But at home a drumbeat of anti-Wilson rhetoric continued. His critics kept hammering that Wilson’s mission to France was purely political—that this entire expedition had been personal exploitation, building his base for a third term. Just as Wilson made it clear to his supporters that they must pour all their energies into the adoption of the League, the Republicans decided to channel all their powers into its defeat. If they could win that one issue, they might reclaim their authority in American politics.
Obviously, Wilson could not return in time to open the Republican-controlled Sixty-sixth Congress, but he sent a long message explaining why he had assembled the legislators and why he would not be present. Washington had to approve certain appropriations in order to keep the government running; and Paris was in the middle of negotiations. While the President hesitated to press any legislative suggestions in his absence, he sent close to three thousand words of recommendations. He revisited his early Progressive themes as he hoped the country would return to a peacetime economy. He called for improvement in workers’ conditions through “the genuine democratization of industry”; he addressed inequities in the tax system—calling for a reduction in sales taxes but an increase in excess profits taxes and estate taxes. With the demobilization of the military forces, he thought it safe to remove the wartime ban upon the manufacture and sale of wine and beer. And he asked Congress to endorse the cause he had been urging upon reluctant Senators that spring: suffrage for women. In a few weeks, the House would overwhelmingly pass the suffrage amendment; and two weeks after that, the Senate would deliver the two-thirds majority by two votes. The amendment moved to the states, where three-quarters of their legislatures were required for ratification. Alice Paul predicted that women would be voting for the next President.
With the opening of this Republican Congress, Wilson knew that passing any of his legislation would be an uphill battle. Ignoring the abuse already being hurled, Wilson hoped to continue leading the United States from its inherent provincialism to a more worldly vision. Off the record, he had derided his rivals for having “horizons that do not go beyond their parish” and said they were “going to have the most conspicuously contemptible names in history.” He found himself thinking of March 5, 1921, for on that day he intended to return to a private scholarly life, and of having “the privilege of writing about these gentlemen without any restraints of propriety.” Until then, however, he had to face not only the American Congress and the warring Allies as they completed the Treaty but also the one adversary that could reduce the last six months of work to naught.
“Will the Germans sign?” were the words on everybody’s lips in Paris. Although the Armistice had been accepted, Allied armies prepared to resume battle and prolong the blockade. Germany was technically boxed into accepting the peace terms as handed to them. But the enemy stuck to its initial response that the “exactions of this Treaty are more than the German people can bear.” The loss of treasury and the territory that might replenish it, and rendering Germany unable to assert itself in a modern world, all but ensured that this peace treaty would become a declaration of the next war. The Social Democratic government of Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann in Germany was against his country’s signing.
So, strangely enough, were many leaders in Great Britain. In addition to fears of revenge, Liberal and Labour factions there questioned the efficacy of creating a fiscal vacuum in the middle of Europe, one certain to suck the financial systems of the Continent down the drain with it. When Lloyd George returned to Paris from London in early June, he spoke of moderating the terms of the Treaty. At the Council of Four meeting on June 2, 1919, he discussed reducing reparations, redrawing borders, reexamining the need for more plebiscites, and removing multitudes of “pin-pricks” whose cumulative effect was lacerating. Later, at a meeting of the American delegation, Wilson announced, “I have no desire to soften the treaty, but I have a very sincere desire to alter those portions of it that are shown to be unjust, or which are shown to be contrary to the principles which we ourselves have laid down.” Clemenceau, of course, remained “absolutely rigid” about leaving all the terms as agreed upon.
In a moment of growing desperation, Lloyd George asked Bernard Baruch if he might arrange a private meeting between him and the President. In doing the Prime Minister’s bidding, Baruch suggested that Lloyd George had been struggling between his campaign promises of toughness toward the Germans and “the dictates of his conscience.” But his dilemma was greater than that. Once he and Wilson came face-to-face, Lloyd George told him that unless they altered the terms of the Treaty, neither the British army nor fleet would compel Germany to sign. The President sat in silence, his jaw clenched, while the Prime Minister reiterated the changes in the Treaty that he required. At last, Wilson had heard quite enough. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he said, “you make me sick! For months we have been struggling to make the terms of the Treaty exactly along the lines you now speak of, and never got the support of the English. Now, after we have finally come to agreement, and when we have to face the Germans and we need unanimity, you want to rewrite the Treaty.”
For months Colonel House had said Lloyd George “changes his mind like a weather-vane,” and Wilson knew the political winds had not stopped blowing. While he maintained that the current terms were strict but fair, he said he would agree to the British proposals—if the French agreed. But in every delegation there were rivalries within rivalries, and even though Wilson knew that Marshal Foch, among others, feared Clemenceau’s harsh insistences as well, he knew nobody in France was strong enough to defy him. Wilson could offer little more than his allowing the Prime Ministers to duke out their differences, telling them that he “did not desire a lenient treaty, but a just one.” In the meantime, the Scheidemann government in Weimar stood firm, as the peacemaking appeared to be doomed.
While Lloyd George and Clemenceau found enough modifications between them to save face, the Wilsons accepted an invitation from the King and Queen of the Belgians to visit their country. For two days they toured by motorcar and train, sandwiching royal receptions between visits to Belgium’s important sites. Beginning in the northwest corner of the country, between Nieuport and Ypres, they sometimes drove as fast as fifty miles per hour over dusty roads through territory where armies had fought and leveled whole towns. Skeletons of dead horses littered the woods, and clusters of graves dotted the landscape. Except for part of a tower, the old cathedral in Ypres was a heap of bricks; the once magnificent Cloth Hall, from the thirteenth century, was in ruins. As he walked the entire length of its seawall, Wilson listened to the wartime history of Zeebrugge, from which Germany had launched the terror of its submarine attacks. In Louvain, the university conferred a degree upon the President in its historic library, which had been reduced to a roofless shell with charred walls. Wilson delivered heartfelt talks throughout his visit and a proper address to the Belgian Parliament, in which he spoke with new understanding of this “valley of suffering.” Now, more than any country in the world, it illustrated the need for a League. Minor adjustments were being made to the Treaty, but it still appeared that only divine intervention could impose German approval.
And then, the very day the Wilsons returned to Paris, the Scheidemann government collapsed under the strain of his refusal to ratify the Treaty. With the selection of a new coalition under Chancellor Gustav Bauer came the announcement from Weimar that the government of the German Republic was prepared to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The acceptance included a last-ditch effort to remove the “war-guilt clause,” but the victors would yield no more.
The citizens of Paris danced in the streets. In Rome, Premier Orlando finally had something serious to cry about, as his government was overthrown. And before the Allies could appropriate the Kaiser’s seventy-five ships that were interned in Scapa Flow, a bay in the Orkney Islands, the German navy ordered their immediate destruction. While burning French flags, the Germans scuttled mos
t of their vessels. The action made Wilson think they were “savage enough to start war again.” In Washington, Republican leaders discussed how best to detach the League component from the Treaty and defeat it. They went so far as to consider a proposal to have Congress unconditionally declare a state of peace between Germany and the United States—for no better reason than to invalidate the last six months of Wilson’s work. Official war painter Sir William Orpen put the finishing touches on his portrait of Wilson, showing a world-weary President with the creases and jowls and heavy lids over sunken eyes that the last six months had produced.
After the Council of Three session on Tuesday, June 24, Wilson, Clemenceau, and Balfour adjourned to Versailles to inspect the arrangements for the signing. Their host had selected the centerpiece of the palace—the Galerie des Glaces, the Hall of Mirrors—for the occasion, not only because it was one of the most spectacular rooms ever constructed but also because there the Germans had concluded the last war on a note of humiliation. This grande galerie was 240 feet long and 35 feet wide. Opposite its signature feature—a series of seventeen arches, each composed of twenty-one mirrors—matching windows opened onto extensive gardens. Upon seeing the space available to them, Wilson said he would like to include his wife and daughter at the proceedings. Clemenceau agreed that a few ladies should be present. Back at the Paris White House that night, the family circle found champagne glasses on the table. Miss Benham attempted to toast the President’s health, but Wilson pre-empted her by raising his glass: “To the Peace, an enduring Peace, a Peace under the League of Nations.”
The final settlement was not what Wilson had envisioned upon his arrival in Paris, as his critics never forgot. Maynard Keynes repeatedly called it a “Carthaginian peace,” one so brutal that it would pulverize Germany into a wasteland. And Harold Nicolson enumerated his many grievances: the covenants of peace were not openly arrived at, as much of the Conference’s work had been conducted in private; the freedom of the seas was not secured; the German colonies were distributed in a manner that was “neither free, nor open-minded, nor impartial”; several frontiers were drawn in contradiction to the nationalities as well as the desires of their populations.
On the other hand, the Treaty embodied the essence of the Fourteen Points and more. Belgium was restored; Alsace-Lorraine was returned; Poland was recognized; and Austria-Hungary was redrawn as a collection of smaller, more discrete free and independent states. When public forums had proved unworkable for the volume of questions that required negotiation, discussions had gone private; but the final covenants were “open,” with no secret treaties. Reductions of armaments and the removal of economic barriers were addressed in a global forum and seriously considered by experts of many countries. Wilson had indubitably tempered the revenge Clemenceau had sought; and he believed the League of Nations could correct what mistakes existed in the Treaty. For the first time, mankind had a blueprint for peace that was practicable, universal, and, theoretically, permanent. President Woodrow Wilson had left his country for more than six months, solely to promote the concepts of global responsibility, self-determination, collective security, and moral imperatives, establishing them as fundamentals of United States foreign policy.
Over the next several months, experts did the basic arithmetic, tallying the final costs of the war and how much Germany should pay. Even without reckoning such future expenditures as pensions and such losses as loans that would never be repaid, Lloyd George told Wilson that the war had cost the United Kingdom £8.5 billion. The sums from all the belligerents totaled $125 billion, a fifth of which the United States had run up. It would be another two years before the final bill for reparations would be sent to the Germans—£6.6 billion ($33 billion). Even at that figure, numerous concessions were made so as not to break the German bank. Over the next decade, the Germans would make good on £1.1 billion. On the eve of the Treaty signing, Lloyd George wrote Wilson that he hoped the United States would consider finding “some way of really assisting the financial needs of the world” by stepping up as its leading creditor.
After an early breakfast on Saturday, June 28, 1919, Wilson crossed the street to Lloyd George’s flat, where Clemenceau also awaited. The German delegation had arrived in Paris early that morning, and now the Council of Three examined the credentials of Dr. Hermann Müller, the new Foreign Minister, and Herr Johannes Bell, the Minister of Communications. Finding everything in order, they sent word that the signing would occur at Versailles at three o’clock that afternoon.
At two o’clock the President and Mrs. Wilson and Dr. Grayson drove to the Élysée Palace, where they bade adieu to President and Madame Poincaré and then proceeded under cloudy skies to Versailles, the road to which was lined with guards. As they approached the palace, the sun broke through.
The Hall of Mirrors shimmered. Again, the placement at the three-sided table approximated that at the Quai d’Orsay, with Clemenceau in the center, Wilson and the American delegation on his right, Lloyd George and his colleagues on his left. The remaining delegates assumed their familiar positions. Distinguished guests—such as Edith and Margaret Wilson—filled one end of the room, while the international press corps filled the other. Because the French had distributed more tickets to the event than there were seats and benches, several minutes of commotion ensued, as people scrambled to find standing room in the hall. It was five years to the day since a teenaged Bosnian Serb had shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
At 3:10, Premier Clemenceau called the session to order. A small table had been set up directly before him on which sat the Treaty and several accompanying documents. To expedite the formalities, each of the signers had pre-impressed his personal seal. Wilson had used his signet wedding ring, which had been fashioned from the chunk of gold the State of California had presented him upon his marriage and which bore his name in stenographic ciphers. Once the Allies and Associated delegates were seated, a marshal ushered the German delegation into the room. Wilson had suggested that they be the first to sign the great document, so as not to give them any time to change their minds. Without flourishes and within three minutes, Ministers Müller and Bell approached the small table and affixed their signatures.
A beaming Wilson was next to sign the Japanese vellum document, rendering an unusually cramped signature. Lansing, White, House, and Bliss followed. Back at their seats, the President whispered to Lansing, “I did not know I was excited until I found my hand trembling when I wrote my name.” The rest of the delegations quietly proceeded to the table—including the Italians, without the recently deposed Orlando. By 3:50, Clemenceau closed the proceedings with four words: “La séance est levée.”
Only two incidents marred the occasion. When its request to sign the Treaty with a reservation regarding the Shantung settlement was denied, the Chinese delegation chose not to appear. And though he signed the Treaty because it meant ending the war, General Smuts filed a document declaring the peace unsatisfactory. For everybody else, it seemed a day of glory—a historic moment marked, ironically, by a barrage of cannonfire from a battery in the southern part of the majestic gardens.
Afterward, Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George descended to the terrace at the rear of the palace, where thousands stood and cheered and, ultimately, pushed past the security so that they might get closer to the three leaders. The President’s guards closed in to protect him; but as Dr. Grayson observed, “Women cried out that they just wanted to touch him.” Planes circled overhead, and guns were fired into the air. After the Big Three and Barons Sonnino and Makino toasted the peace over glasses of wine, the Wilsons returned to Paris. The route was crowded with people waving flags and shouting, “Vive Wilson.”
While Paris rejoiced, the Wilsons enjoyed a quiet last supper in France. Lloyd George stopped in to say goodbye and to explain that he was simply too fatigued to be part of the impending farewell ceremonies at the train station. Although they had quarreled often durin
g the last six months, Lloyd George said, “You have done more than any one man to bring about further cordial and friendly relations between England and the United States. You have brought the two countries closer together than any other individual in history.” The Wilsons left for the Gare des Invalides, where gendarmes held back a massive crowd. Inside, the principals of the Conference stood on the platform, along with practically every member of the French government and the American delegation. Clemenceau said he felt as though he were “saying good-bye to my best friend.”
The man who had until recently claimed the distinction of being Wilson’s best friend faced a decidedly different parting. After weeks of decreasing contact with the President, Colonel Edward Mandell House was little more than a face in the crowd on the train platform that night. His last conversation with Wilson, in fact, had left House unsettled. The Colonel had urged Wilson to return to the Senate in a conciliatory spirit, one of “consideration” instead of confrontation. “House,” the President replied, “I have found one can never get anything in this life that is worthwhile without fighting for it.” House disagreed, extolling the virtues of compromise and contending “that a fight was the last thing to be brought about, and then only when it could not be avoided.” Those would be the last sentences the two would ever exchange in person, as the President chose never to see him again.
At 9:45 that night, the train left the station for Brest. Woodrow and Edith stood pensively at the window, relieved that they were, at last, on their way home. As the City of Light receded into the darkness, he broke the silence. “Well, little girl, it is finished, and, as no one is satisfied, it makes me hope we have made a just peace,” he said, looking into her eyes; “but it is all on the lap of the gods.”
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