by G. J. Meyer
What mattered more than the president’s sharp words was his decision to begin selling the league and criticizing those hesitant to support it in the most public way possible literally from the hour of his arrival in the United States. The congressmen who were to be his dinner guests two days later, and who had consented to keep their opinions to themselves until then, took this as an act of bad faith. They regarded themselves as released from any obligation not to speak out. Some of them, asked by reporters to comment, did so in acid terms. A few said they would not attend the dinner.
Negative reaction to the president’s comments covered a broad spectrum. At one extreme were the very few senators, progressives all, who were already saying that they would not vote to ratify the treaty under any circumstances. They were vastly outnumbered by those who saw the league and the covenant as potentially positive but in need of being altered. These were Republicans, mainly; almost all of the Senate’s Democrats were prepared to follow their president, if only to avoid punishment by the White House.
Some of the opposition was partisanship pure and simple. This was intensified in more than a few instances by dislike for Woodrow Wilson the man. But to characterize the whole of the opposition in this way would be unfair. Among the doubters were people who believed that George Washington had been deeply wise in warning his fellow citizens against “entangling alliances,” and who feared that membership in the league would compromise American sovereignty. These were not irresponsible concerns, especially in light of the covenant as approved at the Paris conference. They were shared by such Republicans as William Howard Taft and Elihu Root, who wanted an international organization of some kind but saw reason for caution. Such people understood that the world of George Washington no longer existed and that the United States with her size and power had a role to play in international affairs that went beyond buying and selling abroad. It has always been unjust to call them isolationists.
Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. senator from Massachusetts, 1893–1924
Haughty, aristocratic, and learned, he said Wilson had “no intellectual integrity at all.”
Henry Cabot Lodge would stand out as the most important and interesting of the skeptics, only in part because of his power as chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. What is curious is how intense and personal his clash with Wilson became—“I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel for Wilson,” he said—in spite of the many values that the two held in common. Both held Ph.D.’s from prestigious institutions and had written numerous books on government and public policy. Both believed that the United States was morally superior to other nations, with an exalted destiny, and that their “race,” the Anglo-Saxon, was uniquely gifted in the arts of governance and destined to lead, if not exactly rule, the world.
Both had such strong personal and cultural ties to Great Britain that they were all but fated to be more sympathetic to the Allies than to Germany, though Lodge had from the start been far more passionately convinced than Wilson of the rightness of the Allied cause and incomparably more hostile to Germany. Beyond their shared beliefs, the two had irreconcilably different views of how the United States should fulfill its great destiny, and the Great War made the gap unbridgeable. Viewed from one angle, their quarrel can appear to have been played out on a loftier plane than is common in politics, one where foreign policy becomes almost a branch of philosophy. Seen from another angle, it was no more subtle than a bare-knuckle fight over streetcar franchises by two big-city ward bosses who just happened to loathe each other.
At the bottom of their conflict over the peace treaty and League of Nations lay one simple fact: Lodge’s thinking about the needs of the postwar world was far more compatible with that of the Allied leaders—Clemenceau in particular—than with Wilson’s. Like the feisty old French premier, the senator wanted the league to be a permanent alliance of the war’s winners, and he wanted its first purpose to be the permanent subjugation of Germany. Attached though he was to Britain, he parted from Lloyd George in being fully in support of French domination of the European mainland. He actually encouraged Clemenceau and Lloyd George, during the peace conference, to resist the American president.
As early as 1912, Lodge had told a friend that Wilson’s abrupt and wholesale shift from Old South conservatism to progressivism showed him to have “no intellectual integrity at all.” He added that “I think he would sacrifice any opinion at any moment for his own benefit and go back on it the next moment if he thought returning to it would be profitable.”
One might almost expect that Lodge, viewing Germany as by its nature a threat to stability and peace, would have embraced the Wilson who called for war in April 1917 and summoned the nation to save civilization by unseating the kaiser and the villains who served him. Such a rapprochement was, however, never possible. By the time of American intervention, Lodge’s natural unhappiness at seeing Wilson become only the second Democrat elected to the presidency since the Civil War had turned into alarm and then contempt. He saw William Jennings Bryan as too ignorant and incompetent to be entrusted with the State Department, and Wilson as so foolishly evenhanded as to be in effect pro-German. The president’s call for peace without victory was, in Lodge’s eyes, unforgivable. Even the decision to enter the war he took as fresh proof of Wilson’s inconstancy; if the things Wilson said in asking Congress to declare war were true, Lodge told Theodore Roosevelt at the time, “everything he has done for [the preceding] two years and a half is fundamentally wrong.”
The Armistice was for Lodge a poisoned chalice. He wanted the war to go on until Berlin was in Allied hands, the whole German nation under occupation. And now the United States was represented at the peace conference by a president who was, Lodge fervently believed, as timid as he was inconstant. By the time of the February 26 White House dinner, the senator saw himself as having been made responsible by fate for protecting the United States and the world from what could easily prove to be a blunder of monstrous proportions.
Thirty-three guests showed up at the White House: men who sat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee or would become members when the new Congress convened. The gathering was in no way a disaster, but neither did it accomplish anything. At dinner Edith Wilson, seated with Lodge, filled his ear with an effusive account of what a tremendous welcome her husband had been given upon disembarking in Boston. It was hardly the way to put an unsympathetic Massachusetts Republican in a relaxed and receptive frame of mind. In the three hours that followed, Mrs. Wilson having withdrawn, the guests asked questions and the president answered. By all accounts he did so politely, patiently, and forthrightly, but to no discernible effect. Perhaps Wilson was too professorial. Possibly he was at times ever so slightly disdainful—or seen as disdainful, at least, by congressmen grown weary of what they thought his superior airs. It is likewise possible that he did nothing wrong. In any case there was no warmth on either side, no meeting of minds, no minds changed. Upon returning to France, Wilson would waste no time in letting Colonel House know that his dinner idea had been a useless exercise.
The president was in the United States only nine days, doing about as much damage to his cause as was possible in such a short time. On the day after the dinner he met with the Democratic National Committee. It was supposed to be an off-the-record event, but Wilson must have understood that the press was going to be curious about what was said, and that in his audience would be people with other priorities than respecting the president’s confidence. As at Boston, he spoke of the league mainly in positive terms, emphasizing its importance to the future of the world. But he went further in heaping scorn on those who hesitated to give him their support—on their “contemptible” character and the “fatuity” of “their poor little minds.” These insults appeared in the newspapers in a matter of hours.
If the president was throwing down the gauntlet, the Republicans were not reluctant to pick it up. As March began, with the statutory
end of the congressional session only hours away, they filibustered some of the appropriations bills that Wilson had returned to the United States to sign. Sufficient votes to stop the filibuster via cloture were lacking, which meant that the president was going to have to call an extraordinary session of Congress within the next several months. This was a particularly clever stroke on the Republicans’ part: by the time of the special session, the men elected in November 1918 would be in office, and those who had lost their seats or were voluntarily retiring would be gone. The Republicans would be in control, and Lodge would be their leader. The Democrats cried foul, but not with great conviction. All but the greenest understood that politics ain’t beanbag.
By now the sharper brains in both parties were becoming more specific about what they found troubling in the covenant. Some feared that it would undercut the Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States had for a century told the European powers to keep their grasping hands off the western hemisphere, promising in return to leave Europe to the Europeans. Others feared that the United States, if she joined the league, would not be free to quit if she later wished to do so, would not be able to refuse unwanted mandates, and would lose control of internal matters—tariffs, immigration—that Washington regarded as nobody’s business but its own.
Above all there was concern about Article 10—the part of the covenant that Wilson believed to be the most indispensable. It pledged members to defend threatened nations in the following terms:
The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council [to be made up of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and four temporary members elected by the General Assembly] shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.
There is no better example of how the covenant was, in historian William C. Widenor’s words, “fraught with ambiguities.” What did these words mean, really? What, specifically, was the “obligation” to which the article referred? Would the league have its own army? If so, how would that army be raised? If not, what armies would be used? Who would command them and set their objectives? Could the league order the ships and troops of member nations to attack wherever it wished, at times of its choosing? What part would the United States, now the world’s most powerful nation, play? Could her armed forces be sent to war at the command of the league, in violation of the Constitution? Would she be obliged to go to war to keep the British Empire intact? To deploy troops whenever any two countries started shooting at each other?
Thoughtful senators and citizens, upon reading the covenant, could hardly avoid asking such questions. Wilson, not wisely but all too characteristically, saw the questioners as enemies. Article 10 was his sole truly original contribution to the covenant, the only part of it not taken from some earlier source. Later in the year, in attempting to sell it to the public, he would say that it “speaks the conscience of the world.” Even now, he was ready with a twofold response to questions. He insisted that Article 10 was essential to the league’s effectiveness and could not, must not, be altered. He insisted also that there was no need to worry about the details: the league itself, once up and running, would attend to the fine print. Lodge, for one, was not satisfied. “We must have facts,” he said. “Glittering and enticing generalities will not serve.” He complained that “I read [Wilson’s] speeches, and they are all in the clouds and all fine sentiments that lead nowhere.” He was not alone.
When supportive Democrats warned that without changes the covenant would have little chance of ratification, Wilson complained in reply that asking the peace conference to debate American amendments would create insuperable difficulties. Again he was particularly adamant about Article 10: it was the guarantee of peace and perfect as it stood.
March 4 was his last day in the United States and the most dramatic of his visit. On the floor of the Senate, Lodge presented a declaration—which the press would call the Round Robin—that the league covenant was not acceptable “in the form now proposed.” It called for the peace conference to make a treaty with Germany its first priority, setting the league aside for attention later. The drama lay in the fact that this declaration bore the signatures of thirty-nine men who would be Republican members of the Senate when the new Congress convened. This was six more than the number needed to defeat a treaty—and any covenant embedded in a treaty.
That evening, as his final public act before departing for France, the president gave a speech in New York. Big enthusiastic crowds welcomed him, and the Metropolitan Opera House was filled to capacity. The Republicans in the audience were cheered by the appearance onstage of one of their own, former president Taft, who as head of the League to Enforce Peace had become a highly visible advocate of an association of all the world’s nations. Now he defended Wilson’s league, defended even Article 10, telling his listeners that there was nothing in the essence of the covenant that Americans need fear.
The good-natured Taft did something else, too—something that potentially mattered more than his endorsement of the covenant. He praised Lodge and other senators from his own party for making “suggestions that should prove especially valuable in the work of revising the form of the covenant and in making changes to which the [Paris] conference may readily consent.” This was not a grasp at partisan advantage; it pointed the way to a bridge across the divide that had been widening since Wilson’s arrival at Boston. By clear implication, it invited the president to make use of the one promising feature of the Round Robin: its assertion that the signers would not accept the covenant in the form now proposed. This gaping loophole created ample scope for a working out of differences. In that place and at that moment, Taft’s positive tone, generous to both sides in the league debate, was a gift to Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson spurned it. Offended by the Round Robin and by Taft’s positive words about Lodge and his followers, his spirits buoyed by the cheering crowds that had lined his route from Pennsylvania Station to the opera house, he used his turn at the lectern to spit venom on all who presumed to question the covenant as he had written it. He professed to be amazed by the “narrowness” of such people, their “comprehensive ignorance of the state of the world,” their “doctrine of careful selfishness thought out to the last detail.” Again he seemed determined not to negotiate but to fight—even to pick a fight.
He also displayed his growing tendency not just to speak in abstractions—he had always done that—but to use grand generalities to describe a war and a world that never were and never could have been. He said on this night that the armies of Germany—armies invincible when faced with Britain and France and Italy and Russia—had gone into collapse as soon as they made contact with America’s doughboys. And they had “continued to break, my fellow citizens, not merely because of the physical force of those lusty youngsters but because of the irresistible spiritual force of the armies of the United States.” Spiritual force: not so surprising a thing, if God was on America’s—on Wilson’s—side. One can only wonder what the Yanks mowed down at Belleau Wood and in the valley of the Meuse would have made of it. No doubt they would have regretted not having had a bit more of it, whatever it was.
Having thus made plain his rejection of all doubts and thrown insults in the faces of the doubters, the president steamed off to France. His belligerence fed on the conviction that the voters of America wanted the league pretty much on his terms, and about that he may very well have been right. At this early stage, before the possible implications of league membership came under close public scrutiny, millions accepted Wilson’s assurances that an international organization—this particular international organization—was going to be essential to the new world order he had promised. In returning to France, he left behind a nation whose economy was still humming along nicely thanks to the needs of devastated foreign co
untries, but where millions of people were finding it difficult to get by. Inflation was essentially out of control, at times spiking to an annual rate of 100 percent. Neither government nor industry felt any lingering need to be generous with workers. The war, after all, was over. Even corporations with fat order books and high profits were reducing their workforces, demanding longer hours, and cutting wages. The gains made recently by well-behaved unions such as the AFL were being taken back.
There would be two and a half thousand strikes in the United States in 1919. As in prewar days, the police powers of the national, state, and local governments would be used against the strikers. Irruptions of discontent including a February 1919 general strike in Seattle were becoming almost commonplace, and were blamed on shadowy unnamed Bolsheviks.
For Wilson all this was little more than background noise. Back in December, before his first departure for France, he announced, in what would prove to be his last annual report to Congress, what amounted to the end of the progressive era. “Our people,” he had said, “do not want to be coached and led. They know their own business, are quick and resourceful at every readjustment, definite in purpose, and self-reliant in action. Any leading strings we might seek to put them in would speedily become hopelessly entangled because they would pay no attention to them and go their own way. All that we can do as their legislative and executive servants is to mediate the process of change here, there and elsewhere as we may.” Domestic reform, in short, not only no longer mattered but was not even achievable. As for himself, he now had more important priorities. The Japanese had been bruised by the Supreme Council’s rejection of their racial equality clause and were suspicious of its slowness in granting them the German concessions in China’s Shantung peninsula. The Italians seemed to want to erect a kind of new Roman empire on the ruins of the old order. And the Middle East was an impossible tangle: Britain and France were in the process, even as the president spoke, of redrawing its map to suit themselves.
