by Hugh Brogan
The actual fighting of the war went well. All the German calculations proved faulty. Britain did not surrender, nor was she starved (though it was a near thing). The great spring offensive of 1918 failed: its last thrust was decisively checked in the Second Battle of the Marne (15 – 18 July), in which American troops played an honourable part and Pershing showed himself to be a highly competent commander. Marshal Foch ordered a counter-attack, and the long-awaited Allied advance began. By September more than a million American troops were engaged, and in the Battle of the Argonne (26 September-11 November) they inflicted one of the great defeats on the Germans which soon brought an end to the war. But even more important to that end was their mere presence on the field, which proved that the Allies now had inexhaustible manpower reserves while the Germans no longer had any.
Meanwhile, from the moment that the struggle began, Woodrow Wilson, delegating his administrative duties with great skill, devoted most of his thought to the problem of ending it decently and giving the world new hope, as he had promised. He had no doubt of his countrymen’s support; the difficulty, he supposed, would lie in imposing America’s will (really, his own) on Europe. He manoeuvred to overcome this impediment with all the skill that he had shown in the earlier rough-houses of New Jersey and Washington politics.
Wilson was to be much maligned, especially by J. M. Keynes, and most of the criticisms were unfair. Yet one of Keynes’s observations went to the heart of the matter. At his core, this son of the manse was a Presbyterian preacher still. Profoundly sensitive to words and ideas, expert at using them, ambitious, yet moved, in the end, by moral visions as by nothing else, Wilson seems never to have lost his feeling that eloquence would finally govern the world: as if Lincoln’s second inaugural had prevailed over Booth’s bullet. It was to prove his last illusion; during the war it was his strength. He reflected on the causes of the conflict, and on proposals to end it and prevent its recurrence; in the fullness of time he laid out his conclusions in a series of orations, the first of which contained the famous Fourteen Points that gave their name to the whole series.
Heir to both North and South, Wilson combined Jefferson Davis’s faith in the letter of the law with Abraham Lincoln’s earnest moralism. Both traits emerged in his grand strategy for the peace. He saw that the international law in which he had believed so deeply and which he had tried so hard to enforce between 1914 and 1917 was a fiction; force, fear and ambition ruled the world. For remedy he turned, as we have seen, to the English liberals’ idea of a League of Peace, or of Nations, which, committed to liberal principles, would resolve international disputes by legal processes – if necessary, by legal sanctions – instead of by the brutal means of war. The League Covenant (which he drew up himself) would replace international anarchy as the Constitution of the United States had replaced the quarrelsome independence of the former colonies. It was a noble dream, but it clearly exhibited Wilson’s resïdual naivety. It had the same weakness as the old idea of the Social Contract, from which in part it derived: it depended on the goodwill of the nations to work, though it was the absence of international goodwill that made it necessary. If goodwill existed, it would not be needed. It was an ideal to work for, not a means to an end. It was not sufficient to realize Wilson’s hopes, nor have succeeding generations brought it much closer; yet they have clung to the ideal, for without it the long-term prospects of mankind are black. Wilson’s reputation has risen or fallen with men’s attachment to the idea of a league of peace and their belief in its practicability.
His other proposals were much more down-to-earth and so roused much more opposition. The second of the Fourteen Points was an assertion, against Great Britain, of the freedom of the seas, a last relic of the doctrines of America’s neutrality: ‘Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.’ It was inconsistent of Wilson to advocate this doctrine, for at the very time of its delivery the United States, that former champion of neutral rights, was harrying neutral commerce assiduously; it was also unwise, for it opened a rift with Britain; but the pride and pocket of America had been too badly hurt by the blockade for this opportunity for a slap at ‘navalism’ to be forgone. For the rest, the Fourteen Points denounced secret treaties and insisted on the old nineteenth-century mixture of nationalism and liberal institutions: self-determination and democracy. Adopt these panaceas, link them with a League of Nations and secure peace for all time. Such was Wilson’s message to his allies and his enemies.
The details of the Fourteen Points (and of the various ‘principles’, ‘particulars’ and ‘declarations’ which he added to them in public addresses before the armistice) were to be greatly modified at the peace conference; but it was the attitudes underlying them which first created trouble. British politicians were comparatively sympathetic, but they rejected ‘freedom of the seas’ and continued to believe, as always, in the principle of the balance of power (which, according to Wilson, was a great game, immoral and ‘now forever discredited’). The French were total unbelievers in the utility or effectiveness of such pronouncements: as always, they stuck to realpolitik. The Germans, while they were winning, had no use for such sentimental aspirations; they believed only in force. The Russians were by now out of the war; their new Bolshevik rulers could see nothing in the Fourteen Points but a conscious challenge to their own programme for the world – and they were quite right.
But it is the peculiar genius of American statesmen to combine lofty visions with effective politics. Underlying Wilson’s preaching was the hard fact that the Allies were increasingly dependent on American strength; they had at least to pretend to take the Points seriously, and their publication in January 1918, bringing the hope that there was a way in which this terrible experience of war could be put behind mankind for ever, made Wilson for a moment supremely popular with the peoples of Europe. Merely as an ideologue, he could not be ignored, since he was also President of the United States. When the German front began to crumble, it was to him that the enemy turned. They hoped to get better terms than they would get from France and Britain; probably they hoped to split the alliance. They offered to surrender on the basis of the Fourteen Points. To their surprise they found Wilson a hard bargainer. He exacted a German revolution (so they overthrew the Kaiser); the evacuation of all occupied territory; the laying-down of arms; acceptance of the Fourteen Points and the President’s subsequent addresses. There were objections to many of the American conditions from both the Allies and the enemy, but Wilson held firm and, thanks to the undrained strength of the United States, was able to impose his will. British, French and Germans, politicians and generals, were forced into line; and on 11 November 1918 an armistice took place. The Great War was over (though many little wars, its offspring, continued to rage) and Woodrow Wilson deserved much of the credit for ending it. It was a great moment – the real high point of his career – and was greeted with wild joy, and tears, and dancing in the streets in all the cities of the West.
Years later someone asked Lloyd George why he had not retired at this supreme hour, with his credit intact. He answered that it had been impossible, looking down from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on the rejoicing crowds, not to believe that he could still do the people service. It may be that similar feelings clouded the vision of Wilson and Clemenceau. Yet forces were now set in motion that would end in the destruction, not only of these three great men, but of their great achievements, victory and peace. As Wilson stood highest, he fell the farthest.
Almost since the beginning of the war he had aspired to use American power to bring about a just and secure peace through the application of democratic principles. Now his moment had come. He determined to go to Paris as head of the American delegation to the peace conference.
This decision, given Wilson’s character and ambitions, was inevitable. The task of peacemaki
ng was too delicate and too important to be left to anyone else; it is impossible to name a substitute who could have performed more effectively than Wilson. All the same, his participation had some most unfortunate consequences. In the end it wrecked his health and thus his hopes; from the beginning it weakened his political position. He stayed in Europe, with one brief interruption, for over six months, and during that time lost control of the American government. He never regained it, and the painfully difficult process of adjusting American society to the return of peace had to be carried out without the guidance or even, it seemed, the notice of the President. Neither Congress nor the mediocre Cabinet could fill the gap; and thus the leaderless country went through a crisis which finally brought about a profound reaction against Wilson and all he stood for. Progressivism had had a very long run, anyway; a reaction was due; but Wilson’s abdication of so much of his responsibility made it more violent than was necessary. The seeds of much future trouble, then, were sown by this action of the President.
At much the same time he made two bad mistakes. The Congressional elections had been held as usual in the autumn of 1918;5 and Wilson, who had suffered much from the refractory behaviour of the outgoing Congress, tried hard to secure a more amenable successor. It was the sort of task that Lloyd George and Clemenceau carried out easily enough; but it defeated Wilson. He published a statement asking the voters to return a Democratic majority, so that he might continue to be ‘your unembarrassed spokesman at home and abroad’. The President was driven into this blunder by the campaign the Republicans were waging against his foreign policy and conduct of the war: just as he was beginning negotiations with the Germans, the opposition leaders began to howl for ‘unconditional surrender’ (Theodore Roosevelt was especially vicious), and they were campaigning widely against the third of the Fourteen Points, which advocated universal free trade. Wilson warned that a Democratic defeat would be interpreted in Europe as a repudiation of his leadership. All the same, he would have done better to be silent, for it was already clear that the Democrats would probably lose; by coming out for the defeated side the President exposed his prestige to a sharp deflation. Worse, he thus put an end to the wartime truce which had previously kept the Republicans under some sort of restraint. They had not been very scrupulous in observing the truce, but they had on the whole given the President the support he needed, while a faction of his own Democratic party, the Southern, Bryanite, pacifist section, had frequently deserted him in Congressional votes. And it was widely believed by voters in the North and West, chafing at the same time under wartime price controls and wartime inflation, that the Democratic South had made unreasonable profits out of the sale of cotton, the price of which, unlike that of wheat, was unregulated. This belief greatly helped the Republicans on election day, and Wilson’s attack enabled them to associate him with his unpopular party and denounce all his policies. It would have been wiser for the President to issue a ‘coupon’ endorsing all those members of Congress, whether Republican or Democratic, who had supported him during the war. As it was, he alienated the Republicans without gaining anything, for as expected the Democrats lost heavily, in large part because their constituents knew that they had obstructed the war effort.
Even then Wilson might have redeemed his defeat by taking chosen Republicans into his confidence and counsel, thereby gaining their support: by appointing former President Taft, or former Secretary of State Root, to the Paris delegation, for example. He did nothing of the kind: the only Republican he took to Paris was of no political weight. Wilson’s enemies (now led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: Theodore Roosevelt died that winter) girded their loins for his return. He would have to bring back a very good treaty indeed to defeat them.
The task proved to be beyond his powers. In Paris, Wilson learned, slowly and painfully, just how limited are goodwill, intelligence and hard work when unsupported by more material forces. He arrived in Europe and made a triumphal tour through France, England and Italy. Soldiers cheered, children presented him with bouquets, peasants dressed up in their traditional costumes for him, George V brought out the gold dinner service at Buckingham Palace, the Milanese showered him with violets and mimosa and serenaded him with a band which he was kind enough to conduct for a few bars himself. But the acclamations of the peoples were of no help in the conference rooms. Rather the reverse: they deluded Wilson about his strength. Thus on one occasion he appealed to the Italians for support against their own leaders and was resoundingly rebuffed. This humiliation did not strengthen his hand in the negotiations. And the war was over. America was no longer in a commanding position. Her soldiers were streaming homewards across the Atlantic in hundreds of thousands (he had passed a shipload of them on his way out of New York harbour): their going symbolized the weakening of the President’s position. No longer could he compel European realities to bend to his will. He would have to compromise, as if he were a politician and not the Messiah.
He found the process painful and exhausting, but also instructive and challenging. The myth, so mischievously propagated by J. M. Keynes, that Wilson was the stupid victim of the guile of George and the obstinacy of Clemenceau, has no truth to it (Clemenceau, indeed, recorded that, next to General Pershing, Wilson was the most obstinate man he had ever met). To Wilson’s mind the overriding interest of the world, and therefore of the United States, lay in the creation of the League of Nations. He put this item on the conference agenda and made sure that the League Covenant was written inextricably into the peace treaty. In spite of subsequent arguments and rearrangements, this achievement endured, surviving even the defection of the United States. The League functioned as an instrument of international co-operation and pacification, on the whole quite impressively, throughout the 1920s. Wilson was also able to redraw the map of Europe, substantially according to the great principle of national self-determination that his speeches had proclaimed. Soon ten new or resurrected states (such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Finland) joined the community of nations: it was Wilson who had secured the recognition of their independence, and through the exertions of his Food Administrator, Hoover, rescued their populations from starvation. Winston Churchill calculated that the Versailles Treaty left less than 3 per cent of the European peoples under foreign rule. Even Germany remained united and independent, and lost only a handful of outlying provinces.6 Wilson would have added that all remaining difficulties could, should and would be referred to the League, there to be settled according to the dictates of democratic law and justice. In spite of much buffeting, the Franco-Anglo-American entente emerged in one piece from the negotiations. All in all it was a mighty achievement, substantially warranting Wilson’s belief that it secured the future peace of the world. It would also act, he thought, as a bulwark against the extremes of Left and Right – of the Bolsheviks and those who were soon to be known as fascists. He had paid a price for it; but the politician and idealist in him agreed in thinking that it was not too high. Compromise and concession were after all of the essence of democracy, whether it was seen as an ideal or as a mode of practical politics.
Nevertheless the concessions he had made had been enormous, and many of them deeply affronted elements of American opinion. Britain, for example, who owed her survival in the war to her success in using the Royal Navy to starve her enemy while preventing him from starving her, forced the abandonment of ‘freedom of the seas’, Clemenceau concurring (‘with freedom of the seas, war would cease to be war’). Japan, who had taken all Germany’s Pacific colonies north of the Equator (Japan’s ally, Great Britain, taking everything south of that line), insisted on helping herself to Germany’s Chinese possession, Shantung, and although American diplomacy eventually succeeded in dislodging her, Woodrow Wilson had to accept the fait accompli for the time being, although it was a flat contradiction of self-determination in a part of the world in which many Americans were extremely interested. The French, the British and the British Dominions took over the German Empire in Africa and elsewhere, and
immense stretches of the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East; the nature of the transaction was delicately disguised by the pretence that the imperialist powers were merely exercising ‘mandates’ under the League of Nations, and Wilson thankfully accepted the fiction (it was a perversion of one of his own pet ideas); but not all Americans could be depended on to do so, for their anti-colonial tradition was still vigorous. Furthermore, Wilson had let himself be inveigled into taking part in the disastrous attempt by Britain and France to crush the Bolsheviks by supporting the White Russians. The Americans were never very deeply involved and soon withdrew; but the whole affair did look very much like an entanglement in those distant quarrels of no concern to the United States which Washington and Jefferson had warned against so earnestly.
Overshadowing everything was the question of Germany. That country had surrendered on the express promise of a magnanimous peace; the sort of ‘peace without victors’ which Wilson had recommended in January 1917. The idea of such a peace had warm and wide support in both Britain and America: it did not take a genius to see that a vindictive settlement might breed another war.7 Wilson’s advisers in Paris were deeply committed to leniency. The President owed his towering prestige in large part to his association with such ideas. To his admirers it seemed inconceivable that he would put his name to such a treaty as that of Versailles: one which exacted formidable compensation from the Germans under humiliating conditions (the treaty which the Germans had to sign contained a formal assertion that Germany was guilty of starting the war). Yet he did so, and his reputation has never quite recovered. Much later it was to be argued that Germany could well afford the reparations that were exacted from her; but at the time informed opinion thought otherwise (Keynes put the case with the utmost brilliance in his Economic Consequences of the Peace); the Germans themselves thought they were being deliberately reduced to beggary (the more so, as the Allied blockade continued for months after the armistice, in spite of American protests); the vindictive nature of the terms was plain to see, and so was the risk, thus created, of another war.