Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Wilson did hear, possibly from Tumulty, that Lansing liked Grey’s letter, and he chose this occasion to stage a showdown with the secretary of state. On February 7, Wilson sent Lansing a stinging letter—which he dictated—asking whether it was true that Lansing had convened cabinet meetings in his absence. “If it is, I feel it my duty to call your attention to considerations which I do not care to dwell upon until I learn from yourself that this is the fact.” For a change, Lansing did not shrink from confrontation. The letter’s “brutal and offensive” language sounded to him like the product of “a species of mania, which seems to approach irrationality. … It sounded like a spoiled child crying out in rage at an imaginary wrong.” He felt relieved because it gave him “the very opportunity I have been looking for to leave the Cabinet.” He replied on February 9 with a coolly worded letter noting that he had always kept the president informed of cabinet meetings and had only tried to serve him. If Wilson was questioning his loyalty or lacked confidence in him, “I am of course ready, Mr. President, to relieve you of any embarrassment by placing my resignation in your hands.”46

  Lansing did not immediately release the exchange of letters to the press, and he allowed Undersecretary of State Frank Polk to go to the White House the next day and talk to Grayson. Polk warned that this incident would make the president look bad, and Grayson agreed and talked to Edith and Tumulty. They also agreed, and they tried to talk Wilson out of firing Lansing. Edith recalled that she told her husband his “letter as written made him look small,” and Tumulty remembered telling the president that “it was the wrong time to do the right thing.” Wilson answered both of them the same way. “Well, if I am as big a man as you think me I can well afford to do a generous thing,” he laughingly told Edith, adding that he had to put a stop to disloyalty. Likewise, he told, Tumulty, “[I]t is never the wrong time to spike disloyalty. When Lansing sought to oust me, I was upon my back. I am on my feet now and I will not have disloyalty about me.”47

  Delusions of potency prompted Wilson to take further action. Urged by Hitchcock and Carter Glass—who had resigned as secretary of the Treasury to fill the Senate seat for Virginia left vacant by Thomas Martin’s death—the president now released his statement on reservations. Some thought this a good move, but Glass told him that every Democratic senator he talked to wanted the president to accept a reservation to Article X like the one proposed earlier by Taft and feared that the voters would punish them if they did not appear conciliatory. Again, Wilson would have none of it. On February 9, Edith wrote to Glass that the president’s “judgment is decidedly against the course Sen. G. proposes. Article 10 is the backbone of the Covenant & Mr. Taft[‘]s proposed reservation is not drawn in good faith.” Wilson still believed that the Republicans should take the initiative to compromise, and he “attached little importance to party strategy at this juncture.”48

  The next day, Wilson decided to take diplomatic matters into his own hands for the first time since the stroke. He had a public note sent rebuking the British and French for what he viewed as appeasement of Italy’s Adriatic ambitions. He put language back into the note that Lansing and Polk had tried to soften, stating that this dispute “raises the fundamental question as to whether the American Government can on any terms cooperate with the European associates in the great work of maintaining peace by removing the causes of war … [through] a concert of powers the very existence of which must depend upon a new spirit and new order.” The note also stated that many Americans were “fearful lest they become entangled in international policies and committed to international obligations foreign alike to their ideals and their traditions,” and to give way to Italy “would be to provide the most solid ground for such fears.”49 This all-or-nothing, isolationist-sounding language would soon damage further efforts at compromise in the Senate.

  More immediately, fallout from Lansing’s resignation did greater damage to Wilson. On February 11 and 12, the president and the secretary of state engaged in a duel by letter. Wilson said he was “very much disappointed” with Lansing’s explanations and accused him of disloyalty. Lansing replied with a letter of resignation in which he denied the charges of disloyalty and recited a series of cases in which he had been ignored or met with “frequent disapproval of my suggestions.” Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long, a former student of Wilson’s at Princeton, believed this exchange of letters would hurt the president and went to the White House and talked with Grayson, who evidently got Wilson to send a brief note simply accepting Lansing’s resignation. The secretary had already had the previous letters mimeographed, and the State Department gave them to reporters at seven-thirty in the evening. “Friday, the 13th!” Lansing exulted. “This is my lucky day for I am free from the intolerable situation in which I have been so long.”50

  Despite Wilson’s fondness for the number thirteen, this was one of his unluckiest days. As predicted, the Lansing affair cast him in a terrible light. Dismissing the secretary of state ostensibly because he had convened the cabinet angered and puzzled even Democratic newspapers, while Republican journals excoriated the action. The editors did not support Lansing so much as they condemned Wilson. “It seems the petulant & irritable act of a sick man,” Baker noted. That view had received reinforcement on February 10, when the urologist from Johns Hopkins who had treated Wilson earlier told a reporter that the president had suffered a “cerebral thrombosis.” This was the first admission by any of his physicians that Wilson had had a stroke, and it set off a flurry of comment by other physicians, including a statement by a former president of the American Medical Association that the president had a “permanently damaged brain.” Grayson did not directly deny the urologist’s statement, but he and Dercum insisted that Wilson was improving.51

  The furor over the secretary’s resignation and the urologist’s disclosure ignited doubts about the president’s ability to govern that had been simmering among the public for the past four months. During the third week in February, The Literary Digest collected newspaper opinion, and nearly every comment it cited expressed qualms about Wilson’s fitness to remain president. Up to this time, to the extent that public opinion can be gauged, it appears that people blamed the Republican senators just as much as Wilson for the deadlock over the treaty and were showing increasing impatience and boredom with the business. Now sentiment was beginning to focus on Wilson’s ability to hold office, especially in view of such domestic problems as strikes, inflation, unemployment, and Palmer’s campaign against Reds. McAdoo warned a Texas Democrat that “a drifting course is the worst possible thing for the party. We have had too much of it. This is due, primarily, I believe to the President’s unfortunate illness.”52

  Wilson sowed further doubt about his competence when he appointed a successor to Lansing. It would be his fifth cabinet appointment in three months. He had already picked Representative Joshua W. Alexander, a Missouri Democrat, to replace William Redfield, who had retired, at Commerce. He had moved Houston from Agriculture to replace Glass at the Treasury, and he had named Edwin T. Meredith, an Iowa Democrat and publisher of a farm journal, to replace Houston. He had chosen John Barton Payne, a Chicago lawyer and member of the Shipping Board, to replace Lane (who had resigned to pursue a private career) at Interior. All were reasonable, though not stellar, appointments. The State Department was another matter. On February 25, he asked Grayson, “Do you know of any reason why I should not appoint Bainbridge Colby Secretary of State?” Grayson guardedly observed, “It would really be an unusual appointment.” Wilson replied, “We do not want to follow precedents and stagnate. We have to do unusual things in order to progress.”53

  This was a bizarre appointment. The fifty-year-old Colby was a New York lawyer, a former Progressive who had supported Wilson in 1916, and a member of the Shipping Board. Colby had no experience in foreign affairs, and Wilson did not know him well. The president was passing over the undersecretary of state, Polk, another New York lawyer and an anti-Tammany Democrat who had
served as a Wilson loyalist in the department for the past four years. Polk blamed Tumulty for being passed over, but it is doubtful he was responsible. Colby probably owed his appointment to the twisted version of Wilson’s thinking about doing bold things. Editorial reaction to Colby’s appointment ran the gamut from puzzlement to outrage. Privately, some observers thought it gave further proof of Wilson’s incompetence. Lodge would not comment publicly to reporters, but off the record he called the appointment the worst he’d ever seen and “a political plum handed to a man who is willing to serve as a rubber stamp.”54

  Other signs of the president’s weakness came from Capitol Hill. When the Senate took up the treaty again, Borah delighted in reading extensive quotations from Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, which had been published in the United States at the beginning of February and earlier serialized in The New Republic. In it, Keynes called the president “a blind and deaf Don Quixote” and portrayed him as not just a naïve and ignorant idealist “bamboozled” by wily Europeans but also a hypocrite who possessed “all the intellectual apparatus of self-deception.” This view of Wilson would soon strike a chord among such self-styled American disillusionists as H. L. Mencken. Democratic senators were also growing restive. On February 27, Tumulty told Wilson that in the Senate “there is no doubt our forces are rapidly disintegrating” and warned that the treaty with the Lodge reservations might be approved by a two-thirds vote that would include a majority of the Democratic senators. He urged the president to accept that outcome but also issue a statement “showing wherein those reservations weaken the whole Treaty and make it a useless instrument.”55

  Others also made abortive attempts to get through to the president and urge him to compromise. On February 29, a conclave of leading Democrats gathered at the Chevy Chase Club: they included Tumulty, six cabinet members, and senators Glass and Hitchcock, as well as Homer Cummings, the party’s national chairman; Edward Hurley, chairman of the Shipping Board; and Vance McCormick, chairman of the War Trade Board. Evidently, everyone at the meeting agreed that Wilson should yield in some way. Hurley recalled that the group agreed that the president should accept the Lodge reservations, but Glass interjected, “I would like to know, in the present condition of the President’s mind and his state of health, who among us will be willing to go to him and tell him that he should accept the reservations.” After Glass spoke, Hurley recalled, “There was a hush. … There was no volunteer.”56

  If any of those Democrats had approached Wilson, he would have been on a fool’s errand. The day before they met, the president started to draft a statement, in the form of a letter to Hitchcock, about the “so-called Lodge reservations.” He said he was willing to accept some of them, but “if the treaty should be returned to me with such a reservation on Article X, I would be obliged to consider it a rejection of the treaty and of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Any reservation seeking to deprive the League of Nations of the virility of Article X cuts at the heart of the Covenant itself.” He maintained that Article X was essential to assuring peace and preventing another world war. “Every imperialistic influence in the chancelleries of Europe opposed the embodiment of Article X in the League of Nations, and its defeat now would mark the complete consummation of their efforts to nullify the treaty.”57

  This stepped-up defiance once more sprang from Wilson’s growing sense of his own strength. This was the first long letter that he appears to have dictated to a stenographer and the first long letter he wrote without relying on a draft by Tumulty. He also made changes and additions in his own handwriting—another first since the stroke. A different sign of recovery came a few days later, when he left the White House for the first time in five months. On March 3, he rode with Edith for more than an hour in the presidential limousine, which traveled along the Potomac and up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill. Many people recognized the car and waved at the president. Rides in the limousine would again be Wilson’s favorite way to relax for the rest of his days in office. At this time, he was also reworking his statement about the Lodge reservations. Tumulty showed the president’s draft to some cabinet members, and they made suggestions. Wilson accepted some of those suggestions, made shorthand notes, and dictated a final version to a stenographer and Edith. This was his longest piece of speaking or writing since the speech at Pueblo, and even people who disagreed with him conceded that it was an impressive rhetorical performance.

  The statement—released as a letter to Hitchcock at the end of the day on March 8—thundered with righteous defiance and focused almost entirely on Article X: “For myself, I could not look the soldiers of our gallant armies in the face again if I did not do everything in my power to remove every obstacle that lies in the way of this particular Article of the Covenant. … Any reservation which seeks to deprive the League of Nations of the force of Article X strikes at the very heart of the Covenant itself.” Without its guarantees, the League would be merely “a futile scrap of paper,” like the guarantee of Belgium that Germany had violated in 1914. Instead of quibbling about obligations, America should fearlessly embrace “the role of leadership which we now enjoy, contributing our efforts towards establishing a just and permanent peace.” The letter ended with a sting: “I have been struck by the fact that practically every so-called reservation was in effect a nullification of the terms of the treaty itself. I hear of reservationists and mild reservationists, but I cannot understand the difference between a nullifier and a mild nullifier.”58

  This bombshell did its destructive work. All but a few staunchly Democratic newspapers recoiled from Wilson. The Washington Post labeled him “an affirmative irreconcilable,” and the New York World carried an editorial titled “Ratify!” which called his position “weak and untenable.” His opponents on Capitol Hill were delighted. Senator Brandegee told reporters, “The President strangled his own child.” On the Senate floor, Lodge mockingly thanked the president for having “justified the position that we on this side, all alike, have taken, that there must be no obligation imposed on the United States to carry out the provisions of article 10.” Mild reservationists bristled at the “mild nullifier” label, and Democrats openly defied Wilson, with Robert Owen of Oklahoma declaring, “I will not follow any leader who is leading to [the treaty’s] defeat or delay.” During the next ten days, the senators voted to attach the same fourteen reservations as they had voted for earlier, plus one more, offered by a Democrat, Peter Gerry of Rhode Island, affirming self-determination for Ireland and expressing sympathy for an independent Ireland. With that, the Senate was ready to vote again on consent to the Treaty of Versailles.59

  The vote came on March 19, exactly four months after the earlier votes on the treaty. This time, debate lasted just six hours, and the senators considered only the treaty with the Lodge reservations plus the Gerry reservation. Several Democrats usually loyal to Wilson announced that they would vote for the treaty with those reservations. At six in the evening, when the roll call began, it looked as if enough Democrats might break with the president to supply the two thirds necessary for consent. Three of the first four answered aye, and next came Charles Culberson of Texas, who had not announced his intentions. There was talk that if he voted in favor, most other Democrats would join him. Culberson reportedly hesitated and looked perplexed before he answered nay. Everything then went as predicted. The vote was 49 in favor and 35 against, seven votes short of two thirds of the members present. A majority of Democrats voted for consent, which was a rebuke to Wilson. All but three of those who stayed with him were from the southern or border states; many of those “loyal” Democrats appeared to be afraid of reprisals by the president. A final bit of business was to return the treaty to the president. The following day, the secretary of the Senate carried back to the White House the same bound volume of the Treaty of Versailles that Wilson had presented to the Senate eight months earlier.60

  This was the end of the League fight. Wilson had lost. The United States would never
ratify that treaty and would never join the League of Nations. Many newspapers and commentators expressed regret at the outcome, and most of them laid the blame on Wilson—properly so. Brandegee’s cruel remark about Wilson’s strangling his own child was not far off the mark. Wilson had blocked every effort at compromise, and only his active intransigence prevented more Democrats from voting for the treaty with the Lodge reservations. Even though he threatened to refuse to ratify the treaty, the Senate’s consenting to the treaty with those reservations would have put pressure on the Republicans to take a stand for League membership on those terms in the 1920 election and, when they won, to complete the process of ratification. As things now stood, the Republicans were free to wipe the foreign policy slate clean and go their own way, which was what Lodge wanted and what they soon would do.61

  One question has haunted Wilson’s defeat in the League fight: what, in the larger scheme of things, did it mean? Did it, as he said, “break the heart of the world”? The outbreak of another world war almost exactly twenty years after the ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles would lead many people to elevate Wilson to the stature of a prophet whose words had gone unheeded. Others, however, would claim that Wilson had made a mountain out of a molehill in his fixation on Article X. With or without stringent reservations like Lodge’s, the United States was going to consult its own interests and convenience every time an international conflict threatened—just as the European powers would do in the League. Yet membership in the League, even though restricted by Lodge’s or some other reservations, would at least have given the United States a larger, more active role and a generation of experience as a leading power in the international arena.62