The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Beyond all this was the still barely addressed challenge of deciding what kinds of peace terms to impose on Germany. A president burdened with such a task could expect to be excused for not giving a great deal of attention to domestic matters, surely, when the world needed him so badly.

  Colonel House, who had been dealing with the German question and other matters before the Supreme Council during the month of Wilson’s absence, was waiting at Brest when the George Washington arrived. His reunion with the president is shrouded in mystery and intimations of intrigue. Edith Wilson, in a memoir written years later, says that House came aboard when the ship docked, talked with the president in private at some length, and sent him into something like a state of shock. “He seemed to have aged ten years,” the lady says of her husband as he emerged from the meeting, “and his jaw was set in that way it had when he was making a superhuman effort to control himself. Silently he held out his hand, which I grasped, crying: ‘What is the matter? What happened?’ ”

  Wilson “smiled bitterly,” according to his wife. She then has him saying that “House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again and this time it will be harder.”

  The least of the problems with this little melodrama is that the colonel never went aboard the George Washington, but waited for the Wilsons to come ashore. The two men certainly had much to discuss—everything that had happened in Washington and Paris during their separation, all the great and little crises—and not everything House had to report would have been received by the president as good news. But nothing had happened that could possibly have caused Wilson to think House had betrayed him or even let him down in any seriously damaging way.

  The colonel had, in keeping with Wilson’s instructions, sat in for him at the meetings of the Council of Ten. But he had stayed within the limits that the president prescribed, kept him informed by cable at every step, and committed the United States to nothing. He had not been passive; passivity was not what the president wanted. But his objective had been not to settle the big questions facing the council but to bring as many of them as possible to a point where they would be ready for the president’s decision when he returned.

  The council, for that matter, had been relatively inactive while Wilson was away. An attempted assassination of Clemenceau on February 19 had left the aged premier with a bullet in his chest, causing him to miss six of the month’s eighteen meetings. Lloyd George had a worse attendance record with less excuse, spending much time in England and showing up only six times. Orlando of Italy, typically, attended only twice. Mrs. Wilson’s dire story may have been, if not simply the result of a confused memory or excited imagination, an effort to justify a subsequent development in which she would play more than a small part: the end of the House-Wilson friendship in absolute estrangement.

  If House did upset the president that morning, he is most likely to have done so simply by giving a candid account of how badly, in his opinion, the peacemaking process had been going during the past month. He was himself in low spirits after prolonged direct exposure to the Supreme Council’s arcane divisions, unfocused deliberations, and glacially slow progress. On the day of Wilson’s Metropolitan Opera House speech, he had added an almost despondent entry to his diary: “It is now evident that the peace will not be such a peace as I had hoped, or one which this terrible upheaval should have brought about….I dislike to sit and have forced upon us such a peace as we are facing. We will get something out of it in the way of a League of Nations, but even that is an imperfect instrument.” The French especially, but the British and Italians, too, were making demands that could only be granted by trampling again on the Fourteen Points. Central and eastern Europe were sinking deeper into disorder. Fear was growing that much of Europe might fall into the hands of revolutionaries.

  House shared these fears. Thus he was not insensitive to the appeal of an idea that was winning adherents at the conference as well as in Washington: that for the sake of restoring stability in Europe before it was too late, a treaty of peace should be concluded with all possible speed, if necessary before creation of the League of Nations. “My main drive now is for peace with Germany at the earliest possible moment,” says a House diary entry at the time of Wilson’s return to France, “and I am determined that it shall come soon if it is within my power to force action.” A day later Wilson’s physician wrote in his diary of being told by the president that, upon his return to Paris, Clemenceau and Lloyd George had declared their support for “side-tracking of the League of Nations.” Worse, the two premiers claimed that the colonel “had practically agreed to the proposition.”

  Lloyd George and Clemenceau were the real threats to the covenant’s place at the heart of the treaty; Colonel House could have done nothing, himself, to separate the two things. It is nonetheless obvious that any sign of willingness on House’s part even to consider separating them would have horrified the president. This undoubtedly helps explain the estrangement of the two men that first became apparent at about this point. The fact that the colonel was motivated by nothing more sinister than a recognition of the desperate state of central and eastern Europe and the magnitude of the challenges facing the Supreme Council would not have diminished Wilson’s sense of betrayal.

  House was learning, if he did not already know, that the Wilson with whom he had worked so intimately in earlier years had passed out of existence by March 1919. The new world-hero Wilson, the Wilson of Paris, deeply hated the thought of having to ask the other members of the council to amend the covenant—hated having to ask them for anything. He hated even more the thought of lowering himself (as he saw it) to satisfy senators for whom he had only contempt. He showed his determination to have things his way by issuing an announcement that the peace treaty and the covenant would continue to move forward together.

  Postwar Wilson was even more isolated than the earlier versions had been. He trusted no one except his adoring wife—not even House at this stage, certainly none of the other American delegates. He shared his plans with no one except, perhaps, Edith, and allowed no one except her to assist him in his work. He was pushing himself to the limits of his strength. House’s fall from grace was hastened by the fact that in Paris he became more visible than he had ever been at home. His role as substitute for Wilson at Supreme Council meetings made anonymity impossible, but beyond that he was making himself more available to the press than he had ever been at home. He granted occasional interviews, and some newspapers suggested that it was he more than Wilson who was making things happen. Mrs. Wilson was aware of this, and it turned her old dislike into open displays of annoyance. For her weary husband, the colonel’s growing celebrity was a maddening new source of distress. The role of great peacemaker was his alone.

  It has been said of Woodrow Wilson that he could break but not bend. In the days following his return to Paris this was not entirely true. One thing could still induce him to show a modicum of flexibility: fear of losing the league. Thus it took less than a week back in France for him to begin to see the wisdom, even the necessity, of altering the covenant as friends had urged in Washington and House was urging now. Taft was helpful in changing his mind. He cabled Wilson that with just a few changes he could force his opponents to abandon their objections. This was wrong as prediction but exactly the right way to persuade Wilson to take a new approach. It enabled him to stop regarding amendments as a humiliation and see them as a way of bringing the likes of Henry Cabot Lodge to heel.

  Working at night, usually alone or with his wife sitting quietly nearby, Wilson drafted four amendments, each one aimed at taking a weapon out of the hands of the opposition back home. They made explicit things that Wilson had been willing to take for granted but others had not. That the league would have no authority to intrude into member countries’ domestic affairs. That members were free to quit the league, and also to refuse mandates. That nothing in the covenant should b
e construed as compromising the Monroe Doctrine.

  The care with which the president crafted his amendments would not make them proof against objections in Congress. The first three, however, were accepted without difficulty by his fellow council members. Wilson must have expected that the one dealing with the Monroe Doctrine, a simple confirmation of what had been unchallenged American policy for a century, would be the least objectionable of all. Though no European country had ever formally recognized the Monroe Doctrine, neither had any ever defied it. There was nothing, really, to dispute.

  Or would have been nothing, if Clemenceau and Lloyd George had not been on the lookout for leverage in their dealings with Wilson. They understood three things. First, that by asking for their agreement the president was putting them in a position of power. Second, that the American Congress was so hostile to even an implied dilution of the Monroe Doctrine that such a possibility would cause it to reject the league. Third, that of all the issues facing the peace conference, for Wilson the league remained paramount. It seemed possible that he might do or refrain from doing almost anything to keep his covenant essentially intact and in the treaty. This was his Achilles’ heel, and it had the potential to outweigh all the advantages he had brought with him to Paris. The Allies set out to exploit it.

  Their task was made easier by Wilson’s deficiencies as a negotiator and his insistence on not sharing his work with anyone, which made it impossible for House and the other American delegates to help compensate for those deficiencies. Every competent negotiator understands the importance of asking in the beginning for more than he needs or expects to get. There is nothing shameful in this. It is how the game has always been played, making it possible for everyone involved to offer concessions and accept compromises and still get a satisfactory outcome. Wilson regarded such tactics as unworthy of a man as upright as himself. He opened what others expected to be bargaining sessions by exposing his bottom line—the irreducible minimum beyond which he was not prepared to go. This, and his frequently sanctimonious tone, made bargaining difficult if not impossible.

  Faced with such an adversary, and presented with the opportunity to deny him something he thought neither he nor the world could do without, Clemenceau and Lloyd George were able to force Wilson to give ground in ways that under other circumstances he would never have considered. He became a sheep among wolves, doomed to be shorn if not devoured.

  Clemenceau was first to name his price. Resigned to the impossibility of getting the one thing that might have satisfied him completely, the undoing of the 1871 unification of Germany, he demanded the next best thing. He said he wanted not only Alsace and Lorraine to be stripped from Germany but much of the Rhineland as well. He wanted the Saar valley, which in addition to being heavily industrialized had more coal reserves than all of France. He wanted some German territory to be given to France outright, some to be put under international governance via the League of Nations, and some to be turned into a new Rhine republic that, though formally autonomous and neutral, would function as a French satellite. He also wanted Germany to pay reparations in amounts so vast that the interest alone would keep her financially crippled indefinitely. These exactions, when combined with Polish annexations of territory on Germany’s eastern flank, might just suffice, Clemenceau conceded, to meet France’s security needs.

  Even Lloyd George, pledged though he was to make the Germans pay for their sins, was taken aback by Clemenceau’s demands. If for Wilson those demands constituted a gross departure from the letter and spirit of his peace plan, for Lloyd George they meant an end to the European balance of power and the return of France to continental supremacy. They also meant, Lloyd George feared, the creation of new Alsace-Lorraines—annexations certain to create lasting grievances and cause future wars. Nonetheless he, too, had his price and was prepared to bargain if doing so could work to Britain’s advantage. He, like Wilson, wanted the league covenant amended, but by no means in the same ways.

  Above all, he wanted to expunge the second of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the one guaranteeing freedom of the seas. Wilson could not accept this; it would remove what he saw as one of the essential elements of a lasting peace, the guarantee that, in case of another war, neutral nations would remain free to trade where they wished. For the British, such a guarantee smacked of national suicide. “Germany has been broken almost as much by the blockade as by military methods,” Lloyd George said. “If this power is to be handed over to the League of Nations and Great Britain were fighting for her life, no league of nations would prevent her from defending herself….My view is that I should like to see this League of Nations established before I let this power go. If the League of Nations is a reality, I am willing to discuss the matter.”

  It cannot have escaped notice that he was promising not to accept freedom of the seas but only to discuss the possibility, and not now but later, after certain conditions had been met. He also wanted the United States to scale back its naval shipbuilding program, so that Britain’s Royal Navy could remain supreme. Wilson saw these demands as barely disguised insults, a flagrant refusal of what he had been advocating since before the United States entered the war. Clemenceau with his grab at the Rhineland was all but mocking what the president had said the previous Fourth of July: that every question of territory, sovereignty, and political arrangement must be settled “upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned.” Lloyd George, more excusably if no less annoyingly, was simply making plain that Wilson had been indulging in wishful thinking in expecting the British to agree to a freedom of the seas that would mean no more starvation blockades.

  The stage was thus set for a showdown, and it was not long in coming. Partly out of frustration with the peace conference’s slow and uncertain progress, possibly in part because he wanted fewer witnesses to what were sure to be tempestuous discussions, in the last week of March Wilson discontinued the Council of Ten and said that henceforth he would meet with Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando only. This reduced the Supreme Council to a membership of four and more often than not to a trio; Orlando would continue to be frequently absent, probably because the discussions were in English, and he alone did not speak it. One of the reduced council’s first sessions, on March 28, was blown apart by an explosive exchange of recriminations having to do with German reparations. Clemenceau, accused by Wilson of wanting too much, called the president pro-German and stormed out. Once again the peacemaking process seemed in danger of collapse, which would have left the war’s winners as well as its losers to shift for themselves amid Europe’s spreading chaos.

  At this moment of crisis, to calm Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George took an extraordinary step. They told Clemenceau that their countries would join with France in a new triple alliance, committing to come to France’s rescue in case of a German invasion. In the short term, this was a meaningless gesture; Germany had demobilized her armies as soon as they returned from the various fronts and was no longer capable of maintaining domestic order, let alone defending herself. With France to her west, Poland’s new army of half a million men to her east, and a quarter of a million Czech troops to the south, Germany’s ability to attack anyone was nil.

  From a longer-term perspective, the proposed alliance was meaningless in a very different way. It was a radical departure for Britain, which had traditionally avoided committing, openly at least, to peacetime alliances with continental powers. Lloyd George did have the power to make it happen, however, and therefore could responsibly make the offer. Wilson had no such power; the alliance he was promising would require Senate ratification and had absolutely no chance of getting it. The president cannot have failed to understand this. It is impossible to believe that the British and French failed to understand it, either. Thus an air of unreality hangs over the entire episode and America’s part in it. Wilson had always responded to fears that the League of Nations would drag the United States into “entangling alliances” by saying
that, as an alliance of all nations against threats to peace rather than of some countries against others, the league would be liberating rather than entangling. Now he was offering an alliance of three nations, one directed at a single specific adversary. That was entangling by any definition of the term, including Wilson’s own.

  Clemenceau professed to be pleased by the offer but said that French acceptance required the approval of his cabinet. It must also, he added, be conditional on the assurance that other, more immediate protections would be provided to France. This was a reference to his Rhineland demands, which were not withdrawn. What made the old Tiger happiest, in all likelihood, was this fresh demonstration of how far the American president could be pushed when the future of the league was at stake. Clemenceau had never objected to the league but had always believed that it would be of little use to France unless made to function as an alliance against the Germans. It now appeared that Wilson was willing to think of it in exactly those terms. Small wonder if Clemenceau was delighted. He continued to press for reparations and annexations sufficient to ruin Germany, but now did so with somewhat less heat.

  Biographers have long been fascinated by the fact that it was just at this point that the president’s health broke down so completely that he had to spend several days in bed. This has been attributed to a small stroke, an attack of the influenza that was still not entirely gone from Europe, or one of the transient nervous breakdowns that Wilson called his “colds.” Whatever the cause, he instructed House to once again sit in for him at council meetings. Alexander and Juliette George, in Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, point to this as another instance of the president’s lifelong pattern of retreating into illness at times of great stress. They suggest that in this case the necessity of dealing with Clemenceau’s and Lloyd George’s demands, and the likelihood that concessions were going to prove unavoidable, persuaded him, if only on a subconscious level, that making them would be less painful if done through House.