Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Meanwhile, Wilson’s enemies were not idle. Lodge turned his committee’s hearings into a sounding board for representatives of groups and nationalities that harbored grievances against the peace treaty, especially regarding Shantung and Ireland. After a delegation of leading Irish Americans spent six hours regaling the senators with stories about their frustration in trying to gain the president’s support for Irish independence, Ashurst privately lamented, “These Irishmen, alas, are lost to the Democratic party in the next election.”27 Floor debate in the Senate also quickened, with twelve speeches on the treaty and the League during August. The most important of those came from Lodge on August 12 and Knox on August 29. Lodge self-consciously aimed at oratorical distinction and larded his long speech with literary allusions. Knox took a clear stand against the League—now definitively aligning himself with the irreconcilables—and other features of the treaty as well. He also unexpectedly condemned the settlement with Germany as a “hard and cruel peace,” and he excoriated the economic clauses in a way that uncannily anticipated Keynes’s as yet unpublished denunciation.

  For Wilson, the unkindest cut of all came four days after his meeting with the Foreign Relations Committee. Right after the lunch at the White House, the irreconcilables on the committee—Borah, Brandegee, Johnson, and George Moses of New Hampshire—huddled to plot strategy. The following day, they met again in Knox’s office, with reporters correctly reading the conclave as a sign that the former secretary of state was about to come out as an irreconcilable. The cabal decided to press Lodge and other Republicans to amend the text of the treaty, a move that if successful in the full Senate would indisputably require new negotiations and delay ratification. On August 23, they scored their first victory when the Republican majority on the committee, minus McCumber, voted to strike the Shantung clauses from the treaty. Democrats protested that the Allies, especially Japan, would never agree to this amendment, but Knox chortled, “The committee decided it would take independent action.” Lodge gladly accepted the amendment and said he also wanted a reservation to Article X that was “much more drastic than anything hitherto drafted,” declaring that “no compromise was possible.”28

  An angry Wilson was not slow to respond to what he saw as a slap in the face. On August 27, the White House announced that the president would undertake a speaking tour that would begin early in September and take him across the country and back. This decision struck some people as an impulsive act committed in anger, and some interpreters would read it as yet another sign of Wilson’s declining health. Both Edith and Grayson tried to talk him out of making this trip, but according to Edith’s recollection, he said, “I promised our soldiers, when I asked them to take up arms, that this was a war to end wars; and if I do not do all in my power to put the Treaty into effect, I will be a slacker and never able to look those boys in the eye. I must go.”29

  Although his wife’s recollection may have embellished his words, Wilson probably did say something like that. This did not mean, however, as some interpreters would later claim, that he was courting martyrdom, seeking to sacrifice himself in a holy cause. Roosevelt might have wanted to do that, but Wilson did not think that way. He had always enjoyed campaigning, and he believed that a democratic leader—like the mythical figure Antaeus, who renewed his strength through contact with the earth—renewed his strength through contact with his people. He may have decided quickly to make the tour, but he was not acting impulsively. Twice before, he had postponed such a trip in order to deal with senators, and Tumulty evidently had arrangements more or less in place against the day when the president gave him the green light.

  The decision to make the tour did not rule out continuing to deal with senators. On August 25, Wilson spent forty-five minutes in the office of one of the Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee, Claude Swanson of Virginia, while Edith waited outside in the limousine. Swanson urged the president to accept reservations in the instrument of ratification. At that meeting and another one a week later, Wilson reiterated his opposition to amendments or anything that might require renegotiation of the treaty, but he authorized Swanson to tell reporters, “If interpretative reservations were deemed imperative, the President said he would not oppose them.” He also met at the White House with one of the mild reservationists, Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin, who later recalled that he spent an hour trying to persuade the president to accept a reservation relieving the United States of obligations under Article X, but Wilson refused, declaring that Article X was the heart of the treaty.30

  Wilson also drafted four reservations of his own. Just before he boarded the train for the speaking tour, he summoned Hitchcock to the White House and gave him a paper titled “Suggestion,” which he had typed himself and revised in his own hand. In a preamble, he asserted that the Senate should consent “with the following understanding” of certain articles. What followed were one-sentence reservations covering withdrawal, domestic questions such as “immigration, naturalization or tariffs,” and the Monroe Doctrine. Those reservations were like the ones that had been proposed by Taft and Hughes and others and were being circulated by the mild reservationists. The fourth reservation, on Article X, asserted that action by the League Council was “to be regarded only as advice and leaves each Member State free to exercise its own judgment as to whether it is wise or practicable to act upon that advice or not.” This was a significant concession, but it differed from other reservations in making no mention of Congress. Wilson was trying to retain presidential flexibility and his notion of “a moral obligation.” It is doubtful that those reservations would have satisfied the mild reservationists or other Republicans, and it is not clear what Wilson hoped to accomplish with them. He forbade Hitchcock to tell anyone he had written them, again fearing that his opponents would demand further concessions; in any case, no one but the president could bargain with the senators, and he was going away for a month.31

  Wilson’s health seemed to take a turn for the better in the last part of August, but he was having trouble coordinating his political moves. Before he left on the tour, he had to turn his attention to the threatened railroad strike. On August 25, he met with union leaders and told them, “Our common enemy is the profiteer.” By appealing for cooperation and agreeing to a modest wage hike, he was able to head off a strike. That same day, he and Edith gave their only party of the summer, a reception on the White House lawn for wounded soldiers. When one of the soldiers took a photograph of the president carrying a cake and some ice cream, as Edith recalled, the doughboy remarked “that he guessed that was the first time a President had ever been caught doing K. P.”—slang for “kitchen police” duty.32 It was the last party the Wilsons would give at the White House.

  On the night of September 3, the presidential train left Washington. At the rear, Wilson’s private car, also called the Mayflower, contained a sitting room, where the president and Edith ate at a folding table; a bedroom for each of them plus one for Edith’s maid and another for Dr. Grayson; and a kitchen staffed by White House cooks. The rest of the train consisted of a dining car, a club car, and sleeping cars for Tumulty, stenographers, Secret Service agents, and twenty-one members of the press, as well as the servants and train crew. Tumulty would regularly spend time with the reporters in the club car, and Wilson would also sometimes go back to talk to them. The train functioned as a miniature mobile White House, and for the Wilsons, except for three nights when they slept in a hotel, it would be their rolling, jostling home for three and a half weeks.33

  The arrangements made the tour look like one of Wilson’s presidential campaigns. As usual, he spoke without notes, although now he resorted to outlines. At some time, probably shortly before he left Washington, he had typed an eight-page outline on particular subjects, such as the nature and scope of the treaty and the League Covenant. Sometime on the trip, probably while he was in California or just afterward, he would type another outline, including extracts from the treaty and Covenant to use as quotati
ons. Wilson had never done anything like that before, and it may have betrayed waning confidence in his once-formidable memory and gifts as an extemporaneous speaker. As in the presidential campaigns, stenographers took down his speeches, which they promptly typed, copied, and distributed, not just to the traveling press but also to local reporters who covered the event at each stop. Nor did the distribution end there. Assisted by the LEP, Tumulty sent out texts of the president’s speeches to 1,400 smaller newspapers throughout the country—at a cost of $1,000 a day, financed mostly by the automobile tycoon Henry Ford. Tumulty kept the train’s telegraph lines humming with requests for information to use in the speeches, reports on opinion in Washington and around the country, and “personal” messages supposedly from the president to individual senators.34

  The first stop on the tour came when the train pulled into Columbus, Ohio, at eleven in the morning on September 4. Dignitaries greeted the presidential party, and a motorcade took them to a municipal auditorium. Crowds along the streets were friendly but, because of a streetcar strike, not large. Still, at the auditorium, 4,000 people packed the seats and aisles, and another 2,000 reportedly tried to get in. Wilson launched into a defense of the treaty and an attack on his opponents. In an implicit reply to Knox’s recent speech, he declared, “The terms of the treaty are severe, but they are not unjust.” After touching on various aspects of the settlement, he spent most of the hour-long speech talking about the League. He professed astonishment at the ignorance and “radical misunderstanding” of the League, which was intended not “merely to end this war. It was intended to prevent any similar war. … [T]he League of Nations is the only thing that can prevent the recurrence of this dreadful catastrophe and redeem our promises.” He closed by saluting “our boys in khaki … because I have done the job the way I promised I would do it. And when this treaty is accepted, men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again. That is the reason I believe in it.” The crowd loved the speech.35

  The train then made its way to Indianapolis, with whistle-stop appearances along the way. Again, dignitaries were on hand to greet the president and First Lady, and a motorcade took them to the state fairgrounds, where between 16,000 and 20,000 people swelled the auditorium. The size of the crowd and poor acoustics made it hard for the audience to hear Wilson, who spoke in a husky voice. As he had done earlier in the day, he jumped around in discussing different parts of the treaty, but he devoted much of the speech to Article X, and he eschewed partisanship in his advocacy of the peace settlement. This speech also made a big hit, with frequent applause and people shouting, in reference to Indiana’s two Republican senators, “Better tell that to Harry New and Jim Watson.”36

  That first day revealed the pattern and problems that would shape and plague the tour. Unlike the presidential campaigns, this swing around the circle was not well paced. Wilson would give forty speeches in twenty-one days, and the original plan called for even more. Never before had he spoken so often and made so many public appearances in so short a time—not in his gubernatorial or presidential campaigns, not on the New Jersey and 1916 preparedness speaking tours, which were his models for what he intended to do now. Wilson was trying to do too much too fast to educate the public about his ideas and his program in a belated attempt to make up for time lost. Moreover, the extent and complexity of the subjects he needed to cover strained his explanatory powers—small wonder, then, that he jumped around in these speeches.

  Overshadowing those problems was Wilson’s health. The wonder of this speaking tour was that he did as well, and lasted as long, as he did. Some of his initial fumbling stemmed from a slowness in hitting his stride on the trail, a trait he had first shown when he ran for governor. The first week of the tour took him through Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota as he made two speeches a day, except for a break on Sunday. State and local officials greeted the party at each stop, and a motorcade or bigger parade took them to the site of the speech. Grayson clashed with Tumulty about Wilson’s speaking at whistle-stops. The doctor vetoed such talks, but even shaking hands with people who crowded the rear platform tired Wilson, as did the late-summer heat in the nation’s heartland. “I believe I lost at least two pounds,” the president joked to reporters on the third day of the tour.37

  As in his earlier campaigns, once Wilson hit his stride, his speaking improved during most of the rest of the tour. Beginning in St. Louis on the second day, he emphasized a few basic points in each speech, usually explanations of how the League and Article X were going to work. He also made greater use of his outline, and his performance varied with his level of fatigue. In his best speeches, he blended his well-worn talent for appealing to people’s minds through clear explanations with his more recent penchant for appealing to their hearts. To businessmen in St. Louis, he extolled the benefits they would reap from the restoration of international trade, while to his audience in Omaha, which presumably included farmers, he compared the international system without Article X to a community where everyone had to defend his own land. He conceded that the League would bring “no absolute guarantee” against another world war, but “I can predict with absolute certainty that, within another generation, there will be another world war if the nations of the world—if the League of Nations—does not prevent it by concerted action.”38

  Wilson also made pointed emotional appeals. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he singled out mothers who had lost their sons in the war, and in St. Louis he warned that without the League and Article X, America would have to stay on a permanent war footing and be ruled by “Prussian” military despotism. In Kansas City, he avowed that he was fighting for something “as great as the cause of mankind” and added that he was descended from “troublesome Scotchmen” known as Covenanters: “Very well here is the Covenant of the League of Nations. I am a Covenanter!”39 It was no accident that he made that declaration of defiance in the adopted hometown of Senator Reed, his persistent antagonist in the Democratic Party and now one of his fiercest foes on the League.

  In the supercharged political and social atmosphere of the summer of 1919, emotional appeals carried the danger of demagoguery. Wilson leaned in that direction just a few times on this speaking tour. Anti-German sentiment offered the greatest temptation, and some League advocates, most notably Taft, touted the organization as a way to keep Germany downtrodden. Wilson used that argument only sparingly in his speeches. An almost equally great temptation lay in the rising tide of anti-Bolshevik and anti-radical sentiment that would soon erupt into Attorney General Palmer’s Red scare. At Kansas City, Wilson scorned the Bolsheviks and slyly linked their destructive spirit to some anti-League spokesmen. Later on the tour, he would take a few more passing swipes at the Bolsheviks, but that was the single time he tried to tar his opponents with the anti-Bolshevik brush. Again, it was noteworthy that Wilson stooped toward demagoguery in the hometown of Reed, who had recently hurled blatantly racist denunciations at the League.

  Most of the president’s sins and errors on the tour fell under the heading of omission. He showed his two most glaring kinds of omission in his speeches during the first week. In his explanations of the treaty, he continued to shy away from responding to criticism. He also failed to suggest possible compromises and reach out to senators. Only once on the tour did he mention any senators by name: in Omaha, he thanked Hitchcock for his support and expressed the hope—in vain—that Norris would join him. Otherwise, in a senator’s state, friend, foe, and fence-sitter alike went unmentioned by name and, with a few exceptions, by implication. Tumulty’s “personal” telegrams from the presidential train were efforts to repair such omissions.

  Wilson was aiming his oratory at an audience beyond the people who came to hear him. The press coverage, which included the texts of the speeches, enabled him to try to influence opinion throughout the country, which, in turn, he hoped would sway senators. This was not a vain hope. Despite Brandegee’s sneer that people could not vote on the treaty,
his colleagues paid attention to public opinion and made their own efforts to influence it. Borah, Johnson, and Reed set out on speaking tours of their own, arranged and financed by the Independence League, to trail the president. In Washington, on the first day of Wilson’s tour, Lodge marshaled the Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee, except McCumber, to pass four reservations. Three of them asserted the absolute right to withdraw from the League and exempt domestic questions and the Monroe Doctrine from its jurisdiction. The fourth declined “any obligation to preserve territorial integrity or political independence of any other country,” join in economic boycotts, employ American armed forces, or accept a mandate except by act of Congress. The public impact of the committee’s action delighted Lodge, who told a friend, “Our reservations made a hit and shared the front page with Wilson.”40

  The senator soon savored a much bigger publicity coup. On September 12, his committee heard testimony from William Bullitt, the young diplomat who had resigned publicly in protest from the peace conference delegation. After two hours of leisurely questioning, Bullitt produced a memorandum of a conversation in which Secretary of State Lansing had condemned much of the treaty, especially the parts dealing with Shantung and the League. Bullitt quoted Lansing as stating, “I consider that the league of nations at present is entirely useless,” and if the Senate and the people really understood the treaty, “it would unquestionably be defeated.” This bombshell made headlines in every major newspaper. Lansing refused to comment and left for a fishing trip on Lake Ontario. After he returned, he stonewalled reporters with the feeble excuse that he could not say anything until he had read the full, official transcript of Bullitt’s testimony. His real reason for not speaking, he privately explained, was that Bullitt’s “garbled” account contained “enough truth so that I would have to explain my statements as quoted by the little traitor. I could not flatly deny the testimony.”41