Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

By December 9, Allenby’s troops had captured Jerusalem; and at noon on the eleventh, the Bloody Bull and his officers dismounted so that they could enter the Holy City on foot. They were the first Christian army to seize the city from the Turks since 1099. The Balfour Declaration was not a legal document, merely a statement of intention; but it became the groundwork for the Jewish state that would remain a bone of contention over the next century. Secretary Lansing suggested to the President that he refrain from taking any position on Zionism—as the United States was not at war with Turkey, the Jews were far from united in their own feelings about a Jewish state, and there were many Christians who would “undoubtedly resent turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ.” But Wilson told Lansing that he had already assented to the Balfour Declaration, recognition that would prove to be fundamental to the region.

  The President dispatched House to Europe, to sit at the Inter-Allied War Council meeting in Paris, where they discussed means of coordinating all their war efforts. With the Allies stumbling on the European fronts, Wilson saw the opportunity for his man to “take the whip hand” in directing the global agenda, for the United States not only to “accede to the plan for a unified conduct of the war but insist upon it.” General Pershing apprised Baker that he hoped to have America’s fighting forces in active service by the summer of 1918. “Winning the war is vital to our future,” he said, “and if humanly possible it ought to be done in 1918. There is no telling what might happen if we defer our utmost exertion until 1919.”

  “A supreme moment of history has come,” Wilson said in concluding his State of the Union Address that December. “The eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favour, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of His own justice and mercy.” To assist in this ascent, the President asked Colonel House for a memorandum from the Inquiry that would pose the different questions a peace conference must consider and propose achievable answers. Mezes, attorney David Hunter Miller, and Walter Lippmann generated a comprehensive but highly readable document—The Present Situation: The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests. It delineated America’s political and military objectives from Berlin to Baghdad—paying particular attention to the Poles, Czechs, South Slavs, and Bulgarians. It enumerated America’s assets, laying out especially how money, if skillfully handled, could be wielded like a weapon, used both to threaten enemies and to lure friends; and it assessed its liabilities—the military impotence of Russia, the “strategic impossibility” of any military operation that could cut to the heart of Middle Europe, the “costs and dangers” of a war of attrition on the Western Front, the possibility that the Germans might agree to a settlement over Alsace-Lorraine without changing the basic balance of power in Western Europe, and the instability of Italy, where social revolution loomed. The proposal offered a program for a “diplomatic offensive,” the best possible scenarios for each of the players in the world drama—including ways of creating discord between Austria-Hungary and Germany and harmony among the Allies. Finally, and most incisive, the Inquiry memorandum offered a statement of peace terms—ten items, territory by territory.

  Colonel House delivered the report on December 23. It evidently went unread through the holidays, during which time representatives of the newly established Bolshevik regime under Vladimir Lenin officially opened talks with the Central Powers in Brest-Litovsk (which would become Brest, Belarus) to discuss a settlement.

  At the first plenary session of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference, Russia presented a manifesto—six principles that centered on a theme of liberation. They included banning “forceable annexation of territory seized during the war,” restoring independence where it had been seized, protecting minorities in multinational territories with “special laws,” safeguarding weaker nations against such bullying tactics as boycotts and blockades, and, most important, allowing national groups to determine their own political futures through referendums. British Ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice had a private audience with Wilson shortly after those terms were made public; and from Washington, he promptly confided to Foreign Minister Balfour, “Situation here is such that the President must in self-defence make some answer to the Bolshevists’ appeal.”

  That very day—Friday, January 4, 1918—Colonel House handed the President an expanded version of the Inquiry’s statement of peace terms. Over the next twenty-four hours, Wilson could not help incorporating at least the sentiments of Lenin’s principles, if not a few specifics, into his own thinking, especially where Russia was concerned. At half past ten on Saturday morning, he and his right-hand man outlined general provisos and then proceeded to specific territorial adjustments. Working directly from the Inquiry’s memorandum, they considered each proposition from both the Allied and Central Powers vantage points. House generally served as the anvil against which Wilson hammered his ideas. The President defined most of the basic stipulations in shorthand and then refined them at his typewriter. Two hours later—having “finished remaking the map of the world,” as House put it—Wilson asked the Colonel to number his short typed statement. They agreed upon the sequence, with one exception—the creation of a peace association, which Wilson thought should come at the very end, as a way of rounding out the message. That became his fourteenth point.

  Also that day, Prime Minister Lloyd George delivered a long speech to the Trade Union Conference in London in which he articulated his nation’s position. The basis of any territorial settlement in the war, he said, was the principle of “government by consent of the governed”—what he now called “self-determination.” When the text reached Washington, Wilson’s spirits sank; he thought the address made many of his very same points. House argued that Lloyd George’s remarks simply laid a foundation for Wilson’s speech and that Wilson “would once more become the spokesman for the Entente, and, indeed, the spokesman for the liberals of the world.”

  On Sunday, Wilson secluded himself in his study and incorporated his fourteen points into a speech. He toiled until day’s end, at which time he read his address to Colonel House. A single theme ran through the text—what Wilson would describe as “the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.” House called the address “a declaration of human liberty and a declaration of the terms which should be written into the peace conference.” More than that, he diarized, “I felt that it was the most important document that he had ever penned.” The next day Wilson read the speech to Secretary Lansing.

  Two days later, the President appeared before both houses of Congress at noon and got right down to business. “We entered this war,” he said, “because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secured once for all against their recurrence. What we demand . . . is that the world be made fit and safe to live in.” All the peoples of the world, Wilson added, were partners in this interest; and with that, he stood before the Congress and the world to present his Mosaic “programme of the world’s peace . . . the only possible programme.”

  Wilson’s first five points were edicts for all the nations to obey: “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” (thus, no secret treaties); “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas”; “the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers” and an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace; a reduction of national armaments “to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety”; and “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.”

  The next eight points eradicated the old imperial borders of specific territories and entreated the rest of the world to honor the new boundaries. Several of the stipulations carried their own Wilsonian homilies. Point VI c
alled for the German evacuation of all Russian territory and the allowance for “the independent determination of her own political development and national policy,” so that she might join the community of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; more than that, Wilson said, the “treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.” Point VII insisted upon the evacuation and restoration of Belgium—as no other single act would so much serve “to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.” Point VIII demanded the release of all French territory and the restoration of its invaded portions—particularly “the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.” Point IX sought a readjustment of Italy’s frontiers “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” Point X said the peoples of Austria-Hungary “should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.” Point XI addressed the Balkan states, granting “political and economic independence and territorial integrity,” especially in according Serbia “free and secure access to the sea.” Point XII disassembled the Ottoman Empire, assuring the Turkish portion a secure sovereignty and the other nationalities the right to develop autonomously, and mandating that the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to ships of all nations. And Point XIII urged the creation of an independent Polish state, complete with free and secure access to the sea.

  Three and a half years earlier, when the fighting in Europe broke out, H. G. Wells published a series of articles that were compiled into a book entitled The War That Will End War. As the fighting persisted, so did that phrase, which modulated into “the war to end all wars.” As Woodrow Wilson became the principal voice of the era—and because that sentiment encapsulated his outlook—the slogan was attributed to him. And nothing addressed that concept—thus permanently affixing it in the public’s mind—more than his Fourteenth Point: “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

  President Wilson said the United States would fight until those fourteen “arrangements and covenants” were achieved. As he had suggested in the past, America carried no vendetta against Germany, no jealousy of German greatness, no desire to block her legitimate influence or power. “We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the world—the new world in which we now live,—instead of a place of mastery,” he said. “The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come,” he concluded on behalf of the people of the United States, “and they are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test.”

  “God was satisfied with Ten Commandments. Wilson gives us fourteen,” France’s Premier Georges Clemenceau would gibe; the British wondered how Point II might affect their ruling the waves; and the German press took Wilson to task for employing “all his demagogic artifices . . . to prevent Russia from closing a separate peace with the Central Powers.” But most of the rest of the world heartily embraced Wilson’s speech. The “extreme radicals, even the socialists, approve it,” House triumphantly noted in his diary, “and so do the conservatives and reactionaries.” Paderewski of Poland sent grateful salutations; speaking in Edinburgh, Balfour referred to the speech as a “magnificent pronouncement”; muckraker Lincoln Steffens and peace activist Jane Addams both conferred their praise; and the French press, cabled General Pershing, offered “unqualified approval.” Even Colonel Roosevelt told The New York Times that he was “much pleased” with it. Thanks to George Creel, when the Germans advanced into Russia in early 1918, they found the walls of the towns placarded with the Fourteen Points—not just in Russian but also translated into German; 300,000 handbills were distributed in five days in Petrograd alone. The CPI printed and disseminated more than four million copies of Wilson’s speech.

  The Germans were just as eager as the Allies to end the war, but Chancellor Georg von Hertling showed no signs of embracing the Fourteen Points. Factions within the Reichstag were prepared to compromise but—as the ongoing talks at Brest-Litovsk indicated—only on their terms and to their advantage. Strikes broke out in Berlin and Vienna, and revolution was in the air. House delighted at the schisms the Fourteen Points had created among the German politicians; and Wilson capitalized on the divisiveness by returning to Congress on February 11 to reaffirm his points, offering four principles for their enactment.

  Each part of the final settlement must “be based upon the essential justice of that particular case,” especially in its striving for a permanent peace; the peoples and provinces were not to be bartered “as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power”; every territorial settlement must be in the interest of the populations concerned and not as a part of an adjustment against rival states; and all “well defined national aspirations” must be considered in light of their effect on “perpetuating old elements” that might break the peace of Europe and beyond. Wilson said he offered no threats, insisting that the power of the United States “will never be used in aggression or for the aggrandizement of any selfish interest of our own”—only to serve freedom. The subtext of Wilson’s speech was clear: he welcomed peace efforts but intended to fight until Germany forsook its militaristic ways.

  “What is at stake now is the peace of the world,” Wilson continued. “What we are striving for is a new international order based upon broad and universal principles of right and justice,—no mere peace of shreds and patches.” The President explained that in raising his Fourteen Points he had meant only “that those problems each and all affect the whole world” and that “unless they are dealt with in a spirit of unselfish and unbiased justice, with a view to the wishes, the natural connections, the racial aspirations, the security, and the peace of mind of the peoples involved, no permanent peace will have been attained.” When Germany suggested it would determine the futures of Russian territory and a place for an independent Poland, Wilson became even more outspoken. “People are not to be handed about from one sovereignty to another by an international conference of an understanding between rivals and antagonists,” he said. “National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent.” And then he added, “‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.” Two weeks later—after losing two million soldiers—Russia would surrender a third of its population and farmland and half its industrial centers.

  Germany realized it had only a few months before American troops would arrive in Europe. And so, beginning on March 21, it committed all possible resources to a spring offensive. This involved four major attacks, the goals of which were to break through the Allied lines, outflank the British forces, which extended to the English Channel, and close in on the French. Under the direction of Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff, the Germans forced the British 5th Army to retreat thirty miles and lose 100,000 men. They continued to inflict serious damage to the French as they drove them back, coming within striking distance of Paris. Severely compromised, the Allies closed ranks behind a single leader, naming Marshal Ferdinand Foch Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies. While the Germans gained significant ground and suffered fewer losses than the Allied armies, Foch was able to keep the enemy from inflicting the coup de grâce. After four years of horrific warfare, victory on neither side was in sight: German casualties in the sp
ring offensive practically equaled those of the British and French combined. There were more than 1.5 million casualties all together.

  That was the same number of doughboys who reached France by June 1918—all fresh and inspired by one of Wilson’s most stirring speeches. Before fifteen thousand people at a rally in Baltimore on April 6—the anniversary of “our acceptance of Germany’s challenge to fight for our right to live and be free, and for the sacred rights of free men everywhere”—Wilson had delivered not just a call to arms but an announcement of America’s new military strength. With all the passion of one of his heroes, Shakespeare’s Henry V, Wilson cried, “Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.” America’s former prince of peace had become a full-fledged warrior king, dispatching millions of young men unto the breach of the greatest carnage the modern world had ever seen.

  “In Flanders fields the poppies grow,” began the most popular poem of the era, an elegy that laced propaganda with pastoral imagery. But the casualties on those fields mounted so high they opiated the mind, keeping people from processing all the horror. With its profusion of noble sentiments and heartwarming songs, the Great War still presented itself as a romantic conflict; but it would be for the last time, as new technology mechanized war, turning from conventional weaponry to more diabolic tools of devastation. Sophisticated automatic rifles and machine guns took more lives in more efficient and gruesome new ways. In the century since shrapnel was introduced, it had developed to the point that each cylinder shot into the air could now release dozens of exploding lead marbles, damaging their human targets not only immediately but also later through the infections the lead balls induced. The Germans developed a highly effective flamethrower. And by 1915, both sides in the war employed poison gas—starting with tear gas and chlorine and progressing to mustard gas. The latter had the ability to corrode the skin and erode the lungs, leading to blindness if not death. Submarines, tanks, and airplanes contributed to the ever-increasing slaughter as armies spent months at a time living and fighting in trenches, behind barbed wire, sometimes losing hundreds of thousands of lives while gaining only a few feet of muddy ground.