1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  The Republicans, however, were ready and waiting for him. They had gotten wind of what was coming and wanted to force a special session of Congress, after Wilson left for France, to debate the League at length. Wilson turned down their request. (As president, only he had the authority to call a special session.) He was determined that Congress not meet until he returned to the United States at the end of the conference, when he would have both a peace treaty and the League Covenant to present as a package.

  On March 28, he did sit down to a dinner with congressional leaders, including the new Senate majority leader, Henry Cabot Lodge. Wilson fended off one question after another about the League: whether it would violate U.S. sovereignty; whether a member nation would be free to leave it; and whether the United States must send troops to Europe or some other place as part of a League of Nations mandate.7

  Wilson replied to all of them that “in his opinion this nation would relinquish some sovereignty,” but it would do so “for the good of the world,” and that every other nation in the League would have to make the same sacrifice. He said that any member could leave if it took “the proper steps,” and that sending troops would not be mandatory under the League Covenant—in his opinion.8

  Two days later, it was Lodge’s turn in the Senate. Everyone hates war, the senator stated at the start, and therefore it was time to lay aside the argument that if men differed over how to prevent one, then the other side must necessarily be against peace. He went on solemnly, “No question has ever confronted the United States Senate which equals in importance that which is involved in the league of nations . . . There should be no undue haste in considering it . . .”

  Right now, he averred, “it seems to have been very hastily drafted, and the result is crudeness and looseness of expression, unintentional, I hope.” There was no clear clause about voluntary withdrawal from the League, despite what the president had said. Every clause, including the one regarding leaving the League, seemed to be open to conflicting interpretations. All these would have to be straightened out and clarified before the Senate put its stamp of approval on the treaty.

  Then the Senate majority leader closed on the heart of the matter. In joining this League, he said, “We abandon entirely by the proposed constitution the policy laid down by [George] Washington in the Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine . . . Washington declared against permanent alliances. He did not close the door on temporary alliances for particular purposes.” The entry into the Great War had been such an alliance. But now “the Washington policy is to be entirely laid aside and we are to enter upon a permanent and indissoluble alliance . . . Let us not overlook the profound gravity of this step.”

  He made some suggestions for changes, including adding a clause to protect the Monroe Doctrine as part of traditional U.S. policy and changing Article 10, which obliged the United States to “guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence” of other League members—which could only mean committing beforehand to the use of force in conflicts and in places unknown.

  Lodge added that he was not ruling out the United States’ joining an organization such as a League of Nations, but as far as the current version went, “we are asked to abandon the policies which we have adhered to during all our life as a Nation”—and that, he believed, the Senate should not do.9

  When he learned of Lodge’s speech, Wilson’s fury was overwhelming. He told a meeting of the Democratic National Committee that their Republican opponents were “blind and little provincial people, they are the littlest and most contemptible . . . They are going to have the most conspicuously contemptible names in history . . . If I did not despise them, I would feel sorry for them.” He furiously set to work to use every tool at his disposal, including appealing directly to the American people, to defeat them. The promise of this League was, he declared, nothing less than “an international miracle.”10

  The Republicans shrugged off Wilson’s rage. On March 2, Lodge and Senators Frank Brandegee and Philander Knox circulated a petition among their colleagues denouncing the League. Forty senators, all but one of them Republicans, signed what became known as Lodge’s Round Robin. Forty did not represent a Senate majority by any means, but it was not a good send-off as Wilson headed back to France.

  Worse was to come on the other side of the Atlantic. One of Wilson’s most important arguments was that his League was inseparable from the peace treaty. When he got back to Paris on March 13, he learned, to his shock, that this was exactly what Edward House had been working to undo. Lloyd George and Clemenceau had learned about the Round Robin and had decided it was time to take a fresh look at Wilson’s “toy,” as Australian prime minister Hughes had branded it.

  The other members of the Big Four began pushing for a preliminary peace treaty with Germany first; only then would they take up the League. It was actually a good idea, one that, if implemented, could have prevented the long delays that complicated relations with the Germans later on. Wilson, however, would have none of it. When he learned that House had been involved in these discussions, which included raising the issue of creating a separate republic for the German Rhineland (one of France’s pet projects), Wilson exploded.

  Edith saw him right afterward. “He seemed to have aged ten years,” she remembered. “He smiled bitterly. ‘House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again.’ ”11

  So, he did, and hammered and cajoled the French and British delegations into accepting once again the linkage between endorsing the League and agreeing to the peace treaty. Yet the bond of trust between Wilson and House had been shattered beyond repair. His most important and sensible associate, especially in dealing with the other Allies, was now permanently sidelined, at a time when Wilson’s own physical and mental health was increasingly in doubt. On May 30, House noted in his diary, “I seldom or never have a chance to talk to him seriously . . . he is practically out from under my influence.” Many of the troubles that came during the rest of the conference, including those with Italy and Japan, might have been avoided if House had been able to offer advice and counsel that Wilson was willing to accept—but which more and more he was not.

  House’s sidelining actually gave the other leaders in the Big Four, including Lloyd George, some additional leverage with Wilson. In the last two months of the conference, whenever they wanted to wring a concession from Wilson on some point, they would threaten to revisit the question of the League Covenant. Instead of holding the Allies hostage to the League of Nations, as he had hoped, Wilson was now the hostage. And because he was staking everything on his hope that a future League of Nations would set straight all the problems and inconsistencies left unresolved by the Peace Conference, including the treaty with Germany—even though, inexplicably, Germany was denied membership in the League—the future of his new world order was being held hostage as well.

  Nonetheless, the Wilson who strode down the aisle of the Senate chamber on July 10, 1919, was ready to do battle. With the consent of the Allies, he had made some cosmetic changes to the League Covenant. The Senate was not going to accept any of these, especially since the exemption of the Monroe Doctrine from League jurisdiction was still missing from the document. But against the U.S. Senate, Wilson firmly believed he had the moral force of the planet behind him, and he would prevail.

  “The treaty constitutes nothing less than a world settlement,” he told the assembled senators. It was the direct fruit of America’s entry into the world war, an act that decisively turned the tide of the conflict but that sprang from “a different footing from every other nation’s . . . We entered it, not because our material interests were directly threatened or because any special treaty obligations to which we were parties had been violated, but only because we saw the supremacy, and even the validity, of right everywhere put in jeopardy,” and freedom imperiled by aggression and tyranny. “We entered the war as the disinterested champions of
right,” he reminded his audience, “and we interested ourselves in the terms of the peace in no other capacity.”

  It was precisely to protect the supremacy of right that the treaty before them had been crafted, Wilson averred. It was “not exactly what we would have written” if left to ourselves, but it still represented a transformative departure from everything that had come before.

  “War had lain at the heart of every arrangement of Europe—of every arrangement of the world—that preceded the war. Restive peoples . . . knew that no old policy meant anything else but force, force—always force. And they knew that it was intolerable.” Wilson glossed over the fact that the old arrangement had managed to keep Europe out of a general war for nearly a century, but his mind was focused not on history but on the future.

  He conceded that “it was not easy to graft the new order of ideas upon the old,” in the drafting of the treaty. “Some of the fruits of the grafting may, I fear, for a time be bitter.” Nonetheless, “every true heart in the world . . . demanded that, at whatever the cost of independent action, every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom should lend itself to a new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics . . .”

  It was important that America, and the Senate, not disappoint them. He added dramatically, “Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty? Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”

  He concluded that “a new role and a new responsibility have come to this great nation that we honor and which we would all wish to lift to yet higher levels of service and achievement.”

  Wilson’s speeches usually included something that astonished (or appalled) his audience, but nothing prepared the Senate for what he said next. Wilson suddenly pushed aside his prepared text, lifted his eyes, and intoned a peroration like none an American president had ever given.

  “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who has led us into this way. We cannot turn back . . . The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.”12

  It was a bizarre speech, even for Woodrow Wilson, and utterly out of step with the occasion. Even Wilson’s supporters in the chamber, such as Arizona senator Henry Ashurst, were stunned by its misplaced religiosity and bad poetry. Ashurst wrote later, “Wilson’s speech was as if the head of a great Corporation, after committing his company to enormous undertakings, when called upon to render a statement as to the meanings and extent of the obligations he had incurred, should arise before the Board of Directors and tunefully read Longfellow’s Psalm of Life.”13

  Ashurst noted mournfully that “League opponents were in a state of felicity”; they sensed that Wilson had blown it. They may also have been rather miffed at his effort at emotional blackmail. Wilson was implying that to say no to the treaty, and to the League of Nations, would be to betray America’s highest responsibilities as a nation to the world—and break the world’s heart. But many senators were asking, “What about our responsibilities to America?” And if refusing to consent to a treaty that was flawed, badly conceived, and in many ways unjust was a betrayal of American boys’ sacrifice on the battlefield, then why had we sent them there in the first place?

  That question would arise in most Americans’ minds later, especially when their boys came home with stories of how much they had sacrificed, and how little had been gained. For now, senators were focused on the immediate issue at hand: could they give their consent to a treaty that left important questions unanswered—questions the president seemed unable to answer himself? House had warned Wilson that “a fight was the last thing to be brought about, and then only when it cannot be avoided.” Perhaps Wilson listened to House on this occasion, because on July 15, he agreed to meet with individual senators every day from ten o’clock to noon, to address their concerns and allay their fears. The first meetings went well; then, on the nineteenth, a Saturday, he and Edith set out on a cruise on the Potomac on the presidential yacht, the Mayflower.

  It went very badly. Wilson became profoundly ill and spent the entire two-day cruise flat on his back in his cabin. He spent another day in bed after they got back.14 His doctor Cary Grayson told the press it was a bout of dysentery. In retrospect, there can be no doubt Wilson had suffered a second stroke, more serious than the one in late April. In a day or two, he began meeting with senators in the Oval Office, but anyone who spoke to him or simply looked at him could see he was a man stretched to the end of his physical and mental powers.

  Yet the battle over the League was just getting started. On August 1, Henry Cabot Lodge’s hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began. In the coming bruising battle over the fate of the treaty, not only in the Senate but in the court of American public opinion, Lodge had lost his most influential and steadfast ally. Theodore Roosevelt had died on January 6, quietly, in his sleep, at Sagamore Hill. (Roosevelt’s son Archibald had telegraphed to his brothers and sisters, “The old lion is dead.”) Lodge attended the funeral at Oyster Bay, along with William Howard Taft and the Republicans’ presidential candidate in 1916, Charles Evans Hughes. None of them commanded the national, let alone international, respect Roosevelt had, especially on an issue such as the League of Nations, though Taft was a League supporter.

  Roosevelt had been opposed not to a League of Nations, but just to a Wilsonian one. He had warned that America could never again “completely withdraw into its shell” and that consultation with other nations would help avert future wars. But the League he had foreseen was one that would be “an addition to, and in no sense a substitute for the preparedness of our own strength for our own defense.” He saw the Great Powers acting in concert, introducing “some kind of police system in the weak and disorderly countries at their thresholds,” while the United States tended to the Western Hemisphere. Above all, he had written after the armistice, “let us with deep seriousness ponder every promise we make so as to be sure our own people will fulfill it.”15

  Now Roosevelt was gone. But Henry Cabot Lodge had other weapons in his own political arsenal. He knew more about foreign affairs than any other American politician, far more than Wilson. He also had an unexpected ally in William Borah, the Republican senator from Idaho. A rock-ribbed isolationist and Progressive, Borah had vigorously opposed the war but was also opposed to the League of Nations—so much so that he had refused to attend Wilson’s at-home dinner on March 28. Although he and Lodge disagreed on just about everything, their shared opposition to the League allowed the Senate majority leader to strike a deal. He convinced Borah it would be impossible to defeat the League in a straight up-or-down vote. Too many wavering Republicans who disliked this or that aspect of the treaty but were afraid to oppose it outright would end up voting for it.

  Yet if Borah and his allies agreed to support a series of amendments (or reservations, as Lodge called them) aimed at protecting U.S. interests and still didn’t like the results, they would be free to vote against it. Borah signed on.16 This ensured that those opposed to the League would have not only enough Republican votes to carry almost all of Lodge’s proposed reservations, but also Borah’s oratorical skills—the Idaho senator was a well-known spellbinder—coming up in support at every step. Borah was not as important an ally as TR would have been, but he filled the gap nicely.

  Lodge’s other ally was Wilson himself. In the Senate, “there were not a few who . . . shared Lodge’s personal distaste for Wilsonian rhetoric” and for the president’s high-handed approach to politics, which had alienated almost as many Democrats as Republicans.17 For six long years, they had endured his often arrogant treatment of them, and his behaving as if the House and Senate did not exist. Even the Democrats who would dutifully cast their votes with their president were, many of them, not entirely with him in spirit. If the defeat of the treaty and of the League ended up being a humiliating one for Wilson as well, not many tears would be shed in the Senate cloa
kroom.

  For now, Lodge’s main problem, in fact, was not so much Wilson as the American public. Polls showed they strongly supported the League of Nations. Lodge figured he knew why: “knowing nothing of the details,” the average man assumed “since the principle was good the plan was also.” This was what Lodge set out to disprove in his hearings.

  One of his first witnesses was Secretary of State Lansing, who powerfully, though unintentionally, helped Lodge’s cause. Wilson had left Lansing out in the hallway during the months of negotiations in Paris, largely because he did not trust him—in some ways, correctly: Lansing was no fan of the League of Nations. Lodge’s probing questions exposed how little America’s own secretary of state knew about what the League Covenant meant at key points, or how specific articles and subsequent modifications of the treaty had been arrived at. Lodge called it a “pathetic exhibition,” and wrote to his daughter, “What do you suppose Lansing did while he was in Paris?” Clearly, he did not oversee his country’s foreign affairs—and if anyone was responsible for this dereliction of duty, it was not Lansing but Wilson.18

  The administration’s case for the League of Nations went downhill from there. The committee asked for documents and papers relating to the Paris conference, which Wilson had offered to surrender in his July 10 speech but which he now resolutely refused to hand over—or delayed so long in producing that committee members, even Democrats, had to shrug their shoulders in frustration. The committee also heard from delegations from Italian American, Irish American, African American, and even Swedish American groups protesting one aspect of the Covenant or another. (Rejection of the racial equality clause was a particularly bitter grievance for members of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and their spokesman, W. E. B. Du Bois.) Meanwhile, Lodge fought to bring along wavering Republicans who liked the idea of a League and were prepared to vote for this one, even though they had one minor reservation or another.