Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Most of Wilson’s detractors forgot how limited and specific most of the Fourteen Points were. They forgot, too, that he had not coined the term self-determination or laid it down as a general principle. His most glaring violations of that line of policy occurred either as a mistake, as with the South Tirol, or as a calculated risk, as with Shantung. Widespread severing of ethnic and linguistic groups from their homelands in Central and eastern Europe came from conditions created by the new states there: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Yugoslav kingdom. Wilson’s preferred solution—to replace the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a federation of autonomous nationalities—might have mitigated some of that splintering and preserved greater stability, but it had become impossible because of factors over which the peacemakers had little or no control. The “acid test,” Russia, was already what Churchill would later call “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” and it should have surprised nobody that the peacemakers merely fumbled with the situation there. The idea of talks with the Bolsheviks, which Wilson initially favored, drew vehement opposition from Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Wilson did not try hard to rebut them, but he did stand firm against schemes for military intervention hatched by Churchill and Foch and the food blockade put forward by Hoover.48

  Outside Europe, the mandate system struck many critics as a fig leaf to cover an imperialist grab for colonies. Like Shantung, other former German possessions wound up in the hands of the respective Allied belligerents that had seized them during the war, and those conquerors were not about to give them up. The designation of those territories as mandates under the League was, however, more than empty symbolism. The mandatory powers promised to improve transportation, utilities, sanitation, health care, and education for the indigenous peoples, and they pledged to prepare them for eventual independence. Such a pledge was something that no power besides the United States had yet made regarding its own colonies. The mandate system sufficiently impressed W. E. B. DuBois—who had been in Paris earlier in 1919 organizing the first Pan-African Congress—that he would support the League and the treaty in spite of his own history of bitter disappointment with Wilson. With former parts of the Ottoman Empire, mandates did mainly cloak a division of territory between the British and the French, although Wilson worked to prevent the Allies from carving up Turkey proper, and at times he considered an American mandate in Constantinople and Armenia.49

  His decisions on nonterritorial matters such as reparations, disarmament, and the League sprang from his deep-seated preference for dynamic processes over fixed terms. Despite Keynes’s excoriation, leaving amounts and schedules of reparations payments to regular review by an international commission was a reasonable approach. Another economic aspect of the settlement that Keynes would condemn, severing the coalfields of the Saar from the iron deposits of Lorraine, was addressed by the arrangement to keep the Saar and its mines under French administration. Some observers might be disappointed that the peace settlement did not prescribe set reductions of arms on land and sea, but all the peacemakers agreed that the wiser course lay in future negotiations, some of which would bear fruit. In his approach to reparations and disarmament, Wilson was not sweeping problems under the rug or betraying principles. If he had wanted to do those things or if he had really cared only about the League of Nations, he would not have subjected himself to the grueling negotiations among the Big Four.50

  Wilson regarded the League as more important than the specific terms of the treaty because he grasped where the core problem in maintaining the peace lay: the defeated must bow to their defeat, and the victors must uphold their victory. This war had left sore losers and disgruntled, divided winners. The Germans’ real complaint was that they had lost the war, and since crushing them was now no longer an option, it was doubtful that gentler terms would have made them more willing to accept their defeat. Conversely, Italy and Japan harbored unsatisfied expansionist urges, and they would switch sides in the next war. Nor were the Big Three of one mind about how to uphold the peace terms. The only way out of this situation lay, Wilson believed, in establishing a new forum for dealing with these problems. In the coming months, he would readily admit that the settlement had flaws that would need mending, but he would argue that only vigilant, constructive engagement by all nations, especially the great powers and most especially the United States, could manage this situation and thereby maintain peace. For him, the sole available path to such engagement lay through the League of Nations.

  The pace of negotiations in Paris slackened for a while after presentation of the preliminary terms. On May 8, Wilson accepted a suggestion by Grayson to go to the famous Longchamp racecourse. He also attended his first formal dinner in weeks and gave his first speeches in more than two months. On May 9, at an international gathering attended by dignitaries interested in international law, he showed signs of fatigue as he rambled and inadvertently seemed to insult his formally clad listeners: “And when I think of mankind, I do not always think of well-dressed persons. Most persons are not well-dressed. The heart of the world is under very plain jackets.” The following afternoon, however, to a group of French academics, he spoke crisply and quipped, “[I]f a man is a fool, the best thing is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.”51

  While they awaited the Germans’ reply to the preliminary terms, the Big Four turned to other matters, chief among them Italy. Orlando pressed claims not only to the Adriatic coast but also to islands in the Aegean with Greek populations, parts of Turkey, and territories in Africa. Although House continued to believe he could easily resolve things, Wilson remained adamant about not giving in to the Italians. Eastern Europe, particularly the borders of Austria, Hungary, and Poland, likewise demanded their attention, as did Russia. Lloyd George and Clemenceau wanted to reach out to the Whites, the Bolsheviks’ adversaries in the civil war raging there, but Wilson disagreed, telling Grayson the Whites were “a pig in a poke.”52 Over all those discussions hung the question of how the Germans would respond. Their delegation asked for and got a one-week extension, which pushed the deadline to May 28.

  Concerns from home also intruded. A delegation of Irish Americans came to Paris and met with Wilson, and Congress demanded his attention. The need to enact appropriations legislation and the prospect of completing the peace treaty impelled him to call the new Republican-controlled Congress into session on May 19. Regretting that for the first time he was not addressing the two houses in person, Wilson sent a message announcing that he hesitated “to venture any opinion or press any recommendation with regard to domestic legislation” and then did just that. He urged passage of legislation to aid labor and help job seekers and maintain taxation along progressive lines. He warned the Republicans not to try to raise the tariff, pleaded for passage of the woman suffrage amendment, and recommended an end to the wartime prohibition on wine and beer. He made only one glancing allusion to foreign policy because, as he told Grayson, “I am leaving my real message until my return home.”53

  Wilson did not stick to that resolve. On May 30, Decoration Day, he went to the American military cemetery on a hillside outside Paris at Suresnes, where he appealed to the spirit of these honored dead: “The thing that these men left us … is the great instrument of the League of Nations. The League of Nations is the covenant of governments that these men shall not have died in vain.” He asked the soldiers at the cemetery what their fallen comrades would say to the peacemakers, and he answered: “Be ashamed of the jealousies that divide you.” Echoing the words and spirit of both Luther and Lincoln, he vowed, “Here stand I, consecrated in spirit to the men who were once my comrades and who are now gone, and who have left me under eternal bonds of fidelity.” Baker saw tears in the eyes of people around him and felt them in his own eyes, and he called this Wilson’s greatest speech. It was also the opening gun of his rhetorical campaign on the peacemaking home front.54

  At first, his health appeared to be bearing up better. Although the Big Four met as often as before, h
e made time to take rides with Edith and Grayson, and the doctor persuaded him to go for morning walks. Family visits heartened him too. His daughter Margaret had come earlier, between singing engagements, and Stockton Axson arrived and reportedly added to the spice of after-dinner conversations. Those measures of relief could go only so far. Baker noticed that Wilson looked tired and that he had a facial tic and often could not recall the day’s discussions among the Big Four. The facial tic was probably less serious than Baker thought, but the memory lapses may have stemmed from effects of arteriosclerosis. Grayson, on the other hand, made no comment about his health at this time, and the president clearly rallied his powers for the Decoration Day speech at Suresnes.55

  The German foreign minister’s written reply to the preliminary terms on May 29—a day late—touched off the final crisis of the peace conference. Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau charged the victors with reneging on their promised peace of justice and maintained that the exactions of the treaty were more than the German people could bear. This reply reinforced doubts and second thoughts that had been percolating in Paris during the past three weeks. No criticisms carried greater weight than the ones that came from Smuts, who put them in writing to Wilson and Lloyd George. Conveniently overlooking his own part in reparations decisions and colonial issues, the South African denounced those and other provisions and threatened not to sign the treaty. Wilson promised to restudy the treaty, while Lloyd George—who had qualms of his own and was hearing doubts from members of his cabinet—called his delegation together on June 1 to reconsider the terms. Smuts’s impassioned arguments carried the day. The British delegates unanimously instructed the prime minister to seek to soften the terms on German borders and reparations, the Rhineland occupation, and other matters and to propose early membership for Germany in the League.56

  Lloyd George tried to prepare the way for his about-face by meeting with Wilson and asking the president to serve as mediator between him and Clemenceau. Wilson would sometimes serve in that capacity in the Big Four during the next two weeks, but he had no intention of playing into Lloyd George’s hands. On June 3, he met for two hours with the entire American delegation to hear their views, which inclined mostly against changes in the treaty and deplored the British loss of nerve. Their stance suited Wilson, who declared, “I have no desire to soften the treaty,” and said about the British, “[I]t makes me a little tired for people to come and say now that they are afraid that the Germans won’t sign, and their fear is based upon things that they insisted upon at the time of the treaty; that makes me very sick.”57

  The ensuing debates in English among the Big Three—Orlando attended only occasionally, to discuss Italy’s claims in the Adriatic—pitted Lloyd George against an alternately icy and acerbic Clemenceau, with Wilson considering but rarely favoring changes in the treaty. The one modification that did emerge from these tense discussions was to order a plebiscite to determine whether Upper Silesia would go to Germany or Poland. Why Wilson did not side with Lloyd George is a pertinent question. After all, the prime minister was trying to rewrite the treaty along lines that were closer to the president’s own thinking. Wilson’s resistance to making changes stemmed in part from impatience with Lloyd George’s constant shifts of position and more from his ever-present bane—fatigue.

  That fatigue got striking visual confirmation in a portrait painted at this time. An artist commissioned by the British government to paint portraits of leaders at the conference, Sir William Orpen, told House early in June that the president was refusing to sit for him because he did not have time. “What damned rot!” House answered. “He’s got a damned sight more time than I have. What day do you want him to come to sit?” The colonel did arrange four or five half-hour sittings, but his remark gave another indication of his estrangement from Wilson. House’s loss of influence was common knowledge and a topic of gossip among the staff of the American delegation.58 Orpen’s portrait depicts Wilson from the waist up against a light background that makes his long jaw and nose stand out, although his glasses are nearly invisible. In contrast to the Sargent portrait of eighteen months earlier, his face appears less smooth, and lines of age and fatigue are striking. His expression is calm and determined, almost but not quite grim. Wilson did not like this second portrait, but it would become one of the best known and most widely reproduced portraits of him.

  Impatient and tired though he was, Wilson held out against revisions in the settlement, and finally, on June 16, after last-minute delays during what Baker called “dull but expectant days,” the Council of Four dispatched the terms, only slightly revised, to Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau and his delegation. The Germans were given a deadline of three days—later extended to a week—to accept the treaty. The interlude offered a chance for Wilson to make a two-day state visit to Belgium. Met at the border by the king and queen, he and Edith spent the first day with the royal couple on a long, often dusty motor ride through some of the most war-ravaged parts of Flanders, viewing the ruins of Ypres and other towns. Crowds once more packed the streets and lined the roads. Children thrust flowers at the First Lady and the queen, who, Edith recalled, sneezed violently because of her allergies. In the evening, a train took them from Bruges to Brussels, where the Wilsons stayed at the royal palace.59

  The next day, the Wilsons witnessed more evidence of German destruction, including the ruins of the library at the University of Lou-vain, and they called at the home of Cardinal Mercier, the hero of the occupation, who showed them where he had sheltered wounded and orphaned children during the war. The Belgian trip had especially great emotional impact because accompanying them was Hoover, whose leadership of the Commission for Relief in Belgium from 1914 to 1917 had made him the most beloved American in the country. As on his earlier visits to Britain and Italy, Wilson gave only short speeches and confined himself mainly to praising the part played by his hosts in the war—with one exception. Speaking to the Belgian parliament, he declared, “The League of Nations is the child of this great war for right … and any nation which declines to adhere to this Covenant deliberately turns away from the most telling appeal that has ever been made to its conscience and its manhood.”60 He was aiming those words at America.

  The trip did him good, and he needed these newfound good spirits because nearly all signs indicated that the Germans would refuse to accept the peace terms. The government in which Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau served resigned rather than sign the treaty, and the commanders of the German fleet anchored at Scapa Flow, off the Scottish coast, scuttled their ships rather than turn them over to the Allies. The Big Four met at least twice, and sometimes four times, a day to discuss contingency plans if the Germans would not sign the treaty and to deal with eastern Europe, Turkey, and, as usual, Italy and the Adriatic. Finally, on June 23, just two hours before the deadline, a newly formed German government cabled its acceptance. Wilson issued a brief statement commending the treaty for compensating victims of the war and providing security against another war, but he added that its greater work lay ahead, with the League.61

  The French took great pride in their arrangements for the signing of the peace treaty. The event was to be an exercise of two qualities at which they excelled—grandeur and revenge. On June 24, Clemenceau took Wilson on a tour of Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, showing the president where he had given his first speech as an officeholder in 1871. That was the year the victors had crowned the first emperor of the newly unified German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors; this grandest room in the palace was where the Germans, now the vanquished, would sign the new peace treaty. To underscore the symbolism, the French arranged for them to sign the treaty on Louis XIV’s council table, the same table on which the Germans had made the French sign the peace treaty after their defeat in 1871.62

  The Council of Four continued to meet regularly, mostly in a last, fruitless stab at untangling the Adriatic imbroglio. The main business of Paris, however, was celebration, and Wilson nearly marred the festive mood by re
fusing to attend a formal dinner given on June 26 by the president of France, but Henry White got him to relent. At the dinner, he saluted the friendship between France and America. Giving measured praise to the work of the conference, he concluded, “As I go away from these scenes, I think I shall realize that I have been present at one of the most vital things that has happened in the history of nations.”63

  The signing was to be on June 28: by another coincidence, this was the fifth anniversary of the assassination in Sarajevo that had sparked the crisis that led to the war. The day before, Wilson at last did what Baker had been begging him to do for months: he met for more than an hour with fifty American reporters. The meeting harked back to the easy give-and-take of the press conferences during his first two years in the White House. He gave bantering replies to some questions and conceded about Shantung, “That seemed the best that could be got out of a complicated situation.” He said the treaty was “rough on Germany,” but he also emphasized that it should never be forgotten “that Germany did an unpardonable wrong.” He answered the only query about the League by saying that the question of American forces under its command had never been raised, and he claimed that the treaty adhered to the Fourteen Points “more closely than I had a right to expect.” Baker was delighted and wrote, “I wish he would do this oftener: but he dreads it.” This performance could have helped in informing opinion back home, but like all of his press conferences, it was off the record and served only to enlighten the journalists who were there.64