Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  From the banquet they hurry to the station.

  “Everyone was in a holiday mood and happy, though a note of sadness too was felt … For one last time we found the red carpet stretched, the lines of soldiers to be inspected, the palms waving, and the French officers lined up to bid us bon voyage.”

  Next day they are aboard the George Washington bound for home.

  Chapter 24

  THE SUPREMEST TRAGEDY

  ON July 10, in the noonday glare of the Washington summer heat, Woodrow Wilson appeared in solemn mood before the Senate and saw the great bound volume of the Treaty of Versailles placed upon the clerk’s desk. Grayson, who was watching him carefully, found his step elastic, his eyes bright, his color good. His attitude was challenging:

  “The united power of free nations must put a stop to aggression and the world must be given peace … Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty? Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?… The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who led us into this way.”

  He urged immediate ratification.

  The document was rushed to the printers. That night copies were distributed throughout the Senate office building so that at last the senators could read the actual text of the commitments which the President had made in the name of the United States.

  By the end of the month Henry Cabot Lodge was ready, as chairman of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, to inaugurate public hearings on the question of ratification. The Republicans, perhaps in somewhat mischievous deference to the President’s call for open covenants, openly arrived at, insisted on these hearings being open to the reporters and to the public. Sensationally reported in the press, the hearings brought dismay to the White House.

  The Heart of the Covenant

  August 19 the President invited the entire Senate committee to a private conference in the East Room. He greeted the senators amiably. He had taken the liberty, he said, of writing out a little statement on the points of controversy which had so far come up. This he proceeded to read.

  He repeated his arguments for ratification of the treaty at the earliest practicable moment. At home and abroad the revival of trade and commerce and industry, and reconstruction, and every sort of plan for the orderly life of the world, waited on the peace. He reminded the senators that he had already introduced revisions on points which some of them had brought up.

  He spoke vigorously in defense of Article X, “the heart of the covenant,” by which the United States joined the Allied powers in undertaking to “preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence” of all members of the League; but he pointed out, in a disarming tone, that this obligation was moral, rather than legal.

  The senators presented their questions. They asked about the disposition of the Pacific Islands under the mandate system. How would that affect American control of the Pacific cables? The President’s answers did not satisfy them.

  The chief stumbling block was Article X. The conference became involved in a tangled argument on the difference between a moral and a legal obligation. The argument became heated.

  The Democratic senators had little to say.

  The President seemed reluctant to reveal how decisions had been reached at the Peace Conference. He was particularly evasive on the subject of Shantung. Had the Japanese been offered Shantung in return for their signature?

  Senator Hiram Johnson of California read the minutes of his examination of Secretary Lansing a few days before. After some squirming, the Secretary of State had admitted that in his opinion the Japanese would have signed even without Shantung.

  Johnson read out his question: “So that the result of the Shantung decision was simply to lose China’s signature, rather than to gain Japan’s?

  “Secretary Lansing: ‘That is my personal view, but I may be wrong about it.’ ”

  The President exclaimed testily that his conclusion was different from Mr. Lansing’s.

  The discussion continued until one of the Democrats suggested that maybe they’d better recess. The President graciously invited the senators to lunch with him. While waiting for the lunch hour Senator Brandegee in acid tones summarized the points at issue.

  Senator Johnson asked to be informed on the practical details. Would American troops be expected to help the French garrison on the Rhine? Would they be expected to enforce every provision of the treaty in Europe, Asia and Africa? The President admitted American troops might have to be stationed for the next fifteen years on the Rhine.

  The senator brought up the paragraph on ratification.

  President Wilson seemed a little vague as to how many signatures, besides Germany’s, it would take to put the treaty in force. Senator Hitchcock came to the President’s rescue by reading a paragraph to the effect that the treaty would be binding on a nation only from the date of that nation’s signature.

  Senator Moses of New Hampshire came back to the mandates: “Mr. President, under the terms of the treaty, Germany cedes to the principal allied and associated powers all her overseas possessions?

  “The President: Yes.

  “Senator Moses: We hereby, as I view it, become possessed in fee of an undivided fifth part of those possessions.

  “The President: Only as one of five trustees, Senator. There is no thought in any mind of sovereignty.

  “Senator Moses: Such possessions as we acquire by means of that cession would have to be disposed of by congressional action.

  “The President: I have not thought about that at all.

  “Senator Moses: You have no plan to suggest or recommendation to make to Congress?

  “The President: Not yet, sir, I am waiting until the treaty is disposed of.”

  At that point Senator Lodge remarked that it was thirtyfive minutes past one. They had been talking for three hours and a half. The conference adjourned and the senators followed the President into the dining-room.

  Though he managed to keep his temper the conference left Wilson in angry turmoil. It was now clear that without modifications the Senate would never ratify the treaty. He was determined to appeal to the people. The voice of the people would cry down these crabbed criticisms. Already he was planning with Tumulty a swing around the country that would bring his great League plan home to the people. The Republicans in the Senate would never dare face a popular uprising.

  Tumulty was all for it. As a practical politician the President’s secretary was appalled by the disrepair into which the Democratic Party had fallen during the President’s absence abroad. In bringing the League home to the people, the President, in whose gifts as a campaign orator Tumulty had childlike faith, would revive the party machinery at the grassroots. Enthusiastically he went to work to plan a speaking tour through the middlewest and down the Pacific coast. The President would meet the erstwhile Progressives like Johnson and Borah, who were the most fervent opponents of the treaty, on their home ground.

  Although Wilson intended to urge the people to insist on ratification of every word of the treaty as he had laid it before the Senate, without dotting an i or crossing a t, at that moment he was admitting to himself that he might have to consent to some modifications. Late in August he drew up a document on his own typewriter for the information of Senator Hitchcock.

  Gilbert M. Hitchcock was a wellmeaning smalltown publisher from Nebraska who, with little parliamentary experience, found himself, through the illness of the aged minority leader, Senator Martin of Virginia, in the position of minority leader pro tem in the Senate. Consequently it was upon Hitchcock that devolved the task of sponsoring the Versailles treaty. What he lacked in knowhow he made up in loyalty to the President as head of the Democratic Party.

  Wilson noted, for Hitchcock’s private information, that he was willing, if absolutely necessary, to agree to four reservations. More emphasis could be placed on the provision that any state could withd
raw from the League at any time. States could use their own judgement as to whether they would use armed force to carry out the League’s decisions. It should be specified that the League might not meddle in questions of immigration, naturalization or tariffs; and he was willing to restate in stronger terms his original reservation as to the Monroe Doctrine.

  Hitchcock told the President he was convinced that these concessions would go far towards meeting the views of all but the most irreconcilable of the Republicans. In his opinion a twothirds majority would not be too hard to obtain.

  Wilson hated the senators and all they stood for. He would arouse the people. He hoped to lash public opinion to such a pitch of enthusiasm for the League that the senators would not dare oppose him. Even so, at that moment, he was willing to go along with those Republican and Democratic senators who were in favor of moderate reservations.

  As the day for the President’s departure approached, Grayson and Edith Wilson grew more and more uneasy about the possible effect on his health of such a gruelling trip. He had not really recovered from his illness in Paris in April. The summer heat had been unusually hard on him. Although he took long periods of rest each day he did not seem able to throw off fatigue as he used to. Edith Wilson urged Grayson to assert himself as the President’s personal physician. They both begged him to call the trip off.

  The President’s answer—as Edith quoted it—was, that as Commander in Chief he had been responsible for sending American soldiers into battle. “If I don’t do all in my power to put that treaty into effect, I will be a slacker and never able to look those boys in the eye. I must go.”

  Tumulty added his plea. He had been argued around to the conclusion that the President’s health was even more important than the Democratic Party. “I know that I’m at the end of my tether,” Tumulty remembered Wilson’s telling him. “… Even though, in my condition it might mean giving up my life, I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the treaty.”

  The Appeal to the People

  The Washington streets were hot and muggy and airless on the evening of September 3 when the President and Mrs. Wilson drove to Union Station. The President arrived jaunty in a straw hat.

  Tumulty had thrown everything he had into the preparations for the trip. A private clubcar named Mayflower was specially arranged for the presidential party. There were staterooms for the President and Mrs. Wilson and for Dr. Grayson and for Mrs. Wilson’s Swedish maid. Brooks the valet was to sleep on the couch in the drawingroom. An office had been installed. On the foldup table was one of the President’s favorite Hammond portable typewriters.

  Tumulty and the White House staff and the secretservice men rode in pullmans ahead. There were accommodations for more than a hundred newspapermen and reporters.

  The first stop was Columbus. The meeting there was thinly attended. After the President had finished speaking a Chinese student called out from the gallery, “What about Shantung, Mr. President?”

  At Indianapolis there was a parade to the state fair. Dust and heat and yelling crowds. An enormous turnout; but when the President spoke people seemed more interested in the fat cattle and the exhibits of prize-winning pickles than in the League of Nations.

  At St. Louis, the bailiwick of knownothing Senator Reed, who was raging up and down the country denouncing the treaty, the crowds were unexpectedly cordial. Wilson was introduced as “The Father of World Democracy.” Shouts of approval and storms of handclapping capped every sentence.

  Kansas City was even better.

  The presidential train avoided Chicago where anglophobe “Big Bill” Thompson was mayor and where Senator Medill McCormick’s excoriation of the treaty had been frantically applauded and Wilson’s name booed, amid shouts of “Impeach him, impeach him.”

  Wherever Wilson talked people seemed to leave the halls convinced. He threatened them with doom. “I can predict with absolute certainty,” he said in Omaha, “that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.” He was thrilled by the response he got. “I am catching the imagination of the people,” he told his wife. “I don’t care if I die the minute after the League is ratified.”

  At Mandan he spoke from the rear platform to a throng collected in the station. Billings and Helena turned out excited crowds. He met with an ovation at Coeur d’Alene in Senator Borah’s home state. Spokane, the hated Poindexter’s home town, seemed to have gone mad for Wilson.

  Tumulty was in his element. He had democratic committees aboard the train at every stop to wring the President’s hand. The President smiled and smiled. Good humor reigned in the presidential party. Grayson and Tumulty carried on a sort of minstrel show that kept everybody in stitches. Edith Wilson put up a brave front though she knew that her husband was suffering blinding headaches, that he hardly ate or slept.

  Wilson was agreeable to everybody. He told stories and shook hands and tirelessly stood up in open touring cars, waving at the crowds through the dusty broiling western towns. At night he’d ask the newspapermen in for sandwiches. He’d never been more affable. When people suggested that he was pushing himself too hard he had a wisecrack for them. “My constitution may be exhausted, but I still have my bylaws.”

  The reception in Seattle was overwhelming. The President made three speeches in a day and reviewed the Pacific fleet in Puget Sound from the deck of the famous old Oregon, back from overawing the Russians off Vladivostok. On the way to the armory singing schoolchildren waved red white and blue flags. When he appeared on the platform he was greeted like a presidential candidate with confetti and balloons and a prolonged demonstration.

  The only sour note was the young Wobblies standing with folded arms along the curb on the downtown streets with PARDON DEBS on their hatbands and banners reading RELEASE THE POLITICAL PRISONERS. Wilson had repeatedly refused even to consider a pardon for any of them.

  The baneful seething that had worried Wilson in past years was rising hourly to the surface in the news that came to the presidential train. The President wracked his brains for solutions. While one secretary was kept busy typing out fresh speeches another had to pound away on the day to day work of the presidency.

  From coast to coast came complaints about wartime profiteering and the high cost of living. War industries were shutting down. There was unemployment everywhere. Wages were cut. There were bloody race riots where Negro laborers had moved north. Steelworkers were on strike. Coal miners were walking out. Employers were fighting strikes with injunctions and hired gunmen. The New York theatres closed because the actors refused to perform until they got fair contracts. In Boston a strike of the police force turned the streets over to hoodlums and thugs.

  To quiet the unrest of labor the President was calling an industrial conference to meet in Washington.

  Overseas hotspots kept exploding on the map like popcorn in a skillet. French and British plans to establish some respectable capitalist regime in Russia went continually awry. The leaders they backed, though they massacred the Reds that fell into their hands as tirelessly as the Reds massacred the Whites, seemed to face invariable defeat. In China echoes of the Fourteen Points had set the young students’ ears to tingling. The blind revolt against foreign exploitation of Boxer days was taking new forms. Students were learning the language of European politics from Wilson and Lenin and from the democratic idealism of American missionaries. Voices calling for Chinese selfdetermination and Chinese selfgovernment were reaching the American press. On the Adriatic a baldheaded poet named Gabriele d’Annunzio was defying the dictates of Versailles by lashing up an Italian mob to seize Fiume. The President could hardly control his indignation.

  As a final aggravation wires from Washington detailed the testimony of a rich and earnest young man named William C. Bullitt before the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs. Bullitt had resigned from a Peace Conference job in protest against the treaty and against the Allied policy of backing every outbrea
k in Russia of partisans of the old regime against the soviet power. Now he revealed some private conversations with Secretary Lansing. Lansing not only disapproved of the Shantung agreement, but of the covenant. The Secretary of State had said the American people would unquestionably defeat the treaty if they ever understood what it let them in for.

  “My God,” Wilson cried out to Tumulty, “I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act in this way.”

  The train was rushing on to the next speaking engagement. There was no time to deal with Lansing now. Lansing would get what was coming to him later.

  Back in Paris the story tickled Clemenceau. His bon mot was going the rounds. “I got my bullet during the conference; Lansing got his after.”

  In Portland the crowds were sedate, but three times as many people stood outside the armory as could get in to hear the President. When the presidential cortege took a fast tour of the scenic drives up the Columbia River, one of the most popular of the newscorrespondents was killed in a car crash. The President and Edith Wilson were immensely saddened. People noticed that the President couldn’t seem to throw off the sense of shock. “It made us jittery,” said one of the secretservice men. “From then on nothing seemed to go right.”

  San Francisco was a success in spite of efforts of the Irish societies to cause trouble. Berkeley and the bay towns were delirious. A special stop was made in Sacramento to boost the League in Hiram Johnson’s back yard.

  The newspapermen declared that San Diego was the high point of the trip. Through a recently installed loudspeaker system the President addressed fifty thousand wildly enthusiastic people. “The war we have just been through,” he told them, “though it was shot through with terror, is not to be compared with the war we would have to face next time.” They shouted approval of the League. Los Angeles tried to go San Diego one better.