When the Cheering Stopped

by Smith, Gene;

  Past them went the chasseurs in blue berets and the spahis in their scarlet and white robes, President Poincaré and Premier Clemenceau. The military bands along the route formed in compact groups and stood silent, and in fact a great silence fell all over Paris and the hundreds of thousands of people, a silence that grew ever more deep, so that when the time came for the train’s arrival only the chomping of the cavalry horses could be heard in the completely jammed streets. Then at ten o’clock the first booming of the batteries on Mont Valérien was heard off in the distance: the train was in Paris. Moments later the sound of The Star-Spangled Banner came floating up the boulevards from the station and a stir went through the waiting multitudes. After the guns and the music came a new sound, like the distant rumblings of thunder, and it grew louder in turn to the ears of those who stood waiting at the Porte Dauphine and on the Champs Elysées and Pont Alexander III, in front of the Chamber of Deputies and in the Place de la Concorde: “Wil-son. Wil-son.” And then he was in the streets of Paris in a two-horse victoria, sitting by the President of France, with the Garde Républicaine, swords on shoulder and plumes dancing, going on ahead, the cheers coming like waves as he moved. “Vive Wil-son! Vive Wil-son! Vive Wil-son!”

  Never, even on Armistice Day, had such cheers been heard. From the windows poured roses, violets, forget-me-nots, holly, greens. The people screamed in holy fervor to the man standing in the victoria and holding outstretched his tall hat. He went under draped flags, and bunting, and an immense electric sign: WELCOME TO WILSON. The military bands beat on their drums and the bugles sounded; the noise was lost in the roaring cheers for the man who would save France from another 1870 and another 1914. The air was filled with coats and jackets thrown aloft after the hats. A huge banner stretched across the Champs Elysées: HONOR TO WILSON THE JUST. Flowers rained down onto the First Lady, so that people could barely see her as she rode in the carriage behind her husband. The President of France looked dazed and pale; he seemed terrified almost by the emotion before him. 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.

  “No one ever had such cheers,” wrote the journalist William Bolitho. “I, who heard them in the streets of Paris, can never forget them in my life. I saw Foch pass, Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning troops, banners, but Wilson heard from his carriage something different, inhuman—or superhuman. Oh, the immovably shining, smiling man!”

  It seemed the Arc de Triomphe would fall before this cascade of sound. His carriage went under it—the first time within the memory of living man this had happened. The Premier of France said, “I do not think there has been anything like it in the history of the world.”

  Later in the day the President spoke at a luncheon, exchanging toasts with the French President: “All that I have said or tried to do has been said and done only in the attempt to faithfully express the thoughts of the American people. From the very beginning of this war the thoughts of the people of America turned toward something higher than the mere spoils of war. Their thought was directed toward the establishment of the eternal principles of right and justice.”

  That day French soldiers joined hands to drag German cannons down the street at a run; French girls screaming with laughter went along as passengers. That day the overloaded branches of a tree near the Madeleine broke and half a dozen doughboys tumbled all over the sidewalk—but it was a day when nothing could go wrong and they all jumped up unhurt and trooped away, laughing. That day Le Petit Parisien headlined: VIVE WILSON! VIVE WILSON! and La Liberté said Paris had given to him all its fire and all its heart. That night Paris was ablaze with illuminations and the boulevards were thronged with singing, dancing, confetti-tossing crowds.

  He went to England. French ships escorted him to mid-Channel; British craft took up the duty there. At Dover the Lord Mayor in wig and robe greeted him, and little English schoolgirls draped in American flags threw flowers in his path. In London a wintry haze hung in the air, but the flags and bunting and triumphal arches made of choice flowers, richly berried holly, and gilt golden eagles in front of Charing Cross seemed to glimmer as the guns in Hyde Park and the Tower pumped off blanks to announce his coming. A detachment of the Scots Guards was at the station, and the band of the Grenadiers, and of course the King in field marshal’s uniform. They went out over red carpets to the great high red-and-gold royal carriages drawn by beautifully groomed bays with red harness and silk on their manes and surrounded by a Sovereign’s Escort and postilions and footmen in royal livery. The people filling the Strand broke out into a roar for the man who would save England from another Continental war with its horrors of gas and mud, and they got under way, the carriages, the Royal Standard Bearer, the clattering horse escort going by Venetian masts, by the National Gallery almost hidden by flags and bunting, by the rigid ranks of the Coldstream Guards. For blocks in all directions the streets were completely jammed; the newspapers said two million people stood to see him. From Hyde Park Corner down Constitution Hill the lampposts were draped in scarlet with flags and emblems bearing Imperial and civic emblems. The Royal Horse Guards band was at Hyde Park Corner to crash into The Star-Spangled Banner when the carriages came to it, and bells and chimes rang out over all London. He stood not simply to raise his hat but to wave it boyishly. They went to Buckingham Palace, where the Welsh Guards band waited, and from the balcony looked over at the crowd reaching all down the Mall to the Admiralty half a mile away, overflowing St. James’s Park on one side and the Green Park on the other. The crowd screamed for him to speak and waved tiny American flags hawked all through the city that day—“a penny each and all silk”—and he laughed and waved his hand to say no, there would be no speech, and went inside but in a few moments had to go out in answer to the immense rolling sound of hundreds of thousands of voices chanting in unison, “WE WANT WILSON.” The First Lady waved a Union Jack as she stood with her husband and the King and Queen. Never had London heard the cheers that reached up toward them.

  A royal state dinner, the first held since Great Britain went to war, was given in the palace. Everything on the table was of gold—the candelabra, dishes, forks, spoons, knives. On three different sides of the room were hung gold dishes not used during the dinner; many were the size of tea trays. Beefeaters from the Tower stood in their red uniforms holding in their motionless hands unmoving halberds. Liveried servants were everywhere. The King’s hands trembled as he read off a toast; the President replied extemporaneously, addressing his host as “Sir” but not “Your Majesty.”

  They left London and went up to Carlisle near the Scottish border and to the little church in which the Reverend Thomas Woodrow, his grandfather, had preached. He stood in front of the communion rail, declining to stand in the pulpit, and spoke to the congregation of the little girl who had worshiped in this church before she went to America and womanhood and ultimately motherhood, and of her sense of duty and of what she had taught her son. He spoke of what that son believed: “We shall now be drawn together in a combination of moral force that will be irresistible … it is from quiet places like this all over the world that the forces accumulate which presently will overbear any attempt to establish evil.” He went along into the vestry to sign the book and the First Lady was glad for his moment of seclusion, for she saw what it meant to him to be in this church.

  They went back to Paris and from there to Italy on the royal train of that country. At ten-thirty on the morning of January 2, 1919, they crossed the Franco-Italian frontier at Mentone to the accompaniment of cheers from the Italian troops lined up by the barriers. They headed south, their way at night lighted by blazing bonfires of welcome. In Rome an Alpine infantry guard of honor waited along with the Mayor’s Guard in crimson and gold and silver helmets with plumes. In the royal carriage they rode with the King and Queen to the Quirinal
Palace. Airplanes roared and a dirigible drifted over the streets covered with golden sand brought from the Mediterranean in compliance with an ancient way of honoring heroes. From the windows of the old houses hung rare old brocades and velvet with coats of arms embroidered upon them, and flowers rained down as swords, handkerchiefs, flags, hats, epaulets flew up into the air. The great cheers rebounded off the Baths of Diocletian and seemed to stir the banners crying HAIL THE CRUSADER FOR HUMANITY and WELCOME TO THE GOD OF PEACE. Triumphal arches were emblazoned with texts from his writings and in the shopwindows all over Rome his picture stood with burning candles before it. The officials kissed the hand of the man who would return Italy to its former glory; his signature they pressed to their hearts. When he stood on the balcony of the Quirinal he threw kisses to the throngs and they in return hailed him as no one in Rome had ever been hailed, not Caesar and his legions returned from the conquest of Gaul, not anyone. Epoca said: “He launched his country into the great conflict with the sole aim of making justice triumph. He comes to Rome and will walk up the Capitoline Hill, whence were dictated to the world the laws of right and justice.” The Corriere d’Italia: “We thought justice and right had disappeared from the world, when his figure arose.” He went to call on Pope Benedict XV and en route to St. Peter’s a child was knocked out of its mother’s arms by the wild crowds. Margaret saw the accident and had the child, whose nose was scratched, brought to her. She fondled it and kissed the bruised nose and the people went mad, falling on their knees to kiss her hand and screaming, “Long live Miss Wilson! Long live America!”

  They left Rome for Milan and again he blew kisses to the wildly cheering people gathered in what the newspapermen said was perhaps the greatest mass of people ever in one spot at any single time in the history of the world. He was gay and easy with the crowds; he waved his arms in time with a band. In Turin the students at the university begged him to speak and he put on one of their blue caps and wore it while saying a few words. The First Lady thought as she looked at him, How young and virile!

  He returned to Paris as the man of whom it was said that he could bring to the earth that peace and good will of which the angelic choir sang upon the occasion of the birth of the Messiah at Bethlehem; of whom it was said that no such moral and political power and no such evangel of peace had appeared since Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount; of whom it was said that only Augustus nineteen centuries before had had such an opportunity to create a new world. In the children’s ward of a Vienna hospital a Red Cross worker gently told the young patients that in that year of defeat for Austria there could be no Christmas gifts; they cried back, “Wilson is coming. Then everything will be all right.” A French teacher asked her class to “describe President Wilson and give your own ideas about him,” and one little girl wrote that he wore no beard so there would be more room on his face for the children to kiss. Another wrote, “I wish that President Wilson may never die.” In the area of the Allied intervention in northern Russia his picture was almost as common in the peasant huts as the ever-present icon, and from Egypt an American wrote that the natives held him to be the Mahdi, the Mohammedan Messiah calling for revolt that would drive out the English so that he might send Americans to help govern the country. His name was recited as an incantation by the effendis, the harem women, the imams and mullahs; with tomtoms beating and pipes shrilling, crowds in the East cried for hour after hour, “Yahia Dr. Wilson.” (“Long Live Dr. Wilson.”) In the mountains of the Balkans the villagers settled petty disputes by saying, “President Wilson would have it so.” Shakespeare, Caesar, Alexander—two thirds of the earth’s inhabitants never heard these names, wrote William T. Ellis, but his name and creed “have found lodgment in a greater number of human minds than any platform or name save Jesus or Mohammed.”

  On the George Washington coming over, the President once grew pensive. “What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment,” he had said.

  * His Ph.D. was from Johns Hopkins.

  4

  Paris in the early days of the new year, in January and February of 1919, was filled with the great men of all the world, and behind them, going where they went, were their secretaries, financial experts, generals, admirals. The torn world sent them to Paris pulsing with the conviction that the price of the war be paid by the body and by the purse of the losers. Europe was consumed by more than a score of violent territorial disputes between Russia and Sweden, Belgium and Holland, Italy and Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece, the Czechs and the Poles, the Rumanians and the Hungarians, the others. In the Far East and in Africa the cry was the same: the peace treaty must give justice, the lands and the reparations must be equitably distributed, all wrongs must be righted.

  One of the great men of the world had no corps of assistants trailing about with him. Sometimes he took a particular expert to sit beside him as he conferred with the Europeans, but more often he sat alone save for perhaps one secretary at his elbow as he talked and argued with the other great men attended each by half a dozen aides. All day and into the night the conferences over the fate of the world went, on; in between there came to see him delegations to tell of their troubles which he might, if he would, cure. The Committee of Mutilated and Wounded Soldiers of Milan came, and the National Union of Railwaymen in England, and the Worshipful Company of Plumbers of London. Prince Charoon of Siam came, and the Carpatho-Russian delegation, the President of the Provisional Government of Albania, the Celtic Circle of Paris, the representatives of the Parliament of Kouban, the Archbishop of Trebizond. Other great men could go golfing on weekends outside Paris, but when they returned, always they saw lights burning in the anterooms and inner chambers where the President’s questioners and petitioners waited.

  There was no end to the problems that the war brought. The Bolsheviks possessed Russia; it was said they would march into Germany and then into France. Along the areas east of Berlin irregular armies fought nasty pocket wars; in the Orient the Japanese moved into China. For eighteen hours a day, day in and out, the President, the great man of the great men, worked and conferred, often holding several meetings in different rooms at the same time, walking swiftly from one to the other. But no amount of work could change reality, which was that no country, no matter how enormous its losses in the war, could get all that it wanted. And so in the newspapers there appeared criticisms of the way things were going, and the other great men became argumentative. The President began to tire under his load. He developed a nervous habit of talking too much and too definitely, and with the new assertiveness came a nervous little chuckle with which he would interrupt himself. But the problems of who would get what remained.

  Besides the foreigners, there were the Americans. “Come home and reduce the high cost of living,” wired twenty Democrats of the Massachusetts legislature. Suffragettes sent demands that women deserved the vote; Californians wrote they did not want Japanese men to bring Japanese wives to produce Oriental citizens of their state. Adherents of the Socialist Eugene V. Debs, jailed for sedition, sent petitions asking his release. The President got up at dawn to deal with the questions confronting him, and before breakfast worked two hours. Afterward there would be a conference on a French contention limiting the size of the future German Army, or a Japanese one dealing with racial equality, or an English one concerned with the money to be paid out by Berlin. At lunch there would be guests with axes to grind. Then more sessions, more conferences—who would rule Vilna and who Danzig? At dinner—he gave up changing into evening clothes for the meal—there would be more talk. Afterward the journalist Ray Stannard Baker would come to talk of what news should be given out to the clamoring American reporters. Then there would be several hours of reading the petitions and looking at the maps and studying the reports. There was no time for golf and none for auto rides. He became gaunt, haggard and pale. Under the stress of wartime Washington the President had developed a twitching around one eye, and now this new tension made not onl
y the eye but half of his face jerk up and down in a spasmodic fashion. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels came over to try to help out his chief; he found the strain such that ever after he said he spent a whole year in Paris in one month.

  In February, after two months abroad, the President briefly returned to Washington in order to take care of pressing matters. He stayed a few days in America and then sailed back to France and the unending talks and meetings, the interminable arguments and compromises and arrangements. The normal haggling of an American Congress, or of any Parliament, was nothing compared to the Paris of 1919 wherein met the men who spoke for hundreds of millions of people certain that any abridgment of their claims meant that the entire war had been fought for nothing. The God of Peace and Apostle of International Justice, the great man of the great men, began to shrink in the eyes of those who dealt with him. He said that perhaps Italy was not entitled to territories Yugoslavia wanted, and in Rome his picture was torn down. He opposed a partition of Germany that would give France full sway over thousands of miles of undoubted German territory, and the French Premier accused him of favoring the late enemy at the expense of the French people who had sacrificed so much. Explosive rumors sprang into being in the Paris salons; the statesmen reacted to them, or passed them on, and, at once, frightened and angry men came to the President to cry that Evil was attempting to despoil their people and their ideals. “God knows I wish I could give them all they hope for, but only He Himself could do that,” the President signed.

  “Everyone seems to look to him, big and little,” wrote home Ike Hoover, the White House usher brought to take charge of the President’s living quarters, “and yet no one seems to really wish to help him. It is a selfish world we are living in, especially over here. Everyone seems to be trying to further their own interests and to the Devil with the other fellow. It is a selfish bunch.”