In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  “We’ve lived in suspense from day to day,” said Eleanor, “never knowing what would happen next” … in love or war. She said that because of his health, Franklin would “have to be careful this winter. Of course now”—after the Armistice—“he can’t go over and join the Naval guns at the front as he had his heart set on doing. He is anxious to be sent back to see to Navy things over there, but so far the Secretary can’t be brought to see that some civilian with authority must go over. In time, however, F. may convince him.”

  AS THE GEORGE WASHINGTON STEAMED at a leisurely pace across the Atlantic, peace commissioner Edward House, assisted by Roosevelt’s friend from Groton and Harvard, Joseph Grew, was at work in Paris setting up a staff, arranging housing, and paving the way for the President’s arrival.

  Among those whom Grew rewarded with an appointment to the staff was Christian Herter, whom he had first met at the Berlin embassy before the war, who had worked for him in Washington, and who had been doing a first-rate job dealing with prisoner-of-war issues out of the American legation in Bern. After the Armistice—which provided that U.S. and Allied prisoners were to be immediately released and returned to their own lines—Herter had been dismayed, on inquiring how the repatriation was proceeding, to learn that neither the Red Cross nor the army seemed to know anything about it. Taking three Red Cross officers with him, the young American had driven across France and Germany without authorization, making sure that American captives were being well treated. “What do you think of your old husband being the first … of the Allies to cross the Rhine?” he wrote to his wife. “Speedy stuff—what?”

  In Germany, Herter saw authority disintegrating and red flags flying. On returning to the U.S. legation in Switzerland, he heard warnings of the Bolshevik peril to central Europe. He passed on to Washington the advice he received from German and other sources: that the United States should distribute food to the starving masses of the former German and Austro-Hungarian empires in order to combat the menace of communism. He also arranged secret meetings between aides of Herbert Hoover and German and Austrian officials to try to work out something along these lines. The meetings were kept secret from the Allies, who according to Herter were “watching us closely—fearing that we are trying to put some hooks in their present scheme of completely ignoring the Americans generally & President Wilson in particular.”

  At Christmas he was elated to receive word that Grew had appointed him a member of the secretariat of the peace conference, and had attached him to the Republican commissioner Henry White. Though happy to watch what he called the “royal battle of minds & wills” at the approaching conference, Herter had seen enough to fear the “terrible danger” of the fruits of victory “being nullified by the restoration of a … Europe based on the foundations of the old orders,” which would result in “the destruction of faith … among the great masses of the people”—thus “giving bolshevism its great moral hold.…”

  Young though he was, Herter presciently wrote of the coming peace settlement that “it looks as though it would be rotten & that sooner or later America would retire from Europe the laughing stock of imperialist politicians or the greatest hypocrite … ever.…”

  THE GEORGE WASHINGTON DROPPED ANCHOR a mile off the French port of Brest at a little after 1:30 p.m. Friday, December 13; the President believed that 13 was his lucky number. Warships had been firing twenty-one-gun salutes in his honor ever since sighting his vessel offshore early that morning.

  General Pershing and other dignitaries were there to greet the President and his party, who came ashore after lunch. Bands played, bouquets were presented, and soldiers stood at stiff attention all along the way as the Wilsons drove to the private train of the president of France, which had been sent to fetch them.

  Cheering crowds lined the length of the railroad track from Brest to Paris. “WIL-son! WIL-son!” they cried. “Vive WIL-son!” Children waved American flags, and overhead were signs that read: “HAIL THE CHAMPION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN. HONOR TO THE APOSTLE OF INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE. HONOR AND WELCOME TO THE FOUNDER OF THE SOCIETY OF NATIONS.” As the President wryly remarked, such congratulations were a bit premature.

  * For Straight’s criticism of Wilson, see this page.

  24

  DECIDING THE FATE OF THE WORLD

  THE VISION THAT Woodrow Wilson offered to the world—perpetual peace, disarmament, freedom, and justice—was not original. Priests, prophets, and philosophers had spoken of such things ever since the first stirrings of human conscience evidenced themselves in Middle Eastern river valleys millennia ago. What surprised in 1918–19 was to find it the stuff not of a sermon, but of a political program. What was new was that the leader of the greatest power in the world pledged his country’s best efforts to carry it through. To Europeans, it was novel, too, that the President should address the concerns not only of his own country, but of the human race. Above all, the Americans offered food and financing to revive a ravaged world; never before, in the thousands of years of warfare that constitute recorded history, had the conquerors on the morrow of victory stepped forward not to take, but to give.

  The impact of Wilson’s message on the world outside the Americas was unique. For a fragile moment, even men of the world who should have known better allowed themselves to believe. In the United States, voters and politicians alike had lost faith in him; but many of the young men who followed the President to Europe—even those who later were most disillusioned and embittered—remembered their time of service under him as the high point of their lives.

  AS THE PRESIDENT of the United States headed toward Paris to remake the world, so did hundreds of others, in pursuit— unlike Wilson—of their own narrow interests. The central political fact of the winter of 1918–19 was that the old order had broken down throughout central and eastern Europe and western Asia and had to be replaced. The Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires all had come apart, leaving their neighbors, as well as hundreds of indigenous ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, to battle for their share of the inheritance. Some—for example, Jews who hoped to establish a state in Palestine—wanted a small country of their own; others, hoping to achieve a larger presence on the world scene by joining forces, proposed to establish such federations as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia; while still others, among whom the Italians were notable, wanted to annex adjacent lands that hitherto had belonged to different countries.

  To France they all went, to submit their claims to the judgment of Paris. To the European mind it occurred that something similar had happened at least once before. It was remembered that after the fall of Napoleon, the allies who had overthrown him had met in Vienna in 1814–15 to draw up a new map for Europe.

  But to President Wilson’s mind, the Congress of Vienna was a different affair altogether; indeed, there was no precedent in history for what he had in mind to do. At Vienna, statesmen, having erased existing kingdoms, states, and frontiers from the map, had merely sketched in new ones in their place. That was what the Allied leaders planned to do in Paris in 1919; it was only in that sense that they planned to remake the world.

  But Wilson saw the task ahead as a remaking of the world in a more profound sense, never before attempted. He wanted to change forever the way in which countries deal with one another. He proposed to do away with international power politics and with war. In their place would function a worldwide association of states. Other than with House, his coauthor, Wilson had not discussed how his proposed league would work; he had not even told the scholars on the George Washington. But one might have guessed at the broad outlines of the plan gestating in the President’s mind, for its origins were in the recent traditions of American diplomacy.

  The notion to which American presidents and secretaries of state had been drawn for decades past was that of arbitration. In disputes among states, instead of scheming or fighting against one another, each would argue its case before a neutral referee and would agree to be bound by his decision
.

  In the sophisticated version of this plan that was growing in President Wilson’s mind, representatives of every country would assemble on a regular or continuous basis to bring to the surface and articulate all disputes of a potentially disruptive nature; and then the countries that were neutral as between the disputants—and in Wilson’s view, this usually would be the United States—would decide the issue and everyone would agree to abide by that decision.

  So in believing that the proper purpose of the Paris conference was to remake the world and determine the political destiny of the human race, Wilson took a much larger view of what “remaking” might mean than did the leaders of the Allies; and his first priority was to get them to agree to remake the world in his broad sense, not in their more limited one.

  But the three leaders of the principal Allies did not share the President’s vision, nor were they even thinking, as he was, in long-run terms.

  The prime minister of Great Britain, David Lloyd George, a dapper, white-thatched, electrically energetic little man of fifty-five—charming, devious, a political wizard from the magical land of Wales—was a Liberal whose coalition government was in power thanks only to the votes of the Conservatives, who in 1918 had won a landslide victory at the polls and thereafter held a great majority of the seats in the House of Commons. Although he personally favored moderation in dealing with Germany and accommodation in treating with Soviet Russia, in public he felt obliged—at least for the moment, until passions subsided—to take the hard line advocated by Parliament and demanded by the mass-circulation press. He would do the right thing (as he believed it to be) only if he thought he could afford to do it; for above all, the nimble-witted prime minister was an opportunist whose principal goals were to stay in office as prime minister and to acquire as much new territory for the British empire as he could without having to pay a price for it.

  Georges Clemenceau, the French premier, in his late seventies, partly deaf, and portly, was a dedicated patriot: he cared for his country but for nothing else. He was a survivor of the National Assembly that in 1871 had been forced to accept the punishing peace terms that Bismarck’s victorious Germany had imposed upon a beaten France.* In his mind’s eye, he still saw the images of 1870–71: of starving, frozen Paris under siege by Prussians whose cannons shelled the city night and day. He was of an acid skepticism about people and theories, but harbored a lifelong passion: hatred of Germany. His goal was to keep Germany from being able to harm France again.

  Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, fifty-eight, prime minister of Italy, led a country that need not have joined the Allies—indeed, need not have entered the war at all—and had done so only in order to win new territories: the share in the spoils of victory that England and France had promised. Orlando’s mandate from his parliament and his public was to take as much as possible for Italy. Orlando represented a worldly Mediterranean people with no interest in changing the old game of politics, only in increasing their share of the winnings.

  It was toward a meeting with these unillusioned, ethically pagan statesmen, as well as with the envoys of a narrowly focused and unsentimental Japanese government, and with the representatives of other associated powers of expansionist inclination, that America’s visionary preacher-president journeyed on the railroad tracks from Brest to Paris while, lining his path, tens of thousands cheered him on.

  * Clemenceau, who had protested against France’s acceptance of an armistice in that war, also had voted against the peace terms of 1871.

  25

  PARIS IN THE PLAGUE YEAR

  I am describing what was, in fact, not a Conference, but a very serious illness.

  —Harold Nicolson, a young member of the British delegation, later writing of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919

  FRANCE BLAMED THE FLU ON SPAIN, and Spain, on France. The United States suspected that it came from eastern Europe, while western Europe believed that it came from the United States. In the Middle East, Edmund Allenby’s victorious Egyptian Expeditionary Force contracted it from the Turkish troops they defeated. But the epicenter of the plague seemed to be the wartime front line in Europe.

  Somehow the virus was born in the abattoirs that the western battlefields of the Great War had become. It seems to have arisen from the intermixture of mass armies in the principal arena of combat: northern France. For four years most of the killing had been concentrated in that small region. Millions of corpses had been dumped into its earth and waters to rot and be digested. Within its narrow bounds the native French and neighboring German troops fought against or alongside millions more who had been brought from all corners of the world—Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Pacific—each group carrying within it germs and viruses from its native land to which it alone had developed immunity.

  Influenza is, in any event, unstable, mutating easily into different types to get around human defenses; and the mass meeting of the living and the dead from all over the planet on the western front—Flanders, Artois, Picardy, Champagne, and Lorraine—gave it an unparalleled opportunity. It was from these provinces that the deadly new strain of the influenza virus emerged.

  For the American leaders who had come to Paris, it was Henry James’s Daisy Miller writ large; it was in the corrupt, diseased air of Old Europe, amid the subtleties and deceits of cultures centuries old, that they fell ill. In some cases, most notably that of the President, it was to be a sickness not of the body alone, but of the soul.

  WOODROW WILSON’S ARRIVAL in Paris was one of the great scenes in the drama of humanity. “When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history … and [as] the man of destiny … coming from the West, was to … lay for us the foundations of the future.” So wrote the young English economist John Maynard Keynes, who served as an official of the British Treasury at the Paris conference. If anything he understated the case. Wilson was welcomed with rapture by masses who hailed him as a savior from dangers past and as a messiah who would deliver them from dangers future.

  In Gene Smith’s gem of historical narrative, When the Cheering Stopped, we read that the day Wilson came to Paris, “there waited the largest throng in the history of France.… It seemed the whole of France stood in the streets … men and boys clung to the very tops of the chestnut trees. The housetops were covered with people. Lines … of thirty-six thousand French soldiers, the cream of the Army, stood fast to hold back the crowds.… [A] new sound, like the distant rumblings of thunder … grew louder.… ‘Wil-son. Wil-son’ … the cheers coming like waves as he moved. ‘Vive Wil-son! Vive Wil-son! Vive Wil-son!’ … The American Secret Service men were in a frenzy of fear for their charge, but it was impossible to do anything; the crowds were too enormous, the noise too loud, the press of bodies too great. People grew giddy; women wept as they screamed his name.”

  A hundred thousand people had crammed themselves into the Place de la Concorde alone, crying the President’s name. Of the acclaim for Wilson that day, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau said, “I do not think there has been anything like it in the history of the world.”

  William Bolitho Ryall, a British journalist who was to win fame with a book about great men, wrote that “no one ever had such cheers. I, who heard them in the streets of Paris, can never forget them in my life.” He remembered that “I saw Foch pass, Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning troops, banners, but Wilson heard from his carriage something different, inhuman—or superhuman.”

  What Wilson heard was the peoples of the world crying for justice; what he may have failed to hear amid the clamor of “WIL-son! WIL-son!” was that they were calling for justice not as he, but as each of them, conceived it to be.

  THE AMERICANS HAD ARRIVED for the peace conference too soon in every sense. The European powers were not yet ready for them; indeed, they would not be ready for the message the Americans brought with them for another quarter of a century.

  In the month of free time at hi
s disposal while the Allied leaders tended to domestic politics, President Wilson traveled. At Christmas he journeyed to the British Isles; at New Year’s, to Italy. The applause continued, and Wilson continued to misinterpret it. The French, British, and Italian peoples took to the streets to shout hurrah for the President because each thought he was on their side; but Wilson believed they were cheering because they were on his side.

  The politicians did not share the popular enthusiasm for the President. In London, the Imperial War Cabinet found it incredible that Wilson should wish to deny overseas colonies to those who had won them from the enemy. William Hughes, the prime minister of Australia, demanded to know what contribution to the war entitled the United States to enact laws for the rest of the world, while Lord Curzon, of the inner War Cabinet, suggested that Britain and France go ahead to frame a peace settlement without bothering with the Americans.

  In Paris, Clemenceau made clear to his appreciative parliament that Wilson’s ideas—disarmament, ending the balance of power, establishing an international league—held little appeal for him. On the contrary, well-defended frontiers, adequate armaments, and the establishment of a solid balance of power were what would bring peace. If in 1914, he said, the United States, Britain, France, and Italy had agreed that an attack on one was an attack on all, there would have been no war: Germany would not have dared. Such an alliance, therefore, was what was needed to preserve national security in the future. The “old system” of politics remained good enough for him, he said; and in nuanced phrases, he suggested that Wilson was an innocent—someone a bit simple.

  WILSON RETURNED FROM ITALY to gray, cold Paris early in January. It was rainy, and the swollen Seine had overflowed its banks. Late at night, the weather cleared; but the days were dark, chilly, and wet. Wilson was tired, and Dr. Grayson, his physician, ordered a couple of days of total rest.