Beholden to nobody, he had risen to his position through brainpower. Wedding the complexity of his intellect with the simplicity of his faith, placing principles before politics, he followed his conscience, never first checking public opinion. He spoke only for himself, and he found much of the nation agreeing with what he had to say. Arguably the least experienced person to hold the highest political office in the land, he was the Presidency’s most accomplished student of American history and politics. As such, he proved to be an unexpectedly evolved political animal, with a tough hide and sharp claws. In 1912 he entered one of the most thrilling races in the nation’s history and beat two worthy adversaries—a Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft, and the even more popular third-party candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive from the Bull Moose Party.
Ambrose Bierce had recently defined politics in his Devil’s Dictionary as “the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” But Wilson defied such thinking. In the middle of a period of great economic inequality—when the nation’s richest 1 percent owned half its wealth—he unveiled his Presidential program. His “New Freedom” worked honestly to protect the less favored 99 percent of his countrymen. In order to actualize his slate of progressive reforms, he brought a bold new approach to his office, one in which the executive and legislative branches co-operated the government. He literally walked the walk, violating a century-old tradition by appearing regularly before Congress—not just to deliver his State of the Union messages but whenever he had an important measure he wanted passed.
“What I am interested in is having the government of the United States more concerned about human rights than about property rights,” he insisted. Toward that end, he lost no time in creating the Federal Reserve Board, reducing excessive tariffs, reforming taxation, strengthening anti-trust laws, inaugurating the eight-hour workday, establishing the Federal Trade Commission, developing agricultural programs, improving rural life, and making corporate officers liable for the actions of their companies. He even offered the first government bailout of a private industry in distress—cotton. Without so much as a breath of scandal, his New Freedom served as the foundation for the New Deal and Fair Deal and New Frontier and Great Society to come. Future President Harry Truman said, “In many ways, Woodrow Wilson was the greatest of the greats.”
Wilson’s reelection in 1916 was an even more electrifying contest than his first, a legendary squeaker. He ran on his strong legislative record and the powerful message that “He kept us out of war.” He became the first Democratic President elected to two consecutive terms since Andrew Jackson in 1832.
And within weeks of his second inauguration, Woodrow Wilson returned to Congress to announce the most consequential shift in the history of American foreign policy, before or since. On April 2, 1917, he addressed a joint session of the legislature, with the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and the diplomatic corps present as witnesses, in what one prominent journalist called “the most dramatic event that the National Capitol had ever known.” In speaking to an isolationist nation, one that had long adhered to a policy of avoiding foreign entanglements, Wilson summoned the American people less to a war than a crusade, declaring that the United States must help make the world “safe for democracy.”
In urging his countrymen to join in a war being fought an ocean away, to fight pre-emptively for principles instead of retaliating for attacks against them, to wed idealism with interventionism, Woodrow Wilson initiated one of the most far-reaching precepts of American foreign policy. “Democracy” had long been America’s watchword. Wilson now added such terms as “self-determination” and “collective security” to the battle cry.
A dynamic Commander in Chief, Wilson transformed an introverted country with minor defensive capabilities into a competitive military nation. “Perhaps the greatest foreign army that ever crossed a sea in the history of the world prior to the present war was the Persian army of a million men, which bridged and crossed the Hellespont,” wrote the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker. Wilson instituted a program of selective service that would provide the potential to raise an army many times the size of that of Xerxes and would send millions of men across an ocean.
Throughout the war, Wilson’s mightiest weapon was his oratory. With a resonant voice and precise diction, honeyed with a drop of Southern gentility, he became one of the most celebrated speakers of his time. He could extemporize for an hour or longer without a pause or misplaced word. He thought in metaphors, spoke in perfect sentences, and composed entire paragraphs in his head, relying on a superior vocabulary. When speaking formally, he resorted to prepared texts and proved even more eloquent. Muckraker Ida Tarbell said, “I doubt if there is any man in America that can talk . . . with such precision and at the same time so like a human being.” He was the last President to compose all his own speeches.
Wilson codified his war aims—his terms for peace—into “Fourteen Points.” Walter Lippmann, who drafted some of them, said they “merely voiced the common aspiration of liberal men for a better world order. It was assumed that they would create an environment in which a decent and orderly settlement could be made.” The empires of four great dynasties had just toppled—the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Habsburgs in Austria, the Romanovs in Russia, and the Ottomans in Turkey: no longer did divine right rule in Europe or across most of the world. It now fell upon the American President to reconfigure the pieces of those fallen empires.
More than a crowning touch, Woodrow Wilson’s fourteenth point became his raison d’être, what he believed would be his sacred legacy. It was a concept under which all countries of the world might congregate, to avert war by settling disputes through pre-emptive peace talks. Others before him had championed similar organizations, but Woodrow Wilson was the first to stake his life on the idea, forever affixing his name to that vision of a League of Nations.
Wilson was especially sensitive to all sides in the impending negotiations because he was the only President in the history of the United States to have been raised in a country that had suffered a defeat in war. Born in Virginia and raised during the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Confederacy, Wilson grasped the tragedy that overcame the South after the Civil War, in which the aftermath, at times, proved worse than the defeat. He comprehended the feelings of guilt, even shame, the lingering anger, and the contrition; he saw why Southern eloquence turned toward euphemism, especially when it came to talking about “the recent unpleasantness.” He had seen how racism stained the region; and he spent a lifetime sorting out his own feelings on that subject. His administration instituted segregation—“Jim Crow” laws—in Washington, D.C.
In asking his countrymen to engage in this first World War, he had insisted that Americans were fighting for what he called a “peace without victory.” Feeling as right as he was righteous, he hoped to show the world that foreign policy might have a moral component as well as political or economic objectives. “Never before in the history of mankind,” Edwin Alderman noted, “has a statesman of the first order made the humble doctrine of service to humanity a cardinal and guiding principle of world politics.” Nor had any President ever suppressed free speech to so great an extent in order to realize his principles.
The first sitting President to leave the territorial United States, “he enjoyed a prestige and moral influence throughout the world unequaled in history,” said John Maynard Keynes, a young economist who was part of the British delegation to the peace talks. Indeed, concurred his colleague Harold Nicolson, Wilson came “armed with power such as no man in history had possessed: he had come fired with high ideals such as have inspired no autocrat of the past.”
Nobody could predict the quality of his mercy. He had, after all, spoken of fairness and severity in the same sentence, as well as of penalties without being punitive. The world could but wonder whether those who sought revanche and retribution could sign the same document required of those who
believed Wilson was the “one man who would see that Germany was not looted and destroyed; that she would get justice at his hands.” To his longtime secretary, Wilson had confessed before embarking, “This trip will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history; but I believe in a Divine Providence. . . . It is my faith that no body of men however they concert their power or their influence can defeat this great world enterprise, which after all is the enterprise of Divine mercy, peace and good will.” In the end, Henry Kissinger has noted, “Wilson’s principles”—properly applied or misappropriated—“have remained the bedrock of American foreign-policy thinking.”
For all his towering intellect and abiding faith, Woodrow Wilson was superstitious—especially about the number thirteen, which he considered talismanic. His first and last names comprised thirteen letters. In his thirteenth year of service at Princeton, he became the college’s thirteenth president. In 1913 he became President of the United States, whose thirteen original colonies received tribute everywhere in the symbols of the nation, from the number of stripes on its flag to the number of arrows in the eagle’s sinister talon on its national seal. Those close to the President knew that he had selected the date of the George Washington’s departure so that it would dock in France on December 13.
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Five destroyers of the Atlantic Torpedo Flotilla escorted the ship through New York harbor until it met the dreadnought Pennsylvania, her convoy across the mine-littered Atlantic. Once the George Washington was on its course, the President’s flag was hoisted on its mainmast. The sight of it snapping in the breeze signaled a salute from the destroyers, and twenty-one gunshots rent the air. And then, two airplanes shot out overhead and performed aerial acrobatics to everybody’s astonishment and delight.
Anybody in Manhattan with a river view could catch a glimpse of the farewell, and every shoreline window, doorway, and rooftop was filled with cheering citizens and a kaleidoscope of stars and stripes. Down in the Battery, ten thousand New Yorkers huddled along the seawall to pay their respects; at Governors Island, soldiers gathered on the western shore to shout their goodbyes; all of Staten Island seemed to have turned out as well. And there, the Presidential ship passed the Minnehaha, which was bringing home a boatload of soldiers who had fought “over there.” The President was moved by this signal that the war was really over. Indeed, he had made it known that he already believed “the history of mankind will be put into two grand divisions only, that before, and that after, this great world conflict.”
With the sun shining upon the torch-bearing statue in the middle of the harbor, one could not help feeling as the President’s friend and physician Rear Admiral Cary T. Grayson did—that “no person could have wished for a more auspicious commencement of an eventful trip.” Despite the capriciousness of his constituency, The New York Times said the American public admired Mr. Wilson and considered him an “ambassador going beyond the seas not only to conclude a peace, but to establish relations of amity that will endure through all the coming years.” Nobody realized he would be away from home for six months.
One young diplomat, Raymond B. Fosdick, wrote that watching the nation’s farewell to the President “almost made the tears come to my eyes to realize what a tremendous grip on the hopes and affections, not only of America but of the world, this one man has.” That very morning, on his way to the boat, Fosdick had observed hundreds of young men and women leaving the ferry, sweatshop workers commuting in the dark. A few minutes later, Fosdick asked one of the laborers how many hours a day he worked. Fourteen, the man replied; and then, pointing to the George Washington, he added, “But do you see that boat. . . . There’s a man aboard her that is going to Europe to change all that.” When Fosdick related the story to the President, Wilson suddenly looked strained under the burden of impossible expectations.
When the George Washington reached the open water, the Wilsons lunched in their private dining room, after which the President napped. “The long strain of war was lifting,” remembered Edith Wilson. “For three hours he slept without stirring, and got up looking refreshed and renewed.” Some afternoons, the weary leader slept four hours—“storing up energy for the trials ahead.” After these siestas, the Wilsons took long walks around the deck.
By the third day at sea, the George Washington had entered the Gulf Stream, and the weather turned summery. The President spent his mornings addressing his paperwork and holding meetings with members of the American Peace Commission. Several journalists had been invited on the voyage, and he always found time to speak to them, having enjoyed a cordial relationship with the press corps since his earliest days in office, when he became the first President to schedule regular White House press conferences.
Most nights, after a small dinner in their suite, the Wilsons attended the movies. There were two theaters on board equipped with motion picture projectors—the “Old Salt” Theatre for the troops belowdecks and the Martha Washington Theatre for the officers and the Peace Commission on an upper deck. The President preferred to watch with the enlisted men, thoroughly enjoying the latest from Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, and Fatty Arbuckle. While he normally would not have attended a motion picture on a Sunday night, noted the ship’s newsletter, “in true democratic fashion he always fits his personal convenience to the circumstances of the occasion, and he enjoyed the motion picture as much as anybody.” When it ended, the President held an impromptu reception, shaking hands with all the men present, who gave him three rousing cheers.
On the morning of Tuesday, December 10, the hilly green fields and whitewashed towns of the Azores came into view, signaling the end of Wilson’s holiday. He came on deck for a few breaths of air and then buckled down to business. The night before, a young, hotheaded attaché to the Commission, William C. Bullitt, had taken a seat next to him in the “Old Salt” Theatre and boldly explained that the team of advisers on board “was in a thoroughly skeptical and cynical mood” and that “it would have a fatal effect” if they reached Paris and met their British and French counterparts without knowing the President’s precise intentions. Indeed, even Wilson’s chief information officer, George Creel, complained that he “did not know a Goddam thing about what the President was thinking.” Bullitt’s chat made Wilson realize it was time to gather his advisers, each with his own specialty. Most of them, in fact, had been working in private under a nascent government program called “the Inquiry.” This secret council on foreign affairs had, as the times suddenly demanded, become the nation’s first central intelligence agency.
The Azores behind them, the President summoned ten members of the Inquiry to his office that Tuesday. For an hour, he articulated his vision on such topics as indemnities, borders, colonies, and—above all—the League of Nations, which would be essential to resolving all the other problems. If the forthcoming peace was based on “anything but justice and the will of the people rather than that of their leaders,” he said, the next “catastrophe would not be a war but a cataclysm.”
“I have never seen the President in a franker or more engaging mood,” Bullitt wrote in his diary. “He was overflowing with warmth and good nature.” His charm revived everybody’s morale for the work ahead. Before the group dispersed, he asked them to remember one story—that not five months prior, General Pershing’s AEF had joined the French at Château-Thierry, where they were ordered to retreat with the French army. The American commander tore up the orders and commanded his divisions to advance instead, thereby saving Paris and gaining momentum to win the war. “It is not too much to say that at Château-Thierry we saved the world,” Wilson told his advisers, “and I do not intend to let those Europeans forget it. They were beaten when we came in and they know it. . . . They all acknowledged that our men at Château-Thierry saved them. Now they are trying to forget it.” Wilson spent most of his last day at sea in his quarters, quietly preparing for the Peace Conference. “He
goes to face the lions, if ever a man did,” noted Raymond Fosdick.
The Wilsons watched the final movie of their voyage in the Martha Washington Theatre that night. Before the lights came up, fifty sailors—known as bluejackets—quietly gathered in the corner of the hall and, to the accompaniment of the orchestra that had supplied music during the film, softly sang “God Be with You till We Meet Again.” Everybody stood, and all eyes turned to the President, whose head was bowed, tears rolling down his cheeks. Then they all sang “Auld Lang Syne.”
During the voyage, the President had made a point of acquainting himself with all parts of the ship and its personnel. He posed for pictures with everyone, from the enlisted apprentice boys to the “black gang” in the boiler rooms. For the first time, motion pictures documented the history of the nation as much as the words of any reporter, as the Signal Corps had captured on film as much of the last year’s events as possible. Captain Victor Fleming, a twenty-eight-year-old Californian who had launched a promising career in Hollywood as a cameraman before he was drafted, chronicled every interesting moment of the crossing. After his military service, he would return to Hollywood, where he would direct the biggest film stars in the world in such classic features as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. But no cast would ever come close to rivaling the one that was about to assemble in Paris.
December is the gloomiest month in Brittany, where it rains more days than not. It had poured in Brest for weeks. So the President’s entourage buzzed that morning that his lucky number had paid off—that Friday the thirteenth burst with sunlight as the George Washington swung into her anchorage outside the breakwater in the harbor. The President and Mrs. Wilson went on deck at nine o’clock to witness the reception—a fleet of nine battleships and forty destroyers and cruisers. The gun salutes were deafening. Planes soared overhead, and a large dirigible scudded across the clear skies. After an early lunch, a tender pulled to the side of the ship, and five American Admirals boarded, followed by a delegation of French dignitaries who were accompanied by Wilson’s daughter Margaret, a singer who had been in Europe entertaining the troops.
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