by G. J. Meyer
The news from Washington, meanwhile, was not good. On September 10 Lodge’s Foreign Relations Committee sent the treaty to the full Senate with no fewer than forty-five amendments (five of them disavowing and undoing the Shantung settlement) and four reservations. This was so thoroughgoing a repudiation of the president’s work in Paris as to amount to a personal insult. Days later the twenty-nine-year-old William Bullitt, a future ambassador to the Soviet Union and coauthor with Sigmund Freud of a contemptuous and controversial “psychological study” of Woodrow Wilson, was called before the committee to explain why he and a dozen other staff members had quit the peace conference upon seeing the contents of the treaty. Committee members and reporters were less interested in Bullitt’s opinions than in what he claimed to have observed of reactions among the American delegates. At least three of them, he averred, had expressed serious dissatisfaction with the treaty. He stunned his listeners—and delighted any number of them—by reading aloud the note in which he had recorded Secretary Lansing’s words when the treaty was first printed and distributed. “I consider that the League of Nations is at present entirely useless,” the note quoted Lansing as saying. “The great powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves. England and France in particular have gotten out of the treaty everything they wanted, and the League of Nations can do nothing to alter any of the unjust clauses of the treaty except by unanimous consent of the members of the league, and the great powers will never give their consent to changes in the interests of weaker peoples.”
William Bullitt, junior diplomat at the Paris Peace Conference
He testified to the U.S. Senate that Secretary Lansing and others had complained of the peace treaty’s “unjust clauses.”
This was particularly stinging because uttered by Wilson’s own secretary of state. It was both obviously true and totally at variance with what the president himself was saying in speech after speech about how, for the first time in history, a war had ended in a settlement in which the victors sought nothing and gained nothing for themselves. When the newspapers contacted Lansing, he replied only that “I have no comment to make” and departed on a fishing trip. This, too, was headline news, implying as it did that Lansing had no argument with Bullitt’s testimony. Lansing would later tell his undersecretary that he “could not flatly deny” Bullitt’s testimony because, if not entirely accurate, it contained enough truth to make a simple denial impossible. He wrote to Wilson, upon becoming aware of what a sensation his failure to answer reporters’ questions had been, that “I have made no comment on the Bullitt statement believing that it would only introduce a controversy.” Bullitt’s testimony he described as “most despicable and outrageous.”
Lansing was being disingenuous. Upon returning to Washington, he began composing a letter of resignation in which he intended to blast the president for a “grave breach of faith,” as a result of which “a glorious chance to rearrange the world has been lost.” Wilson, for his part, told Tumulty that if he were in Washington, he would fire Lansing immediately. The relationship was obviously finished.
The presidential train was on the West Coast by this point, having reached Seattle on September 13. From there it proceeded southward through San Francisco to southern California, then turned eastward back toward Washington. On September 23, at Ogden, Utah, news reached the president that the Senate’s “mild reservationists,” Republicans whose votes he needed, had come to an understanding of some kind with Henry Cabot Lodge. Details were not provided, but this could not be good news. It was inconceivable that anyone could be both in accord with Lodge on the treaty and prepared to support it on the terms demanded by Wilson. On the bright side, Lodge could not be unalterably opposed to the treaty if he and the reservationists had found common ground.
Such reports gave Wilson no reason to suppose that his tour was changing opinions in Washington. This may have contributed to the increasing sourness of his oratory. In his Ogden address he said things so divisive, so self-defeating that they can easily be taken as early signs of breakdown. “All the elements that tended toward disloyalty [during the war] are against the league, and for a very good reason,” he said. “If this league is not adopted, we will serve Germany’s purpose, because we will be dissociated from the nations with whom we cooperated in defeating Germany.” This was very close to saying that to oppose the league, perhaps even to question the president’s approach to the league, was to side with Germany and betray the Allies. Such accusations were hardly likely to be well received by those senators and citizens who, though they had supported the war unreservedly, now thought it their right and duty to examine the treaty and covenant with critical eyes.
How far the president might have gone down this path we can never know, because two days later he came to the end of his strength. He did so in the course of delivering, in Pueblo, Colorado, one of the most rambling and intemperate speeches of the tour. “I find,” he said, “that there is an organized propaganda against the League of Nations and against the treaty proceeding from exactly the same sources that the organized propaganda proceeded from which threatened this country here and there with disloyalty. And I want to say—I cannot say it too often—any man who carries a hyphen with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic whenever he gets the chance. If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest, I will know that I have caught an enemy of the republic.”
The clumsy syntax, almost incoherent at times and utterly untypical of a healthy Wilson even when speaking extemporaneously, suggests that he was no longer himself. In their book, published in Europe in the 1930s but not in the United States until 1967, Freud and Bullitt would claim that the things Wilson was saying at this point in his tour show him to be “very close to psychosis.” He was telling his audiences that in restoring peace to Europe, the British and French had been inspired to saintly selflessness; that Germany, though now a republic, remained a “monster” that had to be kept in chains; and that any who disagreed were traitors.
To call such talk psychotic or nearly so is of course extravagant (historian A. J. P. Taylor called the Freud-Bullitt study a disgrace) but hardly without foundation. By the time he reached Pueblo, Wilson had been campaigning without pause for more than three weeks. He had been pummeled by the late-summer heat and humidity of the Midwest. Then, as a result of arteriosclerosis, he had found it difficult to breathe in the thin air of the mountain states. For two weeks he had been afflicted with constant and severe headaches and had driven himself to make appearance after appearance in spite of them.
When he returned to the train after the Pueblo speech, he was in such a state that his doctor, Admiral Grayson, took fright. That night the president had a severe attack of what Grayson wrongly diagnosed as asthma. As the train approached Wichita the next morning Grayson was demanding that the remainder of the tour be canceled. Wilson resisted at first but not for long.
“I don’t seem to realize it, but I have gone to pieces,” he said to Tumulty. “The doctor is right, I am in no condition to go on. I have never been in a condition like this, and I just feel as if I am going to pieces.” He looked away and, according to Grayson, wept. The train sped off for Washington with the president in bed, nauseated and racked with fits of coughing, unable to sleep. They arrived at Union Station on Sunday, September 28—the day that the last race riot of the year broke out in Omaha—and Wilson was hurriedly delivered to the White House.
Four days later, early on the morning of October 2, while making his way from bed to bathroom, he was felled by a massive stroke. A neurologist summoned from Philadelphia found him entirely paralyzed on his left side. He was conscious, though drowsy, and his life was judged not to be in danger.
There now began one of the darkest, most disturbing episodes in the history of the American presidency. Throughout October, Wilson was not only totally incapacitated by his stroke but brought to the verge of death by a prostate infection that blocked t
he functioning of his kidneys and could not be surgically corrected because of his fragile state. He lay motionless and silent as Mrs. Wilson took charge, in some sense, of the executive branch of the government. Almost nothing is known of how this was worked out, how she arranged things, or how aware the president was; she allowed no one to see her husband except his daughters, the doctors, the nurses, and those few members of the White House staff who were needed for his care. All took their secrets to the grave. Grayson told reporters that the president was suffering from nervous exhaustion but recovering. For a month and a half not even Tumulty was allowed to see him. Lansing sent appeals for guidance and received no answers. When he called a cabinet meeting, Tumulty told him, falsely but in a convincingly threatening tone, that the president wanted to know by whose authority they were gathering. There were few further attempts to bring the cabinet together.
The life of the nation went on, of course, and in ways that continued to make 1919 an extraordinarily difficult year. A quarter of a million steelworkers had been on strike since September 22, driven to walk out by the refusal of the U.S. Steel Corporation not only to shorten their twelve-hour workdays but to recognize their union. In October they were joined by the coal miners, aggrieved by the government’s insistence that they could not have a pay increase commensurate with inflation because, in the absence of a ratified peace treaty, the country was still at war with Germany and wartime wage guidelines continued to apply. Corporations were exacerbating already tense race relations by hiring black strikebreakers, and fears of the Red Menace were inflamed by depictions of virtually the whole labor movement as Communist-led and even Bolshevik-financed. Certainly there were union leaders and organizers whose opinions were far to the left of the mainstream, but they were rarely radical enough and never numerous or influential enough to warrant such intense paranoia. There was real trouble—bombings, and street fights between radical demonstrators and indignant patriots—but hardly on a scale that threatened the future of the republic.
The government continued to function, but on a strange ad hoc basis in which the chief executive played first no part and then a severely limited one. Cabinet members, depending on their temperaments, either feared to act or acted more boldly than they would have dared under presidential supervision. When on October 28 Congress passed the Volstead Act, which created the mechanism for enforcing Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment having been ratified almost a year before), it was Joe Tumulty and not the president who wrote the message vetoing it. He did so without being able to see Wilson but was confident that he was doing as the president wished. The veto was in any case an empty gesture; Congress quickly overrode it.
The battle over the peace treaty, too, went on without the president. It is an oversimplification, but not a seriously misleading one, to say that it had come down to a tug-of-war between Senate Democrats prepared to approve the treaty as Wilson wanted it and the far less numerous irreconcilables, unwilling as before to approve it in any form. In the middle, being pulled in both directions, were the reservationists. They were willing to have the country join the league but demanded that the obligations of membership be limited and made absolutely clear. Everything depended, or appeared to, on which way this middle group finally moved. Henry Cabot Lodge kept his colleagues guessing about whether he was going to turn out to be a reservationist or an irreconcilable in reservationist clothing. He was positioned to save the league if he wished but obviously would never do so without exacting a price. In any case, compromise was going to be essential, and most of the senators were willing. The problem for the Democrats was that they didn’t want to agree to anything without the approval of their chief, and he was telling them nothing.
It became clear that the Senate was not going to insist on or even accept amendments to the covenant. Therefore the treaty would never be ratified in a form requiring explicit approval of other members of the league; that danger was gone. It was now a question of reservations, which everyone assumed (almost certainly correctly) the rest of the world would accept, without serious complaint, as conditions of American membership. The agreement of which Wilson had learned in Utah, the one worked out between Lodge and the mild reservationists, mainly involved Article 10. Though other parts of the covenant continued to be of concern, this was now the point upon which the debate turned. The White House, whoever was in charge there, did not retreat from the insistence that without Article 10 exactly as the president had written it, the league could never function as it must. Many Americans in and outside the Senate, however, continued to fear that it would oblige the United States to become involved whenever war broke out anywhere in the world, even when the aim of intervention was to maintain a dubious status quo.
This is what Lodge and the reservationists agreed to append to Article 10 and presented to their fellow senators on October 24:
The United States assumes no obligation to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country or to intervene in controversies between nations—whether members of the league or not—under provisions of article 10, or to employ the military or naval forces of the United States under any article of the treaty for any purpose, unless, in any particular case, the Congress, which, under the Constitution, has the sole power to declare war or authorize the employment of the military or naval forces of the United States, shall by act or joint resolution so provide.
Was this simple prudence or the culmination of a plot by Lodge to eviscerate the league? The available evidence makes it difficult to cast Lodge in the role of villain, impossible to convict him of underhanded behavior. He was, as he insisted, never an isolationist, but he had strong convictions about the importance of integrity in international relations. With Theodore Roosevelt, he had always believed that making commitments that the nation might not be willing to fulfill would damage not only America’s credibility and good name but the foundations of international stability. Nor can it be denied that his Article 10 reservation is consistent with, even reinforcing of, the U.S. Constitution. The senator’s judgment is as open to question as Wilson’s, but that he was in earnest, his intentions good, is hardly to be doubted.
November brought signs that Wilson’s physical condition was improving. When the king and queen of Belgium came to Washington and were welcomed as heroes of the recent war, they were invited to visit the president in his bedroom. After a brief and carefully staged greeting, they did as Tumulty requested and spoke to the press of how fit the president appeared to be.
The Senate, aware that its failure even to try to come to a decision on the league compared poorly with Mitchell Palmer’s bold pursuit of radicals, picked up the pace at last. In the thirteen days leading up to the climactic final vote, no fewer than sixty-six speeches about the treaty were delivered on the floor of the Senate. One after another, reservations came up for a vote and were variously adopted or, more often, rejected. On November 13 the Lodge-approved reservation on Article 10 passed by a vote of forty-six to thirty-three. There were seventeen votes on November 15 alone, and the daily total would continue to rise.
Gilbert Hitchcock, U.S. senator from Nebraska, 1911–1923
He tried and failed to get Wilson to relent and save the League of Nations.
Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska was in a particularly difficult position. He had never been one of the Democrats on whom the president could count for support on all questions at all times, but now, as senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and acting minority leader with aspirations to keep the job permanently, he was doing his best to keep the members of his party in line. But he more than anyone else was required by the president’s silence to grope his way half blind through the legislative underbrush. He had been one of the first to be allowed to visit the president after his stroke, later recording his shock at finding him a frail and aged invalid with a scraggly white beard. When he managed to see him again on November 17, with the final vote on the treaty drawing near, he found Wilson stro
nger and more combative. The president told Hitchcock that the Republican reservations were tantamount to crippling the league, and that he would have nothing to do with them. He said he was going to “get the political scalps” of any who voted for the treaty with the reservations attached, and that “I have no hostility towards these gentlemen, only an utter contempt.”
Hitchcock saw the dangers of daring to speak for the president. He therefore drafted a letter from Wilson to himself, a statement of what he understood the president’s position to be, and delivered it to Mrs. Wilson. She read it to her husband, made changes per his instructions, used a rubber stamp to affix his signature, and sent it back to Hitchcock in the following form:
You were good enough to bring me word that the Democratic senators supporting the treaty expected to hold a conference before the final vote on the Lodge resolution of ratification, and that they would be glad to receive a word of counsel from me. I should hesitate to offer it in any detail but I assume that the senators desire my judgment only upon the all-important question of the final vote on the resolution containing the many reservations by Senator Lodge. On that I can not hesitate, for in my opinion the resolution in that form does not provide for ratification, but for the nullification of the treaty. I sincerely hope that the friends and supporters of the treaty will vote against the Lodge resolution of ratification. I understand that the door will probably then be open for a genuine resolution of ratification. I hope therefore that all true friends of the treaty will refuse to support the Lodge resolution.