Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  “The German Peace Delegation has finished the first perusal of the Peace Conditions which have been handed over to them,” wrote Brockdorff-Rantzau on May 10, 1919, in the first of several notes he would send the Council of Four. He said the draft of the Treaty contained “demands which no nation could endure, moreover, our experts hold that many of them could not possibly be carried out.” Marshal Foch had a battle plan prepared should the Germans not agree to the terms in a timely manner, but most of the “peacemakers” verged on bankruptcy themselves. And so France, Great Britain, Italy, and even the United States could ill afford to re-stoke the engines of war and proceed to occupy Germany. When the Germans submitted their 119-page counterproposal on May 28, the only common ground was the League of Nations; and when it came to that, the Germans argued with the terms under which they might sit at the table with the rest of the family of civilized nations. The Germans would artfully use the Fourteen Points to wangle more time and fewer constraints. This peace that was meant to be dictated and signed within two weeks would be dickered for almost two months. Wilson was indignant at the German response, saying the terms comported with the principles of the Armistice.

  But even some of the Treaty’s authors entertained second thoughts. Jan Smuts of South Africa, whom Wilson held in highest regard, said the more he studied the terms, the more he disliked them. He felt the territorial and reparation clauses were so crippling that Germany would never be able to make good on all the provisions, to say nothing of regaining its footing again. “Under this Treaty,” he wrote Wilson a week after the terms had been published, “Europe will know no peace.” And with America’s promise to defend France against aggression, he said, neither would the United States. “I pray you will use your unrivalled power and influence to make the final Treaty a more moderate and reasonable document.” Wilson agreed that consideration should be given to all the German objections; but, he wrote back, “inevitably my thought goes back to the very great offense against civilization which the German State committed, and the necessity for making it evident once for all that such things can lead only to the most severe punishment.”

  Over the next several weeks, the Council of Four pored over every territorial dispute. Tempers wore thin, reducing their efforts to playground politics that often required a referee. One morning session collapsed into an argument over Asia Minor, as Clemenceau accused Lloyd George of misrepresenting the terms of the secret treaties. The Welshman resented being called a liar and insisted upon an apology. The Frenchman said, “That’s not my style of doing business.” Wilson stepped in, and at the end of the meeting said, “You have been two bad boys, and so it would be well for you to shake hands and make up.” They moved toward each other, but several seconds passed before Lloyd George held out his hand, which Clemenceau grasped. Turning toward a smiling Wilson, they both burst into laughter. The same day the Italians announced their intention to seize several Greek islands (under the pretense that they had been ceded by the Treaty of London), Wilson learned that Italy had just changed the name of a road from Via Wilson to Via Fiume. The President laughed at the news and called them “a big lot of babies.” In one candid moment, Orlando unwittingly admitted that Fiume was only of sentimental value to Italy, but he had behaved so mulishly about it because his people made him. The Big Four often worked from a map in the President’s room, one too large for any table to accommodate. Whenever it was needed, they spread it on the floor. One morning Dr. Grayson entered the salon, only to find the four most powerful men in the world on their hands and knees, studying the chart. “It had every appearance,” noted Grayson, “of four boys playing some kind of a game.”

  In the spring of 1919, that quadrumvirate on the floor erased more boundaries and created more new nations than had ever been drawn at a single time. And whenever Clemenceau and Lloyd George fell into another argument, scrapping over patches of Asia Minor, Wilson reminded them that they were engaged in the “bargaining away of peoples.” He vigilantly protected the Jews, wherever they settled, from Poland to Palestine. More than once did Wilson recall having reassured Rabbi Stephen Wise and the American Jewish Congress that he and the Allied nations fully agreed “that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish commonwealth.”

  While the United States had no direct interest in most of the territorial settlements, Wilson continued to involve himself as the others tore at the Habsburg Empire. Austria and Hungary (then in the midst of a series of revolutions) would be divided into two separate landlocked countries, neither of which would ever be powerful enough to rise to any significant stature. The Treaty sanctioned a union of Czechs and Slovaks into a sovereign independent state. Similarly, the Independent Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro joined with the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs as well as much of Dalmatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to form Yugoslavia. Parts of the Habsburg Empire—Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania—joined the Kingdom of Romania.

  The Ottoman Empire offered a map with more blank space on which to draw. Out of the secret treaties and mandates and assurances to Arab leaders, new nations would be built in the sand. They proved problematic because they too bundled diversified populations, often with ancient ethnic and religious differences. Tensions naturally rose in the area as each of these disparate peoples sought self-government and independence while they were in conflict among themselves as well as with their mandatories. Adding to the friction was the steadily increasing demand for the oil beneath their feet. They agreed that the Allies would occupy for several years the nucleus of the empire—Constantinople, which bridged two continents—before the Republic of Turkey would be formed. To the south as far as Acre and to the east as far as the Tigris River, France collected on its claims from the Sykes-Picot Agreement, exercising its “tutelage” over the mandates of Syria and Lebanon. Great Britain assumed responsibility for Palestine, which divided in order to create Jordan on the East Bank of the eponymous river, and then beyond to Mesopotamia. In the end, this modern state of Iraq seemed destined to remain a delicate imbalance of incompatible, even warring, factions—Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds—bound together by man-made borders when they might more naturally have divided into three separate countries.

  The most unsettled and unsettling problem at the Peace Conference remained Russia, which had left more bodies on the battlefield than any of the belligerents. With neither a vote nor a voice at the Conference, it was consigned to watching the Allies grab all the bounty. Much of the problem was Russia itself, then more consumed with the revolution inside its borders than the political evolution on the outside. Ray Baker suggested that “Wilson’s mind was never quite clear on the question of dealing with Bolshevist Russia.” He seemed unable to comprehend the idea of building a nation around an economic precept; and most of what he understood of the country’s state of affairs, said Baker, “was repugnant to him.”

  William Bullitt tried to convince Wilson otherwise, as he advocated American recognition of the Bolshevik regime. He returned from his meeting with Lenin with an understanding that the Communist leader was prepared not only to make an armistice on all fronts but also recognize anti-Communist governments throughout most of the former Russian Empire—including what would become Baltic nations. Soviet expert George Kennan would later assert that the terms Bullitt conveyed did offer an opportunity for the Western powers to extract themselves from “the profitless involvements of the military intervention in Russia” and might have allowed for the “creation of an acceptable relationship to the Soviet regime.” But Wilson put no faith in them because he believed the Bolsheviks were “the most consummate sneaks in the world.” Kennan also suggested the unseasoned and “impatient” Bullitt was not the most effective advocate for his pro-Bolshevik position. And Bullitt did not realize that he had submitted his report the very moment that the President had become ill, which explained why the junior diplomat got no reply to his request for even a fifteen-minute meeting. He took further umbrage
at Lloyd George’s speaking dismissively in the House of Commons of “some American” who had investigated the proposal of recognizing the Bolshevik government in Moscow but who had evidently not turned up enough to warrant it. The Wilson Administration left him in the cold, claiming no interest in the mission. And Bullitt quit.

  Further upset by the decisions Wilson made regarding Shantung, the Tyrol, Dantzig, and the Saar Valley, Bullitt fired off a scathing letter to the President of the United States explaining his resignation. Bullitt said he was one of the millions who had believed in Wilson’s promises of “unselfish and unbiased justice,” but “our government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections and dismemberments—a new century of war.” In a final flurry of bitter disappointment, Bullitt added, “I am sorry that you did not fight our fight to the finish and that you had so little faith in the millions of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in you.” Lansing accepted Bullitt’s resignation without comment. Wilson found it “insulting.” He continued to believe, as he had told the Democratic National Committee when he had been Stateside in February, that the Conference might end before the vast Russian territories had been recomposed, “but if we go home with a League of Nations, there will be some power to solve this most perplexing problem.”

  Lansing—who had been relegated to the role of errand boy for months—also thought the Treaty was “bad,” insufficient to uphold the League; but he continued to perform his job, no matter how menial it became. Herbert Hoover believed the economic terms would ruin Germany and wreak Bolshevism there; but he continued in his unceasing efforts to supervise the feeding of Europe, where the ongoing blockade continued to starve masses of people. Wilson, of course, knew that opposition was building at home and granted that it was “a terrible compromise”; but he believed it would pass in the Senate—League and all—not because it was just, noted Baker, “but because the American people don’t know, don’t care, and are still dominated by the desire to ‘punish the Hun.’” Several other members of the American Commission—including historian Samuel Eliot Morison and future FDR “brain-truster” Adolf Berle—left their posts before the Treaty was done. “The consequences of Wilson’s refusal to turn his mind to the question of Russia were considerable,” wrote Bullitt, presumably referring to the next several decades, in which relations between the Soviets and the Western powers would freeze over. “It is not impossible that Wilson’s refusal to burden his ‘one track mind’ with Russia may well, in the end, turn out to be the most important single decision that he made in Paris.”

  Bullitt’s animus toward Wilson swelled over the next several years, until he unburdened himself to his psychotherapist and subsequent friend, Sigmund Freud. Harboring his own resentment of the pious American president, the Austrian doctor agreed to analyze Woodrow Wilson in absentia, through the details of his life as Bullitt presented them. The result was a spiteful book that scorned practically everything about Wilson, with repeated references to his oversized ears and much more about what was between them—what Freud characterized as a Christ complex. The leitmotiv of the coauthored study was the subject’s abnormal adoration of his father, the Reverend Wilson, and his lifelong wavering between self-identification with the Son of God and his need to assert himself as nothing less than God. “Tommy”’s repressed rage toward the Reverend Wilson, said Freud and Bullitt, manifested itself in a life of hypocrisy and self-contradiction. When Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study was published in the 1960s, critics suggested the book debunked Freud more than Wilson.

  Valid or not, the analysis did capture some of the flaws of its subject, and Bullitt was not the only man in Paris to perceive them. “The President, it must be remembered, was the descendant of Covenanters, the inheritor of a more immediate presbyterian tradition,” wrote Harold Nicolson. “That spiritual arrogance which seems inseparable from the harder form of religion had eaten deep into his soul.” Like Bullitt and Freud, Nicolson also wrote of Wilson’s “one-track mind,” saying,

  This intellectual disability rendered him blindly impervious, not merely to human character, but also shades of difference. He possessed no gift for differentiation, no capacity for adjustment to circumstances. It was his spiritual and mental rigidity which proved his undoing. It rendered him as incapable of withstanding criticism as of absorbing advice. It rendered him blind to all realities which did not accord with his preconceived theory, even to the realities of his own decisions.

  He was like a brave knight-errant, John Maynard Keynes observed. “But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary.”

  Whether the European leaders had outfoxed Wilson or not, Keynes thought the problems with the Treaty were not the fault of one man. He found the Big Four themselves guilty of dwelling on the subject of reparation at the expense of rehabilitation. For all the redrawing of Europe, he felt nobody had thought enough to rebuild the defeated Central empires or to reclaim Russia or restore the “disordered finances” of France and Italy, or even to stabilize the new nations. “It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problems of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four. Reparation was their main excursion into the economic fields,” Keynes wrote of Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando, “and they settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from every point of view except that of the economic futures of the States whose destiny they were handling.” Like Bullitt, Nicolson and Keynes exited the Conference as disgruntled underlings, confident that they had more facts than their leaders, certainly more than Wilson. But political leaders view the world through different prisms from those of junior diplomats and with different perspectives. With his League in place, Wilson considered the Treaty a victory for mankind.

  After the morning session of the Big Four on May 30, 1919, the Wilsons and Dr. Grayson rode to Suresnes, four miles west of Paris. There, on a gentle slope surrounded by acacia groves, the French government had offered a few acres to recognize the ultimate sacrifice of many Americans. The President was dedicating the cemetery that hot, sunny Decoration Day, consecrating a final resting place for 1,500 doughboys who were buried in a precisely measured grid, row after row of white crosses. Local women had decorated each grave with a wreath and a small American flag, a gesture that brought a lump to Wilson’s throat as he entered the ground he was meant to hallow. Thousands of veterans in khaki filled the hillside, boys all looking older than their years, many with visible scars and empty sleeves.

  Wilson stood on a small platform in the middle of the burial ground and removed his top hat. Edith could not help observing that in just the last few months, her husband’s hair had turned white. Extemporizing from notes, he delivered one of the most poignant speeches of his life. The notes proved to be an essential crutch, for the pathos of the occasion almost broke the President’s self-control. “No one with a heart in his breast, no American, no lover of humanity,” he began, “can stand in the presence of these graves without the most profound emotion. These men who lie here are men of unique breed. Their like has not been seen since the far days of the Crusades. Never before have men crossed the seas to a foreign land to fight for a cause which they did not pretend was peculiarly their own, but knew was the cause of humanity and of mankind.”

  His mind filled with details of the final push to complete the Peace Treaty, Wilson extolled the spirit of the American soldiers as he reminded the world that “these men did not come across the sea merely to defeat Germany and her associated powers in the war. They came to defeat forever the things for which the Central Powers stood, the sort of power they meant to assert in the world, the arrogant, selfish dominance which they meant to establish; and they came, moreover, to see to it that there should never be a war like this again.�
�� It was left to civilians, such as himself, the President said, to “use our proper weapons of counsel and agreement to see to it that there never is such a war again.” Of all the matters that had been thrashed out in the last six months, he said, only the concept of the League had met “unity of counsel” and unanimity of acceptance.

  “I beg you to realize the compulsion that I myself feel that I am under,” Wilson said in closing, striking a startling personal note. “By the Constitution of our great country I was the Commander in Chief of these men. I advised the Congress to declare that a state of war had existed.” And then, owning all that had befallen his troops, Wilson squarely confronted the most grievous task of any head of state. “I sent these lads over here to die,” he said. “Shall I—can I—ever speak a word of counsel which is inconsistent with the assurances I gave them when they came over?” Wilson paused for a moment before saying that there was “something better . . . that a man can give than his life, and that is his living spirit to a service that is not easy, to resist counsels that are hard to resist, to stand against purposes that are difficult to stand against.” And in that moment, he appeared to take a vow before the crowd, giving his countrymen at home and all the world a preview of what was to come: “Here stand I,” he said, “consecrated in spirit to the men who were once my comrades and who are now gone, and who have left me under eternal bonds of fidelity.”

  Few bothered to fight back their tears. After renditions of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” the American and French national anthems, and a lone bugler sounding “Taps,” the crowd was undone. The Wilsons drove back into town in silence, except for the President’s own torrent of emotion.

  “As lonely as God—a slave he is!” noted Ray Baker. “Yet he is the only great, serious responsible statesman here: when all is said, a great man: a Titan struggling with forces too great even for him.”