Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  He wrestled with what would become of the League of Nations if Italy refused to return and Japan departed. Having watched the President sweat blood, Ray Baker wrote in his diary that night: “He is at Gethsemane.”

  Secretary of State Lansing wrote himself a memorandum, calling this submission to the Japanese a “surrender of the principle of self-determination, a transfer of millions of Chinese from one foreign master to another.” He thought it better to exclude Japan from the League than to abandon China. Speaking on behalf of Henry White, Herbert Hoover, and himself, General Tasker Bliss went further, sending the President a long letter in which he concluded: “If it be right for Japan to annex the territory of an Ally [China], then it cannot be wrong for Italy to retain Fiume taken from the enemy.” If the United States abandoned the democracy of China to the domination of the “Prussianized militarism of Japan,” he said, “we shall be sowing dragons’ teeth”—a reference to a mythical prince who planted such teeth, from which sprang armed warriors.

  For one of the few times in his life, Wilson suffered from insomnia; and after lunch on April 30, Dr. Grayson urged the haggard President to ride with his wife through the Bois de Boulogne before that afternoon’s meeting. Wilson consented, knowing that he was sure to fall asleep once inside the car. “My mind was so full of the Japanese-Chinese controversy,” he told Grayson. “But it was settled this morning, and while it is not to me a satisfactory settlement, I suppose it could be called an ‘even break.’ It is the best that could be accomplished out of a ‘dirty past’”—one that got even grimier when he learned that France had also signed a secret treaty with Japan.

  The next morning, Wilson bowed to the Japanese demands, leaving the American delegation “mortified and angry.” His loyal supporters tended to blame Colonel House, who was, in fact, the only supporter of the deal. Charles Seymour thought the decision revealed that Wilson was “more the practical politician than has sometimes been supposed.” Instead of risking the dissolution of the Conference and the destruction of the Covenant, he based his decision not on the future conditional or the past imperfect but on the present indicative.

  The Japanese promised to restore Chinese sovereignty to Shantung, though they intended to retain all the economic rights that formerly belonged to the Germans—specifically railways and the mines associated with them. Wilson maintained that had he not fallen on this sword, the Japanese would have departed from the Conference, which, he believed, would have led to an old-fashioned military alliance with Russia and Germany, a perpetuation of the same thinking that had led to this war. With the acceptance of these terms, the Treaty was virtually settled—with the League of Nations still intact.

  That same afternoon, May Day, had started quietly enough but ended with a number of bloody confrontations in the streets between labor and the cavalry. For Wilson, it seemed one stress more than he could bear. In addition to surrendering to the Japanese terms, he officially approved of arraigning the Kaiser and possibly trying him for war crimes. And then, after several more hours of intense discussion, he suddenly announced to Edith and Dr. Grayson after lunch, “I don’t like the way the colors of this furniture fight each other.

  The greens and the reds are all mixed up here and there is no harmony. Here is a big purple, high-backed covered chair, which is like the Purple Cow, strayed off to itself, and it is placed where the light shines on it too brightly. If you will give me a lift, we will move this next to the wall where the light from the window will give it a subdued effect. And here are two chairs, one green and the other red. This will never do. Let’s put the greens all together and the reds together.

  Wilson’s bizarre comments did not end there. He described the Council of Four meetings, how each delegation walked like schoolchildren each day to its respective corner. Now, with the furniture regrouped, he said each country would sit according to color—with the reds in the American corner, the greens in the British corner, and the rest in the center for the French.

  Sensing it was a manifestation of stress, Grayson made little of the aberrant behavior, prescribing only an automobile ride. “Mr. President,” he said lightheartedly, “I think if you ever want a job after leaving the Presidency you would make a great success as an interior decorator.” Wilson smiled and said, “I don’t mean to throw bouquets at myself but I do think that I have made a success of the arrangement of this furniture.”

  In retrospect, Wilson’s behavior that day might have been “ludic”—activity somewhere between playful and delusional, and which sometimes accompanies improvement after brain injuries. Or perhaps it was nothing more than an attempt to impose order on circumstances beyond his control.

  His thoughts about moving the furniture quickly passed, but Wilson’s rearrangement in Asia did not. News of the settlement reached Peking on May 3, 1919, churning up a tsunami of shame and outrage. Students in Shanghai proclaimed that they had turned to Woodrow Wilson looking for the deliverance he had prophesied; “but no sun rose for China,” they wrote. “Even the cradle of the nation was stolen.” The next day, three thousand of them protested at Tiananmen Square before pouring into the streets, leaving angry petitions at the embassies of the Big Four and burning the house of one of China’s envoys. This “May Fourth Incident” provided the tinderbox for pro-national and anti-imperialist sentiment, which ignited a political and cultural awakening, starting with a massive boycott of all things Japanese. For many it signaled the closing of the door the West had opened twenty years earlier. In Hunan it turned a young college graduate, Mao Tse-tung, into a radical newspaper publisher. “We are awakened!” read one of his editorials that summer. “The world is ours, the state is ours, society is ours!”

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  Centuries earlier Confucius had said, “To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.” That philosophy dominated Wilson’s actions as the German delegation was about to arrive in Paris to receive the Peace Treaty. Wilson had heard that Germany still believed he was the one man who would see that “she would get justice at his hands.” But he predicted to Grayson that he would become the object of their animosity once they got their hands on the document. “The terms of the treaty are particularly severe,” Wilson granted, “but I have striven my level best to make them fair, and at the same time compel Germany to pay a just penalty. However, I fully realize that I will be the one on whom the blame will be placed. In their hearts the Germans dislike me because if I had kept America from entering the war Germany would have defeated the Allies. So I know that they blame me for their defeat.”

  The Allied leaders had grown contemptuous as well. Down to crafting the final paragraphs of the Treaty with Germany, they stopped at nothing in achieving their individual goals, each still thinking nationalistically. England and now even France forgot how they had beseeched the United States to join in their fight. Their lack of loyalty to President Wilson matched their growing lack of gratitude. Wilson complained about the French, who had recently shown only “a lack of appreciation” as they assumed the attitude that “France did it all.” The British behavior was even worse. Winston Churchill was already speechifying that the war had “proved the soundness of the British race at every point” and that “in every country, it is to the British way of doing things that they are looking now.” It was only a matter of time before he would tell a New York newspaper editor that “America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War.

  If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have . . . enthroned Nazism.

  Wilson—once “the prophet of the world”—found himself rolling in the political mud, preserving as much of his grand plan as possible. Said Ray Baker: “He must bargain and bluff, give way here, stand firm there. Miserable business—but wise.�
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  And after four months of talks, the time had arrived to see how the Fourteen Points had translated into the Treaty of Versailles. While the printer was setting it in type, a member of the American Commission and Sir Maurice Hankey arrived at the temporary White House to point out two insertions that Clemenceau had made in the Treaty, unilaterally, presumably expecting them to slip by unnoticed. One was a liberty he had taken, which House called “a perversion of the entire mandatory system.” Wilson simply ordered their excision. Over the next several days, John Foster Dulles combed the eighty-five-thousand-word text and discovered even more tampering. Bernard Baruch did the same. “The French seem to be always up to some skullduggery,” Wilson commented; “the word ‘honorable’ doesn’t seem to mean anything to them.”

  On the morning of Wednesday, May 7, 1919, while the Big Three were tying up a few loose ends before that day’s official presentation of the documents to the German delegates, Premier Orlando entered the room and took his chair, as if he had never walked out. He did not want to miss that afternoon’s pageant, which would be short on ceremony, though long on symbolism.

  King Louis XIV had built the magnificent Château de Versailles, ten miles west of Paris, to stand as his monument “to all the glories of France”; and when Bismarck had dictated his harsh peace in 1871, he had added ignominy to the French defeat by selecting Versailles for the occasion. Now, on the perimeter of the château gardens, resplendent with lilacs and chestnut blossoms, world leaders gathered once again at the Trianon Palace Hotel, this time allowing the French to reclaim not only their land but also some of their glory. Tables and chairs were configured in the hotel dining room to replicate the Salle de la Paix at the Quai d’Orsay; and by three o’clock, all the Allied plenipotentiaries were seated (except for the habitually late Paderewski, who was evidently used to audiences being in their seats before he walked onto the stages of concert halls). In fact, the German delegation of six had been waiting in Versailles for a week—some of them believing the talks had slowed intentionally in order for this day to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania.

  As soon as everybody was seated, Clemenceau, wearing yellow gloves, stood and announced that this was neither the time nor the place for “superfluous” words. “The time has come when we must settle our accounts,” he said. “You have asked for peace. We are ready to give you peace.” He offered to explain any terms the Germans might require, but he said there would be no oral discussion—only observations submitted in writing within the next fifteen days. With copies of the 413-page books (in French on the left-hand pages, English on the right, and illustrated with large folding maps) before them, Clemenceau added that “this Second Treaty of Versailles has cost us too much not to take on our side all the necessary precautions and guarantees that that peace shall be a lasting one.”

  Ulrich, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the German Foreign Minister, did not stand, which delegates interpreted as insolence. “We cherish no illusions as to the extent of our defeat—the degree of our impotence,” he said without repentance, “. . . and we have heard the passionate demand that the victors should both make us pay as vanquished and punish us as guilty.” But he said they were required to admit that they alone were “war-guilty” and that “such an admission on my lips would be a lie.” While he did not seek to exonerate Germany from all responsibility, he refuted the idea that Germany—“whose people were convinced that they were waging a defensive war”—should solely be “laden with the guilt,” as the last half century of imperialism of all European states had “chronically poisoned the international situation.” He reminded the Conference that the blockade against Germany persisted to that day, taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants since the Armistice. He made no attempt to delay the restoration of territory in Belgium and northern France that Germany had occupied. In order to do that, he said, they needed the technical and financial participation of the victors. “It must be the desire of impoverished Europe that reconstruction should be carried out as successfully and economically as possible,” he said. Before even reading the Treaty, he endorsed the League of Nations. And he reminded the victors, “A Peace which cannot be defended in the name of justice before the whole world would continually call forth fresh resistance.” Several people had observed that the Count was trembling violently when he entered the room, had fumbled with his chair in trying to sit down, and could not suppress the shaking of his hands and knees—all of which probably explained why he had not stood in the first place. Wilson dismissed the speech as “stupid,” finding it “not frank & peculiarly Prussian!”

  The Treaty of Versailles contained 440 articles, divided into fifteen sections. The first was the League Covenant. The second and third sections redrew Germany’s borders, and much of the rest of Europe’s. Germany would cede 5,600 square miles of Alsace-Lorraine to France, 382 square miles to Luxembourg and Holland, and almost 22,000 square miles, including West Prussia, to Poland. Dantzig would become a “free city,” an internationalized zone under the guarantee of the League of Nations; and a separated East Prussia would hold a plebiscite to determine its nationality. Furthermore, Germany was to recognize the total independence of German Austria and Czechoslovakia, and to respect the independence of all territories that had been part of the former Russian Empire. Section IV itemized the German renunciation of all her overseas possessions—from Liberia, Morocco, and Egypt to Siam and Shantung, including whatever claims she had in Turkey and Bulgaria.

  The next few sections were more onerous, as they compelled Germany to dismantle its military infrastructure. Its massive army of millions would be reduced to 100,000 soldiers, the once ominous navy to no more than 15,000 sailors manning three dozen vessels of war, including six small battleships and no submarines. Conscription was to be abolished, as were the manufacture, storage, and design of arms and munitions of war; no dirigibles could be kept, and only a limited number of unarmed seaplanes; and the manufacture of aircraft was forbidden for six months. While the reckoning for reparations was far from completed, the Treaty required a down payment of £1 billion within two years, in either gold, goods, ships, or other specific forms of compensation. In the meantime, the Inter-Allied Reparation Commission would continue to tabulate the cost of war loss and damage, including injuries caused to civilians by acts of war, directly or indirectly, air bombardments, damage to property other than naval or military materials, all Allied war loans to Belgium, and—of great importance—pensions for Allied soldiers. Much of the rest of the document curtailed Germany’s control of rivers and railways and nullified many of her pre-war contracts, treaties, and property rights. Lest the vanquished nation even consider mounting a military comeback, the Council of Three released an appendix to the Treaty, the pledge from President Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George to propose to their respective legislatures to “come immediately to the assistance of France in the case of an unprovoked attack by Germany.” With that, cabled Canada’s representative, Prime Minister Robert Borden, to his Minister of Finance, “the curtain rang down upon the first scene of the last Act of the terrible drama which has occupied the world’s stage for nearly five years.”

  For Woodrow Wilson, the rest of his time abroad was a vexatious denouement, as the Peace Commission carved free and independent countries out of the fallen Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. As if he were the hero in a Greek tragedy, Wilson’s “flaws” seemed to dictate a series of reversals in his actions. In retrospect, considerable evidence suggests that as early as April 28, the President had experienced another “cerebrovascular accident.” The first indications of his having suffered a small stroke appeared during a plenary session regarding the Covenant, in which he read his remarks with some difficulty, omitting passages that were written out for him and relying on Baron Makino to make certain points because he was simply unable to. Then, for the first time in decades, his elegant cursive turned crabbed, forcing hi
m to switch to writing with his left hand. Days later, in giving an informal after-dinner speech, he meandered into eloquent but pointless blather. And the following week he had another impulse to rearrange his sitting room, suddenly finding that the purple furniture clashed with the green.

  Dr. Grayson did everything he could to inject more leisure into the President’s schedule—even arranging a day at the Longchamps Race Course. The “elasticity” of his patient’s physical and mental makeup—he sprung back to his old self with the least amount of refreshment—continued to impress Grayson. But the pressure of the Council of Four meetings did not relent. The leaders continued to convene at least once a day, as they braced themselves for the German reaction to the Treaty.