1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Finally, on August 14, feeling that he was ready to go on the offensive, Lodge wrote to Wilson asking for a meeting at the White House. Somewhat to his surprise, Wilson immediately agreed, and on the morning of August 19, he and Lodge and the other members of the Foreign Relations Committee, including Idaho’s William Borah, met in the East Room.

  It was a strange gathering. No detail of the meeting was kept secret, any more than the meeting itself. Stenographers took down every word and carried the results out to reporters jammed in the hall, who in turn broadcast them around the country.19 Wilson was in an increasingly uncompromising mood, one not helped by the constant headaches and the feeling of exhaustion that dogged him almost daily. He assumed that Lodge’s concerns about the Monroe Doctrine exception and the procedure for withdrawal from the League had been covered by the changes he had made in Paris—they had not, as he would find out later—and so steered discussion away from those points. On the issue of reservations—in Lodge’s opinion, these were better than amendments because they would not require changing the pact, but would merely register America’s formal exception to certain provisions, even when it had passed—Wilson said he had no objections, either, provided such reservations weren’t “embodied in the instrument of ratification,” which would have required review by the Allies all over again.

  The real issue, however, boiled down to the by-now-notorious Article 10, the Covenant’s final word on collective security, or Wilson’s belief that any attack on a member of the League should be viewed as an attack on all, and should be treated as such.

  Article 10 read as follows: “The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.”20

  No issue was bound to arouse more hostility from the other men in the East Room. Wilson saw Article 10 as the way to replace the “balance of power” with what he called a “community of power.” It not only proposed that if any member of the League were attacked, everyone should view the threat in the same way: as an attack on a peaceful and just world order. It also required every member to make the same sacrifice in terms of committing military force, if the League council so deemed it.

  This could mean, for example, that if Yugoslavia found itself attacked by Italy, or China by Japan, the League could order the U.S. Marines to the rescue if it decided that was the most effective response—even if the United States had no dog in that fight, as Senator Borah might have put it.

  Wilson impatiently waved their objections away. Article 10 “is in no respect of doubtful meaning when read in the light of the covenant as a whole,” he airily said. “The council of the league can only ‘advise upon’ the measures by which the obligations of that great article are to be given effect to.” Military participation for an individual country such as the United States would be a matter of “a moral, not a legal, obligation.”21

  This answer seemed even more confusing than the original article. Sitting there in the East Room, Wilson himself could not clearly explain the difference between a moral and a legal obligation in international affairs (except that the latter came with some kind of sanction, whereas the former did not); nor could he explain what he meant by the council’s giving “advice” regarding what actions would discharge that obligation under Article 10. That was exactly what worried men such as Borah and Lodge. It sounded a lot like signing a blank check on future American military action, with no clear answer as to what would happen if the United States decided to say no. And if the United States (or any other League member) could say no with impunity, which was what Wilson seemed to imply, then what was the point of Article 10 in the first place?

  The arguments ran on and on, politely and without rancor, but by the time the August 19 meeting broke up, it was obvious that there was no room for compromise on either side. Two great and ultimately incompatible visions of the United States’ present and future role in the world were on a direct collision course.

  One vision—Wilson’s vision—was of the United States subordinating its own national interests to an institution representing the larger global community, for the sake of peace and security, while retaining its leadership by moral example. The other was of the United States, for all its moral exceptionalism as the world’s standard-bearer of liberty, being essentially a Great Power like other Great Powers, with vital national interests to protect and defend—in conjunction and alliance with other nations if possible, but by acting alone if necessary.

  One side, Wilson’s side, saw the traditional balance of power between nation-states as a formula for protecting tyrannical and unjust political systems and as the chief source of conflict among nations—as witnessed by the Great War just fought. For Lodge and his friend and mentor the late Theodore Roosevelt, that balance of power preserved the peace among nations. It was when one power tried to overthrow that balance, as Germany did in 1914 (and would do again in 1939), that wars broke out and violence and injustice spread themselves across the landscape, as other nations rose up to defend their interests by any means necessary. This was why both Lodge and Roosevelt had supported going to war on the side of the Allies almost at once—because they saw a German-dominated Europe as more hazardous to U.S. interests than one in which the traditional balance of power was maintained.

  Yet that was precisely why Wilson had refused to go to war. To act in that manner was to act as other nations did, which was exactly what America’s destiny forbade it to do. If America acted like others (France and Britain, for example), then “all the fame of America would be gone, and all her power dissipated.” Instead, “we set this Nation up to make men free, and we did not confine our conception and purpose to America, and now we will make men free.”22

  It was on this same point that Wilson’s vision and Lenin’s startingly agreed. Both conceived of a new international order that transcended the boundaries of traditional politics and of history. One was founded on a universal commitment to freedom for all peoples everywhere; the other on a world proletarian revolution that would eliminate all injustice forever.

  But both new orders, they believed, would be inevitably imposed on others by the forces of history, whether people wanted their lives transformed or not. The force of history as Hegel and then Marx had formulated it was not a force that can be resisted; it was a power that both Lenin and Wilson believed they had personified, and which gave their actions a singular rightness that no opponent could or should dare to oppose.

  Yet each man had been forced to make moral choices that contradicted his universal vision. To bring peace to the world, Wilson had been forced to go to war; to bring freedom to the proletariat, Lenin had enslaved everyone else, and eventually the proletariat as well. In 1917, both men had decided to step outside the normal course of events and act according to their own visions of reality. In the aftermath, however, that normal course of events had come back to bite them—for Lenin, in the Russian Civil War; for Wilson, in the battle over the League of Nations.

  Lenin had endured his greatest trial in 1918–19 and escaped destruction by the skin of his teeth. Now it was Wilson’s turn to undergo the fiery trial, at the hands of the U.S. Senate.

  Nonetheless, one ineluctable fact was that America had gone to war in 1917, and had radically changed the character of the war from a bout between European Great Powers into an international crusade for freedom and justice. As the Democratic leader in the Senate put it, “Internationalism has come” for America; “we must choose what form the internationalism is to take.”23 It is impossible to say now, one hundred years later, which side was ultimately right and which wrong about when America should have gone to war, and why. Wilson had asked for war, and had gotten it on terms both sides could accept.

  Now the two great visions for America were on a
collision course once again, in the aftermath of war and in considering America’s relationship with the League of Nations. And as the summer of 1919 turned into fall, both sides gathered their forces for the final showdown.

  On Lodge’s side, his hearings that August had shifted the public mood. Former president William Howard Taft, previously one of the League’s biggest supporters, now came out in favor of reservations. A few days before the White House conference, Lodge gave a speech on the League and the treaty in the Senate that packed the visitors’ gallery. Nearly every sentence drew wild cheers, with ladies waving their handkerchiefs and a group of marines banging their helmets on their chairs. Even the press gallery cheered Lodge on. Whenever a pro-League Democrat rose to pose a question, he was met by hisses and boos. This marked a sea change. The media, as well as other senators, watched and digested what they saw and heard.24

  By August 20, Lodge was feeling confident that more than a third of the senators, in addition to his allies among the hard-core opponents of the League, would vote against the treaty if the reservations weren’t included. If a vote came up on Wilson’s treaty, it would go down to a crushing defeat. It was now up to Wilson to give ground if he wanted the League of Nations saved.

  Wilson, however, was not a man who gave ground easily. He heard the bad news coming out of the Senate, even from his own supporters, and, on August 27, announced he was going on a cross-country speaking tour to arouse the American people to the importance of supporting the League, and to put pressure on senators in their home states. Both Edith Wilson and Dr. Grayson were appalled by the decision. They knew the true state of the president’s health, even though the press and the public were still in the dark. But Wilson refused to reconsider. “I have to go,” he told Grayson in the end.

  The tour would begin in Columbus, Ohio. It would head out to the West Coast and back, and would include several stops in California. Thirty-three stops were planned across the country, with a major speech, sometimes two speeches, in each. No president, not even Theodore Roosevelt, had ever done a whistle-stop tour quite like this one—certainly not a president with one or possibly two strokes on his medical chart. But Wilson felt this was his destiny, even if it cost him his life.25

  On the evening of September 2, 1919, Wilson arrived at Washington, DC’s, Union Station. His private railway car, named the Mayflower like his presidential yacht, was waiting for him. His aide Joe Tumulty had planned the itinerary down to the last stop. The tour would last twenty-seven days, and would take Wilson all the way from Columbus, Ohio, to the Pacific Coast. He was skipping the South, where his word as Democratic president was law, League or no League. He would also bypass the Northeast, which was Lodge’s and the GOP’s stronghold. Instead, he intended to take the fight to the stronghold of the uncommitted, the land that stretched across the Midwest and the Great Plains and was represented by a bevy of wavering senators.

  How many votes he expected to get by doing the tour, no one could guess, not even Wilson. He had written years before, “[T]he Senate is not so immediately sensitive to [public] opinion” as the House of Representatives, “and is apt to grow, if anything, more stiff if pressure of that kind is brought to bear upon it.”26 Yet it was the only Plan B he had.

  As the presidential train pulled out of the station, Henry Cabot Lodge’s puzzled but wry reaction was: “The only people who have the vote on the treaty are here in the Senate.”27 He was more prescient than Wilson’s devoted admirers were willing to admit.

  TO THE REPORTERS on the train, President Woodrow Wilson seemed in excellent health and in good trim, as he had always been. Only his wife, Edith; his doctor, Grayson; and Joe Tumulty, his political Cagliostro, knew the truth—but they also knew Wilson could not quit, not now.

  Each stop became another Station of the Cross, another ordeal to be endured.

  Certainly, the first, in Columbus, did nothing to lift anyone’s mood. The crowd at the station was apathetic and sparse. Barely a fifth of the seats in the reviewing stand (which had a two-thousand-seat capacity) were filled.28

  Things went better at the hired hall. Wilson wore a dark gray suit as he gave a lackluster speech to a packed audience. He was there, he said, to inform the American public “concerning those affairs of the world which now need to be settled.” He added, “[T]he only people I owe any report to are you and the other citizens of the United States.” It was a theme he would return to again and again: he owed nothing to the U.S. Senate; his obligation was only to the American people as they existed in his grand vision.

  In Indianapolis, things went still better, but Wilson’s voice seemed strained—as did his message. He said it was time for his critics “to put up or shut up.” It wasn’t until he reached St. Louis that he hit his stride. The event was more like those of his two presidential campaigns than a public appearance by a semi-invalid. He jubilantly toured the city for three hours, and at the Coliseum, where he had been nominated for the presidency for the second time, he received an ovation many considered the biggest in the history of the city.

  He offered strong meat to an enthusiastic crowd. He said if the treaty and the League were defeated, he would have to go back to the doughboys who had fought in France and tell them, “ ‘Boys, I told you before you went across the seas that this war was a war against wars, and I did my best to fulfill the promise, but I am obliged to come to you in mortification and shame and say I have not been able to fulfill the promise. You are betrayed. You fought for something that you did not get.’ ” The crowd went wild.

  Then came Kansas City and Des Moines (September 6), Omaha and Sioux Falls (September 8). In Kansas City, he savagely lashed out at Lodge and other opponents of the League as “men who think only of some immediate advantage to themselves.” He gained satisfaction in thinking that “when at last in the annals of mankind, they are gibbeted, they will regret that the gibbet is so high.”29

  Kansas City marked the high point of the tour. From there, the speeches (often two a day, with an hour or more allotted for each) steadily degenerated into off-script rants. For the first time in his life, Wilson had run out of things to say. He tried to gain control of his message. One reporter saw the president “pounding strenuously on his typewriter” as the train pulled out of Kansas City. But usually he produced no useful notes. He was just an angry, increasingly sick man pulling out of his head whatever arguments he could remember.30

  In Des Moines, for example, he told the crowd that America was headed “to those distant heights upon which will shine at last the serene light of justice, suffusing a whole world in blissful peace”—jejune rhetoric even for him.31 Then the telegraph brought two hammer blows. The first was that Henry Cabot Lodge was presenting the Foreign Relations Committee’s report on the League to the full Senate. There were four reservations to the treaty—these included the all-important Article 10—and no fewer than forty-five amendments. Whatever happened on the rest of the tour, Wilson would still be headed back to a mammoth fight in the Senate.

  The second blow was William Bullitt’s testimony before the committee, quoting Secretary Lansing saying that the League of Nations was useless and that if the senators had any sense, they would defeat it. The testimony made headlines across the country, including some in Bismarck, North Dakota, where Wilson’s train had stopped. Wilson’s rage against what he saw as Lansing’s betrayal was fierce: “Think of it! This from a man whom I raised from the level of a subordinate to the great office of Secretary of State of the United States. My God! I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act in this way.”32

  First House, then Lansing, plus the once loyal Bullitt, who testified after resigning from his post in Paris in protest against the treaty—the emerging trail of betrayal added to Wilson’s headaches, which now lasted for days at a time. In Idaho, William Borah’s home state, the president got some more encouraging news: the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, had just fired Boston’s striking police force. Although Coolidge was a Republ
ican, Wilson applauded his bold action and implied it was a tribute to the fight that Wilson was making for the League of Nations. A strange tribute, perhaps, but the president’s inclination now, in the words of biographer August Heckscher, was that “all troublesome or evil things seemed to spring from uncertainty over the outcome of the League; all good things, from the prospect of its favorable conclusion.”33

  When the train reached the Pacific Coast, Wilson appeared to find at last the favorable crowds he had been looking for. “The spirit of the crowd seemed at times akin to fanaticism,” observed the New York Times. “The throngs . . . joined in a continuous and riotous uproar.” There was an emotional moment when Wilson, bareheaded, reviewed the Pacific Fleet from the forward turret of the battleship Oregon.

  In Portland that September 14, a Sunday and a day of rest, the president could pause and reflect. He had completed about half of his thirty-three planned stops. His health was precarious, but the crowds had been supportive, if not overwhelming in number, and the press coverage favorable and respectful. Yet he could not sleep: an “extremely troublesome” cough and the same persistent headache kept him awake almost all night.

  California was Hiram Johnson territory. A Progressive Republican and an isolationist, Johnson was a fierce critic of the League and the treaty generally. Californians didn’t care for the Shandong settlement in favor of the Japanese. Californians of Irish descent didn’t like the fact that Britain’s dominions, but not Ireland, would have votes in the League. The visit to the state was a low point for Wilson, physically and intellectually. A splitting headache in San Francisco left him almost unable to speak. Later, on September 19, he told an audience in San Diego that “the heart of humanity beats in [the Covenant].” If America didn’t join the League, it would be “a death warrant” for its children, who would die in the next war.34