House prided himself on having a hand in the matter. The colonel had differed with Lansing and others in the State Department and Wilson himself about whether to reply to the pope, and he wrote, “I am sure I have a more complete picture of the situation than either the President or Lansing.”59 That was a dangerous attitude for any presidential adviser, no matter how intimate, to harbor, and it portended eventual trouble. For the present, however, House’s relationship with Wilson seemed stronger than ever. Curiously, it did not depend on direct contact. After the British mission to Washington in April, the two men did not see each other again for more than four months, although they wrote to each other frequently.
The separation ended with Wilson’s previously mentioned visit to the colonel’s summer home during the cruise in September. They engaged in two days of conversation that ranged widely. On the first day, Wilson berated Lansing and discussed a possible cabinet shuffle, as well as shipping and naval matters, and on the second day they discussed peace terms. House noticed that his guest sometimes had difficulty resuming a line of thought after an interruption. “He smiled plaintively,” the colonel recorded, “and said: ‘You see I am getting tired. This is the way it indicates itself.’” House also brought up a matter that Wiseman had passed on to him—support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which the British were about to endorse in what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration. Wilson was sympathetic but did not think it was the right time for any commitment.60
During the next two months, House met with Wilson three times for similar broad-ranging talks. The colonel pressed him to speak out again on the future basis of peace, especially the elimination of trade barriers on land and sea, and to demand that a new German government make peace. Wilson gave House two signs of how much he trusted and relied on him: he chose the colonel to represent him at the meeting of the Inter-Allied War Council in November, and he asked him to set up an organization to plan for a peace settlement. The idea for a planning body originated with Wilson, who told House that he wanted to begin systematic work to lay out the American position for post-war negotiations and asked, “What would you think of quietly gathering about you a group of men to assist you to do this?” House jumped at the idea, replying that this was “one of the things I have had in mind for a long while. I shall undertake the work and will go about it at once.”61
The colonel’s activities resulted in the Inquiry, a freestanding organization outside the State Department that would become famous as a covey of experts who brought knowledge and brainpower to the gathering of information and analysis about matters involved in a peace settlement. Actually, in setting up the Inquiry, House acted like the political operator he was. As the organization’s head, he picked his brother-in-law, Sidney Mezes, a former president of the University of Texas who was now president of City College of New York. He also enlisted Walter Lippmann, who had taken leave from The New Republic to work for Baker in the War Department. More than half of the overwhelmingly male staff found their way into the organization through personal connections to five universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago. Few of the recruits possessed up-to-date knowledge of areas outside western Europe; the academic study of most of the world in the United States was such that expertise in those areas was simply not available. The Inquiry staff strove to make up in enthusiasm and idealism for their lack of knowledge.62
The Inquiry played an important role in Wilson’s foreign policy much sooner than anyone expected. The last two and a half months of 1917 were a dark hour for the Allies. A two-week period at the end of October and beginning of November witnessed the Italian debacle at Caporetto and the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Elsewhere, signs of war-weariness were manifest. Earlier in the year, mutinies had broken out in French units on the Western Front, and at the end of November a public plea for peace negotiations came from a former British foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne. At the Inter-Allied War Council meeting in Paris, House supported Lloyd George’s successful push for the creation of a supreme war council to provide a unified command on the Western Front. The colonel also tried to get the Allies to issue a declaration that they were not fighting war for purposes of aggression or indemnity. Wilson backed this move, but his endorsement failed to sway the Allied leaders, and the conference issued no statement of war aims.
Such recalcitrance did not deter Wilson, who was warming up for his own statement. In his State of the Union address in December, he lambasted the rulers of Germany and asked Congress to bring greater force to bear against them by declaring war on Austria-Hungary. At the same time, he insisted that “we do not wish in any way to impair or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” In future peacemaking, he eschewed “any such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna. The thought of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated standards of right and wrong, is the air governments must henceforth breathe if they would live.” Referring specifically to the “peace without victory” address, he affirmed, “We are seeking permanent, not temporary, foundations for the peace of the world and must seek them candidly and fearlessly.”63
When House returned from Europe, Wilson decided at once, the colonel noted, “to formulate the war aims of the United States. I never knew a man who did things so casually. We did not discuss the matter more than ten or fifteen minutes when he decided he would take the action.” House was pleased, although he wished the interallied conference had done it. Wilson asked him to have the Inquiry prepare “a memorandum of the different questions which a peace conference must necessarily take up for solution. I told him I already had this data in my head. He replied that he also had it, but he would like a more complete and definite statement such [as], for instance, a proper solution to the Balkan question.”64 The Inquiry speedily drafted a memorandum that covered the major areas of a peace settlement, and House gave a copy to the president when he was in Washington on December 23.
Wilson does not seem to have consulted that memorandum, in part because other work interfered and in part because he managed to gather his family for Christmas and New Year’s at the White House. Jessie and Nell came with their husbands and small children, Stockton Axson journeyed from Texas, where he was teaching at Rice Institute, and Ellen’s sister, Madge Axson Elliott, and her husband, Ed Elliott, arrived from California. On Christmas morning, Madge gave Wilson a silk hat, which he set on his head at a jaunty angle and said, “Ha! I see the fine Machiavellian hand of Brooks,” meaning the White House valet, who worried about the president’s being properly attired. New Year’s Eve was not a happy occasion, Madge recalled: “The news from France had been bad, and Woodrow’s eyes were grave. He sat a little apart, not sharing our casual talk.” He pulled out a volume of Wordsworth’s poetry and read aloud “Ad Usque,” which he said had been written “when all Europe had fallen to Napoleon and England was threatened.” The opening lines are:
Another year! Another deadly blow.
Another mighty Empire overthrown.
And we are left, or shall be left, alone,
The last that dare to struggle with the Foe.65
• • •
On January 4, House brought with him a revised and expanded memorandum from the Inquiry, and they spent the evening discussing general terms and looking over maps and data. The next day—which House called “a remarkable day”—the men started work at ten-thirty in the morning “and finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it, at half past twelve o’clock [at night].” They worked from the Inquiry memorandum, on which Wilson made revisions in his handwriting and shorthand notes in the margins. Using his typewriter, he set out a series of fourteen statements, most of them a phrase or single sentence, adapted from the memorandum. When they finished, Wilson asked House to number them in the order he thought they should go. The colonel started with the general terms and ended with the territor
ial ones. Wilson agreed, “with the exception of the peace association which he thought should come last because it would round out the message properly, and permit him to say some things at the end which were necessary.” This numbered sequence would become the salient feature of Wilson’s speech—the Fourteen Points.66
They talked again the following day, even though it was a Sunday, and Wilson then went into his study alone to write out his speech, first in shorthand and then on his typewriter. The next day, they talked about Russia—a special concern because the Bolsheviks had negotiated an armistice with the Germans and opened peace talks at Brest-Litovsk—as well as Poland and Turkey. A complication arose when news reached them that Lloyd George had just given a speech in London in which he coined the phrase self-determination and promised freedom to subject nations under the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires. Wilson thought Lloyd George had pre-empted what he wanted to say, but House assured him his speech “would so smother the Lloyd George speech that it would be forgotten and that the President would once more become the spokesman for the Entente, and, indeed, for the liberals of the world.” Reassured, Wilson kept the speech secret from everyone except House and Edith, including the cabinet and Tumulty. The night before he delivered it, he was so keyed up that he talked late into the night and read aloud again from Wordsworth. In the morning, Edith and House persuaded him to play golf before going to the Capitol.67
Wilson again wanted to give one of the greatest speeches of his life, and again he succeeded. Appearing in the House chamber just after noon on January 8, he opened by referring to the negotiations between Germany and Russia at Brest-Litovsk, which had just broken off. Those negotiations were significant because they challenged the Allies and America to state their aims in the war. He complimented Lloyd George for having spoken about the Allies’ aims and said, “I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond, with utter simplicity and frankness.” Americans wanted only “that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.”68
Now came the Fourteen Points, which took up the rest of the speech, except for the final four paragraphs. Wilson stated each one by number—a Roman numeral in the printed text. The first five were brief and general:
Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at …
Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas …
The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers … among all the nations consenting to the peace …
Adequate guarantees … that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims … [in which] the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight.
The next nine points treated territorial matters. Point VI, the longest of all, assured Russia of “unhampered and unembarrassed” sovereignty and stated, “The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations … will be the acid test of their good will.” Point VII called for the evacuation and restoration of Belgium. Point VIII addressed Alsace-Lorraine as “the wrong done to France … which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.” Point IX promised Italy borders “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” Point X offered “[t]he peoples of Austria-Hungary … the freest opportunity of autonomous development.” Point XI held out independence and security to “the several Balkan states.” Point XII promised sovereignty to the Turks and “autonomous development” to other peoples in the Ottoman Empire, along with free navigation through the Turkish straits. Point XIII called for “[a]n independent Poland” with boundaries drawn according to nationality and “a free and secure access to the sea.” The final point, XIV, read: “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”69
He closed by pledging to fight for those points because they would assure a just and stable peace and remove the main causes of war. He assured the Germans once more of America’s goodwill and rejected any notion of forcing them to change their government. “We have spoken now, surely,” he declared,
in terms too concrete to admit of any further doubt or question. An evident principle runs through the whole programme I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak. Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could stand upon no other principle, and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything that they possess. The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they are ready to put their strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test.70
The Fourteen Points speech lived up to House’s promise that it would make Wilson the spokesman for “the liberals of the world.” He did bring off a remarkable coup with the Fourteen Points. His rhetoric was not as grandiose as Lloyd George’s, and he did not use the term self-determination nor lay it down as a general principle to be applied at all times and in all places. Later, Wilson would use that term—it was too good to resist—but he would always be circumspect about making excessive promises. Significantly, he continued to spurn the call to break up the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and urged only “autonomy” for their subject nationalities. This restraint flew in the face of British and French efforts to foment revolts among such peoples as the Slavs of Central Europe and the Arabs and Armenians of Asia Minor, and it reflected an appreciation of how destabilizing the breakup of those empires might be. The Fourteen Points did not express starry-eyed idealism, yet they became a beacon of inspiration, thanks to the president’s measured eloquence and moral authority.
What Wilson hoped to accomplish with the Fourteen Points was less than totally clear. One obvious aim was to get the Bolsheviks to stop negotiating with the Germans and possibly woo them back to the Allied side. Whether that overture would succeed remained to be seen. Another goal was to rally critical and war-weary elements in the Allied countries, particularly socialists and other liberals, toward whom Wilson was reaching out informally. Those overtures did seem promising. Most of all, perhaps, Wilson was aiming his words and ideas at the Germans. His repeated assurances of friendship toward them, coupled with condemnation of their government—which he now toned down—extended an invitation to them to make peace on reasonable terms. The Fourteen Points put flesh on the skeleton of peace without victory, and Wilson was once again inviting both friend and foe to accept a liberal, nonpunitive settlement. Such a settlement could end the war without him and millions of others having to tread further down this grim and passion-racked path of waging war.
19
VICTORY
Of the four wartime presidents who preceded him, Woodrow Wilson thought and cared most about Abraham Lincoln. He left no record of saying anything about James Madison, James K. Polk, or William McKinley during the war. Madison was an odd omission because in earlier years he had remarked on how he and Madison were the only “Princeton men” to become president. At the beginning of 1918, he might well have worried about sharing Madison’s fate of being a president who failed to lead the nation to victory, but not the “peace without victory” he desired. The Allies’ troubles grew when Lenin took Russia out of the war by accepting the humiliating peace terms laid down at Brest-Litovsk. This move freed the Germans to hurl all their might at the Western Front, thereby making the spring of 1918 the Allies’ direst hour. The critical question remained, could enough American troops
get into combat in time?
Wilson had a special reason for thinking about Lincoln soon after he delivered the Fourteen Points address. Critics on Capitol Hill assailed his administration’s conduct of the war and sought to wrest management from the president’s hands, much as others in Congress had tried to do half a century earlier. The chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, George E. Chamberlain of Oregon, was a progressive Democrat who usually supported Wilson’s policies, but in keeping with his state’s political culture, he had a strong maverick streak. At the middle of January 1918, against the backdrop of foul-ups on the railroads and fuel shortages, Chamberlain held hearings that exposed the administration’s war managers, particularly Secretary of War Baker, to charges of gross incompetence. Chamberlain introduced a bill to establish a war cabinet of “three distinguished citizens of private ability”—he did not suggest whom—with virtually limitless jurisdiction. This measure would have taken the conduct of the war out of the hands of not only the secretaries of war and the navy but the president himself.1
These moves in the Capitol stirred intrigue and anger at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. House saw an opportunity to renew his scheme to shove Baker aside, and he bided his time for the right moment to offer his advice. Wilson, however, did not ask House’s or anyone else’s advice and lashed out in a statement to the press, in which he noted that Chamberlain had not consulted him about the war cabinet proposal. He called the senator’s allegations “astonishing and absolutely unjustifiable” and lauded Baker as “one of the ablest public officials I have ever known.” In a cabinet meeting the next day, he said the Republicans wanted a war cabinet representing privilege: “They do not think as we do because they wish to act for a class.”2
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