1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  People stepped forward to congratulate him and pat him on the back. But Lloyd George only waved them off and smiled, and retreated back inside. Soon, people were running from all directions toward the prime minister’s house, and Downing Street was blocked by a surging crowd. “There was no cheering.” Minutes later, Lloyd George appeared again at the garden gate, just to wave—there didn’t seem to be words to describe the feelings that surged through him and through London and the rest of Britain. Later, when Nicolson left the office, he found that “the whole of London had gone mad,” but it was that initial moment of Lloyd George’s spontaneous joy that stuck with him fifteen years later.1

  Britain had suffered much in the Great War. Not as much as France or Germany perhaps, but its 750,000 dead represented twice the deaths it would suffer in World War II—and more than six times the deaths the United States had suffered in little more than a year. Yet Nicolson knew that the United States would be the dominant voice in the Peace Conference to come. Although Nicolson was a well-educated and patriotic Briton, that was fine with him—and for millions of other Britons and Europeans in November 1918.

  Nicolson had first learned about Wilson shortly after the former head of Princeton University became president of the United States, in the late autumn of 1913. In the last autumn before the world changed forever, Nicolson had been having lunch in Constantinople with the new American ambassador there, Henry Morgenthau. When Wilson’s name came up, Morgenthau suddenly leaped up and went into his study. He came out with one of Wilson’s books. “If you really wish to learn the lesson of Wilsonism,” the ambassador said, “then read this book.”

  Nicolson was struck by the word Wilsonism. Here was a president who had become an “ism” before he had even finished a year in office. Nicolson noted that Morgenthau himself was a convert to Wilsonism—“there was a note of religious fervor” in the ambassador’s words about his president—and after reading Wilson’s book, Nicolson became a convert, too.

  “In the main tenets of his political philosophy I believed with fervent credulity,” Nicolson wrote later. Nicolson came to believe with Wilson that “the standard of political and international conduct should be as high, as sensitive, as the standard of personal conduct.” Nicolson added:

  I shared with him a hatred of violence in any form, and a loathing of despotism in any form. I conceived, as he conceived, that this hatred was common to the great mass of humanity, and that in the new world this dumb force of popular sentiment could be rendered the controlling power in human destiny. “The new things in the world,” proclaimed President Wilson on June 5, 1914, “are the things that are divorced from force. They are the moral compulsions of the human conscience.”2

  Even after four years of almost unimaginable violence, Nicolson still believed in Wilson’s powerful, high-minded message. As he set out two months later to take his place with the British staff at the Peace Conference in Paris, he took with him Wilson’s Fourteen Points “the way a fervent Catholic might bring along his catechism.”

  He was not alone in this. For many on two continents after the war, Wilson seemed both prophet and savior. They revered him both for prompting America’s entry into the war and for his vision, which they believed would rebuild the world. If the Fourteen Points were the catechism, then the Peace Conference meeting at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris was to be the service where they would be consecrated.

  Or so many like Nicholson thought. The reality turned out, perhaps inevitably, to be very different.

  There have been many books on the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, including an international best seller. But Nicolson’s personal account, published in 1933, holds a particular fascination. It’s what the Germans would call a Bildungsroman. It is a narrative of a young man steeped in Wilsonism who became intimately involved in the conference and who learned that his hero was not the man he thought he was. He also learned that the principles that Woodrow Wilson espoused were not quite as pure or as disinterested as their advocate—or, more accurately, the young man’s prophet, as Nicolson had branded Wilson—liked to pretend. The Paris Peace Conference in fact turned out to be a chamber of grand illusions, and not only for the president of the United States.

  That, however, was not where everything started—especially for Woodrow Wilson.

  The armistice and the end of the fighting gave him a jubilant, almost frantic energy—a new sense of possibilities for a sixty-one-year-old who was far from the peak of his powers. The war had taken a heavy toll. His secretaries and staff all noticed that he had seemed increasingly tired as 1918 waned; his voice became weak and faded in and out, and he had trouble remembering names and dates. In front of a public audience, though, he could still rise to new, almost biblical heights, which might have reminded old friends of his Presbyterian minister father.

  Wilson would need that revivalist fervor at the Paris Peace Conference. The strain of making war would be nothing compared with the strain of making peace. There, the victors would assemble to put together a final settlement in the wake of the armistice signed on November 8. They would devise the formula for the postwar organization on which Wilson had placed his hopes for the future: the League of Nations.

  All in all, Wilson had set his postwar goals almost unimaginably high. “The whole world must be in on all measures designed to end wars for all time,” he declared.3 In a speech on the Fourth of July, he had proclaimed that the war’s inevitable end had to signal “the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere [or] its reduction to virtual impotence.” He had also spoken in soaring tones of hearing “the voices that speak the utter longing of oppressed and helpless people all over the world,” people who were waiting for the “great hosts of liberty [who were] going to set them free, to set their minds free, set their lives free, set their children free.”4

  Wilson had no doubt as to who was going to lead those hosts of liberty in the confab in Paris. Yet not everyone shared that confidence in the U.S. president, including many Americans.

  In May 1918, he had happily told an audience, “Not a hundred years of peace could have knitted this nation together as a single year of war has knitted it together.”5 He was mistaken, and the proof came in the November midterm elections. Wilson chose to dub them the most important “our country has ever faced or is likely to face in our time.” He told the American people, “If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad,” then the way to show it was to return Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate.

  It was a challenge as well as a heartfelt appeal. The American people replied with a resounding “No, thanks.” In the first election in which senators could be elected by the popular vote under the Seventeenth Amendment, Republicans picked up six Senate seats, which gave them a two-vote majority. In the House, the GOP won twenty-five seats, which gave them control of the lower chamber as well. Whatever peace treaty Wilson managed to negotiate with the Allies, it would now have to pass muster with a Senate controlled by the opposition party. The bitterness with which Wilson had fought against Republicans, and particularly Henry Cabot Lodge, for one and a half presidential terms especially, would now come back to haunt him. Lodge would be the new Senate majority leader—and if ever in American politics an irresistible force (Wilson) was about to hit an immovable object (Lodge), this was that moment.

  Wilson was unfazed. On the same day as the election, his adviser Edward House told him that the British and French had agreed to the Fourteen Points as the basis for the conference. It was a signal victory for Wilsonism, and for the president’s hopes for the transformational nature of this peace summit (although it turned out to be a hollower victory than he realized then). On November 13, he reached another major decision: he would go to Paris himself.

  This was unprecedented: no American president had ever left the United States during his term of office. Criticism came thundering down from various quarters, including from Republica
ns: with Wilson on the other side of the Atlantic, who would be in charge of the government if there was a crisis? Wilson shook off the critics, as he always did—“a little band of wilful men representing no opinion but their own,” as he once called them—but there were other, more prudent reasons for not going. By going to the Peace Conference in person, he shed his status as the outsider, the most powerful man in the world, who could step in and straighten things out if the negotiations wound up in a mess. Now if they became a mess, Wilson would have to bear the responsibility along with everyone else.

  But Wilson ignored the advice to be cautious. In his increasingly messianic mood, he knew there would be no failure in Paris, not while he was there.

  Then came a second decision. As Wilson put together his team of fellow delegates for the conference—the ubiquitous Edward House; Secretary of State Lansing; his military representative on the Supreme War Council, Gen. Tasker Bliss; and retired diplomat Henry White—he deliberately excluded any Republican leaders. It was bitter payback for the harsh attacks by Roosevelt and Lodge—“he is a good hater,” as Wilson’s friend and press secretary Ray Stannard Baker admitted later.6 It was also a major blunder. By being excluded from any role or consultation, the Republicans were also freed of any joint responsibility for what happened in Paris. The treaty Wilson brought back to Washington would be his work and his alone.

  He was quite prepared for that, even eager. But even he sensed he was leaving a hornet’s nest behind him in the Senate. Before he left for Paris, he delivered his annual message to Congress. He quoted from Shakespeare’s Henry V in describing how American troops had turned the tide against Germany: “Back, back, back for their enemies, always back, never again forward!” He spoke of “great days of completed achievement,” and of his plan to “translate into action the great ideals for which America has striven.”

  He also added an almost plaintive note: “May I not hope, Gentlemen of the Congress, that in the delicate tasks I shall have to perform on the other side of the sea . . . I may have the encouragement and added strength of your united support?”7 The response from the assembled congressmen and senators was chilly—“an ice bath,” one observer called it. One of the senators there, Henry Ashurst of Arizona, said that “the applause was meager; his message was long, and surely he must have felt the chilliness of his reception.” It got worse in the following days. Senate Republicans passed a resolution formally protesting President Wilson’s decision to go abroad, and calling for Vice President Thomas Marshall to take power during Wilson’s absence. It was a nonbinding resolution but a shot across the president’s bow nonetheless.8

  In Hoboken, New Jersey, at midnight on December 3, 1918, Wilson and his entourage boarded the USS George Washington (ironically, a former German liner impounded after America’s declaration of war) for the voyage across the Atlantic. Not far away, in a New York City hospital, Theodore Roosevelt lay in the grip of a mortal illness. Among his last words was a public statement denouncing the Fourteen Points and urging Britain to take the lead in stripping Germany of its power. “Let us dictate peace by the hammering guns,” he said in the waning days of the November midterm campaign, “not chat about peace to the accompaniment of the clicking of typewriters,” a clearly dismissive reference to Wilson.9 With Roosevelt’s last blessing, a great battle was looming between two different ways of seeing the war, and the world. Henry Cabot Lodge and his fellow Republicans would be on one side. They would also have important support from many other countries attending the Paris conference.

  Wilson would be on the other. By the time the conference was over, he would be almost alone.

  Wilson’s own mood began to darken as the USS George Washington left its moorings and headed out to sea. The task ahead was mammoth; the obstacles were many. He would be meeting his Allied counterparts for the first time. Delegates from twenty-seven countries, some of which had not even existed a year before, would be there, along with hundreds of experts and scholars ready to redraw the map of Europe and the world. Would his Fourteen Points really be enough of a political and moral compass for an undertaking such as this?

  One of those on board with him was George Creel, the redoubtable head of the Committee of Public Information and Wilson’s right-hand man in getting the American public geared up for war and for the magnificent peace to follow. “You know, and I know,” Wilson confided to him, “that these ancient wrongs, these present unhappinesses, are not to be remedied in a day or with a wave of the hand. What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment.”

  He also said to Creel, “I am wondering whether you have not unconsciously spun a net for me from which there is no escape.”10 He may have been referring to the expectations his propaganda expert had raised in the American public. But it could have been Wilson’s admonition to himself.

  Meanwhile, the USS George Washington sailed quietly on.

  PETROGRAD

  THERE WAS ONE major combatant, and one major leader, who would not be attending in Paris. The combatant was Russia and the leader was Lenin. Lenin’s betrayal of the other Allies in signing a separate peace at Brest-Litovsk had not been forgotten; his brutal murder of the Romanov family had put him and the Bolsheviks beyond the civilized pale. No invitation to attend was forthcoming, and none was expected. As 1918 drew to an end, any intelligent and informed observer had to conclude that Lenin’s Bolshevik Russia not only was an illegal regime but also would be a short-lived one.

  On November 18, 1918, Adm. Alexander Kolchak, hero of the Russo-Japanese War, a dedicated anti-Bolshevik and the man whom Alexander Kerensky had tried unsuccessfully to convince to assume command of the Provisional Government’s armed forces, declared himself supreme ruler of Russia from his capital in Omsk, in Western Siberia—not too far from where Wilson and the Allies were building up their forces.

  It was the worst possible news for Lenin, who controlled barely half of Russia’s prewar population. Finland, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic region, Transcaucasia, central Asia, and Siberia were all either independent states or under the control of the Whites.11 In fact, as 1919 began, Lenin’s regime was coming under military assault from three directions at once: from Kolchak’s forces operating from Western Siberia; from forces led by Gen. Anton Denikin operating in Southern Russia; and from Gen. Nikolai Yudenich’s army based in Estonia with two hundred thousand troops and six British tanks—while Vladivostok had been transformed into virtually an alternative Russian capital. An alliance between the Whites and the Allies was slow to form but difficult to avoid. The first troops to disembark in Archangel and Vladivostok had expected to be fighting Germans; then Germans and Bolsheviks, as the government in Moscow seemed poised to become Berlin’s ally. Now, with Germany’s surrender, there were only Bolsheviks to fight—and anti-Bolshevik insurgents to supply and support.

  Since the summer, also, the new Red Army had been steadily wilting under the pressure. At first its commander in chief, Trotsky, had taken stiff measures to keep units from deserting, including shooting political commissars of units that cracked. When that did no good, he fell back on installing “barrier troops” behind the front lines, with orders to shoot anyone who fled the fighting.

  The real problem through most of that fall of 1918, though, was that Lenin himself was almost entirely out of action, thanks to an assassination attempt that had left two bullets in his body and brought him within inches of death—and nearly shortened the history of communism by three-quarters of a century.

  Not surprisingly, Lenin had been the object of assassination attempts before. He was the most revered but also the most hated figure in Russia, and the single most powerful man in the government, so a host of political factions, from czarists and renegade Old Believers at one end to Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries at the other, wanted him dead. In July 1918, he had been driving to the Smolny Institute after a speech when two armed men stepped into the street and opened fire on his Rolls-Royce limousine. His Ger
man friend Fritz Platten threw himself across Lenin’s body to protect him from being hit. Lenin escaped unwounded, but Platten took a bullet in the hand.12

  The next time, Lenin was not so lucky. On August 30, he was planning to give two open-air speeches in Moscow. His sister Maria Illichna begged him not to go. There were rumors circulating that the head of the Petrograd Cheka had been assassinated. Lenin might be next. He shrugged off her worries and set forth without a bodyguard and with only his chauffeur, Stepan Gil. His first speech was to be at the Grain Commodity Exchange, in the Basmannyi District; he then went to the Mikhelson Factory, where an audience heard him give his usual speech denouncing bourgeois democracy.13

  As he left the factory and stepped into the courtyard to board his car, an angry woman stopped him. She complained that bread coming in from the countryside was still being confiscated at railroad stations, following Bolshevik ration regulations. Lenin told her that orders had been issued to stop the practice, and he then put his foot on the Rolls-Royce’s running board.

  Suddenly, another woman, dressed in work clothes, sprang forward with a pistol and shot him three times.

  One bullet went through his left shoulder blade and was wedged near the collarbone on his right side. The second bullet was far more damaging, striking him where the jaw meets the neck, near the left carotid artery. Another inch or two on either side, and the bullet would have left him completely paralyzed or severed the artery, leaving him to bleed to death in minutes.

  As it was, the wounds were serious enough to make doctors worry about his survival. They discovered that one of the bullets had punctured a lung; when she heard this, Nadezhda, who had been summoned from a meeting at Moscow University, assumed he was going to die.14 Even Lenin at one point asked, “Is the end near?” But he was tougher than the doctors thought. He insisted the wounds were not painful and urged them to leave the bullets in place. By the next day, it was clear he would pull through.