What did Lansing have in mind? Was he plotting a coup to make himself president? If the vice president replaced Wilson, the secretary of state would be next in line of succession and could step up if the vice president resigned. As Lansing knew, Wilson had hatched such a plan three years earlier to make Hughes president if he had won the election. A scheme of that sort might have suited Lansing’s nature, but it did not ring true with much else in the man’s character. The secretary of state was timid and unimaginative, and he was not in good health. Nor did he enjoy close relations with the vice president. At worst, he may have been trying to get rid of a superior who pursued policies he disliked and who, he believed, had neglected and humiliated him.10
If this tense, badly handled business had an unsung, unlikely hero it was the forgotten man of the Wilson administration, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. This folksy, low-keyed Hoosier enjoyed a reputation as a small-bore party hack and was best known for his quip, “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” In fact, Marshall resembled others who survived and got ahead in the cutthroat, faction-ridden politics of the Midwest of that time—most notably Ohio’s Warren Harding—by encouraging people to underestimate them. He was still vice president only because in 1916 Wilson had rejected efforts to dump him in favor of Newton Baker. Marshall had stayed on as before, an invisible figure in Washington, never consulted by Wilson or the cabinet or anyone else in the administration and not even playing much part in relations with Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Marshall still seemed invisible during these days after Wilson’s return from the speaking tour. He made no contact with the White House, and he refused to talk to reporters. Behind that pose of detachment, he was much more involved than all but a few people knew. A political reporter, J. Fred Essary of The Baltimore Sun, later recounted that someone at the White House—most likely Tumulty acting on Edith’s orders—informed him about the president’s condition right after the stroke and asked him to pay a secret visit to the vice president. As Essary told the story, when he went to Marshall’s office in the Capitol, the vice president sat dumbfounded and silently stared down at his hands clasped on his desk. “It was the first great shock of my life,” Marshall said later.11 Other shocks were to follow because rumors about the president’s illness were circulating on Capitol Hill. On October 12, newspapers published a letter in which Senator George Moses of New Hampshire, a Republican irreconcilable, told a constituent that Wilson’s illness was a cerebral lesion. Grayson immediately brushed the assertion aside, joking to reporters that Moses must have his own sources of information.
Grayson’s denial of the gravity of Wilson’s illness and his and the other physicians’ vague but upbeat reports did not satisfy a number of men on Capitol Hill. Senators twice attempted to persuade Marshall to take over from Wilson. One overture reportedly came from two prominent but unnamed Democrats; the second came from four Republicans, probably including Moses and James Watson of Indiana. Marshall spurned both moves and kept the matter almost entirely to himself. His secretary tried to get him to think about replacing Wilson, but the vice president answered that the only way he might agree to become president was if Congress passed a resolution declaring the office vacant and Mrs. Wilson and Dr. Grayson agreed to it in writing. The vice president steadfastly refused to take any initiative. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, Marshall would inject an implied criticism of Wilson and his role in the League fight: “I have sometimes thought that great men are the bane of civilization; that they are the real cause of all the bitterness and contention that amounted to anything in the world.”12
As it turned out, Wilson played no role in the League fight during October and the first part of November. He was in such bad physical shape, particularly at the time of the prostate infection, that he could not pay attention to public business. There is never a good time to suffer a stroke, and Wilson’s stroke and illness came at a particularly bad time in the League fight. As he lay in his bed in the White House, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue senators were voting on the amendments to the treaty that had come out of the Foreign Relations Committee. Republican senators were also negotiating among themselves over reservations. Aside from a few dissidents who backed reservations, Democrats did not take part in those negotiations. They felt both loyal and indebted to Wilson, and they were afraid to act in his absence. On October 24, most of the Democratic senators met in a caucus and voted to take no action on reservations unless and until they heard from the president. Their absence from the negotiations put the mild reservationist Republicans in a bind. One of them, Charles McNary of Oregon, told a reporter, “The proponents of the treaty among the Democrats missed a great opportunity. The mild reservationists were forced to deal with the radicals of their own side.” What McNary meant was that in the absence of competing suggestions and counterpressure from Democrats, he and his fellow mild reservationists had to acquiesce in stronger reservations than they liked in order to defeat the proposed amendments.13
As a result, Lodge won a sweeping victory. Also on October 24, he sent out from the Foreign Relations Committee a set of reservations—which numbered fourteen. These reservations withheld assent to the Shantung clauses of the treaty, allowed the United States to maintain relations with Covenant-breaking nations and exceed arms limitations set by the League, prohibited American mandates for former German colonies, and stingingly asserted exclusive rights to exempt questions deemed to be vital national interests or matters of national honor. The Article X reservation was just as restrictive as, and only slightly less offensively worded than, the one Wilson had denounced in Salt Lake City: this one disclaimed obligations “under provisions” of the article unless authorized by Congress “by act or joint resolution.” In addition, a preamble to these fourteen reservations required three of the four leading Allies—Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—to assent to them.14
In this situation, two questions stood uppermost. First, for Wilson and League advocates, did these reservations concede too much? Were they really a compromise, or did they mask a surrender? Second, could there have been a compromise closer to the convictions of the president and like-minded people if he or Democratic senators had taken part in the negotiations? Wilson would soon answer the first question, and his supporters in the Senate would have to decide whether they agreed with his answer. No one could answer the second question because it involved a might-have-been. Still, it is worth pondering. Democratic senators might have succeeded in modifying the language and softening the thrust of some of the reservations, thereby saving face for themselves and the president.15
As always, however, Article X formed the crux on which everything depended. Here, it would have required a truly gifted dialectician to reconcile Wilson’s insistence on an obligation and Lodge’s demand to gut any such obligation. No Democrat in the Senate filled that bill; the only Republican senator who possessed such gifts was Philander Knox of Pennsylvania, and he had joined the irreconcilables. Outside the Senate, Elihu Root could have played such a role, but he had absented himself since offering his earlier suggestions for reservations. In the end, any meeting of minds on Article X would have required Wilson’s active involvement. If he had returned from the speaking tour a healthy man and if he been able to use another resounding tour, of the Northeast, to strengthen his hand for bargaining, then he might have been able to bring off a grand, mutually acceptable compromise. He had done something comparable in 1916 with military preparedness, although then his political circumstances had been more favorable and he had been dealing with his own party. Now the hour was late, and he had missed more promising opportunities to reach out and shape the terms for a bargain that could bring him some semblance of victory in the Senate. Wilson was no longer capable of that kind of thinking and action, as he would soon demonstrate in a devastating way.
On October 30, Edith finally allowed a visitor into her husband’s sickroom. Albert, king of the Belgians, and his queen, Elizabeth, accompanied
by their son Prince Leopold, called at the White House, and the president insisted on seeing the king. Grayson took him upstairs, where Wilson shook his visitor’s hand and beckoned him to sit to the right of the bed; they had a ten-minute talk. Two weeks later, on November 14, the president received another royal visitor when the Prince of Wales came to call. Propped up in bed, Wilson pointed out that it was the same bed in which the prince’s namesake and grandfather, the future King Edward VII, had slept in 1860 and in which Lincoln had later slept. “I was much relieved to find him looking better than I had expected from the published reports,” Prince Edward later wrote to Edith. Wilson was looking better because two days earlier he had allowed himself to be shaved, and the previous day he had marked the first anniversary of the Armistice by leaving the bedroom for the first time. Grayson had ordered a wheelchair, but the ones then available proved clumsy and hard to maneuver, so the doctor had procured one of the wicker chairs on wheels used to transport tourists on the Atlantic City boardwalk. On the day of the Prince of Wales’s visit, Wilson spent some time sitting in the open air on the South Portico.16
Those royal visits were brief and strictly ceremonial, but between them Wilson received his first caller to talk business. Senator Hitchcock of Nebraska was Lodge’s opposite number as the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and party leader, in an acting capacity, substituting for the ailing senator Thomas Martin of Virginia. In late October, Hitchcock had come to the White House, conferred with Grayson, and requested a meeting with the president. Edith finally relented, and on November 7 the senator spent half an hour with Wilson. “I beheld an emaciated old man with a thin white beard which he had permitted to grow,” Hitchcock later recalled. Wilson asked him how many senators would vote for the treaty without reservations: “I told him not over forty-five out of ninety-six. He fairly groaned: ‘It is possible, it is possible.’” Talking with reporters immediately afterward, Hitchcock said Wilson would accept compromises to save the treaty but believed “that the Lodge reservations would kill the treaty.”17
Attending to public business appeared to do Wilson good. His excursions in the wheeled chair now included some time out on the White House lawn, and after examining him on November 15, Dr. Dercum told Edith and Margaret that the president was making a good recovery. Probably at her husband’s request, Edith asked Hitchcock to send reports on the situation in the Senate, which she read to Wilson. On November 13, Hitchcock characterized the Article X reservation as less “obnoxious” than earlier but still bad. He said the Democrats planned to block consent to the treaty with the Lodge reservations and then introduce five reservations of their own, which he enclosed. “The first four are substantially in accordance with the suggestions made to me by the President,” Hitchcock said, “and the last one is, I think, in accordance with his views on the true meaning of the league covenant.”18 Two days later, Hitchcock restated the plan to block consent with the Lodge reservations and requested another meeting with the president to get his approval.
It is clear that Wilson did think this was the proper course, because Edith wrote on the envelope containing Hitchcock’s second report, “Program [Hitchcock] out lines has [Wilson’s] approval. He could not accept Lodge Reservations in any case.” He agreed to see Hitchcock, who came again on November 17. The senator found a changed man, stronger and more assertive. “I would give anything if the Democrats, in fact, all the Senate, could see the attitude that man took this morning,” he told Grayson afterward. “Think of how effective it would be if they could see the picture you and I saw.” When the senator asked about Lodge’s set of reservations, which Grayson had previously read to him, the president replied, “I consider it a nullification of the Treaty and utterly impossible.” He deliberately used the pejorative term nullification, because he compared these reservations to South Carolina’s efforts to nullify the federal laws before the Civil War—which was like waving a red flag in the face of Republicans. When Hitchcock asked about the Article X reservation, Wilson shot back, “That cuts the very heart out of the Treaty.”19
Wilson meant to play a blame game. “If the Republicans are bent on defeating the treaty,” he said,
I want the vote of each, Republican and Democrat, recorded, because they will have to answer to the people. I am a sick man, lying in this bed, but I am going to debate this issue with these gentlemen in their respective states whenever they come up for re-election if I have breath enough in my body to carry on the fight. I shall do this even if I have to give my life to it. And I will get their political scalps when the truth is known to the people. They have got to account to their constituents for their actions in this matter. I have no doubts as to what the verdict of the people will be. Mind you, Senator, I have no hostility towards these gentlemen but an utter contempt.
When Hitchcock mentioned compromise, Wilson dismissed the idea and then asked the senator to describe the situation in detail. Hitchcock’s rendition stretched the meeting to over an hour, and he apologized for tiring the president. Grayson recorded that Wilson smiled and said, “No, Senator, you have strengthened me against the opponents.”20
The president’s performance awed Hitchcock, but it should have appalled him. The transformation of the wispy-bearded wraith of ten days before was striking, but the psychological effects of the stroke were even more striking. Wilson’s emotions were unbalanced, and his judgment was warped. Whereas he had formerly been able to offset his driving determination, combativeness, and overweening self-confidence with detachment, reflection, and self-criticism, those compensations were now largely gone. Worse, his denial of illness and limitations was starting to border on delusion, particularly when he talked about fighting senators for reelection. Yet when he called himself “a sick man, lying in this bed,” he was displaying a trait that he had never shown before—self-pity. Worst of all, he had said he wanted to “pick up the threads that were left when I was put to bed,” but that—adjusting to changing political realities—was something he was no longer capable of doing.21
Starting with his meeting with Hitchcock, Wilson threw an insurmountable obstacle into the path of the Senate. In a guarded account to reporters waiting outside the White House, the senator invoked the threat of refusing to ratify: “President Wilson will pocket the treaty if the Lodge program of reservations is carried out.” Contradictorily and misleadingly, however, he added that Wilson had not totally rejected the Lodge reservations. Hitchcock and Edith Wilson were going to let the president appear to speak for himself. Later in the day, the senator sent to the White House a draft of a letter—which Edith read to her husband and edited at his dictation—to go out ostensibly from the president dated the next day, November 18. The letter stated that the Lodge reservations did not “provide for ratification but for nullification. I sincerely hope that the friends and supporters of the treaty will vote against the Lodge resolution of ratification.”22
This bombshell blasted away all hopes for compromise. Since the beginning of November, various people inside and outside the Senate had been scurrying to find some middle ground between Lodge’s reservations and milder ones. LEP lobbyists had busied themselves meeting with senators; ex-president Taft and Harvard’s president Lowell had persuaded the organization’s executive board to announce that, if necessary, it could accept the Lodge reservations as the price of entering the League. Even Lodge made a stab at compromise. Stephen Bonsal, formerly a member of House’s staff in Paris and a friend of the Lodge family, later revealed that he met twice with the senator at the middle of November and secured his agreement to changes in Article X. According to Bonsal, a draft of those changes went to House, who supposedly forwarded them to the White House but never got a reply. If the colonel had forwarded those changes—which is doubtful—Wilson probably would have spurned them. “The Colonel’s stock has fallen to zero,” Ray Stannard Baker noted after talking with Grayson early in November. “He is no longer a factor.”23
On the morning of November 19,
Democratic senators met in caucus, where Hitchcock read the letter putatively from the president. Either he or the White House also released the letter to the press, and newspapers carrying its text were circulating in the chamber soon after the Senate convened at noon. Lodge read the letter aloud to his colleagues and said, “I think comment is superfluous, and I shall make none.” Privileged spectators packed the galleries and others milled around in the corridors as the Senate spent ten hours in final debate and then voted on the Treaty of Versailles. On consent with the Lodge reservations, the treaty fell short, with thirty-nine senators in favor—thirty-five Republicans and four Democrats—and fifty-five against—forty Democrats and fifteen irreconcilables. Then, after futile attempts to buy time in order to introduce compromise reservations, Lodge allowed a vote on the treaty without reservations. This too fell short, with thirty-eight in favor—thirty-seven Democrats and one Republican, Porter McCumber of North Dakota—and fifty-three against—thirty-three Republicans, five Democrats, and fifteen irreconcilables. Afterward, just before adjournment, a Democratic senator asked whether the president should be informed. Pennsylvania’s corpulent, cynical conservative Republican Boies Penrose responded, “Oh, he’ll know about it well enough.”24
The president did know. When Edith told him the news, he lay silent and then said, “All the more reason I must get well and try to bring this country to a sense of its great opportunity and greater responsibility.” He tried to draft a statement but managed to dictate to Edith only a few disjointed remarks. Lodge made no public statement either. The next day, however, the senator indulged his malice when he privately told George Harvey, Wilson’s erstwhile patron now turned bitter enemy, “Brandegee and I thought of you last night after the thing was over and wished we could have an opportunity to exchange with you a few loving words.”25
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