American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The key to Wilson’s strategy of conciliation lay with a small group of Republican senators, led by Kellogg, who had proposed a set of four moderate revisions to the treaty. If Wilson and Kellogg could rally a large enough coalition around those reservations, which were mainly interpretive in nature, they could beat Lodge at his own game. The contest settled into a battle of parliamentary tactics. Wilson persuaded Kellogg to submit his interpretive reservations as a separate resolution, requiring a two-thirds majority for passage, to be considered at the same time as the treaty itself. As Wilson explained the plan to his supporters, a coalition strong enough to pass Kellogg’s resolution would be strong enough to pass the treaty. By accepting Kellogg’s compromise, Wilson hoped to maneuver the Republican moderates into voting for the League.

  Lodge recognized at once that Wilson’s tactics threatened his own efforts at coalition-building. The senator insisted that reservations to the treaty had to be submitted as amendments to the text itself, to be approved or rejected by a simple majority vote. Lodge could rally a potential majority behind his grab-bag of amendments, but not a two-thirds majority. The parliamentary arithmetic was plain: if Wilson won on the procedural question of what form reservations should take, the moderate Republicans would probably rally around Kellogg’s resolution as the best possible compromise and the treaty would pass substantially as Wilson wanted it.

  The real climax of the legislative battle, therefore, came on August 20 when Democratic Senator Key Pittman moved that reservations to the treaty be passed in a contemporaneous resolution. Lodge met the challenge head-on, appealing to his fellow Republicans to stand together as a majority and thus retain control over consideration of the treaty. Faced with the prospect of dividing their party to the ultimate advantage of a Democratic President, most of the moderate Republicans sided with Lodge and the irreconcilables on the procedural question. Pittman was forced to delay his motion for a week while Wilson’s allies sought in vain to rally the mild reservationists back to their side. Finally, on August 27, the President conceded defeat in his tactical struggle with Lodge.

  So Lodge had won—in the Senate. He had won because he had carried out one of the most brilliant feats of transactional leadership in the Senate’s history. He had controlled both his Senate majority and his committee with consummate skill. When a senator threatened to drift off the reservation, Lodge spared no pains to persuade the right man to get in touch with the right politicians who could bring the man back into the fold. Day after day he brokered and traded with both the reservationists and the anti-League extremists in his own party. He played the game like a chess master, arraying his men, calculating his tactics, exploiting time, coldly analyzing his foe’s moves, keeping his queen and his king—his committee chairmanship and his majority leadership—intact and in command.

  Wilson too played a strong game in the Senate, mustering all his presidential and personal influence, using face-to-face persuasion, pulling back when need be, always holding his Senate Democrats in line. But the Senate was Lodge’s chessboard, not his. It was Lodge’s two-thirds rule for ratifying treaties, Lodge’s majority rule for amending treaties, not his.

  Wilson’s strength lay in a much wider field, the national electorate. Lodge, to be sure, had not neglected this field: several hundred thousand copies of his key Senate speech were sent to his Senate friends for grassroots distribution; anti-League propaganda organs were busy; Lodge turned to Irish and other ethnic groups for support. But Wilson would transcend all this. By appealing to the nation he could transform the very ground on which the battle was being fought—and transform global politics in the process.

  On the same day that he conceded Senate defeat to Lodge, the President announced his intention of appealing to the country.

  On the evening of September 3, the presidential special rolled out of Washington’s Union Station. The engine drew only seven cars: quarters for the servants, reporters, Secret Service men, and the train crew that accompanied Wilson; a dining car; and, last in line, the President’s blue-painted private coach, the Mayflower. As they sat together in the lounge of the final car, Wilson’s three chosen companions for the journey—his wife Edith, his devoted secretary Joseph Tumulty, and the uneasy doctor Cary Grayson—eyed the President anxiously.

  Wilson had never seemed to recover fully from his bout of influenza in Paris. For weeks he had suffered daily from mind-numbing headaches. The strain of his constant negotiations with the Senate showed in every line on his face, every irritable word and clipped gesture. Grayson, familiar with Wilson’s history of periodic physical breakdowns under stress, was vehemently opposed to the trip. But the President was determined to make his appeal to the country, to circumvent by force of eloquence and will the constitutional impasse that threatened to nullify his diplomatic craftsmanship. He believed that American leaders, like British parliamentarians, should “take their case to the people.”

  When the train arrived next morning in Columbus, Ohio, the President seemed to brighten somewhat. The cheering crowds, though not as large or as reverential as those in Europe, were plainly a tonic to him. He opened his first speech of the tour with words of relief: “I have long chafed at confinement in Washington and I have wanted to report to you and other citizens of the United States.”

  Public speaking as the enunciation of moral principles in clear ringing terms was Wilson’s first love, his greatest political asset. As the audiences responded to his verbal magic, some of Wilson’s frustration at the near-checkmate in the Senate began to ease away. He reached out to touch the issue closest to the hearts of his listeners. If the treaty could be passed, he declared with a beat of his hands, then “men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again!” He also reached upward, to the high ideals that were the staple of his political philosophy. “America was not founded to make money,” he told businessmen in St. Louis, “it was founded to lead the world on the way to liberty.”

  The swing around the country was not destined to be a triumphant march of idealism, however. The President’s visits triggered opposition as well as applause. In Missouri, a minister countered Wilson by denouncing the League as a Wall Street plot. A Milwaukee socialist labeled the President’s plan a “capitalist scheme” to bring “more wars and more armaments.”

  Lodge, meanwhile, was not idle. Although he remained firmly committed to his legislative strategy, he did dispatch several of his allies from among the irreconcilables to counter Wilson in the battle for public opinion. Hiram Johnson arrived in the Midwest shortly after Wilson left and brought an anti-League rally to its feet with charges that England hoped to use the international pact to send a hundred thousand American soldiers to fight in Constantinople. James Reed stumped New England, where doubts about the League and suspicions of Britain were most concentrated. Reed played to the hilt his assigned role of twisting the lion’s tail; “the bloody footprints of John Bull,” he exclaimed in speech after speech on the treaty, were “all over the dastardly document.” But it was back in Washington that Lodge landed the most telling blow, against both the League and against Wilson personally. The senator summoned William Bullitt, still smarting over what he regarded as Wilson’s betrayal of the peace mission to Russia, to testify about Secretary of State Lansing’s true attitude toward the treaty. Bullitt told the Foreign Relations Committee that Lansing had been less than candid in publicly stating his support for the treaty, that privately the Secretary believed the League was “entirely useless” and should “unquestionably be defeated.” When quizzed by the press, Lansing refused to deny that he had made such remarks to Bullitt.

  The rising echoes of opposition that pursued Wilson denied him the release he had sought in the speaking tour. As the special moved westward, the President telescoped his schedule of speeches, canceled the days that had been set aside for rest, harangued crowds at every whistle-stop from the rear platform of his train. His headaches and nausea grew worse. Grayson feared that Wilson was trying to kill himself.


  As the strain mounted, Wilson strove to answer the attacks on the treaty point by point. The people were being “deliberately misled,” he charged in Oakland, especially about the plan for collective security. In Reno and elsewhere, he laid out the rationale behind Article 10, the League Covenant that he himself had composed.

  “Article 10 is the heart of the enterprise. Article 10 is the test of the honor and courage and endurance of the world. Article 10 says that every member of the League, and that means every fighting power in the world … solemnly engages to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other members of the League. If you do that, you have absolutely stopped ambitious and aggressive war….”

  The pressure on Wilson drove him again and again to an emotional prophecy: “I have it in my heart that if we do not do this great thing now, every woman ought to weep because of the child in her arms. If she has a boy at her breast, she may be sure that when he comes to manhood this terrible task will have to be done once more. Everywhere we go, the train, when it stops, is surrounded with little children, and I look at them almost with tears in my eyes, because I feel my mission is to save them. These glad youngsters with flags in their hands—I pray God that they may never have to carry that flag upon the battlefield.”

  The campaigner was fighting his heart out on his own battlefield. On September 25, as the train was pulling out of Pueblo, Colorado, the first premonitory stroke hit the President, temporarily leaving his whole left side numb and practically useless. Wilson pleaded for a chance to continue the journey, to show Lodge and the others that he was not a quitter, but Grayson rallied Tumulty and Edith to dissuade him. The train sped back to Washington, where Wilson suffered an even more massive stroke on the night of October 1. For the next weeks he wavered on the edge of death. By crusading for the League, Wilson had indeed nearly thrown his own life away—yet he had not succeeded in changing a single vote in the Senate.

  Wilson lay imprisoned in his White House sickroom for more than two months after his strokes. His left side was paralyzed, his speech blurred, his vision drastically reduced. Cutting the President off from visitors, Grayson and Mrs. Wilson concealed from the country the seriousness of his condition. With the help of Tumulty and the White House staff, they handled the routine business of the government until Wilson insisted he was well enough to work. He was barely able to receive Senator Hitchcock, the Democratic floor leader, for a few brief consultations as the final vote on the treaty drew near.

  The debate over the treaty culminated on November 19, when the Senate finally voted on the package of fourteen amendments Lodge had assembled. Among them was the reservation Lodge himself had composed to delete Article 10, the League’s collective security pact: “The United States assumes no obligation to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country or to interfere in controversies between nations,” except when Congress, in each individual case, agreed to do so. Wilson had always opposed Lodge’s attack on Article 10. From his sickbed, just two days before the final vote, he told Hitchcock that it was “a nullification of the Treaty and utterly impossible,” the moral equivalent of South Carolina’s nullifying ordinances of the 1830s. “That cuts the heart out of the Treaty; I could not stand for those changes for a moment.” By letter Wilson instructed the Senate Democrats to vote against the treaty as amended by Lodge.

  In the Senate, three factions squared off for the showdown. The Democrats and the irreconcilables voted down Lodge’s reservations by 39 to 55; then the Republican moderates joined the irreconcilables to defeat Wilson’s unamended treaty by 38 to 53. On the surface it was a straight party vote. Only four Democrats supported Lodge’s final bill, and only one Republican backed Wilson’s. In fact, however, it had taken Lodge months of adroit maneuvering to bring about this ultimate result. The Treaty of Versailles was dead, and it was Wilson’s Democrats who were forced to administer the final blow.

  For decades scholars have asked why Wilson allowed the treaty to go down in defeat, why he did not just swallow hard and accept the Lodge reservations as one more necessary concession. One doctor who has done an exhaustive analysis of Wilson’s medical and emotional history maintains that the massive stroke he suffered in the fall of 1919 was the decisive factor in the situation. “It is almost certain,” writes Edwin A. Weinstein, “that had Wilson not been so afflicted, his political skills and his facility with language would have bridged the gap” between the Democrats and the Republican reservationists. Weinstein notes that Wilson’s judgment was clouded by “cerebral dysfunction” in the wake of the stroke, and that his access to information necessary for rational political calculation was being severely limited by his wife and physician. As recently as February 1919, Wilson had shown himself to be an able compromiser; the change, Weinstein concludes, must have stemmed from the President’s physical collapse.

  This analysis assumes that the Republican moderates were still amenable to compromise as the final vote approached. In fact, however, Wilson had already tried to conciliate the reservationists but had lost their support by the end of August; hence the swing around the country. Moreover, Wilson did make one more stab at compromise from his sickbed. His instructions to the Senate Democrats focused on the key Lodge reservation to Article 10. One could conclude that the other reservations were negotiable as long as the attack on the League’s covenant of collective security was deleted. Lodge, however, had by November woven too tight a legislative coalition for Wilson to sunder. None of the reservationists dared to desert Lodge’s amendment lest they see their own pet changes also struck down. Thus Wilson’s famous remark to Hitchcock, that it was up to Lodge to make a move toward compromise, was reasoned political analysis rather than the petulance of a sick man.

  The peculiarities of Wilson’s character were well known during his lifetime and have been subjected to endless analysis since. That Wilson’s self-esteem was damaged in his childhood, with important consequences for his adult behavior, has been commonly accepted by scholars. It still is legitimate to ask, however, whether Wilson was as much the prisoner of those psychological problems as some authors have made him out to be. Time and again in his political career, Wilson in fact was able to transcend his personal limitations. Certainly in the process of drafting and defending the Treaty of Versailles the President made repeated, skillful concessions in order to preserve the essence of his vision of a world parliament for peace. Even when paralyzed and nearly blind, he was able to lead the fight for the League from his darkened sickroom.

  Wilson’s mistakes in the League fight—if mistakes they were—seemed to stem more from intellectual strategy than from mental illness. Throughout his life, Wilson held as his leadership ideal the minister, the teacher, the orator. In politics he sought to practice the arts of persuasion and inspiration, to some neglect of the structural, transactional aspects of party politics. He seemed, to both friend and foe, to care little for the gritty tasks of government beyond his own agenda for reform. Also, Wilson’s focus on inspirational leadership caused him to miss opportunities for tactical alliances—such as with the League to Enforce Peace—that could have promoted the very causes he espoused. One scholar detects in Wilson the self-styled transforming leader an “egocentricity,” a “desire for glory,” that marred his political career. Wilson could write eloquently about Cabinet government, but too often his unwillingness to share credit for accomplishments prevented him from exercising true collective leadership.

  In the battle for the treaty, however, policy and not personality was the crucial factor. Wilson finally would compromise no further because the League—with a binding American commitment to it—was the irreducible core of his program. He seemed willing to accept almost anything else as long as he could preserve his plan for collective security, but that was precisely the one thing Lodge was unwilling to grant him. If the League fight is compared to the famed graduate-school controversy at Prince
ton, in which Wilson became locked in a bitter personal quarrel with Dean Andrew West, we then see a dramatic and ironic reversal of Wilson’s role. In the dispute at Princeton, Wilson was unwilling to accept any of the compromises West offered, whereas in the treaty fight it was Wilson who made concession after concession, only to be rebuffed by the Republicans.

  Ultimately, Wilson’s League was not killed by him, by the Senate Democrats who voted as Wilson instructed them, by the irreconcilables, or even by Lodge. It was thwarted by a political system that chopped up Wilson’s idealism, diluted public sentiment for his cause, atomized his efforts for reform. Lodge, it is true, manipulated that system brilliantly, but he had only inherited it. In the struggle over the Treaty of Versailles, the American system of checks and balances worked as the Founding Fathers intended that it should. The President was unable to bring about a radical alteration in American foreign policy through a simple vote of the Senate. Wilson, however, was not about to give up trying. Already, as his tour of the country had presaged, he was looking for another political lever with which to move the nation.

  1920: The Great and Solemn Rejection

  Defeated in the Senate, where a two-thirds vote was required from a body he considered both unrepresentative and oligarchical, and with his direct appeal to the people cut short by illness, Woodrow Wilson looked now to one last alternative—to the presidential electoral college, where an approximate majority of the people would render the final verdict. Early in January 1920 he wrote the Democratic party leadership that he did not accept the action of the Senate as the decision of the nation. “If there is any doubt as to what the people of the country think on this vital matter, the clear and single way out is to submit it for determination at the next election to the voters of the Nation, to give the next election the form of a great and solemn referendum....”