Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  The Wilsons left Paris on the evening of February 14 to return to the United States, and the president cabled Tumulty to request members of the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees not to discuss the Draft Covenant until he had had a chance to explain it to them in detail.49 Wilson was about to open a second front in the struggle for a peace settlement—a home front, where he would have to fight for approval of his vision and program in his own land among his own people.

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  PEACEMAKING ABROAD AND AT HOME

  When Woodrow Wilson sailed for the United States on February 15, 1919, he had been abroad for more than two months. After an eight-day crossing, he would spend just ten days at home before leaving again for Europe. That second trip to Paris would last four months, with the president not returning to America until July 8. These twin sojourns would make him not just the first president to leave the country while in office but the only one to stay away anywhere near so long. Later, improved communications and swifter transportation, especially air travel, would permit high-level diplomacy to transpire by telephone exchanges, frequent visits of foreign leaders to Washington, short jaunts abroad by presidents, and, occasionally, intense, concentrated “summit” meetings. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 would become the last prolonged international conclave of its kind—harking back to such earlier gatherings as the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15—and it would bring forth the last set of sweeping, general peace treaties.

  Back in the United States, the president had to be present to sign bills passed in the last days of the third session of the Sixty-fifth Congress. This voyage of the George Washington from Europe was as rough as the earlier voyage had been smooth, but Wilson was not affected. He spent most of his first days at sea resting and sleeping in his cabin. Business from the peace conference intruded from time to time: a call by Churchill for large-scale intervention in Russia brought a sharp rebuke from the president; he also sent a message of sympathy to Clemenceau, who had just survived an assassination attempt—which brought high-level negotiations to a halt for a while. As on the previous voyage, he and Edith got out on deck for walks, watched movies with the ship’s crew, and dined with a few fellow passengers, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor.

  Wilson felt both eager and apprehensive about what awaited him at home. Reactions in the press to the Draft Covenant were largely positive, although they varied according to party affiliation and region. Democratic and southern newspapers usually applauded Wilson’s accomplishment, while Republican journals, particularly those in the Midwest and West, more often took a critical stance. Taft came out enthusiastically in support, and he swung the League to Enforce Peace behind Wilson’s program. Attacks had also started. “If the Saviour of mankind should revisit the earth and declare for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it,” William Borah had stated even before the unveiling of the Draft Covenant. When he and several other senators read the document, they immediately denounced it for spelling destruction of the Monroe Doctrine and drowning America in the cauldron of European and Asian power politics. Henry Cabot Lodge and other prominent Republicans honored the president’s request to suspend debate until he had had a chance to explain the document, though their silence did not reassure Wilson. On his last night at sea, he told Dr. Grayson, “The failure of the United States to back [the League] would break the heart of the world.”1

  Troubles dogged the visit home from the outset. Because of a longshoreman’s strike in New York, the George Washington docked in Boston in the evening of February 23, but only after almost running aground in heavy fog. Boston’s being Lodge’s hometown meant that a low-key visit, without any appearance of campaigning, was in order. Local officials foiled that plan when, against Wilson’s wishes, they staged an elaborate welcome the next day, which included a big parade and a rally attended by an enthusiastic crowd of 7,000 or 8,000 people. Speaking extemporaneously, the president avoided any reference to the Draft Covenant, but he did mention his reception in Europe and the national aspirations of the Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Armenians. Later, in brief remarks at the railroad station in Providence, Rhode Island, he maintained that the people of Europe trusted America, “and if America disappoints them the heart of the world will be broken.”2 In New York, he came out onto the platform only to wave. The railroads cleared the tracks for the presidential train, which reached Washington early in the morning on February 25.

  Wilson held meetings in the afternoon with the cabinet and in the evening with Democratic leaders in the Senate. They discussed how to deal with the Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were reportedly holding up appropriations bills in order to force the president to call an early session of the next Congress—which they would control. The Republicans’ aim was to debate the peace proceedings, but Wilson responded that he would not call Congress into session until the conference was over; the White House also announced that the president would not make a speech to Congress about the conference and the League. Instead, he met with members of Congress in different venues. On February 26, he did something no president had ever done before: he had the members of the Foreign Affairs and Foreign Relations committees to dinner at the White House and afterward discussed the Draft Covenant with them for more than two hours. The question of the president appearing before a congressional committee raised constitutional issues involving the separation of powers; having the committees come to the White House rather than the president going formally to them evidently sidestepped the constitutional problem.

  All but three members of the committees went to the White House that evening. According to some of them, the dinner was awkward and uncomfortable. One Republican senator and announced League opponent, Frank Brandegee of Connecticut, complained that no alcohol was served, and he gossiped that Edith Wilson’s fingernails were dirty. After dinner, the president and the thirty-four senators and representatives adjourned to the East Room, where Wilson answered questions. No stenographer was present, and a minor war of words about the discussion broke out in the press as soon as the meeting ended. Pro-League papers such as The New York Times and The World stressed Wilson’s “good humor” and quoted several senators, including Brandegee, who said they appreciated his openness and knowledge in answering their questions. The conservative New York Sun, however, quoted anonymous senators, probably Brandegee and Lodge, who expressed “great astonishment” at the president’s “lack of information” about how the Draft Covenant would affect the Monroe Doctrine and rights to withdraw from the League and refuse mandates. Those anonymous sources also claimed that Wilson brushed aside a question about self-rule for Ireland as strictly an internal affair for Britain, which Democratic senators denied.3

  Privately, Lodge scorned Wilson’s ignorance about the League and told Henry White, “We learned nothing.” But a Republican congressman from Massachusetts, John Jacob Rogers, praised the president to White for being informative and good-humored: “I never saw Mr. Wilson appear so human or so attractive as he did that night.” The following afternoon, Wilson spent two hours at the Capitol talking with members of Congress and reporters in the President’s Room off the Senate chamber. He stood most of the time, and some of his visitors thought he looked tired. He discussed domestic concerns, such as the woman suffrage amendment and appropriations, as well as the peace conference. He also met with several Democratic senators and told them that the Monroe Doctrine was not impaired under the League and that national sovereignty would not be curtailed.4

  Wilson gave three speeches during these ten days at home. Tumulty had persuaded him to speak in Washington at a banquet given by the Democratic National Committee on February 28 and to a conference of governors and mayors on March 3. He also got Wilson to agree to a joint appearance with Taft at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on the evening of March 4, just before he sailed back to Europe. The day Wilson gave the first of those speeches, Lodge attacked the Draft Covenant in the Senat
e, particularly charging that the League would destroy the Monroe Doctrine and take away control of immigration. Lodge wanted a harsh peace and an alliance of Europeans only: “We must not lose by an improvident attempt to reach eternal peace all that we have won by war and sacrifice.” The following day, the Republicans’ other foreign policy expert in the Senate besides Lodge, Philander Knox, delivered an even harsher blast, dismissing the proposed League as “merely an offensive and defensive alliance, … [which] absolutely requires that every future war will be a potential world war, and that we shall be an active participant in every such war.”5

  Those attacks did not bode well for cooperation with the Senate, and they made it hard for Wilson to curb his combative streak. Speaking at the Democratic dinner the evening after Lodge had spoken, he teasingly appeared to rule out a third term by noting that in two years he would “begin again to be a historian instead of an active public man” and would be able to say what he really thought about his opponents. He did allude to “all the blind and little provincial people,” but he worried that “the world placed in America a tragical hope—… it is so great, so far-reaching, it runs out to such depths that we cannot in the nature of things satisfy it.” Still, the League of Nations would set up processes to banish war and must be part of the peace treaty. In his meetings and speeches, he did make some conciliatory moves. Congressman Rogers told White that he got the clear impression at the White House meeting that the president believed the Draft Covenant could be changed. Wilson also promised others that he would bring up the Monroe Doctrine before the League Commission.6

  His opponents in the Senate now moved to thwart those efforts at conciliation and persuasion, which the League to Enforce Peace was augmenting with a massive publicity campaign. On Sunday, March 2, Brandegee, Knox, and Lodge met to write a statement protesting the Draft Covenant. The next day they gathered signatures from Republican colleagues. Just before midnight on March 3, Lodge took the Senate floor to read a resolution stating that the League “in the form now proposed by the peace conference” was unacceptable to the Senate and that the conference should promptly conclude a treaty with Germany. When a Democratic senator objected to the introduction of this resolution, Lodge replied, “I merely wish to add by way of explanation the following.” He then read the names of thirty-seven Republican senators and senators-elect who had signed the document, adding that four others whom he had been unable to contact would probably also sign it. Newspapers used a 200-year-old term to dub this statement a round-robin. Lodge said he knew the resolution could not come to a vote and that by reading the list of signers, “our purpose, however, had been served.”7

  Lodge’s action wiped out all notions of swift or easy approval of American membership in the League of Nations. Its authors deliberately kept it an all-Republican affair, but one Democrat, James Reed of Missouri, had also damned the Draft Covenant. Two absent Republicans immediately telegraphed their support of Lodge’s resolution. Added to the thirty-seven signers, this total of forty comfortably exceeded the one third of the ninety-six-member Senate needed to block consent to a treaty. The authors of the round-robin were also sending a message to Paris. Brandegee, Knox, and Lodge favored a harsh settlement, and they wanted to encourage the Allied leaders to forge ahead and separate the League from the peace treaty. Lodge claimed later that he had aimed the round-robin at provoking an intemperate reaction from Wilson. Such a degree of wily premeditation sounds far-fetched, although the senator had made friends in recent years with Wilson’s old enemy from Princeton, Andrew West, and was glad to do him dirt.8

  Wilson initially ignored the round-robin. When he went to the Capitol shortly before the expiration of the Congress at noon on March 4, he made no mention of it as he chatted with reporters. He did issue a statement about Republican senators reminiscent of his excoriation of “a little group of willful men” exactly two years before and reiterated that he would not call Congress into session until he returned from the peace conference. Early in the afternoon, the presidential party boarded the train for New York and the voyage to Europe. The Wilsons stopped in Philadelphia to see the president’s daughter Jessie, who had given birth a few days earlier to her second son, whom she and her husband named Woodrow Wilson Sayre. The president reportedly said to a nurse, “With his mouth open and his eyes shut, I predict he will make a Senator when he grows up.”9 The party had dinner on the train, and on arrival in New York they went directly to the Metropolitan Opera House for the joint appearance with Taft. People jammed every seat, aisle, corridor, and corner of the hall, and a crowd of 15,000 filled the streets outside.

  Taft hailed the League of Nations as “what I have ever regarded as ‘the promised land.’” It would erect a bulwark against Bolshevism and offer insurance against the “world suicide” of another war fought with still more terrible weapons. He devoted most of his speech to detailed answers to criticisms of the Draft Covenant, including the charge that Article X imposed obligations to intervene in faraway places: instead, he declared, nations closer to conflicts would be called upon to act. Most important, perhaps, he extended an olive branch to Republican senators: he did not mention the round-robin, but he called speeches such as Lodge’s “useful” for offering “suggestions that should prove especially valuable in the work of revising the form of the Covenant and making changes.”10

  Wilson gave a shorter speech, in which he came out swinging at his opponents. He saluted the sacrifices of the troops and vowed not “to permit myself for one moment to slacken in my effort to be worthy of them and their cause.” He did not mention the round-robin by name either, but he announced that the League Covenant would be so tightly bound up in the peace treaty “that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.” He dismissed his critics as having made no constructive suggestions but only carping, “‘Will it not be dangerous to us to help the world?’ It would be fatal to us not to help it.” The crowd went wild when Wilson hurled defiance at his opponents, but a number of observers, particularly Republicans, believed he had committed a blunder. This seems to be another case of his emotions getting the better of him, as had happened a year earlier with “Force, Force to the utmost” in response to the Germans’ actions at Brest-Litovsk. He did feel angry and frustrated. The fatigue that he sometimes complained about and others remarked on was undoubtedly affecting him. Grayson had examined him the night before this speech and found him in good health, but his emotional equilibrium was another story.11

  Wilson had to deal with one other matter of conflict before the George Washington sailed that night. After the speech, he met in an office in the opera house for twenty-five minutes with a delegation of Irish Americans who pressed him to gain a hearing at the peace conference for representatives of an independent Ireland. Tumulty, George Creel, and other Democrats had been warning that discontent over Ireland could hurt the party. At this meeting, Wilson listened politely and told his visitors that when Ireland’s case did come before the conference, he would use his best judgment to determine how to proceed, but to Grayson he said, “[T]he Irish as a race are very hard to deal with owing to their inconsiderateness, their unreasonable demands and their jealousies.” He predicted that dissatisfaction among Irish Americans and German Americans “might defeat the Democratic party in 1920.”12

  Wilson’s defiant mood ebbed a bit on the nine-day voyage across the Atlantic. The seas were calmer, and he was able to rest, although his stomach bothered him and he ran a fever for three days because of a gum infection. He spent time on the voyage reading and discussing memoranda that Ray Stannard Baker had prepared on American opinion of the League and how to promote the Covenant to the public. Baker recommended greater publicity for the negotiations and an educational campaign at home. Supporters in the Senate were also telling Wilson that the round-robin did not mean all was lost and that changes in the Covenant, especially regarding the Monroe Doctrine and later, perhaps, reservations to American ratificatio
n, could turn things around. The rest and reflection seemed to help Wilson. When the George Washington reached Brest on March 13, one of the reporters aboard cabled back, “If he felt any resentment at the Washington opposition and anxiety about Paris, there was nothing to indicate it.”13

  That report exaggerated Wilson’s mellowing. On the train from Brest to Paris the next day, he blamed House for “[y]our dinner” with the men from Capitol Hill because it was “a failure as far as getting together was concerned.”14 In Paris, Lord Robert Cecil also found him truculent and determined to make no concessions to Republican senators. Yet he soon set to work on changes in the Draft Covenant. Discussions with Cecil and David Hunter Miller, the American delegation’s legal expert, revealed, however, that mentioning the Monroe Doctrine might offend the Europeans, who had never recognized it, and might tempt the Japanese to claim similar suzerainty in the Pacific; also, altering Article X would be difficult, and the right of withdrawal seemed already implicit.

  Meanwhile, Wilson had been soliciting views from Republicans about changes in the Draft Covenant. From shipboard, he had sent a request through Tumulty to Taft, and from Paris he sent a request through Henry White to Root. Taft replied with his usual generosity, stressing the need to mention the Monroe Doctrine, which he believed would bring most Republican senators around. Root responded with his usual guardedness. Through intermediaries, he declined to render “matured” judgment but said he regretted the lack of an international court, would like an exemption for the Monroe Doctrine, and worried that Article X committed the United States to intervention in distant conflicts.15 In fact, Root was being more than guarded.