The tender carried the Presidential party to the pier, which had been elaborately decorated with flowers and flags. And for the first time in history, a President of the United States set foot on European soil, muddy at that. The acting Mayor of Brest stepped forward to pay tribute to the President, with gratitude from the people of France for seeing “fit to personally aid in restoring peace to the world.” After the President’s reply, the French Foreign Minister Stéphen Pichon thanked Wilson for coming over “to give us the right kind of peace.” The President graciously corrected him: “I think you mean that we all will cooperate to bring about a just peace.”
A procession of motorcars transported the guests through the medieval streets—festooned with laurel wreaths and banners—past the largest crowd ever amassed in the picturesque city. At the railroad station, a crimson carpet ran the entire length of the platform, leading the American dignitaries to the special train normally reserved for the French President. It was furnished with big easy chairs, footstools, and cushions, in rose brocade, all arranged to maximize the view outside the oversized windows. Beyond this parlor were sleeping cars for the entourage and the French President’s private carriage, which had been given to the Wilsons. The train left Brest at four, and stopped at seven so that Wilson could enjoy a five-course meal in the dining car, followed by a walk in the French countryside before he and his wife retired at ten o’clock.
The train rolled through the night. During the entire length of the journey—even at three o’clock in the morning, when Admiral Grayson looked outside his drawing room window—men, women, and children gathered alongside the tracks, standing in the dark, cheering the train’s passage. But nothing, not even those advance welcomes, could have prepared the President for what awaited him in Paris.
Under brilliant skies, the train arrived precisely at ten o’clock at the private station in the Bois de Boulogne, a terminal reserved for visiting dignitaries of royal blood. The building’s walls and pillars were draped in red, white, and blue, and, high above, from a pair of staffs, waved a huge Star-Spangled Banner and a Tricolore. President Raymond Poincaré, Premier Georges Clemenceau, and all the leadership of the French government, along with members of the American Embassy, greeted the Wilsons as they stepped off the train onto a crimson carpet. Bands played as the dignitaries entered a magnificent reception room fragrant from profusions of roses and carnations. After a few speeches of welcome, the two presidents led the procession outside, where eight horse-drawn carriages, each attended by coachmen and footmen in national livery, awaited. On the roadway above the station and on nearby rooftops and windows, thousands of admirers cheered wildly as they entered the first open victoria. The Presidents’ wives and Margaret Wilson entered the second carriage, followed by Clemenceau and the rest of the party, in hierarchical order. The Garde Républicaine, on horseback and wearing shimmering brass helmets with long black horsetails down the back, led the cavalcade along a four-mile route to the Wilsons’ Paris lodgings.
“The cheering had a note of welcome in it,” observed Admiral Grayson, “and it required the best efforts of the troops to prevent some of the overenthusiastic breaking through and overwhelming the Presidential party.” Irwin Hood “Ike” Hoover, the chief usher of the White House, said that behind the soldiers from many countries who lined the streets, “as far as the eye could see was one writhing, milling mass of humanity. They did not applaud; they screamed, yelled, laughed, and even cried.” Sixty-eight-year-old diplomat Henry White, the lone Republican member of the American negotiating committee, said he had witnessed every important coronation or official greeting in Europe for fifty years and had never seen anything like it. Reporters claimed the crowds were ten times those that had recently assembled for the visiting monarchs of England and Belgium.
Reaching the Étoile, Wilson received a historic honor: the chains encircling the Arc de Triomphe had been removed, thus granting him the passage that had not been allowed to anybody since the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and only to Napoleon before that. Down the broad Champs-Élysées they rode, the crowds thickening. As Edith Wilson observed, “Every inch was covered with cheering, shouting humanity. The sidewalks, the buildings, even the stately horse-chestnut trees were peopled with men and boys perched like sparrows in their very tops. Roofs were filled, windows overflowed until one grew giddy trying to greet the bursts of welcome that came like the surging of untamed waters. Flowers rained upon us until we were nearly buried.” More than an expression of gratitude from one nation to another, the demonstration grew personal.
They crossed the Seine at the Alexandre III Bridge to the Quai d’Orsay and then recrossed to the Place de la Concorde, into which 100,000 people had jammed, hoping for a glimpse of “Meester Veelson.” The noise grew deafening, as the carriages proceeded through the Rue Royale, and the crowd kept roaring the phrase posted overhead in electric lights on a sign that spanned the street—“VIVE WILSON.” President Poincaré declared that the reception “stood alone among the welcome given any previous visitor to Paris.”
The wartime population of central Paris was a little over one million citizens, and newspapers estimated that two million people filled just the handful of arrondissements along President Wilson’s route. Forgetting neither Alexander nor Caesar, not even Napoleon, France offered that day the most massive display of acclamation and affection ever heaped upon a single human being—sheer numbers alone making it the greatest march of triumph the world had ever known. To those who had just endured an apocalypse, observed future President Herbert Hoover—then in Europe to supervise the feeding of the hungry—“no such man of moral and political power and no such an evangel of peace had appeared since Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount. Everywhere men believed that a new era had come to all mankind. It was the star of Bethlehem rising again.” Wilson gloried in the reception.
At 28 Rue de Monceau—behind a wall with two gatehouses—stood the three-story, three-hundred-year-old Murat Palace. The prince who lived there had offered it to the French government for the President’s stay. The Wilsons hardly had enough time in which to bathe and change clothes for a luncheon for 250 that the Poincarés were hosting at the Élysée Palace, the first of a staggering number of public functions that would consume the next two weeks. “An American can have anything he wants in Paris to-day,” wrote Raymond Fosdick in his diary, “—he owns the city. . . . I wonder . . . what will be the greeting of the French when the Peace is finished and Wilson comes to go home. I wish it would be guaranteed that their affection for America and the Americans would be as real and as enthusiastic as it is to-day. Poor Wilson! A man with his responsibilities is to be pitied. The French think that with almost a magic touch he will bring about the day of political and industrial justice. Will he? Can he?”
While Edith took a drive through the city that afternoon, her husband got to work, conferring with his chief adviser, a singular figure in his life and that of the Presidency. Colonel Edward Mandell House was President Wilson’s most trusted confidant. In access and influence, he outranked everybody in Wilson’s Cabinet, including the Secretary of State; and he quietly headed the Inquiry, reporting only to the President. In matters of diplomacy, he had carte blanche to speak for Wilson, and he became America’s first modern national security adviser. As representatives of virtually every population in the world gravitated to Paris, each seeking a private audience with the President, House came to consider himself indispensable. He quietly took pride in one Ambassador’s having referred to him as the “Super-Secretary of State.”
But the eyes of the world remained fixed on one man, examining his every gesture and analyzing every nuance. On his first Sunday in Paris, after attending services at the American Presbyterian Church, Wilson and his wife visited the tomb of Lafayette, where he left a wreath and his personal card, on the back of which he had written, “In memory of the great Lafayette, from a fellow-servant of liberty.” After lu
nch that day, Wilson received his first diplomatic caller, Premier Clemenceau. Colonel House noted that he had “never seen an initial meeting a greater success.” At a subsequent meeting days later, the Premier expressed his feeling that the League of Nations should be attempted, but he was not confident of its success. For Wilson, failure was not an option. The American Ambassador in Rome would report just that week that the Italians regarded Wilson as a “Messiah sent to save them from all the ills that the war has brought on the world.”
Weeks of formalities preceded the peace talks. Wilson took advantage of this time to explain his mission whenever he could, in interviews and at festivities in his honor. The ceremony that resonated most for him occurred on Saturday, December 21, when the University of Paris—the Sorbonne—conferred its first honorary degree in seven centuries and referred to its recipient as “Wilson the Just.” He told the four thousand academicians, all robed in red, “There is a great wind of moral force moving through the world, and every man who opposes himself to that wind will go down in disgrace.”
The Great War had taken the lives of 16.5 million people, roughly a third of them civilians; and another 21 million soldiers suffered wounds. Compared with the European statistics, the United States—entering late and battling at distant barricades—escaped relatively unscathed. But 116,000 brave Americans would not see Hoboken, and another 200,000 would return to the United States wounded.
Twelve hundred doughboys lay in beds at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, which the President and Mrs. Wilson visited that day. For more than four hours, they walked the wards and shook hands. Mrs. Wilson could barely contain herself as a doctor led them into the “facial ward,” filled as it was with “human forms with faces so distorted and mutilated that the place seemed an inferno.” Later that day, they called upon the wounded at the castle-like Val de Grâce, the largest French military hospital. Wilson’s presence alone stirred the patients, many of whom had gathered in a parlor for a Christmas celebration. A slender soldier with one leg sat at a cheap upright piano, while others with bandaged faces gathered around, including one comrade with empty sockets for eyes and a Croix de Guerre on his chest. The pianist banged out the “Marseillaise,” and the blind soldier sang along. Decades later, Edith Wilson would recall the song as “one of the most dramatic moments of my life,” for the rendition had “tears in it—tears which had dropped from those sockets where eyes should have been.”
After spending Christmas Day at General Pershing’s headquarters outside Chaumont, dining with several units of the American Expeditionary Force, the Wilsons reboarded their special train for Calais, which they reached at nine the next morning.
Sir Charles Cust, King George V’s personal equerry, had been sent from England to accompany the President on the hospital ship Brighton as it crossed the Channel. A squadron of British airplanes in battle formation buzzed overhead while two French dirigibles and a half dozen French airplanes followed the boat. Midway, the French destroyers circled back toward home, dipping their flags in salute. A frosty mist enshrouded much of the crossing, but by noon, the fog had evanesced, revealing the legendary chalk cliffs. They glowed as the Brighton pulled into port, and the big guns in Dover Castle—the same that once welcomed Sir Francis Drake—boomed a Presidential salute.
The Duke of Connaught, King George’s uncle, stood at the gangplank, as Wilson became the first President ever to visit Great Britain. His party passed into the railway station, as girls in white dresses with small American flags as aprons strewed flowers along their path to the King’s private train. By 2:30, they had reached Charing Cross Station, where the King and Queen, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and His Majesty’s entire government stood at the far end of the palm-lined red carpet, and an unlikely December sun shone.
Forewarned of the English reserve, the Americans were prepared for nothing like the extreme enthusiasm of the French. But Londoners were not to be outdone. The soldiers who lined the entire route from the station to Buckingham Palace held back the hundreds of thousands who amassed along the streets, crowded the rooftops, and leaned out of windows. Around the great Victoria Memorial, wounded veterans—many limbless young men—joined in the welcome, paying respects on behalf of the nearly one million people who had journeyed “a long way” from Tipperary and did not live to return. Several times along the route, the crowd burst into chants of “We want Wilson!”
In Pall Mall they enjoyed the most striking sight of the day: an elderly woman in front of Marlborough House, wearing no hat, a shawl around her shoulders, standing on the sidewalk, holding her own amid the masses and waving an American flag. When Edith Wilson’s carriage was about to pass, her fellow passenger, a startled Princess Mary, saw the old woman and uttered, “Why, it’s Grandmama.” In the first carriage, President Wilson stood and waved his hat to her—the Dowager Queen Alexandra, widow of Edward VII and mother of the King—and she threw kisses in return.
Shortly after the Wilsons arrived at the Palace and settled into their apartments, King George V and Queen Mary informed the guests that the crowd was calling for them. And so, they joined the Royal Family on the Palace balcony. “I never saw such a crowd,” Edith Wilson wrote her family back in America. The rest of the day was spent visiting various royals and touring the Palace, and the Wilsons dined privately with the King and Queen that night. But diplomatic meetings and more accolades filled the next few days, including Buckingham Palace’s first state dinner in four years, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, classicist Gilbert Murray, painter John Singer Sargent, and Rudyard Kipling in attendance. At the end of another day of adulation, the Wilsons left in the Royal Train on an unofficial excursion that promised to be the most emotional leg of his journey.
Carlisle, England, in the northwesternmost corner of the country, not ten miles from the Scottish border, was the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson’s mother, Janet—the daughter of the Reverend Thomas Woodrow. After the surfeit of adoration, this “peacemaker” yearned for a quiet retreat, and he arranged for what the press called “a pilgrimage of the heart.”
British authorities had agreed to help the President keep his visit as “democratic” as possible, with a minimum of pageantry; but even in remote Carlisle, people insisted upon honoring Wilson. He and his wife awoke while the Royal Train was on a siding on the outskirts of town, after a night of torrential rain; and when Edith looked out the window of her stateroom, she saw “a mass of dripping umbrellas manoeuvring for places nearer the train. The whole population had turned out, and a sturdy-looking lot they were.”
The Lord Mayor of Carlisle and other local leaders greeted the President and Mrs. Wilson at the Citadel station and escorted them to the Crown and Mitre Hotel for a public reception. There Wilson met a nonagenarian, the only surviving student from the Reverend Woodrow’s Sunday school class. The Wilsons pressed on through the steady rain, stopping at the modest but sturdy two-story house in the middle of a red-brick row in Cavendish Place, the home the reverend had built for his family. Although suffering from influenza, the current residents welcomed them into what had been Janet Woodrow’s small bedroom. Without tarrying, the President and his wife proceeded to the Lowther Street Congregational Church, where his grandfather had preached.
After delivering his sermon, the minister called Wilson to the high pulpit. He expressed reluctance, as he said his grandfather would have disapproved of a layman such as himself addressing a congregation. But he did speak emotionally of the memories that had washed over him that day—“of the mother who was born here . . . and her quiet character, her sense of duty and dislike of ostentation.” And just as “the worst war ever”—as George Kennan would call it—had drawn nations together in physical force, now he believed they should be joined in “a combination of moral force.”
Upon concluding the service, the minister invited the Wilsons into the vestry to sign the guest book. After the constant din of the last month—the g
reatest ovations that “had ever come before to a mortal man,” said Herbert Hoover—Edith cherished this moment of seclusion. She welcomed the opportunity it provided her husband to consider his heritage and to contemplate where this rise had begun. In that moment, she turned and watched as he inhaled the silence; and, she observed, “he was profoundly moved.”
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PROVIDENCE
And wee know that all things worke together for good, to them that loue God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
—ROMANS, VIII:28
Everything about Woodrow Wilson is arguable, starting with the date of his birth.
All pertinent documents and statements from the man himself declared December 28, 1856, as his birthday; but the copy of the New Testament in which his family recorded its vital statistics distinctly states that he was born three nights after Christmas at “12¾ o’clock”—almost an hour into the next day, the twenty-ninth. He was named Thomas Woodrow Wilson, arguably in honor of his mother’s father, though four months passed before the Reverend Thomas Woodrow even learned of his grandson.
The Reverend Woodrow was but one of the newborn’s numerous ancestors who were ministers—all followers of Martin Luther, whose disputation of corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church in 1517 convoked other likeminded protestants who sought a purer worship of Jesus Christ. After his excommunication, Luther was urged to contradict his conscience and recant. He refused—in words Woodrow Wilson would later employ: “I cannot do otherwise.”
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