Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  In My Memoir Edith went to some length to describe the magnificence of the Hôtel de Mûrat; the gleaming parquet, the tall mirrors, the flame-colored brocades, the broad sweeping stairway. “Enchanting suites” were reserved for the President and herself. The hangings were embroidered in fiery gold with the Napoleonic eagle. There was a gold toilet set with the Mûrat crest in her marble bathroom and tall crystal bottles of orange-flower water.

  In the President’s bedroom the walls and draperies were of green damask studded with the gold bees of the Empire.

  Edith Wilson hardly had time to glance into the cabinets full of objets d’art in her crimson and ivory parlor, before they had to change their clothes for the official luncheon at the Elysée Palace. The party was thrown into a dither by the announcement by a flustered young American liaison officer that everybody at the Elysée would be wearing a frock coat. These garments were already considered obsolete in America except by a few rural senators. The President was planning on striped pants and a cutaway. After a search through the trunks, Brooks, the President’s colored valet, triumphantly produced not only one but two frock coats. He’d guessed they might be needed, he said, grinning. “One never knows different customs in different countries.”

  Idling the Days Away

  So much of the afternoon was taken up by the luncheon, and the breakneck exchange of official visits demanded by protocol between President and Madame Poincaré and President and Mrs. Wilson, to the accompaniment of the rolling of drums from the guard of honor, that it was late before Wilson could get in a private word with his confidential colonel.

  House found the President in a disgruntled mood. He seemed to be suffering a reaction from the exultation of his welcome. House, who may have suspected Wilson was a little miffed because his alter ego had not come to Brest to meet him, hastily explained that he hadn’t yet recovered his strength after the bout of influenza that had kept him ten days in bed. Other members of American missions were dangerously ill. Willard Straight died of it. House’s doctor had forbidden him to make the trip. House turned to pleasanter matters. He congratulated the President on having induced the British and French to lift the censorship of American press cables.

  Wilson was inquiring with some bitterness why the conference on peace terms couldn’t start immediately. He had planned on December 16. House pointed out that Lloyd George would not make a move until he knew the results of the general election in the United Kingdom. The French were quite content to wait while the Germans and Austrians starved a little more. All the Allies were sabotaging Herbert Hoover’s efforts to get food and supplies moving towards populations in desperate need.

  Wilson had already taken a dislike to Poincaré. He suspected the sawedoff little Président de la République of being behind the French Government’s refusal to let workingclass delegations meet him at Brest. Permission was withdrawn at the last moment for the labor unions to lead a mammoth parade through Paris to greet the American President and to endorse the Fourteen Points. Wilson had planned to address them from the balcony of the Hôtel de Mûrat. The French Government was getting between him and the French people.

  Then there was Lansing. The President complained that Lansing had tried to pack the George Washington with State Department people. “I found him in an ugly mood towards Lansing,” House noted in his diary. House took advantage of that mood to put in a plug for his own organization by telling the President how favorably impressed the specialists of the Inquiry were by his frank chat with them on the boat.

  House admitted that Lansing was tactless. Still the President must remember that Lansing was playing a minor part and playing it without complaint. Jealousies between the State Department crowd and the Inquiry were inevitable. “I am sure Lansing does not mean to be brusque and impolite but he has an unfortunate manner.”

  During the days that followed, President and Mrs. Wilson had every moment taken as they hurried from formal luncheons to formal dinners. They were always changing their clothes. They visited hospitals, they laid a wreath on Lafayette’s tomb, they listened to interminable speeches at the Hôtel de Ville, where the President was presented by the city authorities of Paris with a handsome gold pen to sign the treaty with, and Edith Wilson with “a beautiful Lalique box containing a most unusual pin composed of six doves of peace made of rose quartz.”

  Whenever Wilson wasn’t delivering speeches or listening to speeches he was kept busy receiving callers: Clemenceau, Foch, Pershing, Venizelos with a pair of bodyguards in starched white kilts; military and civilian leaders from countries great and small. “Each day brought more interesting people,” Edith Wilson wrote, “and every hour was parcelled out.”

  House meanwhile was trying to build a fire under the Allied statesmen. He got hold of Northcliffe, the selfrighteous lord of a large section of the British press, and tried to scare him with Herbert Hoover’s documented reports that the most fearful famine since the Thirty Years War impended in Europe. Famine threatened the defeated nations and the newborn republics with disintegration and chaos. The heirs of chaos would be the Communists.

  House urged Northcliffe to use the power of his great press to bring some sense of urgency to the politicians.

  “Northcliffe and I agreed that the President should visit England at once and receive the reception there which we knew awaited him.” According to House’s notes Northcliffe further agreed with him that Wilson’s reception by the Paris populace had already changed the attitude of the French politicians. “We believe that if he goes to England and gets such an endorsement from the English people, Lloyd George and his colleagues will not dare oppose his policies at the Peace Conference.”

  It was clear by this time that it would be the middle of January before the interallied conference, still thought of as preliminary to the real Peace Conference, could get started. In the interval House advised the President to make state visits to England and to Italy.

  The colonel, who had moved his organization to the Crillon when that handsome old hostelry became the headquarters of the American commissioners, chaperoned some preliminary meetings between the President and Clemenceau. House considered the first meeting a success. “Neither said anything that was particularly misleading. They simply did not touch upon topics which would breed discussion.”

  A few days later, when Clemenceau called on the President for a second time at the Hôtel de Mûrat, House noted that in the hour and a half they were together the President did nearly all the talking. “Clemenceau expressed himself in a mild way in agreement … He thought a League of Nations should be attempted, but he was not confident of success either of forming it or of its being workable after it was formed.”

  A meeting, carefully stagemanaged by House, between the President and bland Premier Orlando and avid hawkfaced Sonnino, the redheaded Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, was similarly ineffectual. “The President talked well but he did not convince the Italians that they should lessen their hold on the Pact of London.”

  The French presidential train was brought out once more to take the Wilsons to Chaumont to spend Christmas with the A.E.F. Edith Wilson found it more uncomfortable than ever. The heat didn’t work. “The sheets in the icy beds felt damp and dangerous.” She wondered how they lived through the miserable night without catching pneumonia. They reached Pershing’s general headquarters in a snowstorm and toured the barns and farmyards where the doughboys were billeted. Edith Wilson found touching their efforts at Christmas decorations with green sprays and bits of red paper. Both she and her husband were impressed by the discomforts the doughboys were undergoing through the French winter.

  Deep mud and driving sleet took some of the sparkle out of the military show put on for them by the 77th Division. Even mules bogged in the mire. They ate Christmas dinner in a cantonment with the soldiers. The only warm place they found in Lorraine was General Pershing’s chateau where a welcoming fire roared in the hearth and hot tea was ready for them. There was a dreary train rid
e back to Paris and next day they started for England.

  Colonel House failed to accompany the President. He was husbanding his health, and he felt he was more useful in Paris trying to talk Clemenceau around to the Fourteen Points than appearing in short pants at the Court of St. James. In his place he sent his soninlaw Gordon Auchincloss. Auchincloss, an uppety young man to begin with, was becoming a little too conscious of the importance of his position. The President’s secretaries blamed him for not getting them invited to the state banquets. He officiously made daily reports to House over the longdistance telephone and managed to give Mrs. Wilson and Cary Grayson the impression that the colonel had sent him along to spy on their doings. They promptly infected the President with their suspicions.

  From Auchincloss’s phone calls House heard the details of the British election. It was the first election since woman’s suffrage, and there was a large soldier vote. Lloyd George ran scared. Though he began his campaign with a number of speeches advocating a peace of justice and a League of Nations in Wilsonian style, the wily Welshman soon found that the three topics that appealed to his listeners were immediate demobilization of conscripted men, making the Germans pay the whole cost of the war and trying the German leaders as warcriminals. “Make the ’uns pay to the last farthing” and “ ’ang the Kaiser” became the slogans of his campaign. The result was a landslide victory for Lloyd George and for his coalition government. The khaki election, it came to be called.

  House had hardly digested the results of the khaki election when he learned of the overwhelming four to one vote of confidence Clemenceau won in the Chamber of Deputies the night of December 29. The Tiger spoke sarcastically of Woodrow Wilson’s plans. He described what he called “la noble candeur” of the American President. All Paris fell to discussing the exact shade of meaning in the French phrase. “Candeur” could be translated as candor but it could also be translated as the simplicity of the village idiot. When Clemenceau told the chamber that he preferred firm treaties and alliances to preserve the balance of power to some chancy League of Nations the deputies rose in a stormy ovation.

  House noted that this was about as poor an augury as could be for the success of progressive principles. The facts were exactly the opposite of Wilson’s highflown declaration to the specialists on the George Washington: “The men whom we are about to deal with do not represent their own people.” Of the four national leaders on whom the main decisions would rest at the Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson was the only one who had been repudiated at the polls.

  “Coming on the heels of the English elections,” noted House dismally in his diary on the last day of the old year, “and taking into consideration the result of recent elections in the United States, the situation strategically could not be worse.”

  Edith Wilson’s Grand Tour

  The royal train that picked up President and Mrs. Wilson at Calais was “luxuriously comfortable.” King George and Queen Mary met them at Charing Cross Station at the end of a red carpet lined with potted palms. They were driven to Buckingham Palace in the cumbersome old royal coaches by coachmen in periwigs. Footmen in crimson liveries perched behind. The day turned out sunny. In spite of Boxing Day being a bank holiday, the streets of downtown London were packed with people shouting “We want Wilson.” When they passed Marlborough House the dowager Queen Alexandra was seen leaning out of a window, kissing her hand and waving a small American flag. In every open space troops were drawn up at attention and brass bands played.

  The courtyard of the palace was massed with American doughboys, with hospital cases, on crutches or in wheelchairs, in the front rank. A great shout went up as, with his silk hat in his hand, Woodrow Wilson stepped from the coach to greet them.

  The President and Mrs. Wilson had hardly settled in their state apartments, which they found stacked with baskets of roses from members of the Cabinet and thoroughly chilly from the lack of steam heat, when the President was asked to address the crowd from the balcony. His speech aroused prolonged cheering and the waving of English and American flags.

  The King and Queen could not have been more considerate. Through the days that followed the Wilson party moved in the complicated evolutions of court etiquette. Edith performed the ceremonial acts with rapture. The President caused some sartorial confusion by appearing in plain evening clothes, which meant that all the gentlemen-in-waiting had to do likewise. Cary Grayson preened himself in a fulldress admiral’s uniform.

  In the houses of the politicians conversation was freer than at the state banquets, where they ate under the stern gaze of beefeaters with halberds. While the President was meeting the past, present and future prime ministers at a luncheon tendered him by Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street, Mrs. Wilson was entertained by Lady Reading. Next her at table sat Margot Asquith, whom Edith described as smoking incessantly and scratching her matches, as some men did on their pants, on the seat of her tailored dress. She announced she was dying to meet the President because she had never yet met an American with brains.

  After the traditional receptions at Guild Hall by the Lord Mayor of London, and turtle soup at the Mansion House, the royal train with the royal sleepingcar attached carried the presidential party up into the North to Carlisle. According to House’s diary, he and Northcliffe cooked up this visit of the President to his mother’s English birthplace as sure to appeal to English middleclass sentiments.

  On a rainy Sunday morning the Wilsons attended the service in his grandfather Woodrow’s church and in the afternoon their train took them to Manchester, the capital of the nineteenthcentury liberalism Woodrow Wilson was brought up in. There after accepting the freedom of the city at a municipal banquet, he delivered in Free Trade Hall a speech which he and House had prayerfully concocted in Paris a few days before.

  He touched on the immense complexity of the problems, petitions, demands irreconcilable each with the other, that had poured in on him since he had landed in Europe. “I am not hopeful,” he admitted, “that the terms of the settlement will be altogether satisfactory … Interest does not bind men together, interest separates men,” he exclaimed. “There is only one thing that can bind people together, and that is a common devotion to right … We are not obeying the mandate of party or politics, we are obeying the mandate of humanity.”

  Only a League of Nations would “provide the machinery of readjustment” to right whatever wrongs might be perpetuated in the tugging and hauling he was anticipating at the Peace Conference. His frankness was wellreceived. His idealistic phrases stirred the Midlands crowd. He came away feeling that in Manchester he had met one of his most understanding audiences.

  Returning to the Continent on New Year’s Day of 1919 the Wilsons spent only a few hours in Paris. The President found time for a long talk with House. They discussed the economic commission on which Baruch and Vance McCormick, who were sailing from New York that day, would serve with Herbert Hoover to try to formulate an American policy towards the Allied demands on Germany for reparations, which were getting more exorbitant every day. House was to be chairman.

  The President gave House a lively account of the British political figures he had hobnobbed with in London. Wilson did not feel at home in the fashionable club atmosphere of British politics. House remarked maliciously that Wilson’s trip had robbed the British statesmen of their Christmas vacations on the Riviera. They had all stayed home to welcome him. House pronounced himself delighted with the popular response to the President’s visit to England.

  House then brought up the ticklish question of getting cooperation out of the Republican Congress. He wanted the President to tell the Republicans that legislation was now their affair. His advice was to follow the policy of give and take. House could note the familiar stiffening of the President’s jaw at that suggestion.

  “He had grown so accustomed to almost dictatorial powers,” House confided in his diary, “it will go hard to give them up.”

  After accomplishing a series of official chor
es the President drove with Mrs. Wilson in the evening to the Gare de Lyon, where the Italian royal train awaited them. “To my surprise,” wrote Edith, “the Italian train was the most magnificent of all. I had never seen anything like it: servants in livery of royal scarlet; plate, china and glassware bearing the Italian arms; table linen and bed linen beautifully embroidered.”

  The Italian ambassador to Washington and a “tall lugubrious-looking individual wearing a longtailed frock coat and looking like the undertaker at an important funeral” who represented the King of Italy were hosts on the train. Margaret Wilson and Miss Benham were of the party and, of course, the indispensable Dr. Grayson who cared for two of the ladies who were taken with travellers’ ills on the journey.

  Next morning the American ambassador to Rome met them at the frontier. They stopped in Genoa long enough for the President to visit the house Columbus was reputed to have been born in. The journey south was lovely. “Our arrival in Rome,” wrote Edith Wilson, “will always be the most brilliant canvas in all the rich pictures in my memory.” No more rain. The sky was sapphire blue. Golden sand had been spread on the streets traversed by the state cortège. Brocades and velvets embroidered with coats of arms in tarnished gold hung from the balconies.

  The Quirinal Palace, where they were lodged, was still used as a military hospital, but one wing had been furnished with tapestries and rugs and museum pieces of statuary and of Renaissance furniture. The pictures were a collector’s dream. Every window of their suite of rooms looked out on a garden full of flowers. Edith Wilson was told that a hundred thousand people packed the streets and squares around the palace waiting for her husband to show himself on the balcony.

  During all the state dinners and the mummery and the toasts of his visit to Rome, Woodrow Wilson was tortured by the prospect of having to call on the Pope. Various State Department advisers and members of the diplomatic corps had been insisting that such a visit was essential. Protestant missionaries were bitterly protesting. All the President’s Presbyterian hackles rose at the thought. He had consented to go to the Vatican with the proviso that he should spend the same amount of time calling on his friend the Reverend Mr. Lowry, the rector of the American Episcopal Church.