America went to war in 1917 in order to create a system of nation-states whose legitimacy would be based on democracy and self-determination. Within this system all states were to be legally equal, because Wilson and House believed that such a system would prevent future wars against the democracies. This system would reflect American conceptions of the relationship between nation and state and for that reason it could call upon an American commitment to intervene if necessary to protect the system. The establishment of the League of Nations came to be America's principal war aim because it gave an institutional structure to these ideas. A world order based on a German victory would not be one that was ultimately safe for the American democracy, but neither would an Allied victory that merely reinstated in Europe the state system that had collapsed in the first place. As Lord Devlin, a Wilson biographer, shrewdly observed, “Indeed [Wilson] never lost his distrust of Allied motives… The Allies did not, he believed, genuinely care about democracy and the right to self-government.”54
And of course Wilson was right: the Allies, like the Central Powers they opposed, shared a European conception of sovereignty that held the State's authority to have come by descent from its predecessors, and not to arise directly from its people. Even democratic states like Britain and France held sovereignty to be distinct from elections; sovereignty was an attribute of the State. European states were not limited sovereigns. Because their peoples had wholly delegated their sovereignty to the State the nation could scarcely demand the creation of a new state by withholding sovereignty from that power that ruled them. Yet this was the reason America entered the Long War: to allow the democratic form to fulfill its role in creating the proper relation between a State and its nation. These are Wilson's words when he announced he was taking the United States to war:
But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have carried nearest to our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free…. [T]he day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.55
This is Professor Wilson the constitutional scholar as well as President Wilson the statesman, for he was well aware that “the principles that gave [America] her birth and happiness” were the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that is, the assertion of limited state sovereignty, and not the constitutional structure of the mass democracy of the nation-state, which had had to wait almost a century to come into being. What Wilson sought required a world of law because his vision was universal, and because it rested on legal institutions that would enforce certain grounds of legitimacy (democracy) and justification (limited sovereignty). Yet even these conditions, though necessary, were not enough. If states stood toward one another under law in the same relation that individuals stood toward each other in society, they—like individuals—would still be animated by the same drives that had brought them to war in the first place. It was necessary that the state system generate a spiritual change in its composition. As Devlin noted, “It was almost, but not quite, as if he were trying to bring Christianity into public life.”56
Wilson seems to have believed, with House, that truly democratic institutions that actually reflected the will of the people and made commensurate demands on their attention and contributions would yield just such a spiritual change in mankind. Certainly House did not believe that, absent such a transformation, these institutions could possibly prevail against the self-interests of the State and the powerful sectors that endowed the State, interests that sometimes led to war.
From 1916 on it began to be suggested that House was the author of Philip Dru.57 One newspaper learned that House had given an autographed copy of the novel to Culberson.
[O]fficial Washington is startled from its customary aplomb to find that the sphinx of Texas has treated it to a voluble discourse. Col. E. M. House, maker of governors and a President, the popularly accredited power behind the throne of the present Administration, the western Warwick, the silent Man of Mystery—and now Philip Dru: Administrator.
Most of the initial reaction tended to identify House with Dru: the newspaper that broke the news wrote, “Even the description of Dru in the novel is a description of House.”
But it was not so simple. The 1916 election campaign had uncannily followed the prescriptions not of Dru, who ruled by decree, but of Selwyn, the corrupt political boss.58 The entire organization of the campaign—the concentration on marginal states, the intense precinct focus on swing voters, the frequent polling and issue tracking—all were lifted from Selwyn's rules. Most important for our study, however, is Dru's exchange with his fiancée's wealthy and conservative father about the impossibility of the State actually serving the interests of the mass of its people by redistributing wealth. The father says:
If we had pure socialism, we could never get the highest endeavor out of anyone, for it would seem not worth while to do more than the average. The race would then go backward instead of lifting itself higher by the insistent desire to excel and to reap the rich reward that comes with success,
[to which Dru replies:] In the past… your contention would be unanswerable, but the moral tone and thought of the world is changing. You take it for granted that man must have in sight some material reward in order to achieve the best there is within him. I believe that mankind is awakening to the fact that material compensation is far less to be desired than spiritual compensation. This feeling will grow, and when it comes to full fruition, the world will find but little difficulty in attaining a certain measure of altruism. I agree with you that this much-to-be desired state of society cannot be altogether reached by laws, however drastic.59
House believed, like Hitler and Lenin, that his favored form of the nation-state would produce a spiritually renewed man, and a new society. For House, however, this would come about not through the creation and application of laws but in the private world outside law. House's new man grows from the earth of private life, not the concrete and steel of public life. That is what made House's vision uniquely American, marrying the American division between public and private, and its limitation of state sovereignty, to the parliamentary ideal of the nation-state. That is why Wilson's (and House's) League of Nations had to be a league of self-determination, of democracies, indeed, finally, of American democracies. This goal brought the United States into the world war.
House had persuaded Wilson that submarine warfare would inevitably draw the United States into the conflict and therefore the President now sought to press once more for mediation. Wilson wanted to begin by asking both sides to state their war aims, but House thought it was too late to act as an impartial broker; in the event, both the Allies and the Central Powers refused to state terms for mediation, probably on the grounds that if realistic terms were disclosed, the disclosure would endanger their war efforts. Wilson's proposal died stillborn.
On January 22 in a speech to Congress, Wilson called for a league of peace to enforce the peaceable resolution of state disputes, and he once again asked for the belligerent powers to state their terms. Then on January 31 the Germans did so, coupling their terms—which were expansive and provocative—with the announcement of the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. House went to Washington, and shortly thereafter, diplomatic relations with Germany were broken. Even now, however, Wilson did not agree with House that war was unavoidable, and left the next step to the Germans. Despite asking Congress for the power to arm merchant seamen on February 26, Wilson still maintained that no “overt act” had yet been committed. Actually that very day a German U-boat sank the liner Laconia without warning; twelve died, including two American women. Of even greater impact on the public was the s
ensational publication of an intercepted telegram between the German foreign office and the German minister in Mexico City instructing the latter, in case of war with the United States, to attempt to negotiate a Mexican-German alliance with the promise that Mexico would be assisted in the reconquest of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. On March 14, the American steamer Algonquin was sunk, again without warning. The next week, on March 19, three American ships were sunk within twenty-four hours by German submarines. Finally, on April 2, Wilson went before Congress, declaring that a state of war existed between Germany and the United States, though he was careful to discriminate between the hostile German state and its people. Wilson had written the pope, implying that the German regime was illegitimate and did not really represent its nation:
The object of war is to deliver the fine peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government. This power is not the German people but the masters of the German people.60
In October House sailed for Europe as head of the American mission and the U.S. representative on the inter-allied war committee. In August, he proposed to Wilson, and Wilson approved, the setting up of “The Inquiry,” which would prepare for the peace settlement. The United States had gone to war not because she was attacked but to pursue specific international, political goals at the peace settlement. Now House had to prepare to achieve these goals, which were far more complex and difficult than the mere defeat of the German forces.
American war aims were outlined in the famous “Fourteen Points” first privately formulated by House and Wilson in early January of 1917. Throughout that year the two men worked to refine a settlement proposal embodying this model for internationalism, integrating the micro and the macro aspects, as it were, of a new world order. Now House and Wilson no longer had to attempt to persuade the warring states of Europe to accept American mediation. Rather they would use U.S. intervention in the war to pre-empt the allied states of their war aims, making agreement the price of alliance, while offering to Germany a more attractive settlement option than Britain and France would be willing to give. In the past House had played this two-track strategy: proffering American assistance to the Allies if they would back American war aims while enticing Germany to mediation with the threat of American intervention. This strategy had not worked. Neither side was willing to give up its national ambitions for the mere possibility of American intervention, which, in any event, might not prove decisive.
Now House had made this strategy more potent. By actually entering the conflict, the United States could replace its passive mediation objectives with war aims enforced by the American army. In order to do this, as Walter Lippmann later observed, House persuaded Wilson that by thus joining the war the United States could prevent future wars. He supplied Wilson “with the rationalizations by means of which Wilson was able to bow to a destiny that was overbearing him, and even ultimately to sow the seed of a triumph that may make him immortal.”61
Lippmann was a member of The Inquiry, the secret project set up by House in the autumn of 1917 to collect the data that would provide the factual and analytical basis for an American-directed settlement. House chose his own brother-in-law Mezes, now president of the City College of New York, as the project's director. Although Judge Learned Hand, John Dewey, and Felix Frankfurter, among others, attempted to join the group once its existence became known—Hand asked whether he might leave the bench in order to work on the staff—appointments were tightly held, even as the group grew to 126 geographers, historians, economists, scientists, and lawyers. This group sought to determine what the map of Europe would look like based on American constitutional ideas of self-determination, and political objectives like a nonpunitive peace and an evenhanded system of free trade. No foreign ministry among the Allies— indeed, in the world—had prepared such briefs. In a letter to the secretary of war, Lippmann wrote that the American war effort was “the largest assembly of force for an entirely disinterested purpose ever known to history. The weapon is drawn by men who cannot worship it.”62 “We are fighting,” he wrote House, “not so much to beat an enemy as to make the world safe for democracy.”63
Secretary of State Robert Lansing and Secretary of War Newton Baker were entirely bypassed by Wilson, who made House his sole collaborator in the original drafting of the Fourteen Points.
“Saturday was a remarkable day,” House wrote in his diary.
I returned to the White House at a quarter past ten in order to get to work with the President. He was waiting for me. We got down to work and finished re-making the map of the world, as we would have it, at half-past twelve o'clock. We took it systematically, first outlining general terms, such as open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removing of economic barriers, establishment of equality of trade conditions, guarantees for the reduction of national armaments, [a] general association of nations for the conservation of peace; (and of course) genuine self-government on democratic principles [for the various nationalities].64
House saw clearly that a great divide had opened up between the state-nations whose empires ruled the world before the war and the nation-states whose destinies were asserting themselves. He and Wilson also saw that parliamentary democracy was only one competing candidate for the constitutional order that the nation-state would come to embody. The Fourteen Points, which some historians have ranked with the Emancipation Proclamation in importance, proposed a world order of parliamentary nation-states that was significantly at variance with the order of state-nations but that also excluded fascist and communist nation-states.
Their vision was that of a universal constitution—the original draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations used the word constitution. This constitution rested on a universal common law and various explicit enforcement mechanisms. It simply replicated, at the supranational level, the processes of law making and law enforcement that Americans are accustomed to at the federal level. There was to be a body of legal rules that governed all states equally, regardless of their rank, and all nations, regardless of their power; there was to be a judicial institution of universal jurisdiction that applied these rules to controversies, and another institution of states that enforced these rules by sanctions, including violence if necessary. States were to be held, as Wilson ceaselessly put it, to the same processes as individual citizens had been.
Unless the uniquely American constitutional basis for this world constitution is appreciated, one cannot fully appreciate the intractable differences between the United States and her allies at the peace conference, and the difficulties faced by ratification of the Treaty that emerged from that conference once it went to the U.S. Senate. The customary criticisms of Wilson during this decisive period are that he failed to fight at Versailles for his ideals or was simply outwitted by Lloyd George and Clemenceau; and that he further ruined the chances for a stable peace by refusing to compromise with the Senate on various reservations to the treaty, thus keeping the United States out of the League of Nations and opening the door to the Second World War through a weakening of deterrence against Germany. These conclusions are partly based, however, on misunderstandings of Wilson's policy and the constitutional and strategic world within which it had to operate. Though widely held, these misunderstandings treat the political conflicts at Versailles and later in Washington as if they occurred in a constitutional vacuum, rather than in an environment structured by the Long War and a society of states with competing ideas of sovereignty.
The Fourteen Points were first presented to the Congress in an address by Wilson in January 1918. They can be reduced to the following six policies, each derived from some aspect of the U.S. Constitution: (1) open treaties, “openly arrived at”—a requirement that is absurdly quixotic unless one is committed by law to the American constitutional scheme of limited government and unalienable popular sovereignty, as a consequence of which no treaty that is secret from the People can be legally binding because treaty m
aking requires the consent of the sovereign; (2) “absolute” freedom of the seas, such that in wartime neutral states could not be restricted in their commerce with belligerents beyond those customary rules of international law governing legitimate blockades, e.g., rules against contraband (weapons, munitions, and the like) and those rules protecting the civilians of neutral states against violence on the high seas; these rules have their parallel in the neglected original intent of the declaration of war clause in the U.S. Constitution;* (3) the removal of economic barriers among states—parallel to the abolition of internal tariffs that is found in Article IV of the American constitution; (4) arms reductions to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety—a qualification on sovereignty that is entirely inconsistent with the European idea of inalienable state sovereignty; (5) the impartial adjustment of colonial claims, according a weight to the interests of the national peoples concerned equal to whatever claims of title were to be asserted by the states who governed those people—an application of the idea that runs through the remaining nine points of the declaration that legitimate states are based on the self-determination of the peoples for whose benefit the state is constituted (parallel to the tenth and fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution); thus the Fourteen Points specifically endorsed the creation of a Polish state, the independence of the Baltic states, and the readjustment of the frontiers of Italy “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality”; the people of Austria-Hungary were to be given “the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”65 And finally (6), in Point Fourteen, the creation of “a general association of nations [that] must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike”—the League of Nations, which in its structure replicates the federal and branch structures of the U.S. Constitution.
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