20

COVENANT

On December 28, 1918, Woodrow Wilson celebrated his sixty-second birthday in London, where he and Edith were staying at Buckingham Palace as guests of the king and queen. King George came to the guest suite to congratulate the president and give him a present, and later Wilson went to the American embassy to greet well-wishers. Sentimentally, the next day was an even more momentous day for him. After an overnight train trip, Wilson visited Carlisle, where he was—as he told the pastor of the church where his grandfather had preached—“making a pilgrimage of the heart.” He went to see the Woodrow family’s house and walked through the room where his mother was born. Then he attended Sunday services at the church, where, at the invitation of the congregation, he spoke briefly at the end of the service. He said the memories of his mother that came to him now moved him, and her “quiet character and sense of duty” always remained with him as he strove to do right in the world.¹

It was appropriate for Wilson to mix personal feelings with public purpose. He had come to England, after stopping first in France, for a largely ceremonial tour before the opening of the peace conference. He was deeply suspicious about the intentions of the British and French leaders, but his wildly enthusiastic reception by huge crowds in Paris and London had heartened him. Moreover, he had just received sketches along lines similar to his own ideas for a league of nations from Lord Robert Cecil, a minister in the British cabinet, and Jan Christiaan Smuts, a South African delegate to the peace conference. These circumstances, together with Wilson’s own taste for bold action, were about to impel him on the biggest venture of his life, and it would look as if he might bring off the feat of leading the world down new paths of international justice and peace.

Some people had tried to talk the president out of going to Europe and playing a leading role in shaping the post-war settlement. Three days after the Armistice, House cabled from Paris that unnamed Americans “whose opinions are of value” thought he should not come because “it would involve a loss of dignity and your commanding position.” Clemenceau and Lloyd George suggested Wilson might appear at part of the conference but should hold himself aloof from the negotiating sessions. He exploded in response, “I infer that the French and English leaders desire to exclude me from the Conference for fear I might there lead the weaker nations against them. … I believe that no one would wish me to sit by and try to steer the conference from the outside.” House did not directly try to talk Wilson out of going to Paris, but he confided to his diary, “I wish in my soul the President had appointed me as Chairman of the Peace Delegation with McAdoo and Hoover as my associates.” He believed that this dream team of negotiators could achieve great and speedy results. House later admitted that he liked to be the principal negotiator, and regarding the presidency, “there have been times when I would have like[d] the office itself instead of being an adviser to him who held it.”² Those were troubling thoughts for him or any adviser to harbor.

Not everyone in Washington wanted Wilson to go to Paris either, and after Lansing met privately with him the day after the Armistice, he wrote in a memorandum, “I told him frankly that I thought the plan to attend was unwise and would be a mistake … [and] that he could practically dictate the terms of peace if he held aloof.” Wilson did not take kindly to that advice. “His face assumed that harsh, obstinate expression which indicates resentment at unacceptable advice. He said nothing, but looked volumes.” Wilson did seek other opinions about whether he should go to Paris. He asked two Democratic senators, Key Pittman of Nevada and Peter Gerry of Rhode Island, to seek their colleagues’ views about the matter. Pittman reported that the senators were about equally divided. Some feared domestic affairs would be neglected—a point Lansing had also raised—and some thought he could dominate the negotiations “as a superman residing afar off in a citadel of power beyond that of all nations.” Others argued that he alone could bring about a just settlement and new ways to maintain peace.³

Wilson agreed with those who wanted him to go, and he itched to be in the thick of things. Soon afterward, he laughingly told a visiting Swiss politician, “I’m going over to Europe because the Allied governments don’t want me to. … I want to tell Lloyd George certain things I can’t write to him. I’ll tell him: Are you going to grant freedom of the seas? If not, are you prepared to enter into a race with us to see who will have the larger navy, you or we?” Wilson also wanted to extend the Monroe Doctrine to a mutual security pact, as he had tried to do earlier with the Pan-American pact: “Not a big-brother affair, but a real partnership.” He admitted, “The solutions cannot be ideal and I know that everybody will be disgusted with me.”⁴ On November 18, the White House issued a statement to the press that the president would leave for France early in December, immediately after the opening of the next session of Congress, but that it was unlikely he would stay for the whole conference.

Curiously, this decision raised little public reaction, even from such critics as Roosevelt and Lodge. Wilson’s next decision, however, stirred up a furious outcry that would leave a near-unanimous legacy of later condemnation. That decision involved the four men whom he picked as the other members of the delegation to the peace conference. Several objectives needed to be served in choosing this delegation. Foremost came diplomacy, which put a premium on negotiating skill and experience and considerations of prestige. Those criteria made two choices well-nigh inescapable. Wilson presumed from the outset that House would accompany him, and by virtue of his position, Lansing must go, too. Since military matters would loom large in the settlement, an expert in that field ought to be included. Wilson offered that slot to Baker, but the secretary of war countered that since McAdoo was about to resign as secretary of the Treasury, it would not be wise to have two cabinet members out of the country for an extended period. On Baker’s recommendation, the appointment went instead to General Tasker H. Bliss, who had been serving as the American representative to the Allied Supreme War Council. Of these choices, only House caused any criticism. Critics regularly accused the colonel of being nothing more than Wilson’s crony, and Republicans had made his closeness to the president a minor campaign issue in 1916.

The real controversy arose because representatives from two categories were not chosen: senators and prominent Republicans. The Constitution’s requirement that two thirds of the Senate consent to a treaty made it seem wise, if not imperative, to include members of that body. The last time the United States had negotiated a peace treaty, with Spain in 1898, President McKinley had named three senators among the negotiators—two from the Republican majority and one from the Democratic minority—and those senators had reputedly facilitated approval of the treaty. Twenty years later, however, the president faced an apparently insuperable obstacle in the Senate: Henry Cabot Lodge. Because Lodge was soon to become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and majority leader, to invite any senators without including him would have been both bad politics and an insult to that prerogative-conscious chamber. Perhaps if Wilson had felt his gambler’s instinct more keenly, he might have bet that Lodge would decline an invitation in order to preserve his freedom to criticize and oppose what might come out of the peace conference. Unfortunately, he found the senior Democrat and current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, only slightly less obnoxious than Lodge. In view of so much bad blood and such unappetizing choices, Wilson understandably, though not wisely, gave little thought to choosing senators.⁵

Failure to include a prominent Republican was less understandable or excusable. The previous summer, Wilson and House had bandied about several possibilities, particularly Root, and the colonel and Tumulty continued to push for him to be included. Other possibilities were Taft and Hughes, but their attacks during the recent campaign had left hard feelings. When a cabinet member asked if Hughes might be appointed, Wilson answered, “No—there is no room big enough for Hughes & me to stay in.”⁶ Finally, at Lansing’s suggestion, Wilson chose Henry White to be the delegation’s token Republican. White was a retired diplomat who was close to Roosevelt, Lodge, and Root, and he evidently expected to act as a liaison with those men, because he accepted the appointment only after clearing it with Roosevelt and Lodge.

The complete lineup of delegates—House, Lansing, Bliss, and White—drew heated criticism when it was announced on November 29. “Our delegation with the exception of Mr. White are merely mouthpieces of the President,” Lodge told Lord Bryce, “and if Mr. White should differ he will be overridden.” By not including Republicans, Lodge believed the delegation included no persons of stature who might challenge the president’s views. Wilson explained this omission to a newspaper editor by noting that except for Taft—“I have lost all confidence in [Taft’s] character”—all the leading Republicans who had been suggested “are already committed to do everything possible to prevent the Peace Conference from acting upon the peace terms which they have already agreed to.” He told another correspondent that the delegates should represent “the country as a whole,” not any particular group or interest.⁷

Those were rationalizations. Wilson knew he would need Republican support for a peace settlement, but he was balking once more at practicing the kind of partnership with the opposition party that he should have understood from his study of coalition governments under parliamentary systems. The real reason for his failure to reach out to the opposition was that he wanted a free hand in the peace negotiations. Having powerful but unsympathetic men at his elbow might restrict the freedom of movement he craved in order to be ready to strike out in bold and unconventional directions. Wilson left leading Republicans off the delegation not because they were Republicans but because they might get in his way.

The exclusion of prominent Republicans from the delegation to the peace conference would later become almost as widely condemned as had been his appeal for a Democratic Congress. Wilson would come to be charged with a failure to practice bipartisanship—in sharp contrast to the next two Democratic presidents, who would serve during and after World War II. As with the election appeal, such charges would be overworked. Both the term bipartisanship and its practice would arise twenty years later as another “lesson” learned from Wilson’s supposed mistakes, and the later successes of bipartisanship would depend more on the willingness of the opposition party to cede primacy in foreign policy than on presidential outreach. At the end of 1918, Republicans had repeatedly shown that they had no intention of following Wilson’s lead in peacemaking. Subsequent debates over the peace treaty and membership in the League of Nations would show what a wide gulf separated the two parties; bridging that gulf would have required much more constructive thinking and goodwill than all but a few leading Republicans were willing to show. Wilson can and should be faulted for not reaching out to the opposition party, but taking Root or Hughes with him to Paris would probably not have brought enough of their fellow partisans on board to guarantee success. This sin of omission—like his sin of commission with the appeal for a Democratic Congress—made an already bad situation a bit worse.⁸

Wilson’s decision to go to Paris required assembling a staff to accompany him and wrapping up affairs at home as much as possible. The staff question did not receive a great deal of attention from him and caused further tensions with Lansing. In Paris, House already had a group of advisers, headed by the Foreign Service officer Joseph C. Grew. Wilson evidently planned to have House use this group as the nucleus of the delegation staff. Lansing, meanwhile, appointed Grew secretary—chief of staff—and chose two other Foreign Service officers as his deputies, all without consulting the president. This angered Wilson, although he acquiesced, on advice from House. Also on the colonel’s advice, the president appointed twenty-three members of the Inquiry to the staff, while the State Department, the Navy Department, and various boards also got representation. Most of these appointees accompanied the presidential party and the delegates to Europe aboard the U.S.S. George Washington. Such casualness about assembling the staff and the simmering feud between the president and the secretary of state did not augur well for the negotiations.⁹

A stab by Wilson at wrapping up affairs at home did not augur well either. The war’s sudden, unexpected end raised a host of problems. Doughboys’ families were clamoring for their sons to be brought home—a task that proved easier than expected, thanks to reversing the flow of men on the “bridge of ships.” On the home front, business groups and Republicans in general demanded the immediate suspension of wartime regulations and controls and the return of railroads and telegraph lines to private ownership. Progressive groups and organized labor saw those measures as great gains and wanted them incorporated into a peacetime program of “reconstruction.” Within the administration, two cabinet members, McAdoo and Gregory, announced their intentions to resign as soon as the war was over. Mac had been smarting under what he regarded as his father-in-law’s lack of appreciation of his considerable contributions to the victorious war effort, and he was laying plans to run for president in 1920. He insisted on leaving immediately after the Armistice, and at the beginning of December, Wilson appointed Carter Glass of Virginia, the chairman of the House Banking Committee and an author of the Federal Reserve Act, to be secretary of the Treasury. Two months later, he picked Walker D. Hines for McAdoo’s other post, director general of the railroads. Gregory stayed on until March 1919, to be succeeded by former congressman A. Mitchell Palmer of Pennsylvania.¹⁰

Wilson mainly tried to sidestep domestic questions. Between the Armistice and his departure for Europe, he devoted far more time to international matters. When he delivered the State of the Union address on December 2, he sent mixed signals about where he stood on major domestic concerns. He opened with a celebration of the victory Americans had just won, praising both the soldiers who had fought and the civilians who had worked on the home front. He singled out the contribution of women and asked again for passage of the suffrage amendment. He said he had seen no plan for industrial “reconstruction” that would suit “our spirited businessmen and self-reliant labourers,” although he thought the government should help returning servicemen find work and should mount a public works program to create jobs. He said he had “no answer ready” about the railroads and invited Congress to study the problem. He closed by talking about the upcoming peace conference, promising to stay in touch with Congress and affairs at home and asking, “May I not hope … [that] I may have the encouragement and the added strength of your united support?”¹¹

When Wilson asked for united support from Congress, he was indulging in wishful thinking, and he knew it. Josephus Daniels noted that Republicans said they would “give him an ice bath,” and they sat in sullen silence except when he mentioned the troops. The next day, Senator Philander C. Knox of Pennsylvania, who had been Taft’s secretary of state, introduced a resolution to restrict the peace settlement to the reasons for which the United States had gone to war and postpone for separate consideration any discussion of a league of nations. Knox’s resolution set off a debate in which Wilson’s longtime Democratic nemesis, James Reed of Missouri, denounced the league idea as “the old Holy Alliance all over again”—a reference to Czar Alexander’s scheme to suppress independence and republics a hundred years earlier—and William Borah seconded the charge. Wilson was well aware of the hornet’s nest of opposition on Capitol Hill; it was one reason why, despite much criticism, he refused to discuss specific plans for a league of nations.¹²

The evening after he spoke to Congress, he and Edith boarded an overnight train to Hoboken, New Jersey, where they boarded the George Washington for the ten-day voyage across the Atlantic. Those days at sea offered him a wonderful interlude and a chance to rest up for the peace conference. The weather was mild, and the ocean was calm, and he and Edith took walks on the decks and played shuffleboard. They mingled with the sailors and went to movies with them and the enlisted personnel in the theater belowdecks, not the upper-deck theater reserved for first-class passengers. The musical accompaniment to the silent films included loud, raucous singing, in which the president joined with gusto. The Wilsons took their meals in their stateroom suite, usually with two or three guests. The food was excellent, but Wilson was chagrined to learn that a leading New York chef was cooking only for them and select other dignitaries. “His disbelief in special privilege was aroused,” Edith recalled, “and on our second trip to the Conference this culinary artist was left behind.”¹³

For all the relaxation and joviality, Wilson never forgot that this was a working trip with a major struggle awaiting him at its end. He spent several hours each day going over papers. These included regular telegraphic reports from House about the machinations of the Allied leaders, which disturbed him. Roosevelt had responded to the State of the Union address by claiming that Britain had won the war and should dictate the peace without interference from the United States, particularly over what he sneeringly referred to as “freedom of the seas.” On the first day at sea, Wilson shot back with off-the-record remarks to reporters who were accompanying him on the voyage. “I don’t believe our boys who fought over there will be inclined to feel just that way about it,” he declared. He also observed, “Militarism is equally dangerous when applied to sea forces as to land forces,” and if Britain refused to reduce naval armaments, “the United States will show her how to build a navy.”¹⁴

Despite the mutual hard feelings between him and the Republicans, Wilson tried to convey some reassurances to them. He took Henry White aside to explain that his views on a league of nations were different from Taft’s. “I was much relieved to find that the President’s idea as to the League is a rather general one,” White noted. He was pleased that it would be restricted to reporting on possible breaches of the peace and might impose a boycott, but there would be no authority, in the event of war, “to take further joint action of a punitive character.” Another time, Wilson unburdened himself, as he would do often in the coming months, to Grayson. Reports from House of demands made at a meeting of the three Allied premiers, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando, made him suspect that they sought “a peace of loot or spoliation,” and if they did, he said, “I will withdraw personally and with my commissioners return home.” He also thought problems “under this principle of self-determination” might prove thorny, and he intended to make the League of Nations part of the peace treaty. He did not plan to stay at the conference for long because he would have to return home at the close of Congress in March, but he believed he might have to go back to Paris later.¹⁵

The most extended and best-recorded statement of the president’s thinking came on December 10, when ten members of the Inquiry gathered in his stateroom office. They and others had been complaining of being kept in the dark about plans for the conference, and one of them, William C. Bullitt, a brash and self-confident young man, approached the president before one of the movies and asked him to explain to them his approach to the conference and plans for a league of nations. Seated on chairs in a semicircle around the president’s desk, his visitors listened to him talk for nearly an hour. He was in good form, covering a range of problems and questions, beginning with the League of Nations. “The President does not believe that any hard and fast constitution of the ‘League to Enforce Peace,’ can be established at the present time,” Bullitt noted in his diary. Wilson again envisioned a minimal organization, although he insisted on its upholding independence and territorial integrity, and he believed that it would develop to meet changing conditions, just as the Monroe Doctrine had done; he also insisted it would not be a great power directorate or a balance of power. He impressed his listeners with the spirit in which he approached the conference and his beliefs that America was the only disinterested nation and the Allied leaders did not represent their people. The same words stuck in the mind of nearly everyone who wrote an account of the meeting: they were, as one of them, Isaiah Bowman, recorded, “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it; give me a guaranteed position.”¹⁶

Those words—“Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it”—would come back to haunt Wilson. In the coming months and in later years, a profound disillusionment and sense of betrayal would cause many people to hurl those words back in his face. This may have been another instance of Wilson’s eloquence appearing to promise too much. In fact, he voiced grave doubts about how much he could accomplish. The next day, Bullitt said that Raymond Fosdick, Wilson’s friend and protégé from Princeton, told him, “The President replied that it frightened him to think how much the common people of the world expect of him.” George Creel, who was also part of the mission, later remembered that as they walked on the deck one evening, Wilson told him, “[Y]ou know, and I know, that these ancient wrongs, these present unhappinesses, are not to be remedied in a day or with the wave of a hand. What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment.”¹⁷

The urgency of expectations struck Wilson from the moment he was in Europe. The George Washington landed at Brest, on France’s Atlantic coast, on December 13. The vessel’s most distinguished passenger regarded that as a good omen since he thought of thirteen as his lucky number—the number of letters in his name. As soon as he set foot on French soil, an explosion of celebrations began. French and American soldiers lined the streets of Brest as the Wilsons rode in an open car under triumphal arches of flowers. Throngs packed the sidewalks and leaned out windows, many of them in the folk costumes of Brittany, shouting, “Vivel’ Amérique!” and “Vive Vilson!” His arrival in Paris the following day was spectacular. After ceremonial greetings at the railroad station by President Raymond Poincaré, Premier Clemenceau, and the French cabinet, a mounted contingent of breast-armored Gardes républicaines escorted the two presidents, who rode together in an open horse-drawn carriage down the Champs Élysées to la place de la Concorde and on to the Murat Palace, where the Wilsons would be living. Hordes of cheering people packed the sidewalks and hung out every window. “The French think that with almost a magic touch he will bring about the day of political and industrial justice,” Raymond Fosdick noted. “Will he? Can he?”¹⁸

For Edith Wilson, the cheers of the crowds in Brest were enthralling, and the next seven months would mark the high point of her years as First Lady. She luxuriated in the splendor of their accommodations at Murat Palace, and, best of all, she could shed her wartime austerity wardrobe. In the coming months, she would revel in the rounds of official entertaining, and she would seize the opportunity that the extended time in Paris offered her to order new dresses, coats, hats, and shoes, particularly from her favorite, the leading fashion house of Worth. Still, she recognized that ceremony, entertaining, and fashion were not the reasons why she and her husband were in Paris. “Woodrow is busy here every moment,” she wrote to her family, “& feels he must put through the big thing he came to do first.”¹⁹

On the first day in Paris, he talked with House for two hours, going over plans for the peace conference. They agreed to make the League the first order of business; House thought this move might keep Wilson out of the negotiations and allow the president to go home after a month. On his second day in Paris, Wilson had his first talk with Clemenceau. The seventy-seven-year-old premier had lived as a political exile in the United States during the Civil War and spoke English, and House had coached him before he visited Wilson at Murat Palace. Their encounter went smoothly, and they had another pleasant meeting the next day, when Wilson called on Clemenceau, who told House afterward that meeting Wilson had made him change his mind and want him to be at the peace conference. For his part, Wilson did not let public or private charm turn his head. “I have not been deceived by the acclaim which I have received,” he told a journalist friend. “It is based upon the trust that I will stand fast to the principles and purpose which I have avowed.”²⁰

Wilson had hoped that the peace conference could begin as soon as he arrived. With leaders from all over the world and representatives of racial and ethnic groups and subject peoples descending on Paris, however, a host of logistic problems had arisen. Wilson also suspected that the Allied leaders were in no hurry to sit down with him at the bargaining table, and there were entreaties that he visit the other main Allied capitals. As a result, he and Edith spent the last five days of December in England and the first week of January 1919 going to and from Rome, with stops on the return trip in Genoa, Milan, and Turin. Before he embarked on those journeys, Wilson received a steady stream of visitors at Murat Palace, laid a wreath on the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette, visited an American military hospital and cemetery, spent Christmas with General Pershing and the troops, and gave a few brief talks. He and Edith also took a few automobile rides but were not able to play golf until the first day of the new year.

Wilson decided to use this interlude before the conference to pave the way for the kind of peace he wanted. He pursued this strategy both openly and behind the scenes. While in Paris, he issued a statement to the press on December 18 denying reports that he had endorsed the program of the League to Enforce Peace but also declaring, “I am, as every one knows, not only in favor of a League of Nations, but believe the formation of such a League absolutely indispensable to the maintenance of peace.” In a private talk, the British ambassador, Lord Derby, found his ideas for a league “of the haziest description … apparently to be a sort of general parliament of Ambassadors.” Equality of nations was the one point on which Derby found him “very definite.” Wilson also “rather horrified” him by stating that the League should take control of Germany’s colonies. House reassured Derby a bit by saying that he “need pay no attention to what the President said … about each of the Nations having the same representation.”²¹

On December 26, the Wilsons crossed the English Channel and arrived at midafternoon in London, where the king and queen met them at Charing Cross Station. The two heads of state then rode in an open carriage to Buckingham Palace, over a route packed with spectators on sidewalks, in windows, and on rooftops. In the afternoon, the president and Grayson called on the Queen Mother, and in the evening there was an informal dinner at the palace, which Grayson described as “entirely without stiffness,” as the king and Wilson swapped stories. The next day, he met Lloyd George for the first time when the prime minister and Balfour came to Buckingham Palace for a three-hour discussion. The two men seemed to hit it off well and discussed a variety of subjects. According to Lloyd George, Wilson gave the impression that the League was all he really cared much about, and the prime minister was inclined to let him make it the first order of business and thereby take pressure off such matters as freedom of the seas and colonial claims. Lloyd George also thought Wilson would not stay long at the peace conference. After that meeting, they went to lunch at 10 Downing Street, where Wilson met other British leaders for the first time, including Winston Churchill. He brought off the rare feat of leaving Churchill speechless by teasing him about his recent aspersions on the role of the U.S. Navy in winning the war.²²

Wilson gave more speeches in England and talked more confidentially with his hosts than he had done in France. On his birthday, he responded to a resolution of support presented by British Methodist and Baptist leaders: “I think one would go crazy if he did not believe in Providence. It would be a maze without a clue. Unless there were some supreme guidance we would despair of the results of human counsel.” The same day, in the City of London, he maintained that what was essential was a guarantee of the terms of peace, a permanent concert of power for their maintenance, and he pledged to remain as steadfast in pursuing that goal as were his Scottish forbears in pursuing theirs: “The stern Covenanter tradition that is behind me sends many an echo down the years.” In the evening, before he boarded the train for Carlisle, he warned a top British intelligence officer against thinking of Americans “as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the peoples of the United States.” About Bolshevism, he professed no fear of it in America and said Russians should be free to settle their own affairs as long as they did not menace anyone else. The following day, he kept the Sabbath by giving no speeches except for the impromptu remarks at his grandfather’s church and a brief talk in Manchester, but he privately reiterated to the editor of The Manchester Guardian that the most important thing about the peace settlement was its ability to evolve and change through “a machinery of adjustment.”²³

The Wilsons spent the last day of 1918 traveling back to France. They greeted the new year by playing their first round of golf in Europe, on the links at St.-Cloud. At lunch with House, who had not gone across the Channel with them, Wilson read from Smuts’s draft of a league of nations and then went to the Hôtel de Crillon, the headquarters of the American delegation, to brief the other delegates on his trip and Smuts’s draft, which he studied again the next day as his train traveled toward Rome. On the Wilsons’ arrival on the morning of January 3, the king and queen and the Italian cabinet met the Wilsons at the station, and a splendidly uniformed troop of cavalry escorted the open carriages that transported the party to the Quirinal Palace. Banners festooned buildings along the route, and sidewalks and windows were again packed with people. That evening, there was another state dinner hosted by royalty, and afterward the president visited Capitoline Hill. Between ceremonial events, Wilson spoke to the Italian parliament, using the occasion to declare that the peacemakers must “organize the friendship of the world, to see to it that all the moral forces that make for right and justice are united and given a vital organization … [to be] substituted for the balance of power.”²⁴

The Wilsons’ second day in Rome included a visit fraught with significance and delicacy. At midafternoon, the president, First Lady, and Dr. Grayson called on Pope Benedict XV at the Vatican. Wilson knew well the extent of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, but he was nevertheless determined to be the first president to visit the pope. Swiss Guards lined the corridors as the party walked to the papal throne room. Pope Benedict led the president alone into his study before inviting Grayson and a military aide to join them. They then returned to the throne room, where the pope blessed everyone with the sign of the cross. “It is for you, your family and your dear ones,” Grayson recorded him saying. Later in the day, Wilson attended a reception given at St. Paul’s Within the Walls, the American Episcopal church serving the Protestant community of Rome. In the evening, before the presidential train left Rome, Wilson talked with Leonida Bissolati, a liberal Italian leader who had recently resigned from the cabinet in protest over the demands for the port city of Fiume and the Dalmatian coast. Bissolati urged Wilson to resist those demands, as well as “the excessive pretensions of French and English nationalism.”²⁵

The next day was a Sunday, but Wilson bent his Sabbatarian scruples to make public appearances and speeches and attend a performance at Milan’s famed La Scala, where a cast of 400 performed one act of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda. On Monday, after a stop for a speech in Turin, a telegram from Tumulty informed Wilson that Roosevelt had died. The president sent a telegram of condolence to Mrs. Roosevelt and rewrote the proclamation prepared by the State Department, adding, “As President he awoke the Nation to the dangers of private control which lurked in our financial and industrial systems. It was by thus arresting the attention and stimulating the purpose of the country that he opened the way for subsequent necessary and beneficent reforms.” The ex-president stayed on the president’s mind; the following evening, Wilson read aloud to Edith and her secretary an essay about Roosevelt.²⁶

Wilson would have been less than human if he had not wondered to himself how the death of this man, his greatest adversary, might affect his own political fortunes and his programs. By nearly everyone’s reckoning, Roosevelt was going to be the Republican candidate for president in 1920. The war had wrought an astounding resurrection of his standing with the public and the Republican Party, and old foes as well as erstwhile followers were jumping aboard the bandwagon for his nomination. He had been acting like a president-in-waiting, and some foreign leaders wanted to treat him as such. Roosevelt had meant to bolster other powers’ intentions to impose a harsh victors’ peace on Germany and give a lower priority to a league of nations. Now, Roosevelt’s death relieved Wilson of some of that pressure, although Lodge would guide much of his own conduct in the coming months according to what he believed his fallen friend would have done. On the other hand, the possibility of Roosevelt’s becoming the next president had guaranteed greater Republican receptivity to a league or some kind of alliance and certainly to a greater American role in world politics. The death of this adversary was not necessarily a gain for Wilson.²⁷

Uppermost in his mind during the trip to Italy was the League of Nations. On the night he learned of Roosevelt’s death, he told some American reporters off the record that he had a definite program in mind and was going to rely on Smuts’s draft in order to give the British a sense of authorship. As soon as he got back to Paris, he typed another “Covenant” on twenty-two sheets of paper, adding handwritten emendations. He gave this document to House in the afternoon on January 8, and the two men discussed it at Murat Palace that evening. This document, which later became known as the First Paris Draft, contained thirteen articles and six supplementary provisions. It sketched out the organization’s structure, calling for a “Body of Delegates” to include all members and an “Executive Council” made up of the “Great Powers,” with other countries rotating on and off. It called for arms reduction, laid down procedures to settle disputes, and stipulated that any member not following those procedures would be subject to an economic and financial boycott; the council could also recommend use of military or naval force by the members of the League. The draft likewise provided for blockades of offending nations, asserted the League’s concern in all threats of war, and outlined procedures to admit new members. The supplementary provisions dealt with former German colonies and Austro-Hungarian and Turkish territories, over some of which the League might assume “mandatory” authority.²⁸

For Wilson, the essence of the League in this draft lay in Article III: “The Contracting Powers unite in guaranteeing to each other political independence and territorial integrity.” He added that territorial readjustments “pursuant to the principle of self-determination” could be effected by a three-fourths vote of the members. Finally, he affirmed, “The Contracting Powers accept without reservation the principle that the peace of the world is superior in importance to every question of political jurisdiction or boundary.”²⁹ Some of the ideas and language in this draft drew upon Smuts’s draft, but its overall tone and phrasing were distinctly Wilson’s, as was its central tenet, Article III. This commitment to independence and territorial integrity and the pledge to boycott or even resort to military force to punish violators showed that Wilson intended his league of nations to be essentially a political, not a judicial or consultative, organization. That was where he parted company with Root, Taft, and the League to Enforce Peace, who wanted a peace-enforcing organization to follow set rules and conduct judicial proceedings. By contrast, Wilson wanted the experience and deliberations of the members to guide the organization in responding to changing circumstances.

He sent copies of his Paris draft to the other members of the American delegation and discussed it with them on January 10. Lansing privately scoffed that Wilson “rejoices in catchy phrases” and deplored the president’s vain, curt “manner of refuting valid objections to the document which he has drawn. House says that he must have been feeling unwell.” Soon afterward, General Bliss suggested softening the implied commitment in the preamble to maintaining existing regimes and using the wordcovenantthroughout the document, and he recommended that the guarantee of territorial integrity in Article III should read “as against external aggression.” He also cautioned against identifying the League too closely with the settlement of the war, so as to avoid “the appearance of being a new form of the old Holy Alliance.” Contradicting Lansing’s aspersion on Wilson’s presumed vanity, the president gladly accepted nearly all of Bliss’s suggestions and produced a new version on January 18, which became known as the Second Paris Draft. This would become his outline in upcoming negotiations, but it could be only an outline. In an interview with the president of Switzerland, he affirmed that “only the essential lines could be immediately traced and that the rest will be the fruit of long labor and repeated experiences.”³⁰ The scholar in politics had not forgotten what he had learned from Edmund Burke.

Much as Wilson might have liked to devote all his attention to the League of Nations project, he knew he must deal with the pressing problems of the peace settlement. In fact, he was eager for negotiations to begin and for those problems to be addressed. To Edith and her secretary, he vented his “contempt for [Allied leaders] and the things for which they stood. … [Their] people are eager for peace and are resenting bitterly this delay.” Not surprisingly, Wilson did not enjoy his first discussions with the assembled Allied leaders. Although the peace conference had not yet convened, he attended meetings of the Supreme War Council on January 12 and 13 in the main conference room of the Quai d’Orsay, the headquarters of the French Foreign Ministry. Grayson wrote that Wilson found the atmosphere “exotic,” both because the attendees included Indians in turbans and the Arab leader Emir Faisal “in picturesque costume” and because liveried servants came in to serve tea. “The President remarked to me afterward that it was with a little difficulty that he restrained himself from voicing his surprise, that with the great affairs and future of the world under discussion, this conference should be interrupted by what he considered a tea party.”³¹

The content of the discussions at these meetings did not please him either. The first meeting degenerated into a haggle over renewal of the Armistice agreement and arguments about which countries should be represented at the conference and how many representatives they should have. The second one touched briefly on one matter of substance—reparations—but then reverted to representation, particularly regarding the British dominions and India, with numbers finally agreed upon. The council finally set January 18 for the opening of the conference. Wilson proposed that governments should submit recommendations to the major powers on the League, reparations, new nations, boundary changes, and colonies. The European leaders wanted smaller powers at a preliminary meeting, and the president agreed. Grayson noted that Bernard Baruch, who was present, told him afterward that Wilson was “a complete master of the whole performance and that he entirely dominated the meeting.”³²

Those preliminary meetings, which came to be called the Council of Ten, took place during three days before the opening of the conference; they gathered the delegations of ten nations and would continue to meet as the executive committee of the conference until March. These first meetings dealt with several matters of procedure. One was the official language. Pride and diplomatic tradition impelled the French to insist upon their language, while Wilson championed English as the most widely spoken tongue; as a compromise, both languages were adopted. Another matter was the agenda. The French wanted to add a number of specific items to the subjects Wilson had proposed, and the matter was left in abeyance. The most controversial matter involved publicity. Wilson had just appointed the journalist Ray Stannard Baker as press officer to the delegation, and a small army of American reporters had descended on Paris, hungry for news. The president wanted to admit reporters to the council’s general meetings because delicate and weighty questions would be handled beforehand. Lloyd George objected to “a Peace settled by public clamour.”³³ Finally, Wilson acquiesced to a restrictive policy that would cause him trouble in the future.

The official opening, on January 18 in the Hall of the Clock at the Quai d’Orsay, was an almost strictly ceremonial affair. President Poincaré’s brief welcoming remarks closed with references to “punishment of the guilty” and guarantees against a “return of the spirit by which they were tempted.” President Wilson then nominated Premier Clemenceau to be permanent chairman of the conference. This move honored the custom of having the leader of the host country preside, but Wilson said he also intended it as a tribute to France and to Clemenceau’s leadership. After his unanimous election, the premier demanded “reparation for acts committed—material reparation, if I may say so, which is due to all of us—but the higher and nobler reparation” of security against renewed aggression. The only items of business at this session were receipt of the memoranda requested on pressing questions and the announcement that the question of the League of Nations would be the first item taken up at the next meeting of the full conference.³⁴

The opening of the peace conference made an already busy schedule for Wilson even more demanding. He and Edith had gotten in one more game of golf, but his car rides now consisted mostly of trips between Murat Palace and the Quai d’Orsay for the Council of Ten. On the diplomatic front, he was receiving reports of unofficial talks with representatives of the Bolshevik government in Russia, and he was trying to overcome obstacles to getting food shipments to Europe. From home, he was hearing protests against restrictions on publicity surrounding the conference—to which he replied to Tumulty that publicity for his talks with Allied leaders “would invariably break up the whole thing.” The pace of activity naturally worried Grayson, who on the day of the conference’s opening had to treat the president for a bad cold. The next day, Sunday, Grayson recorded, “I persuaded him to stay in bed during the morning and take a ride in the country in the afternoon: We passed a very quiet day and the rest did the President a great deal of good.”³⁵

Wilson needed that rest. In the evening he spent three hours meeting at Murat Palace with the authors of the latest British plans for a league, Lord Robert Cecil and Jan Smuts. Neither man had met Wilson except in passing, and Cecil quickly formed an unfavorable impression of him, although he seems to have masked his dislike, for the meeting went well. The three of them went over Wilson’s latest draft, which the Englishman described as “almost entirely Smuts and Phillimore combined, with practically no new ideas in it.” Wilson told them that he wanted an informal Anglo-French-American group to draft a plan to submit to the conference. He hoped that they could finish the job in two weeks, a time frame that Cecil sniffed at as “fantastic,” although he did not say so. Wilson confided in them how difficult he found it to be to work with the French and Italians. “He is evidently disillusioned about those two nations,” Cecil noted.³⁶

Wilson had to attend meetings of the Council of Ten, sometimes twice daily, and sessions of the Supreme War Council. Several times he put in fifteen-hour workdays. This was probably the most intensely busy time in his life. Council of Ten sessions particularly tried his patience as between thirty and forty people crowded into the dark-paneled, stuffy, overheated office of the French Foreign Minister at the Quai d’Orsay. He did get the council to propose to the full conference that the plans drafted by Cecil, Smuts, and him be considered by a League of Nations Commission consisting of fourteen members. There would be two members from each of the great powers and one apiece from other countries, with Wilson as chairman and Cecil as vice chairman. The Council of Ten approved the creation of the League Commission and charged it, together with others, with examining war guilt and penalties, reparations, international labor conditions, and international control of transportation. At that session, Wilson declared that the conference was under “a solemn obligation to make permanent arrangements that justice shall be rendered and peace maintained. This is the central object of our meeting. Settlements may be temporary, but the actions of the nations in the interests of peace and justice must be permanent. We can set up permanent processes … [to be] the eye of the nations to keep watch upon the common interest.”³⁷

During its second week of meetings, the Council of Ten dealt mostly with Germany’s former colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Wilson argued strongly for making those territories mandates of the League of Nations, and he told Grayson that the British and their dominions and the Japanese “wanted to ‘divide the swag,’ and then have the League of Nations created to perpetuate their title.” A member of the Inquiry staff, Charles Seymour, who was a professor at Yale, wrote to his family after attending one of these meetings, “Everything reminded me of a faculty committee meeting, rather than a gathering of statesmen.” Seymour commented on the way Clemenceau, who wore gray gloves all the time, looked “expressionless, even rather bored,” whereas Wilson seemed “absolutely at home,” spoke easily, and liked “to make a humorous allusion and Balfour, Lloyd George and Clemenceau are evidently glad of some excuse to smile.”³⁸

The League Commission did not meet until February 3, the beginning of the third week of the conference. Having already packed the commission’s membership, Wilson now sought to stack the agenda with a draft of a covenant that embodied his, Cecil’s, and Smuts’s views. These machinations brought House—who had been ill from an attack of gallstones and did not attend the Council of Ten meetings—back into the thick of things. House met with Cecil on January 30 and the following day with Cecil, Smuts, and Wilson at his suite at the Hôtel de Crillon, where they decided to have legal experts from their staffs, C. J. B. Hurst from Britain and David Hunter Miller from the United States, prepare a more formal draft. When Wilson read what the two lawyers produced over the weekend, he did not like it. “He said the document had ‘no warmth or color in it,’” but House advised accepting this draft anyway. To add punch to the language, Wilson made handwritten changes. Miller then stayed up all night on February 2 to incorporate them into what would be called the Third Paris Draft.³⁹

This new draft almost unhorsed the scheme for a prearranged plan for a league. Wilson met with Cecil and House the next afternoon, just before the League Commission convened for the first time. “The meeting bade fair to be stormy for the first seven or eight minutes,” House noted, but it calmed down when Wilson agreed to accept the Hurst-Miller draft. Cecil felt particularly miffed because the president accepted this draft “as a skeleton, reserving to himself the right to clothe it in flesh and blood.” Cecil disliked Wilson’s autocratic manner, as shown, he noted, in his “abruptly tearing up a draft which we had jointly agreed to have prepared as our working text. He seemed mildly surprised that I should resent it.” Cecil may have thought Wilson was being rigid and egotistical, but the president’s wish to change the Third Paris Draft sprang from his deep feeling for language and concern with the wording of the League Covenant. To Herbert Hoover, he said, “We must have a great state instrument which will be like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, and mark a great step forward in international relations.” In his eyes, these drafts fell far short of that exalted standard. Ironically, his presumed authorship of this new document would later lay him open to a reputed gibe by Senator Lodge: “As an English production it does not rank high. It might get by at Princeton, but certainly not at Harvard.”⁴⁰

In the first meetings of the League Commission, Wilson, Cecil, and the French member, Léon Bourgeois, did most of the talking. “The Japs never speak,” House noted. “General Smuts speaks so seldomly that it is practically not at all.” House believed he and Cecil kept the discussion on course by doing “nearly all the difficult work between meetings.” Those meetings took place at night, from eight-thirty until around midnight—after a full day of work for Wilson. A matter of contention arose early because the Japanese wanted a statement of racial equality in the Covenant. House advised the Japanese members to draft a mildly worded resolution, which Wilson watered down further. Cecil added to the contention by moving to drop from the guarantee of member states’ independence and territorial integrity the words “and preserve against external aggression.” Wilson countered with a compromise amendment saying that the League Council would advise on how to meet this obligation. For his part, Cecil was afraid of trouble “with the Dominions, who do not appreciate the idea of having to fight for the integrity of Bohemia, or some such place”—an example that eerily forecast Neville Chamberlain’s words about the same place (Czechoslovakia) during the Munich crisis of 1938: “a faraway country of which we know little.” Cecil also sniffed that the “smaller powers, who seemed singularly perverse,” backed the president: “It is annoying to find all these foreigners quite keen for the guarantee.”⁴¹

A clash came with the French when Bourgeois made an impassioned plea for the League to have its own army to enforce its decisions. Responding at length, Wilson tried to bridge the gap between national sovereignty and international commitment. “We must make a distinction between what is possible and what is not,” he maintained. The U.S. Constitution would not allow international control, and an international army in peacetime would seem to be trading “international militarism for national militarism.” America could only promise to maintain its military forces and come to the aid of countries threatened by aggression, “but you must trust us. We must all depend on our mutual good faith.”⁴²

On February 13, Wilson was attending a meeting of the Council of Ten when Baron Nobuaki Makino of Japan introduced a revised resolution promising equal treatment of citizens of all members of the League and disavowing all discrimination, “either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” Makino conceded that this was a difficult and complicated problem, but in the war “different races have fought together on the battlefield, in the trenches, on the high seas, … and they have saved the lives of their fellow men irrespective of racial differences.” Cecil, who was presiding in Wilson’s absence, responded that this matter “raised extremely serious problems within the British Empire” and said discussion of it was best postponed.⁴³ House was pleased with this outcome because the British had borne the onus of opposing the racial equality declaration, but his relief was premature. With that controversy temporarily averted, the work of the League Commission was complete.

At the meeting of the Council of Ten on February 13, Wilson secured approval to present the League Commission’s product, which would be called the Draft Covenant, to the full conference the next day. Getting this approval was no small feat, inasmuch as the meetings of this council and the Supreme War Council during the preceding two weeks had been contentious. When the Council of Ten discussed the borders of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Beneš, that country’s foreign minister, appealed for retaining the frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Germany, even though he conceded that doing so would incorporate a large number of Germans—who would later provide the pretext for the Munich crisis. The council also heard Emir Faisal—speaking through his English interpreter, the celebrated Lawrence of Arabia—present the aspirations of the Arab peoples. When Wilson asked him about possible League mandates in the Near East, Faisal answered that the Arabs had fought for their unity and independence and would feel betrayed with anything less. But the council also heard an American, Howard S. Bliss, president of the Syrian Protestant College (later American University) in Beirut, maintain that the Arabs lacked “balance” and “political fairness” and needed to grow gradually toward self-determination.⁴⁴

The discussions in the Council of Ten were mild compared with the arguments in the Supreme War Council over the Armistice terms and disarmament of Germany. Wilson found Clemenceau shifty and unreliable and thought House had sized him up wrong. “The French people are the hardest I ever tried to do business with,” he told Grayson, and attacks on him in French newspapers for alleged softness toward the Germans led him to plan to have Ray Stannard Baker plant a story with the American reporters in Paris to the effect that these attacks might require the conference to move to a neutral capital. House objected, but Wilson insisted on sending the story out. “To my mind it was a stupid blunder,” House noted in one of the first signs at Paris of dissension between him and the president.⁴⁵ Clearly, the volume of work and the emotional tension were taking a toll on Wilson.

The president’s weariness showed on February 14, when he presented the Draft Covenant to the full conference in the Hall of the Clock of the Quai d’Orsay. Cecil may have found Wilson’s two-week timetable “fantastic,” but it had taken only two weeks longer than that to produce this document. He read it article by article, occasionally stopping to offer a few words of explanation. William Allen White found the content of the recitation “as gray and drab and soggy as his reading. Slowly, as he read, the hearers realized that they were getting some new declaration of independence, of the world’s national independence, … that a super-nation had been created and that the President’s words were of tremendous import; he droned on like one reading a list at a receiver’s sale.”⁴⁶

Still, there was no disguising the great step forward in world politics this document proposed to take. Despite Wilson’s dissatisfaction with its language, the substance of the Draft Covenant gave him what he most desired. The guarantee of independence and territorial integrity was there in Article X, almost exactly as he had written it, while Article XI asserted the right of the League of Nations to concern itself about “war or threat of war” anywhere in the world. Articles XII through XV established procedures for mediation and arbitration and called for a “Permanent Court of International Justice.” Article XVI laid down the League’s authority to impose economic boycotts and recommend the use of force against offending nations. Disarmament, mandates over former enemy’s colonies and territories, concern for labor conditions, an assembly in which each nation would have an equal vote, an executive council with the five great powers as permanent members and other countries rotating on and off—all these features of Wilson’s earlier programs were in the Draft Covenant. Most important of all for him, this would be an essentially political body with the potential for enforcing peace and order in strong and far-reaching ways. It was a remarkable achievement, and the lion’s share of the credit belonged to Wilson.⁴⁷

Despite his fatigue, he could not keep gleams of enthusiasm and momentousness from flickering through his explanation of the Draft Covenant to the conference. “Armed force is in the background in this program,” he asserted, “but it is in the background, and if the moral force of the world will not suffice, the physical force shall. But that is the last resort, because this is intended as a constitution of peace, not as a league of war.” As a constitution, “it is not a straitjacket, but a vehicle of life. A living thing is born, and we must see to it that the clothes we put upon it do not hamper it—a vehicle of power, but a vehicle of power in which power may be varied at the discretion of those who exercise it and in accordance with the changing circumstances of the time.”⁴⁸

The Draft Covenant of the League of Nations seemed to vindicate handsomely Wilson’s decision to go in person to the peace conference and dominate his country’s delegation. If he had not been there or if he had needed to answer to Elihu Root or some senator at his side, he almost certainly could not have moved as swiftly and boldly as he did. Yet that freedom of maneuver came at a price. Aside from House, no American had known what the president was about to propose, which meant there had been no chance to prepare any groundwork for support. Democratic senators, sympathetic journalists, and the delegation’s press officer, Ray Stannard Baker, had urged him to share some of his plans for the League with them, but he had rebuffed them.

The Wilsons left Paris on the evening of February 14 to return to the United States, and the president cabled Tumulty to request members of the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees not to discuss the Draft Covenant until he had had a chance to explain it to them in detail.⁴⁹ Wilson was about to open a second front in the struggle for a peace settlement—a home front, where he would have to fight for approval of his vision and program in his own land among his own people.