by G. J. Meyer
The weakness in this hypothesis is that the bedridden Wilson showed no inclination to concede anything. The council began meeting in a study adjacent to his bedroom, with Colonel House shuttling between the presidential bedside and the table to which he delivered Wilson’s pronouncements. On April 5 the subject of the day was reparations. Clemenceau, who had earlier more than doubled Germany’s reparations bill by winning agreement that she must pay the pensions of the Allies’ veterans and widows and orphans, now insisted that there must be no limit on the amount owed or the number of years—or decades, or generations—over which payments would continue. Lloyd George, seeing the help that this could be with his government’s financial problems, supported Clemenceau. Presumably he was also hoping that by doing so he would have Clemenceau’s support when his own demands came up for discussion.
Wilson, with House’s encouragement, stood firm: the Allies’ reparations demands were out of the question. On Sunday, April 6, he summoned the other American delegates to his sickroom; they must have been surprised, as usually the president paid them no attention. He announced that if within the next few days the French and British did not become more reasonable, either the entire American delegation would be going home or he would tell the world what the Allies were demanding and insist that all future negotiations take place in plenary session, which meant in public view. That same evening he cabled instructions to Treasury Secretary McAdoo to stop extending financial credits to the Allies, and he ordered the George Washington to return to Brest from New York and stand by to take him and the others home. If these moves were a bluff—Wilson made certain that the British and French learned of them—they had little discernible effect. Certainly Clemenceau was not intimidated; he moderated none of his demands.
Wilson remained in a combative mood. When he learned that Colonel House, disgusted by the spectacle of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando squabbling among themselves, had walked out of a meeting in Lloyd George’s apartment, he approved heartily. But in the week that followed, what the president liked to call his “fighting blood” cooled, and by Wednesday he was in retreat. Two cables from Washington exposed the weakness of his position on the home front. In one, Tumulty warned that an exit from the conference would be decried in Washington as an act of petulance, a shirking of responsibility. In the other, McAdoo reported that in the near term it was not possible to cut off credits in any meaningful way; the Allies had already received enough to see them halfway through the summer.
In the end Clemenceau got not everything he had demanded but a very great deal. He could not win Lloyd George’s support for the creation of a Rhine republic. That would have been indefensible: five million Germans living on ten thousand square miles of what had always been German soil. Its benefits for France would have been incompatible with Britain’s strategic interests. Almost everything else, however, went Clemenceau’s way. France was given what amounted to ownership of the Saar mines, which produced seventeen million tons of coal annually, for a period of fifteen years. During those years the entire Saar basin was to be governed by a League of Nations commission, and then the population would vote on whether to become French or rejoin Germany. German military installations were forbidden not only west of the Rhine but for thirty miles to the east, and French troops would control all bridgeheads on both sides of the river for fifteen years. Clemenceau had wanted the bridgeheads for thirty years but was given something better instead: a guarantee that the French would not have to withdraw at all if, when the fifteen years were over, they judged that doing so would leave them insufficiently secure. The way was open to keep Germany under France’s heel more or less forever.
Even that was far from all. Wilson’s surrender on the issue of reparations was total. No limit was placed on the amount to be paid (it was to be determined at some future time by a commission) or on the number of years Germany would remain liable. France still had the promise of an anti-German alliance with Britain and the United States, fanciful though it was. Lloyd George even got Wilson’s assurance that the United States would cut back on shipbuilding.
Why did the president give up so much so quickly? He himself subsequently offered various explanations. He repeated his confidence that, if anything including his compromises proved to be problematic, it would be corrected by the league. He said the peace conference was supposed to usher in a new era of international cooperation, and he had contributed to making that happen by being so cooperative. He said also that it was necessary to get things settled in Europe before Bolshevism spread everywhere. The consensus among recent historians is that the deals struck in the first ten days of April, some of them dubious in the extreme and seen even by Wilson admirers as mistakes, were driven almost solely by the president’s determination to keep the creation of the league moving forward. If it died at birth, he had taken America to war for very little. As for the price he was paying to keep the league alive, he put his faith in the ability of the league itself to adjust it downward later.
His reward, when it came on April 11, was meager. The peace conference’s covenant commission approved adoption of the president’s Monroe Doctrine amendment. The entire revised covenant, with all four amendments, was approved by a plenary session later in the month.
No one was thrilled. Many of the hundreds of Americans employed at the conference believed that the president had sold out. Even some of the delegates—Secretary of State Lansing, General Bliss, and Henry White most notably—were making their dissatisfaction known. Staff members were talking of resigning in protest, and some would do so. Even Clemenceau could not celebrate, for though his cabinet had approved the deal that he had worked out, French leaders as important as President Poincaré and Marshal Foch were, rather incredibly, accusing him of letting Germany off too easily. The premier took no heat for agreeing to Wilson’s amendments, however, because no one in France saw them as having the slightest importance. He joked that the Monroe Doctrine was meaningless except as a device for extracting concessions from the United States. He had the same opinion of a League of Nations that had no army of its own; it was never going to matter in any way that France cared about.
Lloyd George found himself under attack in London for allowing France to become too strong. In Washington, congressmen voiced fears that the Monroe Doctrine amendment would encourage Japan to claim a similar sphere of influence in East Asia. Americans were also concerned about the transfer of Shantung to Japan in spite of China’s furious objections. That transfer was regarded by the council as necessary to placate Japanese indignation over rejection of the racial equality clause. Again Wilson appeared to many to have betrayed his own principles—and in doing so to have enhanced Japan’s growing strength in the western Pacific. Drawing upon ancient myth, General Bliss (an amateur scholar who read the Latin and Greek classics for recreation) wrote to his wife that in yielding to “the Prussianized militarism of Japan,” the president was “sowing dragons’ teeth”—making trouble inevitable in the long term. Increasing numbers of his fellow Americans were coming to suspect the same thing, and not only about Japan.
This marks the opening of the final and tragic chapter of President Wilson’s career. From this point forward, the darkest elements of his character would increasingly dominate his actions and utterances, with unhappy consequences for himself, his legacy, and, not least, the world. He was losing his ability to charm—or perhaps had simply stopped trying. With increasing frequency, other participants in the peace conference wrote of finding him unpleasant to deal with. Lord David Cecil, a key member of the British delegation, was all too typical. “I am coming to the conclusion that I do not personally like him,” Cecil wrote of Wilson. “I do not know quite what it is that repels me: a certain hardness, coupled with vanity and an eye for effect.”
Background
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Strange Bedfellows
The framers of the American Constitution, when they made ratification of treaties subject to approval by two-thirds of the
Senate, unknowingly ensured that the ninety-five senators holding office when the Sixty-Sixth Congress convened more than 130 years later would be plunged into one of the most momentous political battles in the nation’s history.
Taken as a group, those ninety-five men (one seat was vacant) were almost as mixed, divided, and combative as the vast sprawling country they represented. They responded to the treaty that Woodrow Wilson brought back from Paris, and the league covenant embedded in it, in such wildly divergent ways as to make generalizations nearly impossible.
On one side were forty-six Democrats, in the minority for the first time since 1913 as a result of the 1918 election. They were under heavy pressure to support the president and the treaty without quibble or qualification. Almost all were willing, but there were exceptions, mavericks such as Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, who disliked the treaty and said so loudly. But all of them, as Congress opened, would have fit into a Model T Ford.
The action, the drama, was on the Republican side. Of the party’s forty-nine senators (fifty when the vacancy was filled), few were either unalterably opposed to the treaty or ready to vote for it as it stood. William Borah of Idaho, almost as potent a figure as Robert La Follette in the progressive movement, had already declared himself to be “irreconcilable”—committed to rejecting the League of Nations no matter how its covenant might be amended. But in March 1919 the Republican senators prepared to stand with Borah would have fit into that Model T with room to spare. Most were inclined to agree with former president Taft that the league idea had merit, but as proposed by Woodrow Wilson was problematic. Such men hoped that compromise was going to be possible, and many expected that it would.
At the center of the drama, like a conductor charged with turning a random assortment of unruly musicians into an orchestra, was the trimly elegant figure of Henry Cabot Lodge. Delighted that the previous year’s election had elevated him to de facto Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at such a critical juncture, he had no illusions about the difficulties that faced him. Though convinced that the covenant as written by the president was unacceptable, he kept clear of Borah and the other irreconcilables. Unlike them, he stood ready to wheel and deal.
His character and personality bring to mind Winston Churchill’s quip about Clement Attlee: that he was a humble man with much to be humble about. Lodge was a snob but an impressive one, with much to be snobbish about. Born into the most exclusive reaches of Boston aristocracy and raised on Beacon Hill, he grew up to graduate first from Harvard, then from its law school, and finally to become, in 1876, one of three men on whom Harvard conferred the first Ph.D.’s in history ever awarded by an American university. He was a protégé of Henry Adams, the most revered man of letters in the country, and in young manhood he was painted by John Singer Sargent.
Cold and sometimes arrogant in his dealings with most people, Lodge was not easy to love and not even liked by many of his colleagues. Early in his career, serving as editor of the prestigious North American Review, he had accepted for publication an article by the young and unknown Woodrow Wilson. This did not mark the start of a friendship. To the contrary, the two appear to have disliked each other from early on, and on a visceral level. Some have speculated that the problem was an age difference of a decade and a half: it made Lodge a potential father figure, and Wilson always had trouble with those. It is perhaps natural to wonder if the president resented Lodge’s superior social, academic, and intellectual credentials.
As 1919 advanced and the new Congress settled in, the fate of the treaty seemed ever more clearly to be in the hands of the undecided Republicans. Everything depended on whether they and the president were going to find common ground. Lodge became less a conductor than a kind of broker, one with a big personal stake in what was being transacted. He was obviously willing to assist in the creation of the league so long as it did not, in his view, make intolerable demands of the United States.
It thus became a matter of old-fashioned political horse-trading, which as Lodge understood is usually best done quietly, in private. Noise, however, was coming from two directions: from the White House, as President Wilson urged the public to demand Senate approval, and from the still-tiny but very slowly growing ranks of the irreconcilables, who had no interest in negotiating with anyone and much interest in damning the treaty. Their minds were made up to an extent that left no room for discussion.
They were a talented and cantankerous lot, the irreconcilables, and some were among the most famous senators of their time. None was more remarkable than Borah. In 1890, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old lawyer, he had left Kansas to seek his fortune in Seattle but was obliged to leave the train in Boise because he was unable to pay the rest of his fare. Seventeen years later the Idaho legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate. By 1919 he was called the Lion of Idaho by his admirers, and the Great Opposer by an exasperated Republican old guard. He was a tireless battler when his passions were aroused. When President Wilson went on the road to sell the league, Borah followed in his wake across thousands of miles, telling the crowds who came to hear him that the president was wrong, the league a mistake.
Borah was a rarity, a bona fide isolationist. He wanted the United States to keep out of the politics of other continents and make sure that the rest of the world stayed out of the western hemisphere. He warned that, the president’s amendment notwithstanding, the covenant would undercut the Monroe Doctrine and encourage European and Asian powers to meddle in the Americas as never before. In this respect he differed from most of his fellow irreconcilables, but they were so varied in their views and their motives that not one of them can be considered altogether typical.
For example, George Norris of Nebraska, another leading progressive, joined Borah without sharing his fears that the league would threaten either national sovereignty or the Monroe Doctrine. Before and during the war, he had advocated the establishment of an international court of arbitration for the nonviolent settlement of disputes. The Wilson league, however, he denounced as “offensive to principles of justice” and designed “to maintain the world supremacy of the British Empire.” Like many senators, he took particular exception to the granting to Japan of Germany’s concessions in China. This part of the treaty was proving deeply objectionable to American voters, many of whom saw it as an injustice to a helpless China and an encouragement of Japanese aggression. It was proving to be an unexpectedly troublesome problem for the president.
Senator Hiram Johnson, two-term governor of California and Theodore Roosevelt’s running mate in 1912, joined the irreconcilables because he agreed with Borah that the league threatened American sovereignty and with Norris that the treaty, if implemented, would reinforce tyranny. Robert La Follette dismissed the entire treaty as “a sham and a fraud…written in a frenzy of hate.” He pointed to President Wilson’s dispatch of troops to Siberia as an example of where ratification would lead.
More consequential than any of these men, because he was almost a symbol of the Republican establishment, was Philander K. Knox of Pennsylvania. He had first entered the Senate after serving as attorney general under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, then resigned his seat to become Taft’s secretary of state, and now in 1919 was a senator again. Early in the Senate’s deliberations, he stood among the skeptical but undecided. He showed himself to be especially concerned about whether the treaty was a recipe for lasting peace or for further wars. His final decision, whenever it came and whatever it was, would carry great weight with his fellow Republicans.
With so much uncertainty and so many senators leaning toward opposition, Lodge could simply have stood aside and allowed the treaty to come up for a vote in its original, unamended form. If he had wanted it killed, that might have been his easiest course. That he did no such thing indicates rather conclusively that in fact he did not want it killed—not if it could be made, in his view, both useful to the world and safe for the United States.
He understood that victo
ry in the war had made Wilson’s league proposal popular with the public. He knew also that voters had not yet given the matter careful attention, were not yet fully aware of the questions to which the covenant gave rise, and were only beginning to recover from their long bout of war fever. He foresaw that all this would change with time and that, as the public’s awareness increased, so would opportunities to change its mind.
He made it his policy to wait, to slow the ratification process, to do what he could to call public attention to the important questions while allowing the issue to ripen. He put his confidence in the informed voter. In doing so, he showed that a Boston Brahmin could be at least as good a small-d democrat as the Democrat in the White House.
Chapter 23
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“Hell’s Dirtiest Work”
IN PARIS, AS springtime came to ripeness, the number of problems confronting the Council of Four appeared to be growing rather than shrinking. The reports and recommendations of the dozens of commissions were piling up and not infrequently ignored. It began to seem that the peace conference might go on forever.
In Washington, as the cherry blossoms came and went, the triple alliance offered to Clemenceau by Wilson and Lloyd George quietly met its inevitable obscure death. When presented to the Senate, it was immediately pigeonholed, never to be brought to a vote. The president’s amendments to the league covenant, also delivered to the Senate after being approved in Paris, had disappointingly little impact on the undecided. Meanwhile Article 10, the most sensitive issue of all, had not yet been seriously debated. On Capitol Hill as in no other place on earth, because of its possible implications for the richest and most powerful nation on earth, Article 10 cast a shadow over the whole league question.