That defense aside, the President began considering House in the same terms Ray Baker had written in his diary:
More & more he impresses me as the dilettante—the lover of the game—the eager secretary without profound responsibility. He stands in the midst of great events, to lose nothing. He gains experiences to put in his diary . . .
Meanwhile, Wilson trusted House less and less. The Colonel, without explanation, stopped visiting the Wilsons’ residence except for business meetings. He now peppered his diary with criticism of the President’s actions; and he liked one negative quip enough to preserve it in his journal: “Wilson talks like Jesus Christ and acts like Lloyd George.” Before the spring was over, House wrote in his diary, “I seldom or never have a chance to talk with him seriously and, for the moment, he is practically out from under my influence.”
Although still febrile, Wilson experienced a surge of emotional energy. Husbanding his strength, he showed an intolerance for wasted time and an inclination toward snap decisions, some in impetuous variance to positions he had long held. If definitive progress was not to be made in a timely manner, Wilson told Grayson, he would simply go home. On Sunday, April 6, Wilson asked him to ascertain the location of the George Washington and to order its immediate retrieval to Brest. “When I decide, doctor . . . to carry this thing through,” he told Grayson, “I do not want to say that I am going as soon as I can get a boat; I want the boat to be here.”
News of deploying the ship from dry dock in America was, according to Ray Baker, “the greatest sensation of the entire Peace Conference.” Tumulty—minding the store in Washington—informed the President through Admiral Grayson that the action seemed politically ill-advised, that Washington viewed it “as an act of impatience and petulance on the President’s part,” if not an act of “desertion.” And then Clemenceau and his Finance Minister, Louis Lucien Klotz, “talked away another day,” producing nothing more than what Wilson called a “mass of tergiversations.” After the meeting he complained to Grayson of having “Klotz on the brain.” He knew he had made the right decision in beckoning his ship.
The American advisers in Paris considered Wilson’s action a turning point in the talks. Henry White thought the time had come for an end to private proceedings—that the Councils of Ten and Four were being used to discredit the President, that he should announce that all future decisions would be arrived at during plenary sessions, and that “not one American soldier, dollar or pound of supplies for military purposes will be furnished until Peace is made.” Herbert Hoover was of a similar mind, believing the Allies were bound in the end to accept the League for fear of losing American financial support. “It grows upon me daily that the United States is the one great moral reserve in the world today,” he wrote the President, and that “if the Allies cannot be brought to adopt peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points, we should retire from Europe lock, stock and barrel.” Unfortunately, the Allies had the United States over a barrel, one the President had rolled out himself. Knowing Wilson’s deathless adherence to the League, the other leaders believed he would yield ground on thirteen of the points in order to preserve his precious fourteenth, and they held it hostage.
Whether it was his stubbornness about the League or some euphoric manifestation of one of his medical conditions, Wilson emerged from his sickbed the second week of April in what one doctor later characterized as a “hypomanic state.” The Big Four quickly came, at last, to several agreements, in which the President conceded points that differed from his prior positions. He agreed, for example, to a clause (written by John Foster Dulles of the Commission on Responsibilities) assigning Allies’ damage to German aggression. Having once renounced such a policy, he now accepted a British proposal to try the Kaiser (living in exile in Holland) for war crimes. He relented on the matter of the Rhenish Republic, allowing French occupation with a future plebiscite. While many within his own delegation questioned his judgment, none of these positions, in truth, was vital enough for him to kill the peace process, especially as the French were showing a willingness to budge from some of their original positions. Wilson characterized all these agreements as diplomatic victories, and in one fundamental way, they were: they allowed him to preserve the League as part of the Treaty.
His recent behavior suggested a susceptibility to suppliants of all sorts and the possibility of further concessions. At a meeting of the League of Nations Committee on April 10, Wilson received a delegation representing the International Council of Women and the Suffragist Conference of the Allied countries and the United States, which petitioned for universal suffrage and against sexual and slave trafficking in women and children. The next day, before his round of Council meetings, he received two Galician goatherds—who arrived in native mountain costume and reeking of goat—representing two small colonies that hoped the new Poland would include them. Only hours later, the President was hosting a lunch for the most glamorous visitor to Paris that season, Marie, the Queen of Romania, whom he had met the day before and who promptly invited herself to his residence. The scandalous blonde—who had boasted of a “love child”—did not endear herself to the President by arriving twenty minutes late and with extra guests. She obviously hoped to lobby for a favorable drawing of Romania’s borders, though secretary Edith Benham could see from the tightening of Wilson’s jaw that a sliver of Romania was being sliced off for each minute she was tardy. The President suggested starting the meal without her, but his wife persuaded him not to breach the rules of etiquette merely because she had.
Once she had arrived, the Queen proved to be a sparkling conversationalist, intelligent and fast-talking and outspoken, especially in hailing the virtues of monarchies for being “less liable to breed Bolshevism than were democracies.” But her charms were utterly wasted on the President, who politely evaded all her blunt questions about the personalities at the Conference. He brought the luncheon to a close so that he could appear on time at the Quai d’Orsay for the three o’clock plenary session devoted solely to a presentation by the Commission on International Labor Legislation. The delegates adopted clauses establishing a forty-eight-hour workweek, banning child labor under the age of fourteen, and ensuring equal pay for women and men “for work of equal value in quantity and quality.”
The following Thursday, Wilson endured his busiest day yet—eighteen appointments, mostly with spokesmen for minor nations and principalities. It began with a committee of Irish American politicians hoping to engage the President in influencing the establishment of an Irish Republic, a political hot potato for Great Britain. Since it struck Wilson as both imprudent and inappropriate to engage in Britain’s internal politics, he kept future contact on an unofficial basis. The day’s procession also included representatives from China, an Assyrian-Chaldean delegation seeking representation in what would become Iraq, and a Dalmatian delegation wishing to be free of Italy, Albania, Romania, Armenia, and Serbia as well as the Orthodox Eastern Churches. “After all this ocean of talk has rolled over me,” he told War Secretary Baker, who was visiting, “I feel that I would like to return to America and go back into some great forest, amid the silence, and not hear any argument or speeches for a month.” But the most strident discussions had yet to begin.
After months of holding back—as Wilson knew he would—Vittorio Orlando held forth. In return for joining the Triple Entente, Italy cited the secret Treaty of London and claimed the South Tyrol up to the Brenner Pass. Rumors suggested the massive display of Italian affection for Wilson during his New Year’s visit accounted for his inexplicably allowing close to a quarter of a million German-speaking Tyrolese to fall under Italian rule. Wilson himself would later admit that he conceded the territory based on “insufficient study” and that he came to regret this “ignorant” decision. The Treaty of London also guaranteed Italy portions of Dalmatia along the Adriatic, and some of the islands therein. Wilson was prepared to challenge these claims, but he knew that Bri
tain and France would stand by the Treaty. Then came Italy’s biggest challenge.
Nestled in an inlet of the Adriatic Sea—not forty miles from Trieste, where the coastline turned from Italy to Croatia—sat Fiume, a port that had long served Austria-Hungary. In the generation preceding the war, Fiume saw great economic growth, in large measure because Hungary (with its own Catholic persuasion) had encouraged Italian immigration there. Within the last decade, the population of the city itself had become home to more Italians than Croatians, though counting all the suburbs gave Fiume a Croatian majority. In signing the Treaty of London, Italy had not included the city among its demands. Now it did. On April 17, 1919, Ambassador Page in Rome wrote Colonel House that Italians had come to feel as passionate about Fiume as the French did about Alsace and Lorraine. Despite the recent spike in the Italian population there, Wilson insisted that Fiume—historically, culturally, geographically, and economically—was a Croatian port, one that properly belonged to the Jugoslavian nation that was taking form, whose people called it Rijeka.
Wilson believed he had conceded enough to Italy, and he considered the Dalmatian coast essentially Slavic. On April 18, he met privately with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, in hopes of creating a united front in blocking Orlando, who was hinting that he would walk out of the Conference if his demands were not met. Wilson asked Ray Baker if he thought Orlando was bluffing, and Baker thought not. The other members of the Big Four had received enough bounty to present to their constituents—including an acknowledgment of the Monroe Doctrine, which Wilson could show naysayers back home. And now Orlando wanted his trophy.
On the morning of the nineteenth, Orlando presented his claims to the Council of Four, and Wilson flatly refused him. He disliked having to disappoint the Italian Premier, for whom he had developed a fondness, but he said it was impossible to accept conditions that so contradicted the very principles that Italy had accepted at the time of the Armistice. Wilson acknowledged Orlando’s strongest argument—that natural borders must be strongly considered. “The slope of the mountains not only threw the rivers in a certain direction but tended to throw the life of the people in the same direction,” Wilson observed; and that largely accounted for his assenting to the claims in the Tyrol, even in Trieste and most of the Istrian Peninsula. “Outside of these, however,” recorded Sir Maurice Hankey, who kept the minutes of the meeting that morning, “further to the South all the arguments seemed to him to lead the other way. A different watershed was reached. Different racial units were encountered. There were natural associations between the peoples.” Wilson maintained that something more than mountains and the flow of streams defined a nation. Despite Orlando’s arguments that Jugoslavia had ports beyond the Italian-populated Fiume on which to rely, Wilson said the essential point was that “Fiume served the commerce of Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary, Roumania as well as Jugo-Slavia.” Hence, it was necessary to establish its free use as an international port.
The inconstant Lloyd George announced that Great Britain would stand by the Treaty. Wilson argued that such a solution would draw the United States into an unfair, even impossible, situation. His country had entered the war in the name of certain principles that were at cross-purposes with the Treaty of London. Italy’s Baron Sonnino unexpectedly reminded the President that in May of 1918, he had spoken publicly of America’s interest in “the present and future security of Italy.” Wilson insisted that “Dalmatia was not essential to the security of Italy.” The foursome agreed to table the matter until the next day. That night Wilson attended the theater for the first time in a month—a divertissement that worried members of the President’s party as some of the girls onstage began to remove some of their garments. The President did not look away.
The next day—Easter Sunday—Wilson resurrected the question of Fiume. Orlando argued that a failure to grant the port to his people would result in a “reaction of protest and of hatred.” When Wilson had heard enough, he read two of the Fourteen Points that applied to the frontiers of Italy and Serbia’s right to access to the sea, and then he read Orlando the riot act. He reminded his fellow leaders that “the material and financial assistance of the United States of America had been essential to the successful conclusion of the War” and that the United States had declared its principles upon entry into that war, principles acclaimed by those present that morning. Wilson said it was “incredible” to him that Italy was turning its current position into an ultimatum, but he was clear that the United States would not sign a treaty that surrendered all that Italy demanded, even if that meant Orlando’s walking out before signing. After the President’s remarks, Orlando rose from his chair, walked to the window, and burst into tears. He did not appear at the meeting of the Council of Four the next day or the day after that.
“You will surely admit,” Wilson said to Clemenceau and Lloyd George, “that it is I who caused America to enter the war, who instructed and formed American opinion little by little. I did it while standing by principles which you know. Baron Sonnino led the Italian people into war to conquer territories. I did it while involving a principle of justice; I believe my claim takes precedence over his.” Wilson instructed financial adviser Norman Davis to sit on a $50 million loan Italy had requested—“until the air clears—if it does.”
With Orlando showing no signs of rejoining the group, Wilson resorted to a tactic that had served him well ever since his days as an embattled college president. He would take his case to the people—in this instance by publishing a friendly and levelheaded statement outlining his position regarding Italy’s territorial claims. It did not play well. Orlando responded with his own long statement to the press, in which he took the President to task. “The practice of addressing nations directly constitutes surely an innovation in international relations,” he said sarcastically. “I do not wish to complain, but I wish to record it as a precedent, so that at my own time I may follow it, inasmuch as this new custom doubtless constitutes the granting to nations of larger participation in international questions.” Protesters marched in Rome; the crowds that had beatified Wilson months prior now burned him in effigy. The Italian press derided “Wilsonian peace,” and Orlando announced that he was withdrawing from the Peace Conference.
On the heels of this Italian retreat from signing the Treaty or joining the League, the President faced an even more crucial ordeal. In late April, after sitting in silence, the Japanese wished to be heard. In fact, Japan had spoken up in February when it suggested amending the clause providing for “religious equality” by adding racial equality as well. Equating the yellow race with the white would not play well across the British Empire—nor in the United States, where anti-Asian laws persisted. The further implication that the black man might stand alongside the white man there was also still anathema. Harold Nicolson knew “no American Senate would ever dream of ratifying any Covenant which enshrined so dangerous a principle.”
Nor would Woodrow Wilson. Only recently, the President had read an article on the strikes in Germany, and it rekindled his fear of Bolshevism. He had serious concerns about Communism creeping into America. The most likely vessel for that occurrence, he confided to Dr. Grayson, was “the American negro returning from abroad.” He related an anecdote of a lady friend who wanted to employ a black laundress and offered to pay the standard wage, but she demanded that she be given more because that money “is as much mine as it is yours.” In the millions of pages documenting Wilson’s administration, the President rarely expressed a belief in inequality among the races; even his discussions of segregation expressed a policy meant for the good of both peoples. But on this incautious occasion, he revealed his true unreconstituted nature, what could only be perceived as genteel racism. He pointed out to Grayson that during the war, the French had placed their Negro soldiers shoulder to shoulder with the whites. That concept, Wilson said, “has gone to their heads.” For all his talk of evenhandedness, Wilson did not consider the races fundament
ally equal, and he had no intention of equalizing them under the law.
The topic of racial equality had been tabled in Paris for several months, but the Japanese now raised it once again, though they were prepared to sacrifice it in order to leverage a greater reward: Shantung Province—in the middle of China’s east coast, on the Yellow Sea—the birthplace of Confucius, a sacred region for Taoists and Buddhists, and a center of the Boxer Rebellion. Since the final days of the nineteenth century, much of the province had fallen under the German sphere of influence. In 1917, Great Britain, needing ships, appealed to Japan, which secretly agreed to supply them in return for all the Pacific islands that Germany held north of the equator plus the Chinese province of Shantung, including its prosperous ports, especially Kiaochow. Britain would receive the German islands south of the equator. This was practically the first Wilson had heard of this secret treaty. Now Baron Makino informed a plenary session that he would not press the “racial equality” clause he had sought earlier, but when it came to Shantung, his delegation was prepared to walk if it did not get its way. Losing two members of the Big Five would render the Conference a debacle.
According to every Wilsonian standard, Shantung should remain Chinese, but Japan’s strategic advantage of already occupying Kiaochow bolstered her treaty-guaranteed right to the rest of the province. After dinner on April 25, Wilson tried to unknot this latest secret entanglement by talking to Dr. Grayson, rather the way he used to converse with Colonel House. “England’s secret treaty with Japan would mean that when it came to a showdown England would side with Japan,” he reasoned. That meant not only that Japan might not stand by the Fourteen Points and would withdraw from the Conference but that England might follow as well. “If I only had men of principle to stand by me,” he lamented. By adhering to his principles without compromise, Wilson figured Japan, Italy, and England would not sign the Peace Treaty—and he would have to “shoulder the blame for obstructing the peace of the world.” He wished the Japanese might see some way of saving face but yield in their demands and that the League of Nations might settle the matter later. Most of Wilson’s experts advised his standing by the principles that had brought them this far. House admitted that his sympathies were “about evenly divided, with a feeling that it would be a mistake to take such action against Japan as might lead to her withdrawal from the Conference.” Tumulty cabled from Washington that “the selfish designs of Japan are as indefensible as are those of Italy.” But, Wilson noted, “they do not seem to realize what the results might be at this crucial time in the world’s history.”
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