Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  The Round Robin

  President Wilson’s trip home was an indifferent success. Landing in Boston he was greeted amiably by a sourfaced little man named Calvin Coolidge, who was the new Republican governor of Massachusetts, and by a crowd that packed Mechanics’ Hall and spread out along Huntington Avenue. They cheered him till the rafters rang. Henry Cabot Lodge, who was already excoriating the League on the Senate floor, took fresh umbrage at the President’s having addressed a Boston crowd. Wilson was trying to undercut him in his own bailiwick.

  The President arrived in Washington in time to preside at a White House dinner of thirtysix covers for the members of the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs. He told stories and answered questions with his most disarming smile.

  “I never saw Mr. Wilson appear so human or so attractive as that night,” Congressman J. J. Rogers wrote Henry White, who was keeping up a busy correspondence from Paris with his Republican friends in an effort to cozen them into going along with the League idea.

  Lodge himself admitted that the dinner had been pleasant, that the President “was civil and showed no temper,” but claimed that he seemed illinformed about the constitution of the League of Nations, particularly on the subject of mandates. “We went away as wise as we came.”

  The President’s few days in Washington were largely spent signing his name. However, he found time to review, amid exuberant crowds, a parade of returned soldiers. Newton Baker’s War Department was bringing the doughboys home almost as fast as it got them transported overseas. Every move towards demobilization received universal acclaim. It was remarked that the American public thought war was like baseball. “We won; let’s go home.”

  The immediate results of the President’s dinnerparty were unfortunate. Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut and Senator Lodge and a group of kindred spirits, alarmed at the influence they feared the President’s declarations might have with the public, immediately introduced a resolution to the effect that the Senate opposed the League of Nations, as at present constituted, and demanded the immediate negotiation of peace with Germany on terms favorable to the United States.

  The Wilson Democrats managed to block their resolution. Brandagee and Lodge gave the document to the press in the form of a “round robin.” They secured the signatures of thirtynine senators, enough to prevent ratification of any treaty under the twothirds rule.

  When Wilson appeared at the President’s room in the Senate wing to sign the last bills, he found the Sixtyfifth Congress expiring in turmoil and confusion. A Republican filibuster, largely animated by that willful man, La Follette, prevented the passage of essential appropriation bills. The President would be forced almost immediately to call a special session of the new Sixtysixth Congress which was safely in Republican hands.

  It was in a defiant mood that the President arrived in New York to go aboard the George Washington. He met some encouragement there. When he went through the streets, protected, so the newspapers said, by the largest contingent of police ever seen in the city, he was greeted by cheering crowds estimated as nearly as large as the crowds on Armistice Day. Al Smith presided over a monster audience gathered in the Metropolitan Opera House to hear the President. Caruso sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Ex-President Taft, who had been wearing out his health on a speaking tour in behalf of the League of Nations, made the introductory address. The two men appeared on the stage arm in arm as the band played “Over There” and the platform committee tried to whoop up an ovation.

  “The first thing I am going to tell the people on the other side of the water,” declared Woodrow Wilson, “is that an overwhelming majority of the American people is in favor of the League of Nations.”

  The New York Times reporter discerned no overwhelming applause. Certain expressions aroused “short nervous moments of clapping.” He described the audience as intent, attentive to every word.

  A large part of the speech was an attack on the President’s critics. “The men who utter the criticisms have never felt the great pulse of the heart of the world.”

  Wilson announced for the hundredth time his dedication to the cause the soldiers had given their lives for. He was determined there would be no peace without the covenant: “When that treaty comes back, gentlemen on this side will find the covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the covenant, that you cannot dissect the covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.”

  Colonel House at the Helm

  Freed, for a while, from the sermonizings of the American president, the negotiators in Paris turned eagerly to House. Lip service had been paid to the “noble candeur” of Wilson’s aspirations for a league to abolish war. The time had come to get down to practical business. The colonel expressed understanding of everybody’s problems. Orlando called him “my dear friend.” He was Clemenceau’s chum.

  When Lloyd George, facing an uprising in Parliament and suffering daily tonguelashings from the Northcliffe press, went home to trim his fences, he left the absentminded and philosophic Balfour in command. Though skeptical of the perfectability of human affairs, Balfour was a thoroughly humane man. House and Balfour became thick as thieves.

  They agreed that before bolshevism made any further inroads the German peace terms must be settled. A bad peace today might be better than a good peace three months later. The League of Nations must temporarily be shelved in favor of a preliminary treaty.

  The American and British plenipotentiaries had an appointment for a meeting with Clemenceau on this very topic at House’s office at the Crillon at ten the morning of February 19. The Tiger, so House explained, with perhaps a touch of fatuity, in his diary, “had come around to my way of thinking that it was best to make a quick and early peace with Germany.”

  House and Balfour were waiting for him when news came that the French Premier had been assassinated as he left his house on his way to the meeting.

  Stephen Bonsal, House’s interpreter in French, reported that Balfour exclaimed “Dear, dear” in his dreamy way, as if someone had spilled a cup of tea; “I wonder what that portends.”

  They were soon reassured. Clemenceau was seriously wounded but he was far from dead. A demented young man named Cottin, shouting that he was a Frenchman and an anarchist, had jumped on the runningboard of Clemenceau’s car and shot seven bullets at him with a revolver. Only one took effect but it lodged much too near the lung for safety. The Tiger remained unruffled. He insisted that the madman’s sentence should not be too severe and kept making jokes about how it disgusted him to find that, after four years of war, any Frenchman could be such a bad shot.

  The doctors ordered quiet. Clemenceau laughed at the doctors. He was a doctor himself. Three days after the attempt on his life, he was sending Mandel to ask House to call on him. House found him in his apartment, out near Passy, sitting up in an armchair, wrapped in an old army blanket with a soiled silk muffler around his neck. A Sister of Mercy in a big butterfly cap, whom Clemenceau kept teasing unmercifully, hovered over him for a nurse.

  “The poor old fellow,” wrote House, “has not been able to leave his chair since he was shot”—when he tried to lie down he started to choke. “He speaks of it as ‘the accident.’ He should not be permitted to see visitors but I suppose he is so insistent that they think it is best to humor him. I was surprised to see the very humble apartment where he lives.”

  Bonsal, who went along, found the Tiger “gay as a cricket”; he quoted him as telling House in his quaint fluent English, “As I cannot lie down since that madman shot me I naturally will not let anyone else lie down. I shall insist on a little speed being turned on. I am confident that if we Americans”—he grinned through his mustache. It amused him to think of himself as an American—“and the British and French could only get together we could push through the peace treaty with Germany in a very few days and then we would be at liberty to take up arrangements with Austria, Turkey, and the Bulgars—and those fellows s
hould not detain us for long.”

  Speed was essential. Behind the blockade Germany was starving. The Spartacist revolt seemed on the verge of success. Although Joffe and his propagandists had been forcibly expelled from the Russian Embassy in Berlin by the Social Democratic Government, Communist rubles and Communist agitators remained behind. Although the Social Democrats were firmly backed by the rank and file of returning soldiers, they were desperately put to it to preserve order. Only in January a Spartacist revolt had been suppressed with great loss of life. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the most eloquent of the revolutionists, were killed at that time. News came daily of further uprisings. Kurt Eisner, on whom all German moderates depended, was assassinated in Munich. A Communist coup threatened in Bavaria.

  In Russia Trotsky was using the winter breathingspace to improve the organization and rifle power of his Red Army. At the same time on the anti-Bolshevik frontier the Czechs were fighting the Poles for Vilna. Other Polish contingents were trying to take Lemburg from the Ukrainians. Where they weren’t fighting their neighbors the liberated Poles fought among themselves. As fast as the Supreme War Council furnished them arms they turned them on each other.

  The French military were busy everywhere. Foch had the bit in his teeth. His agents were stimulating a movement for an independent Rhine-land. His plans were Napoleonic. He was airily telling the Supreme War Council that if they would give him a hundred thousand Americans he’d solve the bolshevik problem once and for all. He’d raise an army of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Balts and, with the Americans as a solid core, he would mop up the Reds to the Urals.

  Bliss, representing the United States, sat stoneyfaced. He called it a program for a new Thirty Years War. He exploded in a private letter to Mrs. Bliss: “We ought to get out of Europe, horse, foot and dragoons.”

  Lloyd George came back to Paris full of new zest for reparations. He had to bring home something tangible for his electorate. The British experts had settled on a sum amounting to a hundred and forty billion dollars. The French went them one better by demanding two hundred billion. Most of the Americans agreed with Baruch that it didn’t make sense to even talk of anything more than twenty billions. Both Lloyd George and Clemenceau admitted to House in private that the Germans would not be able to pay these astronomic sums, but talk of big sums was what the people wanted. “I was amused and struck,” House noted, “by the cynical way they discussed their people.”

  In order to hurry a preliminary treaty through, House was making concessions right and left. He was getting concessions in return. “It is now evident,” he wrote, “that the peace will not be such a peace as I had hoped.”

  On the first day of March, Clemenceau was back in his chair presiding over the meetings in Monsieur Pichon’s parlor. At his best he was lively as ever, but people noted that he tended to drowse off during discussions. Often he was in pain. The old ivory of his eyelids would drop over his strangely animal-like eyes, and he’d sleep gently as a baby; except when something came up pertaining to French demands. Then he would be awake in a moment.

  March 2, House noted in his diary, was Texan independence day. “I wish I was home to celebrate it.”

  Though stimulated by the free hand the President’s absence gave him to model history as he’d dreamed of doing, House was far from encouraged by the prospect ahead. “There is scarcely a man here in authority, outside of the President, who has a full and detached understanding of the situation … The President himself lacks a certain executive quality which in some measure unfits him for the supreme task … If the President should exert his influence among the liberals and laboring classes, he might possibly overthrow the governments of Great Britain, France and Italy, but if he did he might bring the whole world into chaos …”

  House felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. “It is Archangel and Murmansk at one moment, the left bank of the Rhine the next, next Asia Minor, the African Colonies, the Chinese-Japanese difference, the economic situation as to raw materials, the food situation … No one can ever know how hardpressed I have been during the past month.”

  March 6 he had a cosy lunch along with Lloyd George at the prime minister’s apartment off from the Place des États-Unis. The Welshman made a clean breast of it to the confidential colonel. He had to bring home the bacon. The British electorate dreamed of reparations to cut down their taxes, to pay war pensions, to float new industries. The colonials wanted repayment for their sacrifices out of the German colonies.

  “It always amused me to have George say in his naïve way that he has done this or that or the other for political effect but that he really knew better,” noted House musingly. “He doesn’t seem to have any ingrown sense of right and wrong, but only looks at things from the standpoint of expediency … with all his faults,” the colonel concluded, “he is by birth, instinct and upbringing a liberal.”

  Decisions had to be made. Problems had been postponed too long to be settled properly. Lloyd George was beginning to promise Clemenceau a separate treaty guaranteeing France from attack in return for French complaisance to British demands. He would even build a tunnel under the Channel to bring British troops over faster.

  “When the President was away,” wrote House of these informal meetings, “I never hesitated to act and take as much responsibility as either of the others.”

  By the time Wilson arrived back in Paris the three Europeans, plus House, had managed to freeze out the Japanese delegation. The reiterated request of the little yellow brethren that racial equality be written into the covenant was as embarrassing to the British colonials as it was to President Wilson. In the strictest secrecy, at meetings which, as soon as Wilson arrived were to be given official status as the Council of Four, they were at work on a preliminary treaty with Germany.

  President’s Return

  The President arrived at Brest on March 13 too late to leave for Paris the same night. He had insisted on the George Washington making port on his lucky thirteenth. He was recovering his equanimity after the disappointments of his trip back to America. The sea voyage did him a world of good. Edith and Dr. Grayson thought him in fine fettle.

  He arrived in an ugly mood towards House. The confidential colonel’s plan for a preliminary treaty conflicted with his decision not to sign any treaty that didn’t have the covenant imbedded in it. He was worried, and with reason, for fear Lodge’s round robin would serve as an excuse to shelve the whole plan for a League of Nations. Reports from the British and American newspapers gave him reason to believe a rumor was being circulated that the League was dead.

  Edith Wilson never had liked House any better than she liked McAdoo. Now she saw a chance to get rid of him. “A regular jellyfish,” she called him. She kept telling her husband that House was weakkneed; and, besides, he got too much publicity. He was no longer the anonymous adviser. Last spring the President had had to write personally to Doubleday Page, the publishers, suggesting that they quietly drop Arthur Howden Smith’s book called The Real Colonel House. Now House was being written up in the British and American press as the brains of the Peace Conference. His photographs were everywhere. Wickham Stead, one of the foremost British advocates of a League of Nations, was giving House all the credit.

  Grayson agreed with Mrs. Wilson. A “yes man,” he called the confidential colonel. The whole presidential party was up in arms against Colonel House. Even the secretservice men were indignant about how he had sold out the President.

  House rode down to Brest on Poincaré’s train to meet his affectionate friend. Although House states in his journal for March 14: “I did not go out to the George Washington to meet President and Mrs. Wilson, but met them at the landing stage,” both Mrs. Wilson and E. W. Starling, one of the secretservice men, describe in their recollections a scene in the President’s stateroom aboard the ship.

  Starling described, to the journalist who wrote up his story, the President and Colonel House being closeted that night in the President’s c
abin.

  “… After what seemed like a long time Colonel House emerged from the suite, looking disturbed and walking rapidly. As I stepped inside to close the door I saw the President standing, his eyes fixed on me but showing no recognition … His face was pale and seemed drawn and tired. The whole figure expressed dejection. I closed the door, mentally cursing Colonel House.”

  Edith Wilson remembered the scene even more dramatically. “I look back at that moment,” she wrote in My Memoir, “as a crisis in his life, and feel that from it dated the long years of illness, due to overwork, and that with the wreckage of his plans and his life have come these tragic years that have demoralized the world.”

  Her account of the scene was vivid: “It was after midnight and very still aboard, when I heard my husband’s door open and the Colonel take his leave … Woodrow was standing. The change in his appearance shocked me. He seemed to have aged ten years, and his jaw was set in that way it had when he was making a superhuman effort to control himself. Silently he held out his hand, which I grasped, crying ‘What is the matter? What has happened?’

  “He smiled bitterly. ‘House has given away everything I had won before I left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again, and this time it will be harder.’ ”

  Wherever the interview took place—Ray Baker writes of it as taking place on the train—it was tense. The President blamed House for having induced him to set the senators up to that dinner; “Your dinner … was a failure as far as getting together was concerned,” House remembered his saying. The senators had been intransigent. The President would have no part of a preliminary peace with Germany. If they forced him he’d insist on a preliminary peace with every one of the belligerents.

  House summed up the conversation: “The President comes back very militant and determined to put League of Nations into treaty.”