Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Some people had tried to talk the president out of going to Europe and playing a leading role in shaping the post-war settlement. Three days after the Armistice, House cabled from Paris that unnamed Americans “whose opinions are of value” thought he should not come because “it would involve a loss of dignity and your commanding position.” Clemenceau and Lloyd George suggested Wilson might appear at part of the conference but should hold himself aloof from the negotiating sessions. He exploded in response, “I infer that the French and English leaders desire to exclude me from the Conference for fear I might there lead the weaker nations against them. … I believe that no one would wish me to sit by and try to steer the conference from the outside.” House did not directly try to talk Wilson out of going to Paris, but he confided to his diary, “I wish in my soul the President had appointed me as Chairman of the Peace Delegation with McAdoo and Hoover as my associates.” He believed that this dream team of negotiators could achieve great and speedy results. House later admitted that he liked to be the principal negotiator, and regarding the presidency, “there have been times when I would have like[d] the office itself instead of being an adviser to him who held it.”2 Those were troubling thoughts for him or any adviser to harbor.

  Not everyone in Washington wanted Wilson to go to Paris either, and after Lansing met privately with him the day after the Armistice, he wrote in a memorandum, “I told him frankly that I thought the plan to attend was unwise and would be a mistake … [and] that he could practically dictate the terms of peace if he held aloof.” Wilson did not take kindly to that advice. “His face assumed that harsh, obstinate expression which indicates resentment at unacceptable advice. He said nothing, but looked volumes.” Wilson did seek other opinions about whether he should go to Paris. He asked two Democratic senators, Key Pittman of Nevada and Peter Gerry of Rhode Island, to seek their colleagues’ views about the matter. Pittman reported that the senators were about equally divided. Some feared domestic affairs would be neglected—a point Lansing had also raised—and some thought he could dominate the negotiations “as a superman residing afar off in a citadel of power beyond that of all nations.” Others argued that he alone could bring about a just settlement and new ways to maintain peace.3

  Wilson agreed with those who wanted him to go, and he itched to be in the thick of things. Soon afterward, he laughingly told a visiting Swiss politician, “I’m going over to Europe because the Allied governments don’t want me to. … I want to tell Lloyd George certain things I can’t write to him. I’ll tell him: Are you going to grant freedom of the seas? If not, are you prepared to enter into a race with us to see who will have the larger navy, you or we?” Wilson also wanted to extend the Monroe Doctrine to a mutual security pact, as he had tried to do earlier with the Pan-American pact: “Not a big-brother affair, but a real partnership.” He admitted, “The solutions cannot be ideal and I know that everybody will be disgusted with me.”4 On November 18, the White House issued a statement to the press that the president would leave for France early in December, immediately after the opening of the next session of Congress, but that it was unlikely he would stay for the whole conference.

  Curiously, this decision raised little public reaction, even from such critics as Roosevelt and Lodge. Wilson’s next decision, however, stirred up a furious outcry that would leave a near-unanimous legacy of later condemnation. That decision involved the four men whom he picked as the other members of the delegation to the peace conference. Several objectives needed to be served in choosing this delegation. Foremost came diplomacy, which put a premium on negotiating skill and experience and considerations of prestige. Those criteria made two choices well-nigh inescapable. Wilson presumed from the outset that House would accompany him, and by virtue of his position, Lansing must go, too. Since military matters would loom large in the settlement, an expert in that field ought to be included. Wilson offered that slot to Baker, but the secretary of war countered that since McAdoo was about to resign as secretary of the Treasury, it would not be wise to have two cabinet members out of the country for an extended period. On Baker’s recommendation, the appointment went instead to General Tasker H. Bliss, who had been serving as the American representative to the Allied Supreme War Council. Of these choices, only House caused any criticism. Critics regularly accused the colonel of being nothing more than Wilson’s crony, and Republicans had made his closeness to the president a minor campaign issue in 1916.

  The real controversy arose because representatives from two categories were not chosen: senators and prominent Republicans. The Constitution’s requirement that two thirds of the Senate consent to a treaty made it seem wise, if not imperative, to include members of that body. The last time the United States had negotiated a peace treaty, with Spain in 1898, President McKinley had named three senators among the negotiators—two from the Republican majority and one from the Democratic minority—and those senators had reputedly facilitated approval of the treaty. Twenty years later, however, the president faced an apparently insuperable obstacle in the Senate: Henry Cabot Lodge. Because Lodge was soon to become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and majority leader, to invite any senators without including him would have been both bad politics and an insult to that prerogative-conscious chamber. Perhaps if Wilson had felt his gambler’s instinct more keenly, he might have bet that Lodge would decline an invitation in order to preserve his freedom to criticize and oppose what might come out of the peace conference. Unfortunately, he found the senior Democrat and current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, only slightly less obnoxious than Lodge. In view of so much bad blood and such unappetizing choices, Wilson understandably, though not wisely, gave little thought to choosing senators.5

  Failure to include a prominent Republican was less understandable or excusable. The previous summer, Wilson and House had bandied about several possibilities, particularly Root, and the colonel and Tumulty continued to push for him to be included. Other possibilities were Taft and Hughes, but their attacks during the recent campaign had left hard feelings. When a cabinet member asked if Hughes might be appointed, Wilson answered, “No—there is no room big enough for Hughes & me to stay in.”6 Finally, at Lansing’s suggestion, Wilson chose Henry White to be the delegation’s token Republican. White was a retired diplomat who was close to Roosevelt, Lodge, and Root, and he evidently expected to act as a liaison with those men, because he accepted the appointment only after clearing it with Roosevelt and Lodge.

  The complete lineup of delegates—House, Lansing, Bliss, and White—drew heated criticism when it was announced on November 29. “Our delegation with the exception of Mr. White are merely mouthpieces of the President,” Lodge told Lord Bryce, “and if Mr. White should differ he will be overridden.” By not including Republicans, Lodge believed the delegation included no persons of stature who might challenge the president’s views. Wilson explained this omission to a newspaper editor by noting that except for Taft—“I have lost all confidence in [Taft’s] character”—all the leading Republicans who had been suggested “are already committed to do everything possible to prevent the Peace Conference from acting upon the peace terms which they have already agreed to.” He told another correspondent that the delegates should represent “the country as a whole,” not any particular group or interest.7

  Those were rationalizations. Wilson knew he would need Republican support for a peace settlement, but he was balking once more at practicing the kind of partnership with the opposition party that he should have understood from his study of coalition governments under parliamentary systems. The real reason for his failure to reach out to the opposition was that he wanted a free hand in the peace negotiations. Having powerful but unsympathetic men at his elbow might restrict the freedom of movement he craved in order to be ready to strike out in bold and unconventional directions. Wilson left leading Republicans off the delegation not because they were Republicans but because they might get in h
is way.

  The exclusion of prominent Republicans from the delegation to the peace conference would later become almost as widely condemned as had been his appeal for a Democratic Congress. Wilson would come to be charged with a failure to practice bipartisanship—in sharp contrast to the next two Democratic presidents, who would serve during and after World War II. As with the election appeal, such charges would be overworked. Both the term bipartisanship and its practice would arise twenty years later as another “lesson” learned from Wilson’s supposed mistakes, and the later successes of bipartisanship would depend more on the willingness of the opposition party to cede primacy in foreign policy than on presidential outreach. At the end of 1918, Republicans had repeatedly shown that they had no intention of following Wilson’s lead in peacemaking. Subsequent debates over the peace treaty and membership in the League of Nations would show what a wide gulf separated the two parties; bridging that gulf would have required much more constructive thinking and goodwill than all but a few leading Republicans were willing to show. Wilson can and should be faulted for not reaching out to the opposition party, but taking Root or Hughes with him to Paris would probably not have brought enough of their fellow partisans on board to guarantee success. This sin of omission—like his sin of commission with the appeal for a Democratic Congress—made an already bad situation a bit worse.8

  Wilson’s decision to go to Paris required assembling a staff to accompany him and wrapping up affairs at home as much as possible. The staff question did not receive a great deal of attention from him and caused further tensions with Lansing. In Paris, House already had a group of advisers, headed by the Foreign Service officer Joseph C. Grew. Wilson evidently planned to have House use this group as the nucleus of the delegation staff. Lansing, meanwhile, appointed Grew secretary—chief of staff—and chose two other Foreign Service officers as his deputies, all without consulting the president. This angered Wilson, although he acquiesced, on advice from House. Also on the colonel’s advice, the president appointed twenty-three members of the Inquiry to the staff, while the State Department, the Navy Department, and various boards also got representation. Most of these appointees accompanied the presidential party and the delegates to Europe aboard the U.S.S. George Washington. Such casualness about assembling the staff and the simmering feud between the president and the secretary of state did not augur well for the negotiations.9

  A stab by Wilson at wrapping up affairs at home did not augur well either. The war’s sudden, unexpected end raised a host of problems. Doughboys’ families were clamoring for their sons to be brought home—a task that proved easier than expected, thanks to reversing the flow of men on the “bridge of ships.” On the home front, business groups and Republicans in general demanded the immediate suspension of wartime regulations and controls and the return of railroads and telegraph lines to private ownership. Progressive groups and organized labor saw those measures as great gains and wanted them incorporated into a peacetime program of “reconstruction.” Within the administration, two cabinet members, McAdoo and Gregory, announced their intentions to resign as soon as the war was over. Mac had been smarting under what he regarded as his father-in-law’s lack of appreciation of his considerable contributions to the victorious war effort, and he was laying plans to run for president in 1920. He insisted on leaving immediately after the Armistice, and at the beginning of December, Wilson appointed Carter Glass of Virginia, the chairman of the House Banking Committee and an author of the Federal Reserve Act, to be secretary of the Treasury. Two months later, he picked Walker D. Hines for McAdoo’s other post, director general of the railroads. Gregory stayed on until March 1919, to be succeeded by former congressman A. Mitchell Palmer of Pennsylvania.10

  Wilson mainly tried to sidestep domestic questions. Between the Armistice and his departure for Europe, he devoted far more time to international matters. When he delivered the State of the Union address on December 2, he sent mixed signals about where he stood on major domestic concerns. He opened with a celebration of the victory Americans had just won, praising both the soldiers who had fought and the civilians who had worked on the home front. He singled out the contribution of women and asked again for passage of the suffrage amendment. He said he had seen no plan for industrial “reconstruction” that would suit “our spirited businessmen and self-reliant labourers,” although he thought the government should help returning servicemen find work and should mount a public works program to create jobs. He said he had “no answer ready” about the railroads and invited Congress to study the problem. He closed by talking about the upcoming peace conference, promising to stay in touch with Congress and affairs at home and asking, “May I not hope … [that] I may have the encouragement and the added strength of your united support?”11

  When Wilson asked for united support from Congress, he was indulging in wishful thinking, and he knew it. Josephus Daniels noted that Republicans said they would “give him an ice bath,” and they sat in sullen silence except when he mentioned the troops. The next day, Senator Philander C. Knox of Pennsylvania, who had been Taft’s secretary of state, introduced a resolution to restrict the peace settlement to the reasons for which the United States had gone to war and postpone for separate consideration any discussion of a league of nations. Knox’s resolution set off a debate in which Wilson’s longtime Democratic nemesis, James Reed of Missouri, denounced the league idea as “the old Holy Alliance all over again”—a reference to Czar Alexander’s scheme to suppress independence and republics a hundred years earlier—and William Borah seconded the charge. Wilson was well aware of the hornet’s nest of opposition on Capitol Hill; it was one reason why, despite much criticism, he refused to discuss specific plans for a league of nations.12

  The evening after he spoke to Congress, he and Edith boarded an overnight train to Hoboken, New Jersey, where they boarded the George Washington for the ten-day voyage across the Atlantic. Those days at sea offered him a wonderful interlude and a chance to rest up for the peace conference. The weather was mild, and the ocean was calm, and he and Edith took walks on the decks and played shuffleboard. They mingled with the sailors and went to movies with them and the enlisted personnel in the theater belowdecks, not the upper-deck theater reserved for first-class passengers. The musical accompaniment to the silent films included loud, raucous singing, in which the president joined with gusto. The Wilsons took their meals in their stateroom suite, usually with two or three guests. The food was excellent, but Wilson was chagrined to learn that a leading New York chef was cooking only for them and select other dignitaries. “His disbelief in special privilege was aroused,” Edith recalled, “and on our second trip to the Conference this culinary artist was left behind.”13

  For all the relaxation and joviality, Wilson never forgot that this was a working trip with a major struggle awaiting him at its end. He spent several hours each day going over papers. These included regular telegraphic reports from House about the machinations of the Allied leaders, which disturbed him. Roosevelt had responded to the State of the Union address by claiming that Britain had won the war and should dictate the peace without interference from the United States, particularly over what he sneeringly referred to as “freedom of the seas.” On the first day at sea, Wilson shot back with off-the-record remarks to reporters who were accompanying him on the voyage. “I don’t believe our boys who fought over there will be inclined to feel just that way about it,” he declared. He also observed, “Militarism is equally dangerous when applied to sea forces as to land forces,” and if Britain refused to reduce naval armaments, “the United States will show her how to build a navy.”14

  Despite the mutual hard feelings between him and the Republicans, Wilson tried to convey some reassurances to them. He took Henry White aside to explain that his views on a league of nations were different from Taft’s. “I was much relieved to find that the President’s idea as to the League is a rather general one,” White noted. He was pleased that it would be rest
ricted to reporting on possible breaches of the peace and might impose a boycott, but there would be no authority, in the event of war, “to take further joint action of a punitive character.” Another time, Wilson unburdened himself, as he would do often in the coming months, to Grayson. Reports from House of demands made at a meeting of the three Allied premiers, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando, made him suspect that they sought “a peace of loot or spoliation,” and if they did, he said, “I will withdraw personally and with my commissioners return home.” He also thought problems “under this principle of self-determination” might prove thorny, and he intended to make the League of Nations part of the peace treaty. He did not plan to stay at the conference for long because he would have to return home at the close of Congress in March, but he believed he might have to go back to Paris later.15

  The most extended and best-recorded statement of the president’s thinking came on December 10, when ten members of the Inquiry gathered in his stateroom office. They and others had been complaining of being kept in the dark about plans for the conference, and one of them, William C. Bullitt, a brash and self-confident young man, approached the president before one of the movies and asked him to explain to them his approach to the conference and plans for a league of nations. Seated on chairs in a semicircle around the president’s desk, his visitors listened to him talk for nearly an hour. He was in good form, covering a range of problems and questions, beginning with the League of Nations. “The President does not believe that any hard and fast constitution of the ‘League to Enforce Peace,’ can be established at the present time,” Bullitt noted in his diary. Wilson again envisioned a minimal organization, although he insisted on its upholding independence and territorial integrity, and he believed that it would develop to meet changing conditions, just as the Monroe Doctrine had done; he also insisted it would not be a great power directorate or a balance of power. He impressed his listeners with the spirit in which he approached the conference and his beliefs that America was the only disinterested nation and the Allied leaders did not represent their people. The same words stuck in the mind of nearly everyone who wrote an account of the meeting: they were, as one of them, Isaiah Bowman, recorded, “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it; give me a guaranteed position.”16