soldiers at the front that referred to statesmen by the coats they favored, he wrote later, “All the ‘frocks’ did their tricks to perfection.”66

  Not all the victors signed the treaty or did so cheerfully. The seats assigned to the Chinese delegation remained empty; its members refused to sign because they were not allowed to register their reservations about Shantung. Smuts stated his dissatisfaction with some of the clauses regarding Germany but signed because he held hopes for the League of Nations and future cooperation in the rebuilding of Europe. Wilson did not speak at the ceremony, but he issued a brief statement to the press to be released in the United States: “It is a severe treaty in the duties and penalties it imposes upon Germany, but it is severe only because great wrongs done by Germany are to be righted and repaired.” He stressed that it was much more than a peace treaty with Germany: it liberated peoples, abolished the right of conquest, put small nations on an equal footing with great ones, established the League of Nations, and was withal “a great charter for a new order of affairs.”67

  After everyone present had signed the treaty, the Big Four walked out onto the terrace for photographs. Then Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau went inside for a final meeting, at which they issued an appeal to Italy to settle the Adriatic dispute. When the three came out into the square in front of the palace, the crowd shouted “Vive Wilson” and rushed forward to shake the president’s hand while women cried out that they just wanted to touch him. The crowd nearly pushed the president into a fountain, and bodyguards had to surround him. The Wilsons drove back through cheering crowds to the house on la place des États-Unis, where they ate a quiet dinner and Lloyd George came over to say a private and effusive farewell. Shortly after nine o’clock, they went to la gare des Invalides for the overnight train to Brest, where the George Washington waited to take them back to America. French dignitaries filled the platform to see them off. “In saying good-bye to the President I am saying good-bye to my best friend,” Clemenceau gushed to Grayson. As a military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the doctor noted, “[W]e steamed slowly out of Paris, the work of seven months finally accomplished.”68

  Wilson may have thought that too, but his mind was already on affairs at home. Earlier that day, he had cabled Tumulty about issuing an amnesty for anyone convicted during the war of expressing a dissenting opinion. Tumulty replied that the new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, advised waiting until the president returned. In the evening, House had been among the party at the station, where the two men had what turned out to be their final face-to-face meeting. With unconscious prescience, the colonel recorded in his diary, “My last conversation with the President yesterday was not reassuring.” He urged Wilson to adopt the same conciliatory approach and spirit of compromise that he claimed both of them had used with foreign leaders in Paris. Wilson had replied, “House, I have found one can never get anything in life that is worth while without fighting for it.”69 He knew he had as hard a struggle awaiting him as the one he was leaving behind, and he was girding himself for the home front of peacemaking.

  22

  THE LEAGUE FIGHT

  When Woodrow Wilson used the word fighting in talking about the Senate and the League of Nations with Colonel House, he was not indulging in a spasm of pugnacity. He was voicing his considered view of the upcoming debates over the peace treaty. Republican attacks on his foreign policy in the previous fall’s campaign and the reception given the Draft Covenant in March by Senator Lodge and others had left little doubt that he would have a fight on his hands when he went back with this treaty incorporating the League Covenant. In April, he had urged William Allen White to “get into the fight at home” for the League. Nothing that would happen in coming months would change his mind about this fight and what he thought was at stake in it. On the speaking tour that he would make in September 1919, he would look at the children who flocked to see him and say, “I know, if by chance, we should not win this great fight for the League of Nations, it would be their death warrant.” This was going to be the fight of his life—one that would cost him more dearly than any other and would, if he lost it, he believed, “break the heart of the world.”1 All evidence pointed to a hard fight against great odds in an unpromising arena. Public opinion, as well as positions in the Senate, had hardened since Wilson’s trip home in March. A rival organization to the League to Enforce Peace had entered the field: the League for the Preservation of American Independence. Usually called the Independence League, this organization would mobilize anti-League opinion and send oratorical stars such as senators Borah and Hiram Johnson and former senator Albert J. Beveridge out on speaking tours. Meanwhile, Lodge and Elihu Root had adopted a strategy of attacking provisions of the Covenant, particularly Article X, and demanding “reservations”—binding statements in the instrument of ratification—to limit American commitments and participation. Revisions to the Covenant after Wilson’s return to Paris had not won over Republican senators, and in May, once Congress convened, senators Borah, Brandegee, and Philander Knox had attacked the Covenant root and branch. In June, four days before the signing of the treaty, the Chicago Tribune published a lineup of senators, which showed forty as pro-League—all but one of them Democrats—forty-three as reservationists, eight as die-hard opponents—who proudly called themselves irreconcilables—and four as undecided. Months later, when the Senate came to vote on the treaty, this forecast would prove remarkably accurate.2

  Wilson faced a choice at the outset between an inside and an outside strategy. An inside strategy required him to stay in Washington and try to deal with the senators. An outside strategy required him to make speaking tours and try to educate the public. He had been getting advice both ways. Tumulty and McAdoo had written and cabled urging him to take his case to the public soon after his return home; in Paris, Thomas Lamont had recommended the same course. Democratic senators and Postmaster General Burleson had counseled the opposite, urging him to respect the sensibilities on Capitol Hill and let some time elapse before making any appeal to the public. Simple logistics favored staying put initially, and the two strategies dovetailed with the presentation of the treaty to the Senate early in July, w
hich everyone expected to be a widely watched event.

  Wilson wanted to deliver a great speech that would rank beside “peace without victory,” the war address, and the Fourteen Points. He started working on this speech on the second day of the voyage home. As usual, he enjoyed the respite offered by the ten-day crossing on the George Washington. He slept late, dined with a few fellow passengers, watched movies with the crew, and walked on the deck with Edith. Yet the upcoming speech vexed him as none had ever done before. He excused the difficulty to Grayson by saying that “he had very little respect for the audience.”3 That was a lame rationalization. By this time, he had addressed joint sessions of Congress or the Senate twenty-two times, and never before had he had any trouble preparing a speech. He also did something now he had never done before with a speech: he rehearsed with a small group of advisers, including Baruch, Lamont, and Vance McCormick. Oddly, however, he did not consult with the one person on board the George Washington who could have given him sound advice—Ray Stannard Baker. As press secretary to the delegation, Baker had been in daily contact with American journalists, and he had stayed abreast of opinion about the League and the treaty. Nor did Wilson consult with Tumulty or others in Washington, except about whether to speak to a joint session of Congress or to the Senate alone.

  The presidential party enjoyed a festive homecoming on July 8. Crowds packed the sidewalks of New York, where a ticker tape parade took Wilson to Carnegie Hall for a brief speech. A train then took the Wilsons to Washington, where a crowd estimated at 100,000 gathered around Union Station to greet their arrival at midnight. The president did not speak to the crowd, but on the way to the White House he said he was touched by the reception. After a day of seclusion to work further on the speech, Wilson opened his campaign for the League and the treaty on July 10. In the morning, he held a press conference with more than 100 reporters in the East Room of the White House. Speaking on the record for a change, he gave newspaper readers a taste of the way he performed at press conferences; he was clear, to the point, and informative while holding his ground and remaining noncombative. Some of his answers were just a few words, but on Article X and proposed reservations he gave longer explanations. Asked if he would discuss criticisms of the article, he replied, “No, only to say that if you leave that out, it is only a debating society, and I would not be interested in a debating society.” He maintained that reservations would be “a complicated problem,” but he did not rule them out. He closed by affirming, “The Senate is going to ratify the treaty.” It looked like a promising opener to his effort to gain acceptance of the treaty.4

  At noon, he went to the Capitol to present the document to the Senate and give his speech. Grayson noted in his diary that as Wilson entered the chamber, Lodge asked him, “Mr. President, can I carry the Treaty for you?” To that, Wilson smiled and answered, “Not on your life.” That exchange and Borah’s presence among the escort committee drew laughs in the chamber. This was the first time a president had presented a treaty to an open session of the Senate. Even though it was raining heavily and only ticket holders could enter the building, a large crowd had been milling around the Capitol for hours. When Wilson came into the Senate chamber, loud applause greeted him, mixed with rebel yells, but reporters noted that nearly all the applause came from the galleries and Democratic senators. Only a few Republicans joined in, and at the end only one, Porter McCumber of North Dakota, an outspoken supporter of the League, applauded again. The chamber was silent during the thirty-seven-minute speech, and the senators appeared to be listening intently.5

  Wilson maintained that the treaty was too complicated to explain in this address, although he did talk in general terms about some parts of the settlement. He paid tribute to the American forces, and he expatiated on the hopes raised for a better, more peaceful world, which the League of Nations was a first step toward fulfilling. “Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty?” he asked rhetorically. “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” He answered that such was impossible, and he closed with what he thought was a burst of eloquence by intoning, “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and a freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.”6

  The speech was a flop. In comments to reporters, Democratic senators sounded upbeat while Republicans were often scathing. “Soap bubbles and a soufflé of rhetorical phrases,” snorted Brandegee, while George Norris of Nebraska called it “a fine lot of glittering generalities.” The senators had anticipated explanations of such things as the Shantung settlement, the workings of Article X, and the future of Ireland. A Democrat, Henry Ashurst of Arizona, thought it was as if the head of a business had been asked to explain its obligations to his board of directors “and tone-fully read Longfellow’s Psalm of Life. … His audience wanted red meat, he fed them cold turnips.” Why Wilson did so badly is puzzling. His health may have played a part. One reporter noted that he skipped several words in reading from his typewritten text and then reread the sentences. Ashurst noted tight muscles in his neck and the paleness of his ears. Those were signs of tension, probably a headache, and perhaps insufficient blood to the brain—possibly symptoms of the underlying condition that would bring on a stroke three months later. Even more than poor delivery, the speech suffered from poor judgment. Ashurst was not alone in thinking that Wilson had given the wrong speech at the wrong time in the wrong place. Something more along the lines of what he had said in the press conference would have better filled the bill. He was showing impaired political judgment, which did not augur well for his performance in the League fight.7

  When the president finished his speech, he placed the bound copy of the treaty on the vice president’s lectern. He left the chamber in good spirits and went into a reception room to meet with some senators, all but one of whom were Democrats. In what newspaper accounts described as a frank, open discussion, Wilson talked about reservations, which he again called complicated and perilous; the Monroe Doctrine, which he explained was now recognized by the European powers for the first time; the Shantung settlement, which he admitted he disliked; Ireland, which he called one of the most difficult problems of the conference; and Article X, which he believed did not infringe on Congress’s power to declare war. This exchange went some way toward repairing omissions in the speech, and on advice from Burleson and others, he decided to have meetings with individual senators. That meant again shelving plans for a speaking tour, which relieved a number of people close to him.8

  Staying in Washington spared Wilson the rigors of summer travel, but it did not offer him a pleasant respite. The summer of 1919 was torrid even by the capital city’s standards, and racial violence exploded there as in other urban centers. This came to be called the Red Summer, because of the blood that figuratively and literally flowed in the streets. Before this time, race riots had occurred almost entirely in the South, but now, thanks to the migration of African Americans to northern cities, these white-instigated attacks on blacks in their neighborhoods spread to such places as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington. More than 100 people were killed and thousands injured, the great bulk of them African Americans. Homes and stores went up in flames. Soldiers from National Guard units and the regular army patrolled thoroughfares and gradually restored order. In Washington, much of the violence broke out in African American neighborhoods less than a mile from the White House, and troops patrolled Lafayette Square and the Mall and around the Capitol. In all, it was a frightening and unnerving spectacle.9

  The president seemed removed from the racial violence as well as other serious domestic problems, such as a rash of strikes, unemployment, inflation, and the continuing anti-radical crusade that would culminate in a full-fledged Red scare at the end of th
e year. His posture may have stemmed from concern about his health. On July 19, Wilson fell ill after a meeting at the Capitol and canceled his other appointments. A cruise on the Mayflower the next day did not help, and Grayson told the press that the president was suffering from dysentery. Whether something more serious was involved cannot be determined.

  When he was not resting in the White House, Wilson was meeting with senators. Between July 18 and August 1, he saw twenty-six of them: twenty-two Republicans and four Democrats; two other Republicans were invited but declined. The meetings took place one-on-one in the East Room and lasted about an hour apiece. Afterward, each Republican senator told waiting reporters that his conversation with the president had been cordial but that he had not changed his mind about the need for reservations. In private, accounts of the meetings contradicted one another. Taft’s chief informant in the capital told the ex-president that Wilson’s “attitude had been courteous and even gracious … and I believe he has done some good.” On the same day, Truman H. Newberry, a newly elected Republican from Michigan, told the state’s other Republican senator he had had an agreeable meeting but said to a Washington lawyer that Wilson had given “the impression of a spoiled society belle, who considered herself irresistible to me.” Wilson’s usual persuasiveness in personal encounters evidently did not change any senator’s mind, and the meetings took a lot out of him.10

  He broke off these meetings at the beginning of August because domestic problems finally demanded his attention. He had resumed cabinet meetings, and on July 31 the discussion for the first time dealt exclusively with troubles at home: inflation and another threatened railroad strike. Inflation, which had earned the initials HCL (for “high cost of living”), was particularly troubling, and the Republicans were trying to reap partisan gain from it. In response, Wilson spoke to a joint session of Congress on August 8. As with the speech to the Senate a month earlier, this one gave him great trouble in writing, and his delivery was rambling and disorganized. Substantively, aside from vigorous enforcement of laws and the dissemination of economic information, he had little to recommend: “We must, I think, freely admit that there is no complete immediate remedy from legislation and executive action.” He digressed with a description of the destruction wrought by the war, he attempted to link problems at home with delay in ratifying the peace treaty, and he delivered vague injunctions. It was the last address he would deliver to Congress in person.11