House took the memorandum with him when he caught the noon train back to Washington December 23 to spend the Christmas holidays; later that day he handed it to the President, who did not read it at the time. Dining at the White House on December 27, the colonel was worried by Wilson’s appearance: “I could see some signs of weariness in him and I begged him to take, as nearly as possible, a week’s rest before we get at the war aims message. He promised to do the best he could.” Wilson asked House to return in eight days, saying that he had to address Congress on the railroad question January 4 “and after that,” House wrote in his diary, “we will prepare together his address on war aims which he hopes to deliver to Congress.”
WILSON WAS BEING BOMBARDED during the Christmas–New Year holidays with advice about a statement of war goals—although, unknown to its authors, he did not read or heed it. Most of the suggestions he received were alike: William Boyce Thompson, a wealthy American businessman who had become leader of a Red Cross mission to Russia, returned from Petrograd on Christmas morning and (having been denied a personal interview with the President) submitted a memorandum urging him to make a statement of war goals to Congress. Such a statement, he said, would show the Russian people that there was common ground between the aims of the United States and some of those professed by the Bolshevik government.
At about the same time, the American ambassador to Russia dispatched two communications to Wilson asking him to make a public statement of war goals—along the lines of his earlier peace-without-victory address—intended to hearten the Russians and encourage them to hold out against German demands. Edgar Sisson, who represented the American government’s Committee on Public Information in Petrograd, wired a similar request January 3: “Re-state anti-imperialistic war aims and democratic peace requisites of America …”
Back in New York, House asked the Inquiry to assemble the maps and atlases that would be needed, but the material proved to be so unwieldy that he took an Inquiry professor with him to Washington to carry it. He brought back also a new memorandum from the Lippmann team dated January 2, which deleted Parts I and II and was a revised version of Part III only—the war aims section—of the earlier one. Lippmann believed that it was the President who asked for the cuts and augmentations, unaware that Wilson had not yet read the document.
The new memo was entitled “A Suggested Statement of Peace Terms,” which previously had been the heading of Part III. Instead of merely listing proposed peace goals, it discussed each proposed goal in some detail. As it later turned out, the President was not interested in such discussions; all he wanted was a list of the issues he would have to deal with.
In preparing a statement of war goals, one of Wilson’s unavowed but evident purposes was to score a victory in his rivalry with Lenin on the one hand and Lloyd George on the other. He wanted to stake out a claim to be the worldwide leader of progressive opinion.
He could not have wanted the British prime minister to believe, however, that he was merely seeking the limelight; and he called in London’s ambassador to disclaim any such desire. On January 3 the President met with Cecil Spring-Rice, whom he disliked and almost never saw. Concealing his hope of appealing to opinion abroad, Wilson said he was about to address a statement to the American public. On the face of it, there was no need for such a statement; Wilson conceded that domestic opinion was solid for war and that revelation of the Allied secret treaties had produced no visible effect. But what of the future? Might not continuing Bolshevik calls for unselfish peace terms be heeded eventually? It was to obviate that possibility, Wilson told Spring-Rice, that he must answer the Soviet propagandists by telling the American people what their government’s war goals truly were.
The following day Spring-Rice cabled the foreign secretary in London that Wilson planned to outline war goals in a speech designed to quiet the doubts of the American public, and that he had this news on the highest authority. The prime minister may have had this in mind as he pondered what he himself would say in a hastily scheduled speech the next day to a labor union conference. His object was to obtain certain concessions from the workers in furtherance of the war effort; and a liberal statement of peace aims might counter communist influence in their ranks and whip up their enthusiasm for the war.
On January 4 House’s train was delayed and he arrived three hours late at the White House, but dinner had been saved for him, and after he had eaten quickly, he went to work with the President until 11:30 p.m. They resumed their labors the next day.
But then there was bad news. Only a couple of days before, House had noted, “I wish to again call attention to the selfishness which seems to lurk in the minds of those in authority. The President is anxious to state his peace terms before Lloyd George and Clemenceau have an opportunity to forestall him.” But on January 5, even as Wilson began to work on his speech, Lloyd George delivered his own. The worst of it was that it was a stirring expression of liberalism that offered views nearly identical to the President’s. Addressing the labor unions, the British prime minister called for a postwar world in which the shackles of class and empire would be cast off, economic issues would be resolved by international cooperation, and all peoples would be accorded the right of self-determination. Wilson, plunged into gloom, decided to abandon the idea of articulating American war goals. But coaxed by House, he changed his mind. House argued, as did British Foreign Secretary Balfour, that it was desirable for both the prime minister and the President to issue statements so long as the statements were consistent with each other.
The two friends went to work, but we have only House’s account of what each of them said, thought, or wrote. Much of what they composed must have come from Wilson’s pen, for although he worked a good deal of the time with House, at other times he drafted alone.
Freedom of the seas, nondiscriminatory trade practices, disarmament, fairness in dealing with colonial issues, generosity in dealing with Russia, and open rather than secret diplomacy were goals that were basic to the Wilson-House political philosophy, although none of them were listed in the Inquiry memorandums. The two men decided that these goals should be placed at the beginning of their list of terms, and they devoted their Points 1 through 6 to them. House claimed to have thought of numbering the various war goals.
Disregarding the January 2 memorandum and instead writing in longhand in the margin of Part III of the Inquiry memorandum of December 22, then working on successive drafts that he typed himself, Wilson turned to Points 7 through 13, dealing with the claims and conflicts of other countries. These were not American war goals as such. They merely set forth impartial America’s best judgment as to how the most divisive issues in world politics could be resolved in fairness to all. Wilson and House decided, therefore, that in framing these points, they would use the word “should” rather than “must.”
Point 14—a “must”—provided the climax to Wilson’s proposals. It advocated the establishment of a general association of nations after the war to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all countries. It remained a vague proposal, but provided a rallying cry for the millions who hoped to see a different and better world emerge from the ashes of the war.
The principal purpose of the Fourteen Points was to reassure the people of Russia that if they decided to fight on, they need not fear that they would be doing so for anybody’s imperialist goals. Major subsidiary purposes were to win over the Left in the Central Powers, and to win it back in the Allied countries. Wilson and House must have hoped that if enough public support were forthcoming for their formulation of terms, the governments of the Allies might feel compelled to accept them as an agreed basis on which to offer peace to their enemies.
Sometimes by himself, sometimes with House, the President drafted and redrafted for four days. Then, on January 8, 1918, having asked permission that morning to address a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, he delivered his speech to Congress. The Fourteen Points, though imper
fectly understood, were an instant success with peoples abroad, many of whom read their own desires into Wilson’s words.
The authors of various memorandums to Wilson took self-awarded pats on the back. At least four American officials in Petrograd flattered themselves that they had inspired the Fourteen Points, and the U.S. ambassador believed that Wilson had quoted his exact phrases. Walter Lippmann bragged that he had “put words into the mouth of the President.”
In Lippmann’s case, there was some truth to the claim, for his list of eight of the war goals had been used by Wilson as a first draft. But because he was not privy to the drafting process, he did not grasp the President’s intentions, which he wrongly assumed to be the same as his own. Outraged by the Allied secret treaties, Lippmann read into the Fourteen Points a disavowal of them, and therefore an implicit pledge to keep the Allies from adding to their empires in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific. As a result, he was to feel betrayed—as did his friend Bullitt in a related connection—by Wilson’s stance at the peace conference a year later.
At the time Lippmann merely misunderstood; later, he forgot. His reminiscences of how the Fourteen Points came to be formulated, provided in interviews that were taped decades later, were hopelessly wrong, with dates, places, and persons muddled.† As historians have tended to take his word for it, histories and biographies in use today often provide an inaccurate and often misleading account.
The real intention of House and Wilson in drafting the President’s statement was to persuade the peoples of Europe that, contrary to what the Bolsheviks charged, America was fighting the war in order to build a better world.
* It is now in Belarus.
† In his taped interviews Lippmann says that publication of the Allied secret treaties “shook the morale of this country” and that House came back from Europe “not later than the middle of November and told Wilson the only way to right the situation was by a statement of American peace terms which would override those secret treaties. Wilson agreed …” and House met with Lippmann in midtown Manhattan to tell him that “our organization was assigned the business of drafting that statement.”
Later, Lippmann quoted House as having told Wilson: “You’re going to have to disentangle the Allied cause from these treaties, and you can only do it by the restatement of the terms of peace.…”
But far from returning in November, House was in Europe that month, heading an American mission to Britain and France to confer with Allied leaders (as his records and theirs show) and exchanging London-Washington and Paris-Washington cables with the White House into the first week in December. His ocean liner took the second week of that month to make the Atlantic crossing. House, who debarked December 15, went immediately to Washington, concluded his business at the White House December 18, and could not have seen Lippmann in New York until December 19.
From the House diaries and the Wilson papers, it is evident that making a public statement of war goals was House’s idea and that his notion of what such a statement could accomplish had nothing to do with the secret treaties, which he seems never to have mentioned to the President.
Lippmann’s “organization,” the Inquiry, was not assigned to draft the statement. As a reading of the December memorandum shows, its authors did not know what information the President was asking for or whether his speech would touch on war goals. Its final section begins: “What follows is suggested as a statement of peace terms in case a general statement of terms at this time is desired” (emphasis added)—which indicates that Lippmann and his colleagues did not know whether such a statement was wanted or not. The bulk of the memo is a confidential discussion of war strategy, and could not possibly have been intended as the draft of a public speech.
“We spent three weeks on it …,” Lippmann recalled repeatedly, and finished it the week before Christmas; but at most, it could have been three days. Wilson decided December 18 to make the statement; the earliest House could have seen Lippmann in New York to ask for a memo was December 19; and the memo was submitted to House December 22.
Modestly, Lippmann said that he had not done it all: “Isaiah Bowman played a big part.…” But Bowman did not come into the Inquiry’s work until later. (Lippmann’s memory betrayed him on many of these things; later he described how he and Admiral Grayson were at Willard Straight’s side in Paris when Straight died—at a time when Grayson, far from Paris, was attending Wilson in America.)
Lippmann claimed that “it was we”—he, Mezes, and Miller, the authors of the two memos—“who invented the form of doing it in points.” This became central to his memory of the whole affair, because he claimed that they had summarized the provisions of the secret treaties point by point, and then had given America’s answer to each in the same numerical order. So the fact that he had numbered the peace goals supported his claim that what he was doing was restating war goals of the Allies, as shown in the secret treaties, while cutting out their “poison.” “It was all keyed upon the secret treaties,” he claimed. “I’ve never seen an adequate discussion of the Fourteen Points, because the fourteen Points are exactly fitted to the secret treaties.”
But a look at the two Lippmann memos disposes of that claim: the goals are not numbered. And we have House’s notes, written at the time, telling us that it was he and Wilson, working alone and without anyone else present, who hit on the idea of numbering the points.
In the Lippmann papers at Yale are two copies of the beginning of a memo, one in longhand, one typewritten. The fragment is undated, and has been misidentified as part of the January 2, 1918, memo, to which it bears no resemblance. As no copy of it has been found in the Wilson or House papers, it is unlikely that it was submitted to the President—the more so as neither Wilson nor House made any known reference to it. It is merely the start of what looks as though it would have been a lengthy document, and it is possible that Lippmann never got around to writing it.
The introductory paragraphs indicate that this will be a discussion of how the great powers will be forced by their peoples to openly disclose their war goals, and how, in the process of doing so, they will feel obliged to change those goals to bring them more in line with what the common people want—and would be prepared to continue fighting for. Lippmann begins his discussion of the goals of the powers with Great Britain. The document stops after the first paragraph. But it is suggestive that Lippmann has numbered Great Britain “1.”
Could this be the memo, either written or projected, in which Lippmann summarized and numbered the terms of the Allied secret treaties—and which he confused with the one Wilson used?
17
WILSON VERSUS LENIN
ONE OF THE YOUNG MEN whose suggested phrases did find their way into Wilson’s rhetoric was Lippmann’s friend William Bullitt, who from his office in the State Department communicated directly with House. Bullitt followed the press in the enemy countries with great care. His notion, which seems to have been accepted by House and Wilson, was that the President should criticize the German and Austro-Hungarian governments in the same words and on the same grounds as did their domestic labor, liberal, and socialist opponents. With Wilson, House, Lippmann, and Trotsky, Bullitt shared a belief in the power of public opinion; and like them, he underestimated the extent to which nationalism, and solidarity in the face of a wartime enemy, would keep even opposition groups within the Central Powers loyal to their governments.
To Bullitt, the weeks following the Fourteen Points address seemed ripe for an American peace offensive. In Germany the new chancellor, conservative and almost blind seventy-four-year-old Count Georg von Hertling, and his foreign secretary, Richard von Kuhlmann, looked to be making at least some attempt to fight free of military control. In Austria-Hungary, which was crippled by strikes and food shortages, the new emperor, Charles I, and his foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, had come to believe that the Hapsburg empire could not survive another year of war. Only later would it be learned that Hertling and Kuh
lmann differed from Germany’s military leaders more about methods than about objectives. As for Charles and Czernin, though they wanted peace, they did not intend to make a separate peace: they would go on fighting as long as Germany did.
In public statements responding to Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech, Hertling and Czernin seemed to accept some of Wilson’s proposals, each man, though, in different measure. In memorandums January 29 and February 3, Bullitt supplied House with a detailed and careful analysis of their statements. Like the German generals, Hertling (as Bullitt saw it) wanted to gamble that another offensive would win the war. But the chancellor recognized that the German public was unwilling to do that. So Hertling (in Bullitt’s view) was only pretending to enter into a public dialogue with Wilson, and he was pretending in order to buy time. He was going through the motions of talking peace in order to keep the German people quiet until the generals could launch their attack.
Bullitt urged the President to follow up the Fourteen Points address with another, couched in the terms used by German liberals and socialists, and plainly advocating a peace with no annexations or indemnities. In conclusion, Bullitt wrote grandly that “the common people of the world desire to build a new world of international order. Is it too much to hope that the President may now become the leader of the liberals of Germany and Austria-Hungary as he had become the leader of the liberals of France and England?”
In the Time of the Americans Page 21