The discussion of a league of nations on the first day of the visit was their longest and most important one. On the other days, except Sunday, Wilson spent the morning playing golf with Edith and Grayson and saw House in the afternoon. The colonel mentioned the Inquiry and found out Wilson valued its work on details but probably would not use it that much. They also discussed diplomatic appointments, particularly a possible replacement in London for Walter Page, whose health was failing, and considered how best to use McAdoo, who felt overworked and underappreciated. House privately quizzed Grayson about the president’s health and his capacity to serve another term. Wilson himself joked to House “that his mind was getting ‘leaky,’” and the colonel told Edith that her husband was working too hard and not delegating enough. She answered that “when he delegated to others he found it was not well done.”34
In Washington, Wilson tried to maintain his accustomed routine, including golf games, car rides, and evenings at the theater, yet the workload continued to pile up, with papers, correspondence, and official functions. Except for brief trips to Mount Vernon for a Fourth of July speech and to Philadelphia for a ship launching, the visit to House gave the president his only chance to escape the heat and humidity of summertime Washington. Some observers then and later said that they detected changes in Wilson’s psychology around this time. Brandeis later said he thought Wilson’s bold, independent thinking began to slip in August 1918. Whether these were signs of a deeper problem—stemming from his long-dormant arteriosclerosis—is impossible to tell. Still, it was clear that this sixty-one-year-old man, who was burdened with responsibilities that he seemed loath to share, was not at the peak of his powers.35 That did not bode well for the job of tackling big new challenges.
One task Wilson knew he must tackle was to share his ideas about a postwar world with the public. During the summer of 1918, he did issue press statements on specific subjects, but only in his Fourth of July address at Mount Vernon did he air his larger thinking. There, Wilson declared, “The Past and Present are in deadly grapple.” The war’s settlement must be final and must rest on four principles, which he enumerated:
I. The destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere … [or] its reduction to virtual impotence. II. The settlement of every question … upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned … III. The consent of all nations to be governed … by the same principles of honour and respect that govern individual citizens of all modern states … IV. The establishment of an organization of peace which shall make it certain that the combined power of free nations will … serve to make peace and justice the more secure.
These “great ends” could not come through high-level intrigues, “with their projects for balances of power and of national opportunity,” but must spring from the people, “with their longing hope for justice and social freedom and opportunity.”36 This speech gave a whiff of uplift and again endorsed self-determination, though not by name this time. Otherwise, it marked a retreat into generalities from the Fourteen Points and the four additional points.
Wilson knew he was going to have to do more by way of educating the public. A fine opportunity arose when McAdoo suggested that the president make a trip to the West in September and October as part of a new Liberty Loan campaign. The White House announced a tour to the West Coast and back, but on September 9, Wilson canceled the trip. “I have keenly felt again and again the privation of being confined to the Capital,” he explained, “and prevented from having the sort of direct contact with people … which would be of so much benefit and stimulation to me.”37 But delicate and critical matters did not allow him to leave. He was not exaggerating: he genuinely regretted having to abort this trip. As he had with his speaking tour on behalf of the preparedness program in 1916, he would have had a chance to explain his aims and plans in homely, compelling language. That was his forte as a leader, and a tour at this time could have done him and his programs a lot of good.
In the fall of 1918, he issued more statements to the press, but he gave just two speeches before the end of the war. One was the appeal to the Senate to pass the woman suffrage amendment, which he linked to the war aim of spreading liberty. The other had come three days earlier, on September 27, when he addressed a Liberty Loan gathering, again at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. In that speech, Wilson enlarged upon points he had made in July at Mount Vernon. People’s free choices of governments and equal rights among strong and weak nations must be backed by an instrument to make peace just and lasting: “a League of Nations formed under Covenants that will be efficacious.” He reiterated five of the Fourteen Points—impartial justice, a ban on special interests, a ban on alliances, a ban on economic discrimination, and publicity for all agreements—and he closed by demanding “complete victory,” not on Germany’s slippery “terms” but a “final triumph of justice and fair dealing.”38
Wilson made that ringing avowal because he was getting diplomatic feelers that he knew might lead to an end to the war. The Central Powers were crumbling away at the edges. The Turks were retreating from Palestine and Mesopotamia, while Bulgaria was collapsing and about to sue for peace. On September 15, Austria-Hungary had sent out a vaguely worded public appeal for an informal conference to explore “compromise peace.” Because the United States was not at war with Turkey or Bulgaria, Wilson declined to take part in negotiations with those countries, and he made a quick, terse reply to the Austro-Hungarian appeal, noting that the United States had stated its terms “repeatedly and with entire candor.”39 House, who was not consulted about that reply, thought Wilson should have waited to answer the Austrians and used the occasion to rally the Allies behind liberal peace terms.
Wilson was conducting diplomacy with an eye toward domestic politics. Lodge, Roosevelt, and other Republicans were thundering about “unconditional surrender” and punitive peace terms. At the beginning of October, he told the financier Thomas Lamont that the whole country was growing “intolerant [and] revengeful,” and he worried that the Allied governments, particularly the British, were bent on colonial and commercial aggrandizement. He feared the dangers of a “non-healing peace.” Any other kind of peace would leave nations determined to right perceived wrongs: “Providentially I have been placed in a position at this time to have great power for good or ill. I see you smile, Mr. Lamont, when I use the word ‘providentially.’ I do not mean to indicate that it is necessarily a wise providence that has placed me in this position, but merely that circumstances have done so.”40
The falling away of Germany’s allies foreshadowed a peace move from the main adversary itself. On October 6, the country’s newly installed civilian chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, transmitted a public note to Wilson requesting peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points and principles laid down in the September 27 speech. This note sparked the kind of reaction at home that Wilson feared. Various newspapers lambasted the overture as an insincere ploy by the Germans to evade their complete and richly deserved defeat, and a fierce debate erupted on October 7 in the Senate, where Republicans, particularly Lodge, and some Democrats vied with each other in demands for total, crushing victory. The Senate passed a resolution declaring that there be no armistice until the Germans totally disarmed and agreed to pay reparations and indemnities. Despite those reactions and against House’s advice, Wilson sent a prompt reply to the German note in which he asked whether the German government agreed to the Fourteen Points and subsequent principles and would negotiate only “the practical details of their application.” He warned that he could not agree to an armistice until German troops evacuated all invaded territory, and he asked whether the chancellor was “speaking merely for the constituted authorities of the Empire who have so far conducted the war.”41
Reaction abroad to the German overture was even fiercer than at home. Before Wilson’s reply went out, the three Allied prime ministers—Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France,
and Vittorio Orlando of Italy—met as the Supreme War Council at Versailles and drafted harsh, specific terms for an armistice. In a tense meeting at the White House with Jusserand, the French ambassador, Wilson objected to those terms having been elaborated without the United States being consulted. Jusserand countered by saying that the Allied leaders needed to have “a person who knows the President’s thinking and would be in a position to take a real part in debates and decisions.” Jusserand himself believed that Wilson was not inclined to delegate power and did not think an armistice was imminent.42 Then, on October 12, the Germans responded by agreeing to Wilson’s reply and expressing their belief that the Allied governments likewise accepted the Fourteen Points; they also told Wilson that they were speaking for their government and their people.
The German reply set off another explosion in the Senate on October 14, and a Democrat, Henry Ashurst of Arizona, went to the White House that afternoon. Ushered into the president’s office, the senator told Wilson that if he failed to express “the American spirit, you are destroyed.” Wilson shot back, “So far as my being destroyed, I am willing if I can serve the country to go into a cellar and read poetry the remainder of my life.” He said he was not making armistices, which must be left to the commanders in the field. Ashurst replied that not demanding unconditional surrender would mean that Wilson would have to read poetry in a cellar “to escape the cyclone of the people’s wrath.” Four days later, Wilson recalled that he told Ashurst, “Senator, it would relieve a great many people of anxiety if they did not start with the assumption that I am a damn fool.”43
He may have anticipated such senatorial bluster. That morning he closeted himself with House, Lansing, Baker, and Daniels to discuss his answer to the latest German note. He wanted to frame a reply that would not lead to any further dickering, and he and his advisers agreed that if the Germans felt beaten, they would accept any terms. But he did not want vengeful terms. “Neither did we desire to have the Allied armies ravage Germany as Germany has ravaged the countries she has invaded,” Wilson wrote after the others had departed. In this note, he left no doubt that Germany must come through the door to peace on bended knee. Only the military commanders could negotiate terms for an armistice, and such terms must maintain Allied military supremacy in the field. Germany’s armed forces must also at once stop such “illegal and inhumane practices” as sinking civilian ships, deporting Belgians to work in war industries, and stripping occupied territories of property and people. Finally, any armistice must “come by the action of the German people themselves.”44
House called October 14 “one of the most stirring days of my life.” He was referring not to the discussion of the reply but to what happened that evening. After he had dinner with House and Edith, the president wrote a letter appointing the colonel “my personal representative … to take part as such in the conferences of the Supreme War Council and in any other conferences in which it may be serviceable for him to represent me.” House exulted at having been given “the broadest powers. It puts me in his place in Europe.” They once again arranged a secret code, and as House was leaving, Wilson told him, “I have not given you any instructions because I feel you will know what to do.” This lack of instructions suited House fine. “He knows that our mind runs [parallel], and he knows where they diverge. … He has his weaknesses, his prejudices and his limitations like other men, but all in all, Woodrow Wilson will probably go down in history as the great figure of his time, and I hope, of all time.”45 The colonel left at once on a rough crossing of the Atlantic. He kept in touch with the president by wireless, but he took no part in the next round of dealings with the Germans.
On October 20, Wilson received a defensive and somewhat ambiguous response from the Germans. After discussing the next move—first with Lansing, Daniels, Baker, and the army chief of staff, then with the cabinet, and finally with the War Cabinet—he told the Germans that he and the Allies could negotiate only with a government that spoke for its own people: any further dealing with “the military masters and the monarchical autocrats” would require “not peace negotiations, but surrender.” House thought this move was a blunder. He faulted Wilson for not having consulted with the Allies, risking a stiffened German resistance, and losing a golden opportunity to achieve a liberal, nonpunitive peace. The colonel had sent the journalist Ray Stannard Baker to Europe to sound out opinion among liberals and socialists, and those contacts encouraged his view of the prospects of rallying international opinion behind a nonimperialistic settlement and a league of nations. Despite sharing those hopes and aims, Wilson had still decided to take this harsh line.46
Two days after he sent that note to Germany, the president turned to domestic politics. On October 25, he issued a statement to the press in which he appealed to voters to elect Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. This appeal had been at least a month in the making, and on October 18, he had shown a draft of it to Vance McCormick and Homer Cummings. According to Cummings, McCormick objected to language that might seem bitter, and Wilson deleted it. In the final, published version of the appeal, he observed that the impending elections were occurring at a critical time. He said he was seeking only “undivided support to the government” and was not impugning Republicans’ patriotism or support for the war. Rather, he feared the impression that a Republican victory would create abroad: “It is well understood there as well as here that the Republican leaders desire not so much to support the President as to control him.” Wilson insisted that he was not appealing for himself or his party: “In ordinary times I would not feel at liberty to make such an appeal to you. But these are not ordinary times.” He begged voters to “sustain me with undivided minds” and not embarrass him at home or abroad. “I submit my difficulties and my hopes to you.”47
No single act of Wilson’s as president would spark more criticism at the time and lead to more retrospective repudiation. Of the few people who knew about the appeal in advance, only McCormick expressed doubts about it. Once the appeal went out, members of the cabinet grumbled about not having been consulted, and Franklin Lane commented, “The country thinks that the President lowered himself by his letter.” After the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress two weeks later, the second-guessing swelled into a veritable chorus. McCormick, Gregory, and Daniels all later said they thought this was the biggest mistake Wilson made. Burleson and Gregory also claimed afterward that it inflamed partisan passions and that the Democrats would have won if Wilson had just kept his mouth shut.48
Why did such an intelligent man do something so universally derided as an act of folly? Part of the explanation lay in pressure to help the party’s candidates who were up for reelection. Wilson’s aborted speaking tour for the Liberty Loan could have served as a campaign swing and might have obviated the need for this appeal. The night before the appeal went to the press, as Edith later recalled, she tried to talk her husband out of issuing it, but he said it was too late: “I have told them I would do it.” Presumably, he was referring to fellow Democrats, and he did feel an obligation to help them, especially after getting such strong support for his intervention in the primaries. It was unlikely, however, that he felt any last-minute qualms. Lane put his finger on the heart of the matter when he noted on November 1, “[H]e likes the idea of personal-party leadership—Cabinet responsibility is still on his mind.” The appeal came as a logical outgrowth of Wilson’s studies of parliamentary governments and his ideas of making the American system more like them. Those ideas, together with his penchant for taking action, made a move like this well-nigh impossible for him to resist.49
Contemporary charges and wise hindsight about the appeal were overworked. Wilson’s action made a bad partisan situation marginally worse, but opposition to him already bordered on and sometimes crossed over into hatred. Roosevelt and Lodge defined the far edge of bitterness, but the normally milder-mannered Taft—who had now reconciled with Roosevelt—likewise assailed Wilson and his works wit
h venom. The party’s national chairman, Will Hays, displayed superb organizational skills and urged Republicans to stress issues that united rather than divided them. Insurgency and progressivism played almost no part in the campaign, even in Wisconsin, where La Follette and his followers were temporarily eclipsed by war frenzy. Not all Republicans jumped aboard the bandwagon. Senator Norris won reelection in Nebraska despite his vote against the declaration of war, but he was an exception. The run of Republicans gleefully joined in cries for all-out war to the finish and harsh treatment of “traitors.”50
It would be wrong, however, to read the 1918 election results as a referendum on foreign policy. If the electorate had been as war-mad as many people believed, the opposition party would have scored an even bigger victory. The Republicans picked up thirty-eight seats in the House, to give them a majority of 238 to 193, and twelve seats in the Senate, to give them a two-vote majority. That new Senate majority included La Follette, Norris, and one other war opponent, Asle Gronna of North Dakota, as well as such uneasy supporters of the war as Borah and Hiram Johnson, who had been elected in 1916. The Republicans gained these majorities by further strengthening their traditional dominance in the Northeast and Midwest and by rebounding in the West from a string of losses in the last four elections. Like most midterm contests, this one turned chiefly on domestic and local issues rather than foreign affairs, even though a war was raging.51
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