Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  The content of the discussions at these meetings did not please him either. The first meeting degenerated into a haggle over renewal of the Armistice agreement and arguments about which countries should be represented at the conference and how many representatives they should have. The second one touched briefly on one matter of substance—reparations—but then reverted to representation, particularly regarding the British dominions and India, with numbers finally agreed upon. The council finally set January 18 for the opening of the conference. Wilson proposed that governments should submit recommendations to the major powers on the League, reparations, new nations, boundary changes, and colonies. The European leaders wanted smaller powers at a preliminary meeting, and the president agreed. Grayson noted that Bernard Baruch, who was present, told him afterward that Wilson was “a complete master of the whole performance and that he entirely dominated the meeting.”32

  Those preliminary meetings, which came to be called the Council of Ten, took place during three days before the opening of the conference; they gathered the delegations of ten nations and would continue to meet as the executive committee of the conference until March. These first meetings dealt with several matters of procedure. One was the official language. Pride and diplomatic tradition impelled the French to insist upon their language, while Wilson championed English as the most widely spoken tongue; as a compromise, both languages were adopted. Another matter was the agenda. The French wanted to add a number of specific items to the subjects Wilson had proposed, and the matter was left in abeyance. The most controversial matter involved publicity. Wilson had just appointed the journalist Ray Stannard Baker as press officer to the delegation, and a small army of American reporters had descended on Paris, hungry for news. The president wanted to admit reporters to the council’s general meetings because delicate and weighty questions would be handled beforehand. Lloyd George objected to “a Peace settled by public clamour.”33 Finally, Wilson acquiesced to a restrictive policy that would cause him trouble in the future.

  The official opening, on January 18 in the Hall of the Clock at the Quai d’Orsay, was an almost strictly ceremonial affair. President Poincaré’s brief welcoming remarks closed with references to “punishment of the guilty” and guarantees against a “return of the spirit by which they were tempted.” President Wilson then nominated Premier Clemenceau to be permanent chairman of the conference. This move honored the custom of having the leader of the host country preside, but Wilson said he also intended it as a tribute to France and to Clemenceau’s leadership. After his unanimous election, the premier demanded “reparation for acts committed—material reparation, if I may say so, which is due to all of us—but the higher and nobler reparation” of security against renewed aggression. The only items of business at this session were receipt of the memoranda requested on pressing questions and the announcement that the question of the League of Nations would be the first item taken up at the next meeting of the full conference.34

  The opening of the peace conference made an already busy schedule for Wilson even more demanding. He and Edith had gotten in one more game of golf, but his car rides now consisted mostly of trips between Murat Palace and the Quai d’Orsay for the Council of Ten. On the diplomatic front, he was receiving reports of unofficial talks with representatives of the Bolshevik government in Russia, and he was trying to overcome obstacles to getting food shipments to Europe. From home, he was hearing protests against restrictions on publicity surrounding the conference—to which he replied to Tumulty that publicity for his talks with Allied leaders “would invariably break up the whole thing.” The pace of activity naturally worried Grayson, who on the day of the conference’s opening had to treat the president for a bad cold. The next day, Sunday, Grayson recorded, “I persuaded him to stay in bed during the morning and take a ride in the country in the afternoon: We passed a very quiet day and the rest did the President a great deal of good.”35

  Wilson needed that rest. In the evening he spent three hours meeting at Murat Palace with the authors of the latest British plans for a league, Lord Robert Cecil and Jan Smuts. Neither man had met Wilson except in passing, and Cecil quickly formed an unfavorable impression of him, although he seems to have masked his dislike, for the meeting went well. The three of them went over Wilson’s latest draft, which the Englishman described as “almost entirely Smuts and Phillimore combined, with practically no new ideas in it.” Wilson told them that he wanted an informal Anglo-French-American group to draft a plan to submit to the conference. He hoped that they could finish the job in two weeks, a time frame that Cecil sniffed at as “fantastic,” although he did not say so. Wilson confided in them how difficult he found it to be to work with the French and Italians. “He is evidently disillusioned about those two nations,” Cecil noted.36

  Wilson had to attend meetings of the Council of Ten, sometimes twice daily, and sessions of the Supreme War Council. Several times he put in fifteen-hour workdays. This was probably the most intensely busy time in his life. Council of Ten sessions particularly tried his patience as between thirty and forty people crowded into the dark-paneled, stuffy, overheated office of the French Foreign Minister at the Quai d’Orsay. He did get the council to propose to the full conference that the plans drafted by Cecil, Smuts, and him be considered by a League of Nations Commission consisting of fourteen members. There would be two members from each of the great powers and one apiece from other countries, with Wilson as chairman and Cecil as vice chairman. The Council of Ten approved the creation of the League Commission and charged it, together with others, with examining war guilt and penalties, reparations, international labor conditions, and international control of transportation. At that session, Wilson declared that the conference was under “a solemn obligation to make permanent arrangements that justice shall be rendered and peace maintained. This is the central object of our meeting. Settlements may be temporary, but the actions of the nations in the interests of peace and justice must be permanent. We can set up permanent processes … [to be] the eye of the nations to keep watch upon the common interest.”37

  During its second week of meetings, the Council of Ten dealt mostly with Germany’s former colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Wilson argued strongly for making those territories mandates of the League of Nations, and he told Grayson that the British and their dominions and the Japanese “wanted to ‘divide the swag,’ and then have the League of Nations created to perpetuate their title.” A member of the Inquiry staff, Charles Seymour, who was a professor at Yale, wrote to his family after attending one of these meetings, “Everything reminded me of a faculty committee meeting, rather than a gathering of statesmen.” Seymour commented on the way Clemenceau, who wore gray gloves all the time, looked “expressionless, even rather bored,” whereas Wilson seemed “absolutely at home,” spoke easily, and liked “to make a humorous allusion and Balfour, Lloyd George and Clemenceau are evidently glad of some excuse to smile.”38

  The League Commission did not meet until February 3, the beginning of the third week of the conference. Having already packed the commission’s membership, Wilson now sought to stack the agenda with a draft of a covenant that embodied his, Cecil’s, and Smuts’s views. These machinations brought House—who had been ill from an attack of gallstones and did not attend the Council of Ten meetings—back into the thick of things. House met with Cecil on January 30 and the following day with Cecil, Smuts, and Wilson at his suite at the Hôtel de Crillon, where they decided to have legal experts from their staffs, C. J. B. Hurst from Britain and David Hunter Miller from the United States, prepare a more formal draft. When Wilson read what the two lawyers produced over the weekend, he did not like it. “He said the document had ‘no warmth or color in it,’” but House advised accepting this draft anyway. To add punch to the language, Wilson made handwritten changes. Miller then stayed up all night on February 2 to incorporate them into what would be called the Third Paris Draft.39

  This new draft almost unhorsed th
e scheme for a prearranged plan for a league. Wilson met with Cecil and House the next afternoon, just before the League Commission convened for the first time. “The meeting bade fair to be stormy for the first seven or eight minutes,” House noted, but it calmed down when Wilson agreed to accept the Hurst-Miller draft. Cecil felt particularly miffed because the president accepted this draft “as a skeleton, reserving to himself the right to clothe it in flesh and blood.” Cecil disliked Wilson’s autocratic manner, as shown, he noted, in his “abruptly tearing up a draft which we had jointly agreed to have prepared as our working text. He seemed mildly surprised that I should resent it.” Cecil may have thought Wilson was being rigid and egotistical, but the president’s wish to change the Third Paris Draft sprang from his deep feeling for language and concern with the wording of the League Covenant. To Herbert Hoover, he said, “We must have a great state instrument which will be like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, and mark a great step forward in international relations.” In his eyes, these drafts fell far short of that exalted standard. Ironically, his presumed authorship of this new document would later lay him open to a reputed gibe by Senator Lodge: “As an English production it does not rank high. It might get by at Princeton, but certainly not at Harvard.”40

  In the first meetings of the League Commission, Wilson, Cecil, and the French member, Léon Bourgeois, did most of the talking. “The Japs never speak,” House noted. “General Smuts speaks so seldomly that it is practically not at all.” House believed he and Cecil kept the discussion on course by doing “nearly all the difficult work between meetings.” Those meetings took place at night, from eight-thirty until around midnight—after a full day of work for Wilson. A matter of contention arose early because the Japanese wanted a statement of racial equality in the Covenant. House advised the Japanese members to draft a mildly worded resolution, which Wilson watered down further. Cecil added to the contention by moving to drop from the guarantee of member states’ independence and territorial integrity the words “and preserve against external aggression.” Wilson countered with a compromise amendment saying that the League Council would advise on how to meet this obligation. For his part, Cecil was afraid of trouble “with the Dominions, who do not appreciate the idea of having to fight for the integrity of Bohemia, or some such place”—an example that eerily forecast Neville Chamberlain’s words about the same place (Czechoslovakia) during the Munich crisis of 1938: “a faraway country of which we know little.” Cecil also sniffed that the “smaller powers, who seemed singularly perverse,” backed the president: “It is annoying to find all these foreigners quite keen for the guarantee.”41

  A clash came with the French when Bourgeois made an impassioned plea for the League to have its own army to enforce its decisions. Responding at length, Wilson tried to bridge the gap between national sovereignty and international commitment. “We must make a distinction between what is possible and what is not,” he maintained. The U.S. Constitution would not allow international control, and an international army in peacetime would seem to be trading “international militarism for national militarism.” America could only promise to maintain its military forces and come to the aid of countries threatened by aggression, “but you must trust us. We must all depend on our mutual good faith.”42

  On February 13, Wilson was attending a meeting of the Council of Ten when Baron Nobuaki Makino of Japan introduced a revised resolution promising equal treatment of citizens of all members of the League and disavowing all discrimination, “either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” Makino conceded that this was a difficult and complicated problem, but in the war “different races have fought together on the battlefield, in the trenches, on the high seas, … and they have saved the lives of their fellow men irrespective of racial differences.” Cecil, who was presiding in Wilson’s absence, responded that this matter “raised extremely serious problems within the British Empire” and said discussion of it was best postponed.43 House was pleased with this outcome because the British had borne the onus of opposing the racial equality declaration, but his relief was premature. With that controversy temporarily averted, the work of the League Commission was complete.

  At the meeting of the Council of Ten on February 13, Wilson secured approval to present the League Commission’s product, which would be called the Draft Covenant, to the full conference the next day. Getting this approval was no small feat, inasmuch as the meetings of this council and the Supreme War Council during the preceding two weeks had been contentious. When the Council of Ten discussed the borders of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Beneš, that country’s foreign minister, appealed for retaining the frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Germany, even though he conceded that doing so would incorporate a large number of Germans—who would later provide the pretext for the Munich crisis. The council also heard Emir Faisal—speaking through his English interpreter, the celebrated Lawrence of Arabia—present the aspirations of the Arab peoples. When Wilson asked him about possible League mandates in the Near East, Faisal answered that the Arabs had fought for their unity and independence and would feel betrayed with anything less. But the council also heard an American, Howard S. Bliss, president of the Syrian Protestant College (later American University) in Beirut, maintain that the Arabs lacked “balance” and “political fairness” and needed to grow gradually toward self-determination.44

  The discussions in the Council of Ten were mild compared with the arguments in the Supreme War Council over the Armistice terms and disarmament of Germany. Wilson found Clemenceau shifty and unreliable and thought House had sized him up wrong. “The French people are the hardest I ever tried to do business with,” he told Grayson, and attacks on him in French newspapers for alleged softness toward the Germans led him to plan to have Ray Stannard Baker plant a story with the American reporters in Paris to the effect that these attacks might require the conference to move to a neutral capital. House objected, but Wilson insisted on sending the story out. “To my mind it was a stupid blunder,” House noted in one of the first signs at Paris of dissension between him and the president.45 Clearly, the volume of work and the emotional tension were taking a toll on Wilson.

  The president’s weariness showed on February 14, when he presented the Draft Covenant to the full conference in the Hall of the Clock of the Quai d’Orsay. Cecil may have found Wilson’s two-week timetable “fantastic,” but it had taken only two weeks longer than that to produce this document. He read it article by article, occasionally stopping to offer a few words of explanation. William Allen White found the content of the recitation “as gray and drab and soggy as his reading. Slowly, as he read, the hearers realized that they were getting some new declaration of independence, of the world’s national independence, … that a super-nation had been created and that the President’s words were of tremendous import; he droned on like one reading a list at a receiver’s sale.”46

  Still, there was no disguising the great step forward in world politics this document proposed to take. Despite Wilson’s dissatisfaction with its language, the substance of the Draft Covenant gave him what he most desired. The guarantee of independence and territorial integrity was there in Article X, almost exactly as he had written it, while Article XI asserted the right of the League of Nations to concern itself about “war or threat of war” anywhere in the world. Articles XII through XV established procedures for mediation and arbitration and called for a “Permanent Court of International Justice.” Article XVI laid down the League’s authority to impose economic boycotts and recommend the use of force against offending nations. Disarmament, mandates over former enemy’s colonies and territories, concern for labor conditions, an assembly in which each nation would have an equal vote, an executive council with the five great powers as permanent members and other countries rotating on and off—all these features of Wilson’s earlier programs were in the Draft Covenant. Most important of all for him, this would be an
essentially political body with the potential for enforcing peace and order in strong and far-reaching ways. It was a remarkable achievement, and the lion’s share of the credit belonged to Wilson.47

  Despite his fatigue, he could not keep gleams of enthusiasm and momentousness from flickering through his explanation of the Draft Covenant to the conference. “Armed force is in the background in this program,” he asserted, “but it is in the background, and if the moral force of the world will not suffice, the physical force shall. But that is the last resort, because this is intended as a constitution of peace, not as a league of war.” As a constitution, “it is not a straitjacket, but a vehicle of life. A living thing is born, and we must see to it that the clothes we put upon it do not hamper it—a vehicle of power, but a vehicle of power in which power may be varied at the discretion of those who exercise it and in accordance with the changing circumstances of the time.”48

  The Draft Covenant of the League of Nations seemed to vindicate handsomely Wilson’s decision to go in person to the peace conference and dominate his country’s delegation. If he had not been there or if he had needed to answer to Elihu Root or some senator at his side, he almost certainly could not have moved as swiftly and boldly as he did. Yet that freedom of maneuver came at a price. Aside from House, no American had known what the president was about to propose, which meant there had been no chance to prepare any groundwork for support. Democratic senators, sympathetic journalists, and the delegation’s press officer, Ray Stannard Baker, had urged him to share some of his plans for the League with them, but he had rebuffed them.