Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Bernard Baruch, who saw the President regularly, knew he was not opposed to making concessions so long as the Covenant remained intact. Believing he would accept any number of Senate corollary resolutions interpreting the Treaty, Baruch discussed the matter with him, Attorney General Palmer, and War Secretary Baker. Two days after the Foreign Relations Committee met at the White House, one of Wilson’s key allies, Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, introduced several “interpretative” reservations in language that suggested not only the President’s blessing but even his dictation. Earlier in the week, Wilson had stood behind the clarity of the Treaty’s points, but now he was granting the need for further elucidation. To some, he was sounding more like a seasoned politico than a principled statesman.

  By the end of August, Wilson realized that he was winning no converts in Washington. As opposition intensified, several Democrats urged him to play his trump card and take his case directly to the people. Wilson knew where to find the nation’s most independent thinkers. Reigniting the same voters who had delivered his reelection meant going west—where greater acceptance of new ideas came with the territory. The White House’s chief telegrapher, Edward Smithers, charted a four-week itinerary, which covered ten thousand miles with stops in twenty-nine cities. The President would speak in all but four of the states west of the Mississippi, half of which were represented by Irreconcilables. It would be Wilson’s last opportunity to rally public opinion. Failure to wrest control of the argument would mean he had returned from Europe with nothing more than victory without peace.

  While Tumulty generally considered Wilson’s political fortunes paramount, in this instance, he made an exception. In a quiet moment alone with the President, he raised the subject of his health. “I know that I am at the end of my tether,” Wilson said, “but my friends on the Hill say that the trip is necessary to save the Treaty, and I am willing to make whatever personal sacrifice is required, for if the Treaty should be defeated, God only knows what would happen to the world as a result of it.” He acknowledged that such a trip might mean “the giving up of my life.” But, he said, “I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the Treaty.” Tumulty looked at the “old man” before him—grim in his determination to fight to the end, like some “old warrior.” In fact, it was the young soldiers who impelled Wilson to make the trip. “If the Treaty is not ratified by the Senate,” he told Edith, “the War will have been fought in vain, and the world will be thrown into chaos. I promised our soldiers, when I asked them to take up arms, that it was a war to end wars; and if I do not do all in my power to put the Treaty in effect, I will be a slacker and never able to look those boys in the eye. I must go.”

  A few days before his scheduled departure, Bernard Baruch called on a gaunt and pale Wilson to cancel his trip. Short of that, he asked the President to consider a brief respite during which he could compose his speeches. The President insisted he lacked the time. “Mr. President,” Baruch asked, making his best argument, “if anything happens to you, what will we do?” Wilson replied with an unanswerable question: “What is one life in a great cause?” He had determined this was his cross to bear.

  Dr. Grayson made the final appeal. Having already argued that the rigorous schedule, the inability to exercise, the constant strain of speechmaking and handshaking, the discomfort of living on a train for a month—especially in the summer, when the steel cars would become ovens—could all be lethal, he visited the President in his study. Before Grayson could speak, Wilson looked up from his writing and said, “I know what you have come for. I do not want to do anything foolhardy but the League of Nations is now in its crisis, and if it fails, I hate to think what will happen to the world. You must remember that I, as Commander in Chief, was responsible for sending our soldiers to Europe. In the crucial test in the trenches they did not turn back—and I cannot turn back now. I cannot put my personal safety, my health, in the balance against my duty—I must go.” Still holding his pen, Wilson rose from his desk and walked to the window, silently gazing upon the Washington Monument. Looking as though he had just signed a death warrant, he turned to his physician, who saw tears in his eyes. Grayson realized there was nothing for him to do except pack his own bags and provide the best medical attention that he could.

  • • •

  An unexpectedly jaunty Woodrow Wilson—in his straw boater, blue blazer, white trousers, and white shoes—strode through Washington’s Union Station that Wednesday evening, September 3, 1919. The Presidential car—like the yacht, called the Mayflower—was attached to the rear of a Pennsylvania Railroad train and came configured with a sitting room, which doubled as a dining area, and then a bedroom for the First Lady, which connected to that of her husband; each had a single bed and a dressing table. Beyond that was an “office,” with a table on which the President’s typewriter sat. Finally, there was a compartment for Edith’s maid and another for Dr. Grayson. Brooks, the valet, would sleep on the leather couch in the sitting room. Ahead of the Mayflower was a string of baggage cars, a diner, and Pullman cars to accommodate Wilson’s four stenographers, seven Secret Service agents, and the largest press corps ever to make a Presidential tour. Because radio was still in its infancy, Wilson would rely upon those two dozen representatives of the media—journalists, still photographers, newsreel photographers, and an official from the Western Union Telegraph Company—to capture him as he attempted to regain the support of the people. The train pulled away from the station a little after seven.

  No President had ever gone to such lengths for a cause. Candidates in the past had campaigned for their own political fortunes; sixty-two-year-old Wilson was sallying forth across America purely for an ideal. He came prepared, having filled eight pages with thoughts and themes he intended to draw upon. The next twenty-seven days would showcase the quintessential Woodrow Wilson, who believed oratory suffused with reason, emotion, and depth of character could convert a nation.

  The quest began inauspiciously the next morning at eleven, when the Mayflower arrived under gray skies in Columbus, Ohio. A local streetcar strike kept many away, and the morning rain doused the spirits of some who ventured downtown, but Wilson found a capacity crowd of more than four thousand waiting for him at Memorial Hall, where close to two thousand people had been turned away. Despite a headache, he touched upon most of the salient aspects of the Treaty and reminded his audience of the reason they had gone to war. This treaty, he said, sought “to punish one of the greatest wrongs ever done in history.” He called the terms “severe” but “not unjust.” By one o’clock the Mayflower was heading west.

  Big crowds gathered at the small stations along the way, and Wilson stood on the rear platform to shake hands. In Richmond, Indiana, he delivered a short speech about the Treaty:

  The chief thing to notice about it . . . is that it is the first treaty ever made by great powers that was not made in their own favor. It is made for the protection of the weak peoples of the world and not for the aggrandizement of the strong. . . . The extraordinary achievement of this treaty is that it gives a free choice to people who never could have won it for themselves. It is for the first time in the history of international transactions an act of systematic justice and not an act of grabbing and seizing.

  He asked his fellow citizens what difference a political party label made “when mankind is involved.”

  The train arrived in Indianapolis at six, and after a quick dinner, the Wilsons greeted a nonpartisan reception committee, which included the Republican Governor, James Putnam Goodrich. An automobile parade, complete with a band, led the President to the Fair Grounds, where an audience of close to twenty thousand awaited in the Coliseum. In a slightly husky voice, Wilson attempted to reach everybody in the hall, but a few hundred people at the perimeter left in frustration. Within five minutes, Wilson had captivated those who had remained.

  Nobody seemed to care that he mistakenly spoke at the outset of the assassination of th
e Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbia, when he meant Bosnia. This crowd, like the others that would follow, seemed less interested in small details of the past than in Wilson’s larger vision for the future. He stuck to the manner that had served him for the last decade, that of never speaking down to his audience. In so doing, he lifted their spirits and raised their aspirations. He called upon the commonsense Hoosiers to ignore the misinformation his opponents were spreading about Article X of the League Covenant and consider for themselves that “there is no compulsion upon us to take [the advice of the Council of the League] except the compulsion of our good consciences and judgment. . . . There is in that Covenant not one note of surrender of the independent judgment of the government of the United States, but an expression of it.” By 10 p.m., the President was on his way to Missouri.

  The Mayflower reached St. Louis before dawn, though the President rested on board until nine. Civic ceremonies filled the morning, and 1,500 people paid two dollars each for lunch and the privilege of hearing Wilson address the Chamber of Commerce. The Republican Mayor, Henry William Kiel, announced that most of the host committee was, in fact, Republican—opponents of the Treaty at that, as seemed to be the case with the majority of Wilson’s audiences that day. He said that he was glad to hear his own phrase repeated by his adversaries—that “politics was adjourned.” The President’s headache persisting, Dr. Grayson was able to take him for a brisk walk in a local park, providing some exercise before his speech that night to twelve thousand people in Convention Hall. In this city with its large German American population, Wilson spoke of the need to rebuild Germany, if only so that she could pay her reparations bill. He further stated that America “went into this war to see it through to the end,” but that the end had not yet come. “This is the beginning, not of the war,” said Wilson, “but of the processes which are going to render a war like this impossible.” At eleven o’clock the Presidential train started across the state, arriving the next morning, Saturday, in Kansas City.

  Thousands of schoolchildren, each waving an American flag, lined a five-mile parade route, as the President rode to Convention Hall. Recharged by an overflow crowd of close to twenty thousand cheering citizens, Wilson walked from the back of the hall to the stage to deliver one of the most ebullient and bare-knuckled speeches of his life. “I came back from Paris bringing one of the greatest documents of human history,” he said, before spending the better part of the next hour proving as much. He clarified that the Treaty was “in spirit and essence . . . an American document,” since American principles had penetrated to the hearts of the peoples of Europe and their representatives. Most significant of all, he said, was the Covenant of the League of Nations, which substituted consultation and arbitration for “the brutal processes of war.” That methodology, he reminded his listeners, was the central principle of the Bryan treaties, instituted in the earliest days of Wilson’s presidency. He spoke of the new power grab in Russia, where the Bolshevik government was proving itself more cruel than the Czar or even the Kaiser had been in “controlling the destinies of that great people.” He warned, “If you don’t want little groups of selfish men to plot the future of Europe, we must not allow little groups of selfish men to plot the future of America.”

  “I have come out to fight for a cause,” Wilson said, leading with his chin. “That cause is greater than the Senate. It is greater than the government. It is as great as the cause of mankind, and I intend, in office or out, to fight that battle as long as I live.” He explained that his ancestors were “troublesome Scotchmen,” among whom were some of that nation’s most stubborn and strong, the Covenanters. Upon taking his leave of the stage, Wilson said, “Here is the Covenant of the League of Nations. I am a Covenanter!”

  By nightfall he was three hundred miles to the north, in Des Moines, Iowa. As in the preceding cities, the elected officials who greeted him were for the most part Republicans, which fueled Wilson’s argument that the nation was looking for a unified, nonpartisan response to the Treaty. He observed that the “isolation of the United States is at an end, not because we chose to go into the politics of the world, but because . . . we have become a determining factor in the history of mankind.”

  On Sunday the President rested in a hotel in Des Moines. He had garnered banner headlines in the nation’s newspapers his first five days on the road. Articles initially spoke of Lodge as having taken the lead in the early innings of this great debate, but now that Wilson was swinging for the fences, the shift in the country’s mood was palpable. An overnight Republican survey in Missouri revealed that the President had flipped the state from anti- to pro-League. Because Wilson could dip into a $25,000 travel fund allotted the President, one Republican Congressman from Missouri proposed a resolution providing $15,000 to defray the expenses of any Senators who sought equal time on the road opposing the Treaty. Edith Wilson noticed that the waves of approval helped calm her husband’s nervous energy and headaches. With friendly crowds gathering at every junction, Tumulty wanted the President to address them from the rear platform. Here Dr. Grayson put his foot down, as he anxiously knew that each appearance and each bad night’s sleep depleted his patient’s reserves.

  At 5 a.m. on September 8, the Mayflower rolled into Omaha, Nebraska; and over the next week, it would zigzag north before heading west. The itinerary required as many as four speeches some days, and Wilson alone composed his material. Before retiring each night, he jotted notes for the program the next day, as he tailored each speech with an unexpected twist or inspiring phrase. He walked onto the stage of the Auditorium in Omaha with a prop—a copy of the Treaty, so that all could see it was a lot more than the few clauses that had been debated endlessly in the press. “Why, my fellow citizens,” Wilson said, “this is one of the great charters of human liberty, and the man who picks flaws in it—or, rather, picks out the flaws that are in it, for there are flaws in it—forgets the magnitude of the thing, forgets the majesty of the thing, forgets that the counsels of more than twenty nations combined . . . were . . . unanimous in the adoption of this great instrument.” Wilson readily conceded that this treaty created only a “presumption” that there would not be another war—because “there is no absolute guarantee against human passion.” But he predicted with absolute certainty that “within another generation, there will be another world war if the nations of the world—if the League of Nations—does not prevent it by concerted action.”

  “Sometimes people call me an idealist,” he told an audience at the Armory that night in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “Well, that is the way I know I am an American.” Wilson’s talk was not always so elevated. He said America could stay out of a society composed of the governments of the world, but that would cast suspicion on their nation. He hoped the American farmer would appreciate that “you can make more money out of men who trust you than out of men who fear you.” He posited that friendship made American wheat taste better than that of Australia or Argentina, that it made American cotton better than that of India. During the night, the Mayflower coupled onto the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad line to Minnesota.

  Wilson encountered his first political slap the next morning as his train car waited for the reception committee to arrive at the St. Paul station. Knowing the President was scheduled to address a special session of the state legislature, Governor Joseph. A. A. Burnquist—chairman of the committee and a bitter Republican opponent of the Treaty—intentionally detained the group at the Capitol for half an hour, arriving at the station with neither explanation nor apology. The President of the United States turned the other cheek. Without mentioning a single name, Wilson concluded his address with a word about the reception committees he had encountered on his tour. Most, he said, had been made up of Republicans, which gave him great pleasure—“because I should be ashamed of myself if I permitted any partisan thought to enter into this great matter. . . . Everybody knows that we are all Americans. Scratch a Democrat or a
Republican, and underneath it is the same stuff.”

  After lunch, the President faced an enthusiastic reception on the streets of Minneapolis and then delivered a speech in the Armory. By the time he had returned to St. Paul for another speech that night, the city was abuzz over Governor Burnquist’s insult that morning. Fifteen thousand Minnesotans jammed into the Auditorium and heard the President pay tribute to the soldiers who had fought in the Civil War to preserve the Union. Although he had been born and bred in the South, he said saving the Union was “the greatest thing that men had conceived up to that time.” Now, Wilson said, “we come to . . . the union of great nations in conference upon the interests of peace.” So rousing was Wilson, the Mayor of St. Paul leapt to the stage upon the conclusion of the address. “All those in favor of the ratification of the Treaty without a single change will vote Aye,” he shouted to the crowd. And fifteen thousand shook the hall in agreement.

  Each of the next five nights saw the President traveling west on the Northern Pacific Railway. And just as Wilson approached their home states, Senators Borah and Johnson launched their own nationwide opposition tour of the nation, leaving the Foreign Relations Committee with forty-five proposed amendments and four reservations to the Treaty. Because Wilson had no new themes to convey, he had to rely heavily on performance to persuade. The press removed coverage from the front pages and some days did not publicize his tour at all. Through North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington, Wilson maintained his breakneck pace nonetheless. Pounding headaches and asthma attacked him regularly, and Dr. Grayson could provide little treatment beyond propping up the President with pillows. After several nights, Wilson chose not even to bother the doctor. He simply grabbed his pillows and chair and caught what few winks of sleep he could before the next day’s events.