The German-Americans also entered the fray. For the first half of 1919, they had maintained a wary silence. The number of German-language newspapers had dropped from 537 to 278, and their leaders were afraid of triggering a new outburst of hostility from the 100 percent Americans of the National Security League and other patriotic watchdogs. When the peace conference began, their newspapers called on German-Americans to “stand by the president” in his struggle to win a peace based on the Fourteen Points. They slowly grew disillusioned when Wilson did nothing to lift the food blockade. When they saw the results of Wilson’s personal diplomacy in the final treaty, the German Americans were stunned and outraged. Although they did not hold mass meetings to condemn it, they united, as one historian wrote, “in sullen opposition” to Wilson’s handiwork.28
VII
The alienation of the three largest ethnic blocs in the country encouraged Senator Lodge and his Republican confreres. They allowed the Irish, the Italians, and other hyphenates to air grievances against the treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and gloated over the headlines these witnesses created. Indians and Egyptians also sent spokesmen who condemned English imperialism. A committee of American blacks called for a statement of worldwide racial equality, hoping it might eventually apply to the United States.
The committee also asked members of the American delegation to testify. The first and most damaging witness was Secretary of State Lansing. His problem was how to say something positive about the treaty without revealing how much he detested it. After his first day of laconic testimony, in which he sometimes merely answered yes or no to questions, this troubled man informed his diary that he could have avoided criticism by “a statement of the facts”—but that would have “opened the floodgates of invective against the president.” By facts, Lansing probably meant how little he or any other member of the delegation except Colonel House had been consulted by Wilson.29
Senator Lodge and his allies nonetheless got the drift of Lansing’s evasions. Lodge concluded that the secretary of state knew virtually nothing about how the treaty had been negotiated, which led the senator to conclude that Wilson was “one of the most sinister figures that ever crossed the history of a great country.” there was obviously no moderation in Lodge’s detestation of the president.30
No one knew that Lansing had returned to the United States determined to resign because of the way Wilson had treated him in Paris. But a strange tortured “loyalty,” not to Wilson but to the Democratic Party, kept him on the job. The secretary knew his resignation would reveal the breach between him and Wilson at the worst possible time. Lansing was also well aware that if the treaty failed to win ratification, the Democrats’ chances of winning the White House in 1920 would sink to nonexistent.
When asked if he thought the Shantung settlement violated the Fourteen Points, Lansing had said yes. This led Lodge to demand from Wilson all the correspondence within the American delegation about this controversial deal. The president dragged his political feet while he and Tumulty decided what not to send. Perhaps the most damaging thing that stayed in the file was a letter from General Bliss, in which he had scathingly denounced the transaction and Japan’s growing desire to dominate Asia.
Finally came a climax of sorts—Wilson agreed to meet in the White House with the Foreign Relations Committee. The three-hour and twenty-five-minute session, which the New York Times called “epoch making,” was occasionally brusque to the point of overt hostility, but Wilson kept his temper and answered tough questions with little or no hesitation. He betrayed his inner anxiety only once, when he was asked when he had first learned about the secret treaties that had so complicated the situation in Paris. Wilson replied that he and Secretary of State Lansing had not known about them until they arrived in Europe to begin the peace conference.
Wilson defenders claim this stonewalling is proof of his cumulative brain damage. But his evasiveness is virtually a replica of a big lie Wilson had told ten years earlier in a dispute with Princeton’s trustees before he became a politician. At that time, he claimed never to have seen or read a document which he had signed and approved—and which undermined his claim that his opponents had failed to consult him on a crucial aspect of their quarrel. The brain-damage theorists constantly downplay Wilson’s almost obsessive need to win a public controversy.
Admitting that he had known about the secret treaties long before he went to Paris would have raised questions about Wilson’s statesmanship—particularly his unilateral dismissal of these agreements in the Fourteen Points. If he had known about them, he should have negotiated with the Allies before he issued the Fourteen Points. But Wilson had yielded to his image of himself as a mystic world savior and decided negotiation was unnecessary. He had foolishly assumed Lloyd George and Clemenceau would humbly beg his pardon and jettison the treaties.
The exact opposite had happened, of course. The lie in the session with the senators is another indication of the destructive inner war raging in Wilson’s mind and body over the intimations of political disaster gathering around him. He got no help from insiders such as the now totally disillusioned Walter Lippmann. In the New Republic, Lippmann castigated the president as a liar:“Only a dunce could have been ignorant of the secret treaties.” this was not mere rhetorical exaggeration. The treaties had been published in the newspapers when the Bolsheviks revealed them in November 1917 and had been distributed by the antiwar New York Evening Post in pamphlet form.31
Wilson’s external war with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee soon focused on Article 10 of the covenant, to which Senator Lodge and his allies objected because it seemingly obliged the United States to fight foreign wars at the behest of the League of Nations. Wilson tried to finesse the argument by claiming it was a moral, not a legal, obligation, but he complicated the matter by loftily insisting that a moral obligation was more binding than a legal one. Thoughtful men such as Elihu Root were unimpressed. In a letter to Lodge, Root called Wilson’s distinction “curious and childlike casuistry.” He also said it was “demoralizing and dishonest.”32
Wilson took an intransigent stand on the question of attaching any serious reservations to the treaty. He claimed this would require renegotiation with the Allies and might endanger the peace. Virtually no one agreed with him on this contention. Democratic as well as Republican senators declared that a majority of their ranks wanted reservations. Wilson remained immovable.
One reason for his obstinacy, now visible to historians, lay behind the scenes throughout this long hot summer. Even before he returned home, Wilson and Tumulty had begun planning a speaking tour that would throw his enemies on the defensive. Colonel House, the alter ego of negotiated compromise, was no longer in the equation. Tumulty, the pugnacious Irish-American who had masterminded Wilson’s first political triumph in New Jersey, was now in charge. He was by no means alone in urging such a tour. Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo liked the idea, as did Assistant Secretary of State Frank Polk and J.P. Morgan banker Thomas Lamont, Wilson’s chief economic adviser in Paris. Wilson’s conversations with individual senators and the Foreign Relations Committee had convinced him that his enemies “wanted not only to defeat the league but to discredit and overthrow” him. He would answer them with his favorite weapon: oratory. He would humble these arrogant Republicans by arousing the American people to join him in a magnificent crusade that would crown his presidency.33
VIII
By the end of August, Tumulty had the trip worked out to the last detail. It would cover 10,000 miles and include some thirty speeches. In memoirs written years later, both Mrs. Wilson and Admiral Cary Grayson claim that they tried to talk Wilson out of going. Grayson has a grimly determined Wilson telling him,“You must remember that I, as commander in chief, was responsible for sending those soldiers to Europe. In that crucial test in the trenches, they did not turn back—and I cannot turn back now. I cannot put my personal safety, my health in the balance against my duty.”34
Wilson may have said something like this. There is no question that he was troubled by guilt for plunging the nation into a war with the naive assumption that there was little likelihood of American soldiers’ dying in France. But there are grounds for doubting that his determination to make the speaking tour was framed in such apocalyptic terms. Another contemporary witness, Secretary of the Navy Daniels, reported a very different reaction when he worried aloud that the trip might strain Wilson’s health. “You are much mistaken,” the president replied. “It will be no strain on me—on the contrary, it will be a relief to meet the people. . . . I am saturated with the subject and am spoiling to tell the people all about the treaty. I will enjoy it.” wilson was basing this optimism on his reaction to previous speaking tours, in particular the highly successful swing through the Midwest he took in 1916 to persuade the Democrats in Congress to vote for a preparedness program—and incidentally demolish the “hyphenates” who opposed it. Daniels added his own observation:“The thought of the trip exhilarated him.”35
On the evening of September 2, Wilson, his wife, Admiral Grayson and Tumulty boarded his private blue railroad car, the “Mayflower,” which had a double bed and a sitting room to give the president a semblance of privacy. Although the crowd was sparse at his first stop, Columbus, Ohio, the numbers built rapidly as the seven-car train rolled into other Midwestern cities. The president’s speeches made headlines. The twenty-one reporters on the train agreed with the New York Times man’s observation that Wilson seemed to be “refreshed as he [went] along.”
But the trip soon became a very different experience from previous tours. The opposition to Wilson’s appeals for the League of Nations was vocal and well financed. Leading the assault were the Friends of Irish Freedom, which took out two days’ worth of full-page ads in the newspapers of every city Wilson visited, denouncing him as a fraud and a hypocrite and an enemy of Ireland. In many cities, the group organized mass meetings to refute his speeches.
At least as potent was a Republican senatorial “truth squad” led by liberal Republican Senators Borah and Johnson and conservative Senator Medill McCormick, who held their own rallies. At these gatherings, some of them markedly larger than the president’s, they denounced the League of Nations and the peace treaty with savage sarcasm. Johnson’s favorite theme was the clause in the covenant that gave the British six votes in the league’s assembly to America’s one. In Chicago, where the three senators spoke on the same platform, a huge crowd of mostly German-Americans and Irish-Americans hissed at the mention of Wilson’s name and shouted, “Impeach him! Impeach him!”
Anti-Wilson Democratic Senator James Reed of Missouri spoke to another big crowd in Saint Louis with the Catholic archbishop on the platform beside him. Reed lambasted the league as a British plot to rule the world and keep Ireland enslaved forever.
These brutal assaults took a mounting toll on the president’s nerves. His speeches, most of which were based on notes, rather than the usual carefully wrought texts, contained unexpected gaffes. At one point he described himself as descended from “old Revolutionary stock.” the opposition reminded Wilson that his four grandparents had been born in the British Isles and his mother was born in England. By no stretch could he claim kinship with the Revolutionary generation. The Irish-Americans had a field day with the president’s attempt to disguise his British roots.
In Saint Louis came an even more baffling remark. Wilson said the real cause of the war was the rivalry between Germany and England:“This was, in its inception, a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.” Wilson said this while trying to persuade his audience that U.S. involvement in the league would eliminate such murderous rivalries. He seemed oblivious to the way the admission virtually repudiated his 1917 rhetoric about a war between autocracy and democracy. The words reveal a defensive psychology at work in Wilson’s mind. Seven months in Paris left little room for doubt about British economic fear and loathing of Germany.36
After the first week of the tour, the exhilaration of the early speeches began to fade. The sheer physical effort of the trip, with its repetitive parades and dinners and speeches to large crowds without benefit of amplifiers, undoubtedly played a part in Wilson’s mounting fatigue. The news from Washington played an equally deleterious role. On September 10, the Foreign Relations Committee sent the peace treaty to the full Senate, proposing ratification with forty-five amendments and four reservations—a direct affront to Wilson. Five amendments obliterated the Shantung settlement—hitting Wilson where he was most vulnerable.
Another blow fell on September 12, when newspapers carried blazing headlines about William Bullitt’s testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee. The young diplomat who had fed Wilson-House hopes of overturning the German government with words was no longer loyal to the administration. Bullitt told how he had resigned in disgust from the American staff in Paris when he read the treaty, along with several other young associates. Senator Lodge asked Bullitt if any members of the American delegation had expressed their opinion of the treaty to him.
“It is no secret that Mr. Lansing, General Bliss and Mr. White objected very strongly to . . . numerous provisions,” Bullitt said.
Lodge said it was “public knowledge” that they objected to the Shantung settlement. Was there anything else they disliked?
Bullitt said he had made a “note” of a conversation with Secretary Lansing. He proceeded to read it. Lansing thought “many parts” of the treaty were “thoroughly bad,” especially those dealing with Shantung and the League of Nations. The secretary’s opinion of the league could not have been more negative.“I consider that the League of Nations is at present entirely useless. The great powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves,” the secretary said (according to Bullitt). Worse was another supposed remark: “The League of Nations can do nothing to alter any of the unjust clauses of the treaty.”
Bullitt had asked Lansing what he thought of the treaty’s chances for ratification. Lansing had supposedly replied,“If the Senate could understand what this treaty means, and if the American people could really understand, it would be unquestionably defeated.”
Wilson was aboard his train in California when he read the newspaper accounts of this staggering repudiation of the league and treaty by his own secretary of state.“I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act this way,” Wilson said. It was a sad commentary on his frequent inability to grasp what was happening in personal relationships. The president had treated Lansing with contempt; he had spoken of him with contempt. Yet he was amazed when he discovered the secretary detested him and most of his works.37
These devastating attacks on the treaty added immensely to the strain of Wilson’s tour. In California, he was again thrown on the defensive by a warning letter from the state’s Irish-American senator, James D. Phelan: “The Irish are in a fair way to leave the Democratic Party.” The San Francisco Labor Council followed with a distinctly hostile query about why the president had ignored Ireland at the peace conference. When Wilson tried to speak at a rally that night, Irish demonstrators howled him down for several minutes. Wilson tried to explain how the league would help, not injure, Ireland’s fight for independence. In New York, Ireland’s president, Eamon de Valera, on a speaking tour of his own, said he was completely dissatisfied with the president’s explanation.38
Under these attacks, Wilson’s temper soured and his speeches acquired an ugly cast. In Saint Paul, he denounced the use of “Irish-American” or “German-American” before a man’s name. “It ought not to be there.” In Omaha, he warned against a revival of “pro-Germanism”—a low blow that infuriated German-Americans in the audience, who said they had just as much right to criticize the treaty as anyone else. The pro-treaty New York Times encouraged this tack by saying the president was outmaneuvering his ethnic critics and the country would soon “turn in resentment” on any immigrant group that tried to block America’s participation i
n the league. The Times was remembering Wilson’s 1916 triumph over the hyphenates. But 1919 was an entirely new game on a vastly altered playing field.
In Salt Lake City, Wilson said opponents of the treaty came from “exactly the same sources as the pro-German propaganda” of the prewar years. In Cheyenne, he declared the only opposition to the treaty outside the Senate was “the forces of hyphenated Americans.” In Denver, he compared ethnic Americans to knives being stuck into the treaty. In the final speech of the tour, at Pueblo, Colorado, the president descended to the most sunken stretch of the low road:“Any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger which he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.”39
This was appalling stuff from a president for whom ethnic Americans had responded in overwhelming numbers to fight and die in France. (One in five draftees was foreign born.) The president’s obsession with the League of Nations had turned him into a parody of the idealist who had led the United States into World War I. By this time he was a battered man, a punch-drunk political fighter who had taken too many blows to the head and body.40
IX
Wilson combined these descents to the low road with repeated affronts to the senators who wanted reservations. He said their opposition was rooted in “downright ignorance” or some malicious “private purpose.” the ignorant seemed to have a problem understanding English. As for the malicious, they would be “gibbeted” by historians. At times he spoke as if he had never heard the word “reservations” and ordered his opponents to “put up or shut up”—sign the treaty he had negotiated, or face the wrath of the American people, who were unanimously behind him in this fight for world peace.41
How Wilson could say this while the senators who opposed the treaty were addressing huge rallies is a textbook example of a man driven by a compulsion to humiliate his political enemies. A dismayed William Howard Taft, still a supporter of the league, wrote to a friend:“Wilson is playing into their hands [his Senate opponents] by his speeches in the West. It is impossible for him, schoolmaster that he is, to . . . explain the league without framing contemptuous phrases to characterize his opponents. . . . The president’s attitude in not consenting to any reservations at all is an impossible one.”42
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