American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Where would Lodge stand on the President’s proposal? The senator’s personal antipathy toward Wilson was well known; so too, however, were his wartime statements in favor of the general idea of an international council or league. During the early stages of the Paris negotiations, Lodge hedged on the question, pleading ignorance of the President’s intentions, while touching base behind the scenes with TR and other Republican leaders inclined to distrust Wilson. Now, two days after the White House conference, he stated his position to the Senate. Lodge noted that America was being asked “to give up in part our sovereignty and independence and subject our own will to the will of other nations.” He continued: “I am not contending now that these things must not be done…. What I ask, and all I ask, is consideration, time, and thought.”

  Fair words, spoken in a moderate tone—but Lodge had already made up his mind. At the suggestion of Brandegee, he now drew up a resolution urging that “the constitution of the league of nations in the form now proposed to the peace conference should not be accepted by the United States.” Securing in a single feverous day the signatures of thirty-seven senators—enough to block the passage of any treaty—Lodge rose in the Senate just before midnight on March 3 to read his “Round Robin” into the record. Next morning, the editors of the New York Sun chortled: “Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations died in the Senate tonight. Henry Cabot Lodge … read the death warrant of the League.”

  Wilson’s response to the Senate Round Robin was swift. Previously he had tended to slight the efforts of ex-President Taft and other Republicans who had been stumping the country in support of an international peacekeeping body; now Wilson telegraphed Taft, asking that he appear with the President to speak in favor of the League. The Republican leader raced northward by train to New York, meeting Wilson just hours before he was scheduled to sail back to France. The two then addressed a cheering crowd of League supporters gathered at the Metropolitan Opera House. Taft spoke first, calling the League “the living evidence of the united power of Christian civilization to make this treaty a real treaty of peace.” Wilson then followed with a combative defense of his plan. To Lodge’s suggestion that the League be considered separately from the peace treaty, Wilson replied, “Gentlemen on this side will find the Covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the Covenant that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.”

  The next two months were to be among the most difficult of Woodrow Wilson’s life. Immediately upon his return to Paris, he received a nasty jolt: during his absence the Europeans and House, for reasons of their own, had proceeded to detach the League plan from the peace treaty—just as Lodge had suggested. With Ray Stannard Baker, the President drew up a statement reiterating his commitment to making the Covenant an integral part of the treaty, a statement so strong that Baker feared it would “break up the Conference then and there.”

  Over the next weeks, the differences between Wilson and the European leaders became starkly apparent. In particular, the rigid Clemenceau clashed repeatedly with the idealistic President. Relations between the two men, which had once seemed so promising, reached such a low that at one point Wilson prepared to abandon the talks and return to America. Gone were the happy days of the League-committee “seminar.” The conference now revolved around the daily meetings of the Big Four, and their increasingly acrimonious debates over military and territorial questions. During part of this time, Wilson was prostrated by an attack of influenza, the debilitating effects of which lingered through the spring and summer. He also became increasingly distant from Colonel House, whom he began to suspect of pursuing his own separate program at the conference. “I seldom or never have a chance to talk with him seriously,” House lamented, “and, for the moment, he is practically out from under my influence.”

  At this critical juncture, Bullitt returned from Moscow, afire with a proposal from Lenin for a truce in the Russian Civil War and negotiations to resolve the Bolsheviks’ differences with the West. Wilson, in the thick of a fight to keep his Covenant in the treaty, could spare only brief attention for Bullitt’s report. More important, the young emissary’s two original supporters, House and Lloyd George, now backed away from the prospect of dealing directly with Lenin. The Russian offer was allowed to lapse; when Bullitt repeated it to Harold Nicolson, the Englishman “blinked politely.” Wilson, meanwhile, went ahead with a unilateral withdrawal of the American forces in northern Russia, and with the promotion of his supreme goal of the League.

  In the end, Wilson preserved the Covenant by compromising on a number of issues less important to him. He accepted some of Clemenceau’s proposals for weakening Germany, agreed to British suggestions on disarmament and reparations, yielded to the Commonwealth nations on mandates, and let the Japanese retain control of Shantung. At the same time, in spite of the defiant speech he had made in New York, Wilson took steps to placate his Republican critics at home. Through Taft and some Democratic sources, Wilson learned of four basic changes that most of the signers of the Round Robin seemed to desire; in exchange for his concessions to Clemenceau and the others, Wilson was able to write three of those alterations into the Covenant. Even so, Lodge told Henry White, these were not good enough.

  The final Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, did not completely satisfy anyone, and certainly not Wilson. But at least it included a strong, well-defined League of Nations. Throughout the talks the President had put so much emphasis on the League because, in part, he believed that eventually it could correct any other mistakes embodied in the peace settlement. He had succeeded in committing the European and other leaders to this great experiment in international democracy; now he had to persuade his own countrymen.

  The Battle for the Treaty

  On July 10, 1919, just one day after his return from France, President Wilson drove to Capitol Hill to present the completed Treaty of Versailles to the Senate. In his address Wilson reviewed the causes of America’s entry into the war, the diplomatic commitments that the Allies had made to one another before America joined them, and the compromises that he had been forced to make in Paris. The treaty was not perfect, he conceded, but it did give international sanction to American principles of individual liberty, free trade, and the peaceful resolution of disputes.

  The proposed League of Nations formed the core of Wilson’s address. If the League was to fulfill its promise of bringing disarmament and peace, the President urged, then America must join it. The weaker nations trusted the good intentions of the United States, which after the Spanish-American War had honored its pledge to evacuate Cuba and begin giving self-rule to the Philippines. Leadership of the League, and thus of the world, was being offered America. “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”

  Wilson answered his own question with a stirring peroration: “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 in this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.”

  Wilson’s eloquence reverberated through a press and public that already were bestirring themselves to debate the treaty. Thanks in part to the work of ex-President Taft and the League to Enforce Peace, public opinion in general was favorable to the idea of a League of Nations. Such diverse papers as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Des Moines Register applauded Wilson’s League as a “broadening out of the Monroe Doctrine” to cover the entire world. Only an “international despot or an international pariah” could object to the League concept of collective security, the New York World opined. The Baltimore Sun unconsciously paraphrased James Madison’s language in Federalist 51, saying that the League of Nations would not “make nature angelic” but would be a large stride toward that goal. The Register put it more
succinctly: “The alternative of the league of nations is an armed America.”

  In April, the Literary Digest, in an effort to gauge public sentiment, asked newspaper editors across the country whether they favored the proposed League. Of the 1,377 editors who replied to the poll, 718 answered yes, 181 no, and 478 indicated conditional agreement. If these papers represented the views of their readers, then Democrats overwhelmingly supported the League, and even the vast majority of Republicans favored some international organization. A breakdown of the replies by region shows that the South was solidly behind the League, while conditional supporters were concentrated in the Northeast and New England. In no area did outright opponents number even 20 percent of the responses.

  But while across the country League opponents may have been few and divided, in the U.S. Senate they were powerful, concentrated, and organized. While Wilson was still in Paris, Henry Cabot Lodge and his allies had agreed to launch a public campaign against the League. With funds provided by Henry Clay Frick and by the Pennsylvania industrialist Andrew Mellon, the opponents set up their own league—the League for the Preservation of American Independence—which ran advertising and sponsored meetings nationwide. William Randolph Hearst was also persuaded to throw his vast chain of newspapers into the fight against Wilson’s proposal. Meanwhile, the New York Sun declared that “greater even than the Monroe Doctrine is the Washington Doctrine,” which warned America against entangling “our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, honor or caprice.”

  Lodge himself entertained hopes that the efforts of the League critics would eventually turn the public against Wilson’s plan, to the advantage of the Republicans in the next presidential election. Indeed, the senator made a conspicuous contribution to the public campaign by engaging Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell in a much-publicized debate of the League’s merits before a capacity crowd in Boston’s Symphony Hall.

  The real debate, however, was to occur in the Senate. The Founding Fathers had feared both a runaway majority and an overweening chief executive, so they had fragmented power throughout the structure of American government—and Lodge never for a moment lost sight of the fact that the Constitution gave the upper chamber the ultimate power of decision to accept or reject a treaty. “The only people who have votes on the treaty are here in the Senate,” he reassured a friend. A consummate dealer in the transactions of legislative politics, Lodge relied from the first on defeating Wilson and the treaty through a legislative strategy.

  Lodge’s first task was to ensure that the Republicans controlled the Senate. The election of 1918 had given the GOP a majority of two in the upper house, but Lodge had to keep in line Idaho’s William E. Borah and several old Bull Moosers who had become “irreconcilable” opponents of the treaty. While the majority of Senate Republicans agreed that some sort of league was desirable, although not necessarily the one presented by Wilson, Borah and his allies seemed willing to bolt the party rather than vote for any international organization that might infringe upon American sovereignty. Before Wilson’s return, Lodge had met with Borah and struck a deal. The irreconcilables would cooperate with the other Republicans in organizing the Senate and amending the treaty, and then would be free to vote against the pact in the final roll call. In return, Lodge would give Borah ample opportunity to promote his arguments for isolationism. Thus Borah could be sure that, even if the treaty did pass, it would be thoroughly “Republicanized.”

  The Lodge-Borah arrangement worked. The Republicans took control of the Senate, elevating Lodge to the post of majority leader—and, more important, to the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, to which Wilson now had to submit the treaty. Lodge proceeded to stack the committee with irreconcilables, and with less ideological skeptics like Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio. In particular, the new chairman denied a seat to Frank Kellogg of Minnesota, one of the foremost Senate spokesmen for the Taft wing of the party, when Kellogg refused to cooperate with Lodge’s plans.

  Lodge acted in large part out of partisan considerations: if Wilson and the Democrats were allowed to take credit for creating an international organization that outlawed war, Lodge feared, they could reap a harvest of votes in the next election and undermine for years to come the tenuous Republican majority across the country. Personal factors were also at work—the two men in fact loathed each other. “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel toward Wilson,” Lodge had written Theodore Roosevelt long before the League fight. Even Jefferson was a better man than Wilson, the senator wrote another friend; “he could not have been worse.” Soon Lodge was calling the President “the most sinister figure that ever crossed the country’s path.” His venom arose in part from his indignation that Wilson should be regarded as the foremost intellectual in American politics—this Princeton man with his popular writings, as compared with his own classical education at Harvard. Wilson, for his part, simply viewed Lodge with cold contempt.

  At the core of the hostility, however, lay genuine differences of outlook and principle. For nearly three decades, Lodge had been a leading spokesman for an aggressive, unilateralist foreign policy backed by a stronger military establishment. In the 1880s and 1890s, he had led Theodore Roosevelt and a few other young Republicans in calling for a naval buildup and the acquisition of colonies overseas. He had supported, as matters of paramount national interest, the war with Spain, the annexation of the Philippines, the building of the Panama Canal, and most of the interventions in Latin America carried out by Roosevelt and Taft. In 1919, Lodge hoped for a peace settlement that would strengthen America’s international influence vis-à-vis the European powers, and also in the Western Hemisphere. Wilson’s “idealistic” internationalism left Lodge cold, and he viewed the idea of collective security that was at the heart of Wilson’s League as a distinct threat to American freedom of action.

  The President and the senator, therefore, were engaged in a battle over two conflicting foreign policy strategies. Wilson’s concept had its intellectual origins largely in his personal moral values; Lodge’s sprang mainly from traditional power considerations. The President placed his faith in the collegial good sense of an international parliament that he had taken great pains to craft; the senator proposed to rely on the nationalist economic and military policies that he had promoted for decades.

  When the debate was cast in these terms, Lodge was able to rally some support in the Senate and in the country, yet seemingly not enough to block the treaty. In order to defeat Wilson, Lodge had to win and keep the backing of senators who opposed the treaty for a variety of other reasons, some of them not very admirable. Indeed, the struggle over the League of Nations aroused some of the basest prejudice and hate-mongering in American politics. James Reed of Missouri declared that “dark” peoples would outnumber whites three to one in the League assembly, while Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois alleged that the Catholic majority in the League would make it a tool of the Vatican. Other senators engaged in the traditional sport of twisting the lion’s tail, claiming that the British would use the League to send American boys to suppress freedom-fighters in Ireland.

  With these and other legislators, Lodge acted as a traditional power broker, agreeing to tolerate or support their objections to the treaty in return for their supporting his. Slowly Lodge worked to knit the treaty opponents into a coherent group that would act together to amend or kill Wilson’s proposal. Hiram Johnson of California came over when Lodge agreed to support Johnson’s objection to Canada, Australia, and other British dominions having an independent vote in the League. At the same time, Lodge conducted delicate negotiations with Senator Porter McCumber, one of the mildest reservationists on the treaty, to find some common ground for an amendment to Article 10—Wilson’s Covenant.

  The League’s opponents needed time to organize their coalition in the Senate and to convey their message to the general public. Lodge used parliamentary maneuvers to secure that time,
first by tying up the Foreign Relations Committee with a two-week, word-for-word reading of the entire 268-page treaty, and then by inviting every conceivable opponent of the pact to testify at length against it. Lodge’s delaying tactics, however, did not redound exclusively to his side’s advantage. Wilson was also able to use the extra time to round up votes, for he too was pursuing a legislative strategy.

  Soon after the President returned from Europe, several of his advisors suggested that he immediately tour the country to arouse further public support for the League. Other political insiders, however, most notably Herman Kohlsaat and Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, calculated that Wilson could do more good by staying in Washington to deal directly with the Senate. He heeded the advice of the latter; for six weeks he talked with senators individually and in small groups, wrote private letters to wavering Republicans, and submitted evidence—although not as much as Lodge requested—to the Foreign Relations Committee. One historian concludes that Wilson’s “approach to senators was flexible, not dogmatic and doctrinaire, not rigid and unbending.” The President answered questions and expounded on the League Covenant, but he also listened to the senators’ reservations and weighed their advice. Both Democrats and Republicans informed him that, despite the compromises that Wilson had made in Paris, the treaty would not gain the support of two-thirds of the Senate as it stood. Finding himself in a “perplexed and somewhat distressing situation,” the President nonetheless resolved to compromise once more in order to achieve his main goal of leading the United States into the League.