Worldmaking

by David Milne

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  On July 8, 1919, Wilson returned to the United States, where a ticker-tape parade in New York City carried the president to Carnegie Hall for a brief speech. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., where one hundred thousand well-wishers met his train at midnight. When asked at a press conference in Washington on July 10 if the Senate would ratify the treaty on acceptable terms, Wilson tartly replied, “I do not think hypothetical questions are concerned. The Senate is going to ratify the treaty.”144 Later that same day, Wilson presented the treaty to a packed chamber in the Senate. Declining to dwell on the minutiae of the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson emphasized the League of Nations’ vast potential. The president presented the negotiation of the treaty as a zero-sum game by asking, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” As Wilson continued his speech, religious invocations began to inhabit the space where substance would have better resided: “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into 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.”145

  While Wilson’s speech was greeted with rousing applause in the chamber, astute observers noticed that only one Republican—the iconoclastic League of Nations enthusiast Porter McCumber from North Dakota—applauded. Even Democrats were worried by the hollowness of Wilson’s words. Henry Ashurst of Arizona likened Wilson’s effort to a businessman explaining his primary functions to a board of directors by reciting “Longfellow’s Psalm of Life … His audience wanted red meat, he fed them cold turnips.”146 To leave so many people disappointed was hugely damaging, but one significant extenuating circumstance partly explains his stuttering performance. In the weeks prior to the speech, Wilson had been suffering from headaches and tight neck muscles that we now know were early signs of a stroke that would hit him three months later. A combination of combativeness, ill-advised appropriation of higher powers, and debilitating health all served to undermine Wilson’s formidable communicative skills at a critical juncture.

  Wilson had refused to invite two groups of individuals to accompany him to the negotiations in Paris: senators and Republicans. That both groups possessed absolute power over the fate of the Treaty of Versailles in the United States—and would indeed “break the heart of the world” in the due course of time—illustrates the magnitude of Wilson’s error. The president had reasoned that accommodating Republicans within his negotiating team would circumscribe his freedom of action, precluding the conjuring of radical initiatives to realize his ambitions. Propelled forward by absolute belief in the righteousness and logic of his ideas, Wilson at Paris was intent on realizing his thesis: the creation of a collaborative world system. Yet he was dangerously insulated from the reality of a domestic political calculus that was stacked against him, particularly after Democrat losses in the midterm elections. Surrounded by friends, Wilson failed to see that a world governed by a League of Nations was an abstraction, not an actionable reality. The flight of Wilson’s intellectualism—his scientism—took him away from what was politically possible. That this astute student of American politics failed to finesse the limitations of his approach is testament to two things: the seductiveness of crafting grand strategy and the fiendish nature of the war that had just visited the world.

  Wilson compounded his initial errors regarding the composition of the delegation with an adamant refusal to negotiate with those Senate Republicans who were amenable to a watered-down version of the treaty, in which American sovereignty was better protected. For perhaps understandable reasons, Wilson despised Henry Cabot Lodge and his cohort of Senate allies and press admirers. The president’s press secretary, Ray Stannard Baker, observed that Wilson was “a good hater,” an attribute that doesn’t help when the political chips are down.147 Edward House was well aware of the strengths and limitations of his president’s style of decision making: “Whenever a question is presented he keeps an absolutely open mind and welcomes all suggestion or advice which will lead to a correct decision. But he is receptive only during the period that he is weighing the question and preparing to make his decision. Once the suggestion is made it is final and there is an absolute end to all advice and suggestion. There is no moving him after that.”148 That this approach was antithetical to steering a revolutionary treaty through a recalcitrant Senate scarcely needs emphasizing.

  The Senate’s opposition to the treaty was divided into “irreconcilables,” cross-party isolationists who opposed all aspects of the treaty; “strong reservationists,” who might vote for the treaty in a much reduced form; and “mild reservationists,” composed mainly of Republican internationalists who supported the crux of the treaty but wanted some changes before their vote could be assured. As is well known, Wilson’s stance toward those who opposed the treaty, to whatever degree of reservation, was uncompromising. In a barb directed at the “strong reservationist” Lodge—in a speech provocatively delivered in Worcester, Massachusetts, the senator’s home state—Wilson warned that “any man who resists the present tides that run in the world will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from his human kind forever,” which more or less captures Wilson’s views on political compromise circa 1919.149

  Which is not to say that Wilson did not try to talk down his opposition. The president held a series of face-to-face meetings with his opponents in the Senate but was unable to convince them to back down. Steadfast in his aversion to negotiation, and warming to a very different tack, Wilson at the end of August decided to embark upon a nationwide speaking tour, designed to build public support for the treaty, which in turn would convince hold-out senators that ratification was in their political interests. Wilson’s new wife and doctor expressed deep concerns about how a tour of this nature might impact his health. From a different perspective, members of his administration struggled to imagine how a public-speaking tour at this stage might translate into Senate votes. But detecting a specious parallel to his previous nationwide speaking tour, which had drummed up critical support for his preparedness agenda, Wilson rejected these reservations and took his message above the heads of the senators whom he most needed to convince.

  Wilson set out on his tour at the beginning of September 1919, delivering forty-two speeches in twenty-one days without the assistance of a microphone. It was a magnificent effort, in which he displayed all the rhetorical skills that his father had encouraged from a young age. Wilson described the League of Nations as “the only possible guarantee against war,” and sought to allay fears that Article X of the treaty would result in American boys being dispatched to Central Europe to settle atavistic, irresolvable disputes. While he struggled to compromise with senators, the president was infinitely better at respecting and meeting the doubts expressed by the general public. And it is at this point that the story turns Shakespearean.

  Drained by his cumulative efforts, on September 25 Wilson collapsed onstage in Pueblo, Colorado. Ushered away onto another train, Wilson confided to an aide, “I just feel as if I am going to pieces,” before looking away to shield tears that were welling in his eyes. One week later, in Washington, Wilson suffered a massive stroke. Death toyed with Wilson for a week before releasing him partly blind and paralyzed down the left side of his body. If the president had died, one might imagine the Senate passing the treaty with minor amendments: an apt eulogy to a major presidency. As it happened, the wounded Wilson proved even less prone to compromise than before, instructing fellow Democrats to vote down any version of the treaty that was sullied by Republican reservations.150 On March 19, 1920, twenty-one Democrats—ignoring their president’s pleas for purity in defeat—and twenty-eight Republicans voted for Lodge’s version of the treaty, which greatly reduced the potency of the League of Nations but left much of the o
riginal intact. Yet this cross-party tally fell seven short of the two-thirds majority required for ratification.

  During the 1920 Democratic Convention, Wilson reluctantly declined to stand for reelection, and the nomination was secured by a rank outsider aided mainly by his lack of connection to the president: Governor James M. Cox of Ohio. Wilson and his followers scored a partial success when Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a Wilson devotee and League of Nations enthusiast—secured the vice presidential nomination. FDR performed well during the campaign and set an important marker in defeat that served him well during later nomination tussles within his party. A few months later, Republicans swept to power, electing Warren Harding to the presidency in a landslide—Harding won more than 60 percent of the vote compared to Cox’s sub-Bryan showing of 34 percent. The American public had delivered a damning indictment of Wilson’s diplomatic vision, which hurt the president a great deal in the four years that remained of his life. It fell to Elihu Root to register an apt appraisal of the Wilson presidency, observing that Americans “had learned more about international relations within the past eight years than they had learned in the preceding eighty years,” and they were “only at the beginning of the task.”151

  3

  AMERICANS FIRST

  CHARLES BEARD

  The historian and political scientist Charles Beard was unimpressed by Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to avoid involvement in the European conflict from 1914 to 1916. He supported early American entry into the First World War, a stance that appears improbable at first sight. Beard hailed from Quaker origins, opposed the expansionist thrust of the McKinley-Roosevelt years, and the main cause of his celebrity was a book reviled by millions of patriotic Americans. His An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States was a provocative reinterpretation of America’s founding, which sold in large numbers and made him famous.

  Published in 1913, the book observed that while most political actors are driven to some degree by economic self-interest, the Founding Fathers had elevated this imperative to a fine art. Fearful of the chaos created by the Articles of Confederation, in which states’ rights trumped those of the federal government, Beard argued, the Founding Fathers had an overarching goal during their deliberations in Philadelphia: to protect men of means from the threat posed by broad-based political activity. The American Constitution was for Beard “essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.”1 It was a radical piece of revisionism that created an almighty stir. President Wilson denounced the book, as did The New York Times in an editorial.2 The Ohio Star presented an evocative (and provocative) banner headline, “Scavengers, Hyena-like, Descecrate the Graves of the Dead Patriots We Revere,” then added that the book was “libelous, vicious, and damnable” and that true Americans “should rise to condemn [Beard] and the purveyors of his filthy lies and rotten aspersions.”3 With admirably dry humor, William Howard Taft wondered why Beard had to depress people by telling the truth.4

  In 1912, Beard refused to vote for either Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, viewing their Progressivism as timid affairs driven by the same economic self-interest—albeit cloaked in ameliorative rhetoric—that motivated the Founders. Away from domestic policy, Beard criticized Wilson’s attempts to export democracy to Mexico, dismissing the president’s “loose talk … about restoring order by bayonets,” and observing that if worldwide democratization is inevitable, “it is better to let it alone or to aid in its culmination.”5 Yet there was something about the First World War—and German motives in particular—that roused Beard’s pugnacity. On a trivial level, Charles and his wife, Mary Ritter, a distinguished scholar in her own right, had honeymooned on the European continent in 1900, where Beard was “amused at the pretensions of German professors and fuming at Prussian soldiers who forced him into the gutter rather than share the sidewalk,” according to his later friend and colleague, the historian Eric F. Goldman.6 More substantively, Beard had delivered a speech at the City College of New York in the autumn of 1914 that condemned German militarism so forcefully that the college president banned future talks by Beard on that subject.7 As German U-boat attacks increased, Beard criticized President Wilson for his weak responses, observing “that this country should definitely align itself with the Allies and help eliminate Prussianism from the earth.”8

  Beard detected something rotten in Germany’s heart, and his fierce egalitarianism led him to view the nation as a dangerous adversary to be defeated if Progressive causes were to survive at home and abroad. In a speech at Amherst College in 1917, he warned that the “present plight of the world seems to show that mankind is in the grip of inexorable forces which may destroy civilization if not subdued to humane purposes.”9 Like Walter Lippmann, Beard viewed American participation in the war as an opportunity to effect lasting social reform in the United States and beyond. Even the robber barons would be compelled to serve a larger good. Dispensing praise that would likely have stirred disquiet among its recipients, Beard lauded the Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Harrimans as “creative pioneers,” anticipating a time when their “magnificent economic structures” would be used for “public purposes.”10

  Irritated by the irresponsibility of the Wilson campaign’s slogan in 1916—“He kept us out of war”—Beard held his nose and voted for Charles Evans Hughes, until recently an associate justice of the Supreme Court, primarily due to his support for military preparedness (it also helped that the Republican candidate offered clear support for national woman suffrage). Deploying Mahanian reasoning, Beard observed that “war has been one of the most tremendous factors in the origin of the State and the progress of mankind,” and that ducking a necessary fight was an abdication of responsibility.11

  During the election year, Beard mischievously claimed to understand the tenor of public opinion better than Wilson’s campaign advisers: “Millions of Americans would give their life blood to prevent the establishment of [a Prussian state] on these shores. In this I mean no breach of neutrality. With due scientific calm and without expressing any preference in the matter I think I am stating accurately the opinions of most of my countrymen.”12 Sarcasm aside, Beard’s words revealed his sense of urgency. As Wilson edged slowly toward intervention, Beard condemned the president’s cant. He complained to The New York Times that the “Peace Without Victory” speech was “not much of a basis for negotiation,” and unless Wilson was operating from a script written with the other belligerents, “he was just preaching a sermon.” Wilson’s support for ethnic self-determination, meanwhile, brought to mind Pandora opening her box. “Does it mean an independent Ireland?” Beard wondered. “What about Alsace-Lorraine? What about Bohemia? What about Croatia and the scores of little nations in the Balkans? What about India? What about Haiti and Santo Domingo, where the United States is ruling according to President Wilson’s orders.”13 Beard was relieved when Wilson finally requested a declaration of war. Distancing himself from the president’s grander ambitions, however, he called for “poise, cold-bloodedness, and a Machiavellian disposition to see things as they are … whether we like them or not.”14

  The First World War witnessed a remarkable mobilization on the part of America’s universities and intellectuals. When America’s war began, its research universities—inspired by early efforts, such as Robert La Follette Sr.’s “Wisconsin Idea,” to have universities serve a wider political purpose—willingly donated their resources to help realize Wilson’s plans. Hopeful that national planning would elevate the significance of the social sciences, Beard wrote in an article for The New Republic on November 17, 1917, that “political science, economics, social economy, and sociology are now in the crucible of circumstance.”15 Yet it was the natural and physical sciences, not the social sciences, that found it easier to embrace their elevation to circumstance. In February 1918, for example, Columbia University’s mechanical
and electrical engineering departments offered all the assistance to the Navy Department that it deemed useful—a windfall for the government. Science and engineering departments followed suit across the nation.

  Concerned lest they be left behind, humanities and social science scholars also began to offer their services to wartime America. Alongside distinguished fellow historians such as Carl Becker, Albert Bushnell Hart, and J. Franklin Jameson, Beard propagandized for President Wilson under the aegis of the Committee on Public Information. His scholarly efforts primarily consisted in placing Wilhelmine Germany in its proper historical context: as a ruthless expansionary power that posed a direct threat to the United States.16 In an appeal to support President Wilson’s fourth Liberty Bond Drive, Beard wrote in Harper’s Magazine that America “and her allies are now pitted against the most merciless despotism the world has ever seen … A German victory means the utter destruction of those ideals of peace and international goodwill which have been America’s great reliance.”17 Beard was aware that presenting despotism versus democracy in Manichaean terms obscured as much as it revealed. But he willingly set aside complexity to serve a larger good.