21

PEACEMAKING ABROAD AND AT HOME

When Woodrow Wilson sailed for the United States on February 15, 1919, he had been abroad for more than two months. After an eight-day crossing, he would spend just ten days at home before leaving again for Europe. That second trip to Paris would last four months, with the president not returning to America until July 8. These twin sojourns would make him not just the first president to leave the country while in office but the only one to stay away anywhere near so long. Later, improved communications and swifter transportation, especially air travel, would permit high-level diplomacy to transpire by telephone exchanges, frequent visits of foreign leaders to Washington, short jaunts abroad by presidents, and, occasionally, intense, concentrated “summit” meetings. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 would become the last prolonged international conclave of its kind—harking back to such earlier gatherings as the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15—and it would bring forth the last set of sweeping, general peace treaties.

Back in the United States, the president had to be present to sign bills passed in the last days of the third session of the Sixty-fifth Congress. This voyage of the George Washington from Europe was as rough as the earlier voyage had been smooth, but Wilson was not affected. He spent most of his first days at sea resting and sleeping in his cabin. Business from the peace conference intruded from time to time: a call by Churchill for large-scale intervention in Russia brought a sharp rebuke from the president; he also sent a message of sympathy to Clemenceau, who had just survived an assassination attempt—which brought high-level negotiations to a halt for a while. As on the previous voyage, he and Edith got out on deck for walks, watched movies with the ship’s crew, and dined with a few fellow passengers, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor.

Wilson felt both eager and apprehensive about what awaited him at home. Reactions in the press to the Draft Covenant were largely positive, although they varied according to party affiliation and region. Democratic and southern newspapers usually applauded Wilson’s accomplishment, while Republican journals, particularly those in the Midwest and West, more often took a critical stance. Taft came out enthusiastically in support, and he swung the League to Enforce Peace behind Wilson’s program. Attacks had also started. “If the Saviour of mankind should revisit the earth and declare for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it,” William Borah had stated even before the unveiling of the Draft Covenant. When he and several other senators read the document, they immediately denounced it for spelling destruction of the Monroe Doctrine and drowning America in the cauldron of European and Asian power politics. Henry Cabot Lodge and other prominent Republicans honored the president’s request to suspend debate until he had had a chance to explain the document, though their silence did not reassure Wilson. On his last night at sea, he told Dr. Grayson, “The failure of the United States to back [the League] would break the heart of the world.”1

Troubles dogged the visit home from the outset. Because of a longshoreman’s strike in New York, the George Washington docked in Boston in the evening of February 23, but only after almost running aground in heavy fog. Boston’s being Lodge’s hometown meant that a low-key visit, without any appearance of campaigning, was in order. Local officials foiled that plan when, against Wilson’s wishes, they staged an elaborate welcome the next day, which included a big parade and a rally attended by an enthusiastic crowd of 7,000 or 8,000 people. Speaking extemporaneously, the president avoided any reference to the Draft Covenant, but he did mention his reception in Europe and the national aspirations of the Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Armenians. Later, in brief remarks at the railroad station in Providence, Rhode Island, he maintained that the people of Europe trusted America, “and if America disappoints them the heart of the world will be broken.”2 In New York, he came out onto the platform only to wave. The railroads cleared the tracks for the presidential train, which reached Washington early in the morning on February 25.

Wilson held meetings in the afternoon with the cabinet and in the evening with Democratic leaders in the Senate. They discussed how to deal with the Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were reportedly holding up appropriations bills in order to force the president to call an early session of the next Congress—which they would control. The Republicans’ aim was to debate the peace proceedings, but Wilson responded that he would not call Congress into session until the conference was over; the White House also announced that the president would not make a speech to Congress about the conference and the League. Instead, he met with members of Congress in different venues. On February 26, he did something no president had ever done before: he had the members of the Foreign Affairs and Foreign Relations committees to dinner at the White House and afterward discussed the Draft Covenant with them for more than two hours. The question of the president appearing before a congressional committee raised constitutional issues involving the separation of powers; having the committees come to the White House rather than the president going formally to them evidently sidestepped the constitutional problem.

All but three members of the committees went to the White House that evening. According to some of them, the dinner was awkward and uncomfortable. One Republican senator and announced League opponent, Frank Brandegee of Connecticut, complained that no alcohol was served, and he gossiped that Edith Wilson’s fingernails were dirty. After dinner, the president and the thirty-four senators and representatives adjourned to the East Room, where Wilson answered questions. No stenographer was present, and a minor war of words about the discussion broke out in the press as soon as the meeting ended. Pro-League papers such as The New York Times and The World stressed Wilson’s “good humor” and quoted several senators, including Brandegee, who said they appreciated his openness and knowledge in answering their questions. The conservative New York Sun, however, quoted anonymous senators, probably Brandegee and Lodge, who expressed “great astonishment” at the president’s “lack of information” about how the Draft Covenant would affect the Monroe Doctrine and rights to withdraw from the League and refuse mandates. Those anonymous sources also claimed that Wilson brushed aside a question about self-rule for Ireland as strictly an internal affair for Britain, which Democratic senators denied.3

Privately, Lodge scorned Wilson’s ignorance about the League and told Henry White, “We learned nothing.” But a Republican congressman from Massachusetts, John Jacob Rogers, praised the president to White for being informative and good-humored: “I never saw Mr. Wilson appear so human or so attractive as he did that night.” The following afternoon, Wilson spent two hours at the Capitol talking with members of Congress and reporters in the President’s Room off the Senate chamber. He stood most of the time, and some of his visitors thought he looked tired. He discussed domestic concerns, such as the woman suffrage amendment and appropriations, as well as the peace conference. He also met with several Democratic senators and told them that the Monroe Doctrine was not impaired under the League and that national sovereignty would not be curtailed.4

Wilson gave three speeches during these ten days at home. Tumulty had persuaded him to speak in Washington at a banquet given by the Democratic National Committee on February 28 and to a conference of governors and mayors on March 3. He also got Wilson to agree to a joint appearance with Taft at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on the evening of March 4, just before he sailed back to Europe. The day Wilson gave the first of those speeches, Lodge attacked the Draft Covenant in the Senate, particularly charging that the League would destroy the Monroe Doctrine and take away control of immigration. Lodge wanted a harsh peace and an alliance of Europeans only: “We must not lose by an improvident attempt to reach eternal peace all that we have won by war and sacrifice.” The following day, the Republicans’ other foreign policy expert in the Senate besides Lodge, Philander Knox, delivered an even harsher blast, dismissing the proposed League as “merely an offensive and defensive alliance, … [which] absolutely requires that every future war will be a potential world war, and that we shall be an active participant in every such war.”5

Those attacks did not bode well for cooperation with the Senate, and they made it hard for Wilson to curb his combative streak. Speaking at the Democratic dinner the evening after Lodge had spoken, he teasingly appeared to rule out a third term by noting that in two years he would “begin again to be a historian instead of an active public man” and would be able to say what he really thought about his opponents. He did allude to “all the blind and little provincial people,” but he worried that “the world placed in America a tragical hope—… it is so great, so far-reaching, it runs out to such depths that we cannot in the nature of things satisfy it.” Still, the League of Nations would set up processes to banish war and must be part of the peace treaty. In his meetings and speeches, he did make some conciliatory moves. Congressman Rogers told White that he got the clear impression at the White House meeting that the president believed the Draft Covenant could be changed. Wilson also promised others that he would bring up the Monroe Doctrine before the League Commission.6

His opponents in the Senate now moved to thwart those efforts at conciliation and persuasion, which the League to Enforce Peace was augmenting with a massive publicity campaign. On Sunday, March 2, Brandegee, Knox, and Lodge met to write a statement protesting the Draft Covenant. The next day they gathered signatures from Republican colleagues. Just before midnight on March 3, Lodge took the Senate floor to read a resolution stating that the League “in the form now proposed by the peace conference” was unacceptable to the Senate and that the conference should promptly conclude a treaty with Germany. When a Democratic senator objected to the introduction of this resolution, Lodge replied, “I merely wish to add by way of explanation the following.” He then read the names of thirty-seven Republican senators and senators-elect who had signed the document, adding that four others whom he had been unable to contact would probably also sign it. Newspapers used a 200-year-old term to dub this statement a round-robin. Lodge said he knew the resolution could not come to a vote and that by reading the list of signers, “our purpose, however, had been served.”7

Lodge’s action wiped out all notions of swift or easy approval of American membership in the League of Nations. Its authors deliberately kept it an all-Republican affair, but one Democrat, James Reed of Missouri, had also damned the Draft Covenant. Two absent Republicans immediately telegraphed their support of Lodge’s resolution. Added to the thirty-seven signers, this total of forty comfortably exceeded the one third of the ninety-six-member Senate needed to block consent to a treaty. The authors of the round-robin were also sending a message to Paris. Brandegee, Knox, and Lodge favored a harsh settlement, and they wanted to encourage the Allied leaders to forge ahead and separate the League from the peace treaty. Lodge claimed later that he had aimed the round-robin at provoking an intemperate reaction from Wilson. Such a degree of wily premeditation sounds far-fetched, although the senator had made friends in recent years with Wilson’s old enemy from Princeton, Andrew West, and was glad to do him dirt.8

Wilson initially ignored the round-robin. When he went to the Capitol shortly before the expiration of the Congress at noon on March 4, he made no mention of it as he chatted with reporters. He did issue a statement about Republican senators reminiscent of his excoriation of “a little group of willful men” exactly two years before and reiterated that he would not call Congress into session until he returned from the peace conference. Early in the afternoon, the presidential party boarded the train for New York and the voyage to Europe. The Wilsons stopped in Philadelphia to see the president’s daughter Jessie, who had given birth a few days earlier to her second son, whom she and her husband named Woodrow Wilson Sayre. The president reportedly said to a nurse, “With his mouth open and his eyes shut, I predict he will make a Senator when he grows up.”9 The party had dinner on the train, and on arrival in New York they went directly to the Metropolitan Opera House for the joint appearance with Taft. People jammed every seat, aisle, corridor, and corner of the hall, and a crowd of 15,000 filled the streets outside.

Taft hailed the League of Nations as “what I have ever regarded as ‘the promised land.’” It would erect a bulwark against Bolshevism and offer insurance against the “world suicide” of another war fought with still more terrible weapons. He devoted most of his speech to detailed answers to criticisms of the Draft Covenant, including the charge that Article X imposed obligations to intervene in faraway places: instead, he declared, nations closer to conflicts would be called upon to act. Most important, perhaps, he extended an olive branch to Republican senators: he did not mention the round-robin, but he called speeches such as Lodge’s “useful” for offering “suggestions that should prove especially valuable in the work of revising the form of the Covenant and making changes.”10

Wilson gave a shorter speech, in which he came out swinging at his opponents. He saluted the sacrifices of the troops and vowed not “to permit myself for one moment to slacken in my effort to be worthy of them and their cause.” He did not mention the round-robin by name either, but he announced that the League Covenant would be so tightly bound up in the peace treaty “that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.” He dismissed his critics as having made no constructive suggestions but only carping, “‘Will it not be dangerous to us to help the world?’ It would be fatal to us not to help it.” The crowd went wild when Wilson hurled defiance at his opponents, but a number of observers, particularly Republicans, believed he had committed a blunder. This seems to be another case of his emotions getting the better of him, as had happened a year earlier with “Force, Force to the utmost” in response to the Germans’ actions at Brest-Litovsk. He did feel angry and frustrated. The fatigue that he sometimes complained about and others remarked on was undoubtedly affecting him. Grayson had examined him the night before this speech and found him in good health, but his emotional equilibrium was another story.11

Wilson had to deal with one other matter of conflict before the George Washington sailed that night. After the speech, he met in an office in the opera house for twenty-five minutes with a delegation of Irish Americans who pressed him to gain a hearing at the peace conference for representatives of an independent Ireland. Tumulty, George Creel, and other Democrats had been warning that discontent over Ireland could hurt the party. At this meeting, Wilson listened politely and told his visitors that when Ireland’s case did come before the conference, he would use his best judgment to determine how to proceed, but to Grayson he said, “[T]he Irish as a race are very hard to deal with owing to their inconsiderateness, their unreasonable demands and their jealousies.” He predicted that dissatisfaction among Irish Americans and German Americans “might defeat the Democratic party in 1920.”12

Wilson’s defiant mood ebbed a bit on the nine-day voyage across the Atlantic. The seas were calmer, and he was able to rest, although his stomach bothered him and he ran a fever for three days because of a gum infection. He spent time on the voyage reading and discussing memoranda that Ray Stannard Baker had prepared on American opinion of the League and how to promote the Covenant to the public. Baker recommended greater publicity for the negotiations and an educational campaign at home. Supporters in the Senate were also telling Wilson that the round-robin did not mean all was lost and that changes in the Covenant, especially regarding the Monroe Doctrine and later, perhaps, reservations to American ratification, could turn things around. The rest and reflection seemed to help Wilson. When the George Washington reached Brest on March 13, one of the reporters aboard cabled back, “If he felt any resentment at the Washington opposition and anxiety about Paris, there was nothing to indicate it.”13

That report exaggerated Wilson’s mellowing. On the train from Brest to Paris the next day, he blamed House for “[y]our dinner” with the men from Capitol Hill because it was “a failure as far as getting together was concerned.”14 In Paris, Lord Robert Cecil also found him truculent and determined to make no concessions to Republican senators. Yet he soon set to work on changes in the Draft Covenant. Discussions with Cecil and David Hunter Miller, the American delegation’s legal expert, revealed, however, that mentioning the Monroe Doctrine might offend the Europeans, who had never recognized it, and might tempt the Japanese to claim similar suzerainty in the Pacific; also, altering Article X would be difficult, and the right of withdrawal seemed already implicit.

Meanwhile, Wilson had been soliciting views from Republicans about changes in the Draft Covenant. From shipboard, he had sent a request through Tumulty to Taft, and from Paris he sent a request through Henry White to Root. Taft replied with his usual generosity, stressing the need to mention the Monroe Doctrine, which he believed would bring most Republican senators around. Root responded with his usual guardedness. Through intermediaries, he declined to render “matured” judgment but said he regretted the lack of an international court, would like an exemption for the Monroe Doctrine, and worried that Article X committed the United States to intervention in distant conflicts.15 In fact, Root was being more than guarded.

White, acting on his own while the president was still at sea, had cabled Lodge to ask what changes the senator wanted. Reporters learned about White’s cable, and the New York Sun contacted Lodge before he received it. Lodge immediately met with Brandegee and sent an intermediary to consult Root. In a reply to White drafted by Root—which Lodge used verbatim—the senator stated: “The President expressed no willingness to receive any communication from the Senate when that body was in session. If he now wishes to have amendments drafted which the Senate will consent to, the natural and necessary course is to convene the Senate in the customary way.” Cold reactions like those did not make prospects for cooperation with leading Republicans look promising.16

As before, cooperation with the Allied leaders was more immediately pressing and equally vexing. While Wilson was away, Lloyd George had gone back to London to attend to parliamentary business, and Clemenceau was recuperating from the assassination attempt on February 19 by a deranged anarchist—one shot hit the premier in the chest between the ribs, leading him to joke about “a Frenchman who misses his target six times out of seven at point-blank range.” House had sat in Wilson’s place at the Council of Ten and planned to use the time to speed things up. Just before Wilson left, House had told him he could “button everything up in the next four weeks” by reaching a preliminary agreement that dealt with such matters as boundaries, colonies, and reparations: the colonel asked the president “to bear in mind while he was gone that it is sometimes necessary to compromise in order to get things done.”17

If Wilson did agree to the colonel’s plan, he was sowing seeds of misunderstanding. While he was away, House and Arthur James Balfour conducted negotiations concerning German boundaries. They attempted to deal with French efforts to tear away and possibly annex the Rhineland, which Wilson adamantly opposed. They grappled with the conundrum posed by the Bolsheviks in Russia. Churchill, Marshal Foch, and others were pushing for large-scale military intervention against them, which Wilson also opposed. Others wanted to expand tentative, low-level talks with them. Under House and Balfour’s direction, the council approved sending the junior American diplomat William Bullitt to Moscow—a move that would later backfire and harm Wilson and his program. Most sensitively of all, House proposed, with Cecil’s and Balfour’s backing, that the League of Nations start to function at once. This may have been a ploy to separate the League from the peace treaty, and Wilson had cabled that the plan bothered him and would offend the Senate.18

How House’s doings in his absence sat with Wilson is a matter of dispute. Edith later wrote that her husband’s appearance after his first meeting with the colonel on their return shocked her: “He seemed to have aged ten years and his jaw was set in that way it had when he was making a superhuman effort to control himself.” When she asked what the matter was, he said with a bitter smile, “House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris.” That account may have been skewed by Edith’s long-festering dislike of House and her memories of her husband’s later attitude toward him. Yet Wilson’s gibe at House about “[y]our meeting” with the congressional committees was consistent with her account, and the two men had talked for only a short time on the train from Brest to Paris. Grayson also noted that the next day Wilson reproved the delegation—meaning House—“for apparently failing to keep the League of Nations covenant to the fore” and for not maintaining a firm stand on German boundaries. Ray Stannard Baker and others who later studied this relationship would conclude that things were never the same between them again. There was no dramatic break at this point or later, but Wilson was now in a frame of mind that allowed him to believe the worst about his onetime intimate friend.19

Other circumstances added to his troubles on his return to Paris. The Wilsons did not resume residence at the Murat Palace but had to move to a house at 11 place des États-Unis. The location, with its statue of Lafayette and Washington, had a nice symbolism, but as Grayson noted in his diary, “The new quarters were by no means so commodious and were far less comfortable.” Edith, however, remembered the house as “less ornate … and more homey.” She particularly liked the garden outside her husband’s window and her bathtub, which was “almost like a small pool” and had faucets made of gold.20 Wilson’s rooms included a comfortable study with a fireplace, which would become the most important meeting place of the conference. These new quarters were across the street from the residence assigned to Lloyd George, who came over as soon as the Wilsons arrived and stayed for more than an hour. After lunch, Wilson spent the afternoon at the Crillon with the American delegation, and in the evening he met with Premier Orlando, who as usual pressed Italian claims to the Dalmatian coast, and with Admiral Sims, who discussed naval aspects of the settlement. The work and the tension had resumed without a missing a beat.

During Wilson’s first full week back in Paris, the Council of Ten met three times, the Supreme War Council twice, and the League of Nations Commission once. These sessions proved as protracted and fruitless as ever. The Council of Ten resorted to the delaying tactic of deferring consideration of Poland’s borders with Germany until an investigative commission could issue a report. “It is hard to keep one’s temper when the world is on fire, and we find delegates, such as those of the French, blocking all of the proceedings,” Wilson told Grayson. “It is bad enough to waste time just talking but these men give us no constructive suggestions whatever. They simply talk.” In the League Commission, he was able to get the right of withdrawal specified in the Draft Covenant, but he did not yet propose an exemption for the Monroe Doctrine. Cecil privately broached that question to Lloyd George, who objected strongly and planned to use the matter as a bargaining chip. This dickering quickly undid the good effects of the voyage on Wilson. “The President looked worn and tired,” House noted, but his sympathy sprang from more than concern for the president’s health: he thought negotiations were moving too slowly, and he could not decide questions “on my own initiative as I did when the President was away.” He told Lansing, “It was a mistake for [Wilson] to come at all. However we must make the best of it.”21

Self-serving though House’s complaints were, the colonel made a point that the president and others had already grasped. On March 19, Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau decided to constitute the Council of Four, comprised solely of them and Orlando. This council replaced the Council of Ten, which met for the last time on March 24, and excluded foreign ministers and advisers and, at first, even a secretary to take minutes. For a while, only one other person sat with them: because Orlando spoke no English, Professor Paul Mantoux of the Sorbonne interpreted into French what Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau (when he was speaking English) said. At the middle of April, Orlando brought in a senior Italian diplomat, Count Luigi Aldrovandi Maresotti, to serve as his own interpreter. On Clemenceau’s orders, Mantoux secretly kept notes of the meetings, which were the only record of the discussions until mid-April, when the negotiators decided to call in the secretary to the British cabinet, Sir Maurice Hankey, to take minutes. During the next three months, this group would meet 148 times—almost every weekday, frequently twice or three times a day, and sometimes on Sundays—mostly in Wilson’s study in the house on la place des États-Unis. Wilson normally sat upright in an armchair; Clemenceau wore his gloves and lounged back in his chair while Lloyd George fidgeted, gesticulated, and often stood up. Those three were on one side of the fireplace, while on the other side, next to Mantoux and Aldrovandi Maresotti, sat Orlando, looking at the others and taking less part in the discussion. Except for drafting the Covenant of the League of Nations, this Big Four, as they were soon dubbed, did the real work of peacemaking in 1919.22

Wilson got their meetings off to a brisk start. First, he proposed taking up reparations, French security, and the Adriatic coast. Reparations sparked a clash between Clemenceau, who held out for big, undefined payments spread over many years, and Wilson, who wanted prompt payment of a fixed sum of between $25 billion and $35 billion. Lloyd George played an equivocal game, holding out for big indemnities but also circulating a memorandum that deplored an overly harsh peace with Germany. French security proved even more fractious, as Clemenceau held out for both taking away the Rhineland and annexing the coal-rich Saarland. When Wilson maintained that the League of Nations would provide security, Clemenceau scoffed that America was “far away, protected by an ocean,” and derided the “excellent intentions of President Wilson.” The president responded by noting the worldwide “passion for justice” and declaring, “I wish to do nothing that would be said of us, ‘They profess great principles, but they admitted exceptions everywhere.’ ”23

These clashes struck House and Lansing as unnecessary. The colonel told Lloyd George that Wilson was “the most difficult man I ever knew when aroused.” The prime minister asked him to try to soothe Wilson, but House evidently did not, because the next day the president said to Grayson over lunch that “it was a time for courage and audacity” and that he intended to confront both Lloyd George and Clemenceau that afternoon. He must have been letting off steam, because the notes of that afternoon’s meeting do not record any confrontation. Rather, the four discussed the Baltic port of Danzig, which had a German population but provided an outlet to the sea for Poland; Hungary, where Bolsheviks led by Béla Kun had seized power; and reparations again, with questions raised about what damages to compensate.24

In fact, Wilson was working toward compromises with the French over their security and the German borders. He suggested that the left bank of the Rhine and fifty kilometers beyond the right bank be demilitarized, and he proposed a “military guarantee” by Britain and the United States to France. In his own hand, he wrote out and signed a statement pledging himself “to propose to the Senate of the United States … an engagement, subject to the approval of the Council of the League of Nations, to come immediately to the assistance of France in case of unprovoked attack by Germany.” On the Saar, he soon suggested turning administration of the coal mines over to the French for a period of time. Along with Lloyd George, he proposed that Danzig become a free city under League of Nations administration. He resisted efforts by Clemenceau and Lloyd George to demand that the Dutch turn over the former German emperor for trial and likely execution. Wilson responded, “He has drawn universal contempt upon himself; is that not the worst punishment for a man like him?” The French did not warm to these proposals, and their reserve frustrated the president.25

Grayson noted the stress caused by this frustration, and he had cause to worry. The Council of Four was making the strain and an already difficult workload even worse for Wilson. On March 31, Ray Stannard Baker had breakfast with him at eight and commented in his diary, “He is working fearfully hard.” The press secretary noted that the president’s schedule that day included two hours of correspondence, two meetings of the council, lunch with House, evening meetings with him and Secretary of the Navy Daniels, who was visiting Paris, and at the end, “[s]tudying maps & reports of experts &c &c.”26 Such a schedule left no time for golf, and Wilson could take only an occasional evening ride in a limousine with Edith.

Besides French security and reparations—which involved reports from and meetings with financial advisers—and Hungary, the council took up Russia, Poland, and Italy’s claims in the Adriatic. Russia caused a flare-up in the press at home when anti-administration newspapers published garbled stories about Bullitt’s mission to Moscow, with allegations that Wilson was planning to recognize the Bolsheviks. The Adriatic question brought Orlando out of his usual silence to argue passionately for his country’s right to annex Fiume and a large slice of the Dalmatian coast, on top of other border claims from the South Tirol up to the Brenner Pass.

Wilson’s health gave out on April 3 during an afternoon meeting of the council. He abruptly left the room and summoned Grayson. He had made himself sit through most of the meeting in spite of intense pains in his back, stomach, and head, but he had given in to an uncontrollable coughing spell. Grayson found that the president was running a fever of 103 degrees, and he coughed violently throughout the night. Grayson avoided the word influenza until he issued a statement to the press two days later, yet it seems clear that this was what ailed Wilson. It was almost certainly not the notorious Spanish flu of the pandemic that had raged worldwide in recent months. Unlike much of the White House staff, the president had escaped that plague the previous autumn, but his fatigued condition now made him susceptible to a different strain. He spent the next four and a half days confined to his bedroom, the first two in bed. He did not attend sessions of the Council of Four, although he did meet with Bernard Baruch and called in House, Lansing, White, and General Bliss for a two-hour conference on Sunday, April 6.27

As he usually did when forced to be idle, Wilson brooded. He told Grayson he was fed up with the French, and he thought he might have to threaten to leave the conference: “And when I make this statement I do not intend it as a bluff.” He asked Grayson to get the navy to send the George Washington to Brest: “When I decide, doctor, to carry this thing through, 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.” Reports of the order to bring back the George Washingtonimmediately appeared in the press—probably because Grayson leaked the story to a New York Times reporter—stirring consternation in some quarters. But Baker welcomed the move: “He will fight for his principles. … He has reached the point where he will give no further.”28

Not wanting to delay the negotiations while he was sick, Wilson designated House to sit in his place at the Council of Four. This could have been taken as a sign of trust, but it was not. Wilson said to him, “[I]t is very hard not to go to the full length with you in concessions.” House did not make significant concessions during the president’s illness, but his contrasting style was such that Baker commented, “The colonel sides with the group which desires a swift peace on any terms.” House indiscreetly made his differences with Wilson public when he told reporters that the order to bring over the George Washington was, in fact, a bluff, a gesture for home consumption. According to Grayson, this ploy of the colonel’s backfired with the newspapermen, and the doctor had to discourage one of them from writing an article about House titled “The Great American Acquiescor.” Yet Grayson noted that “no one has yet heard Colonel House say NO … and in any event he never refuses.”29

None of this was lost on the man in the sickbed, and Grayson’s view of House reflected his patient’s attitude. Grayson also wrote that when Edith asked whether House should telephone the other delegates about the Sunday conference in the sickroom, Wilson emphatically said no, because House would have his son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, do it, “and he (Auchincloss) has such an exalted opinion of himself these days that I don’t care to have him do any business in my name.” The next day, Wilson asked Grayson, “Do you see any change in House; I don’t mean a physical change; he does not show the same free and easy spirit; he seems distant with me as if he has something on his conscience.” Wilson later added that House, “whose specialty had been saying YES,” had allowed the French to staff his and Edith’s new residence with spies.30

Although Wilson was what Grayson called “‘wabbly’ [sic] on his feet” and “markedly showing the effects” of his illness, he insisted on rejoining the Council of Four on the afternoon of April 8. They met in his bedroom rather than the study, but that was the only concession he or anyone else made to his recent indisposition. Wilson again resisted Lloyd George and Clemenceau’s push to bring the former German emperor to trial. “The worst punishment will be that of public opinion,” he said—to which Clemenceau shot back, “Don’t count on it.” Turning to the Saar, the president continued to stand against tearing the region away from Germany while once more offering the French control of the coal there. This meeting and the one the next morning in the study took a toll on Wilson, who told Grayson he felt tired, but he was pleased that he had worked out a compromise on the matter of bringing the emperor to trial: his surrender would be “requested” but not demanded from the Dutch, who were not likely to comply; any trial would not be for “a violation of the criminal law, but as a supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties,” and no penalties would be specified. In the afternoon, Wilson presented a proposal drafted by British and American experts to place the Saar under French rule for fifteen years, to be followed by a plebiscite to determine ultimate sovereignty; Clemenceau seemed receptive to this approach, although he later appeared to renege.31

Notwithstanding those apparent agreements, neither the pace nor the emotional tenor of the discussions was doing Wilson any good. The problems included what struck him as a contradictory back-and-forth about whether to set a fixed sum for reparations. “I must confess I do not know where I am,” he said. The League Commission meeting also troubled him, as he had to make an impassioned plea for amending the Draft Covenant to recognize the Monroe Doctrine as a regional understanding unaffected by the League. Then the Japanese reintroduced their racial-equality amendment; Jan Christiaan Smuts was not present, and Cecil, as he later wrote, had “to grapple with the Japanese as best I could, which was not very well.” Eleven members of the commission voted for the amendment, with Cecil and the Polish delegate voting against it. Wilson ruled that the motion failed because it had not carried unanimously. Cecil privately faulted him for not showing “quite as much courage as I could have hoped in resisting the amendment” and called him “a very curious mixture of the politician and the idealist. … He is not to me very attractive.”32

If Cecil faulted Wilson for not sticking up for racial inequality, nearly everyone else afterward would fault him for not striking a blow against it. He wanted to avoid giving offense to the Japanese and smaller nations, but he knew that any statement hinting at racial equality would bring outcries not just from the British and their dominions but from his own countrymen as well. He told the League Commission that he wanted “to quiet discussion that raises national differences and racial prejudices” and see such matters “forced as much as possible into the background.” He had dealt with, or ignored, race relations at home in this manner, and his approach was not working any better now in the international arena. He tried to reassure the Japanese by affirming, “The League is obviously based upon the principle of the equality of nations.”33 For the moment, they accepted his decision, but they would soon exact a stiff price from him. This was not one of his finer hours, but he did come out of the meeting with a revised version of the Covenant, which he hoped would mollify critics at home.

The next few days brought him no respite. After meeting again with his financial advisers, Baruch and Thomas Lamont, he decided that no fixed sum of reparations should be stated but that a commission set up under the peace treaty should work out the amount, schedule, and kinds of payments. This decision soon drew particularly harsh condemnation from John Maynard Keynes, who would resign from the British delegation in May. Keynes then spent the summer furiously writing his excoriation of the settlement and the president’s role in it, which would be published in December 1919 as The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Failure to set a sum for reparations may have been a mistake, but Wilson’s reliance on a reparations commission did reflect his preference for processes over fixed terms, not only in peacemaking but in politics generally. Much of the blame for the way wrangling over reparations would poison the post-war environment would lie in American nonparticipation in those deliberations, something neither Wilson nor anyone else could have foreseen.34

Monday, April 14, was a rare day off for the council, but not for Wilson, who spent much of his time in other meetings. Orlando came to press Italy’s claims in the Adriatic once more. Taking his stand on the Fourteen Points, Wilson did not relent in his opposition. “I do not feel at liberty to suggest one basis of peace with Germany and another for peace with Austria,” he stated in a memorandum that he gave to Orlando. Yet he also made an important concession in that memorandum. He said he was willing for Italy to have the South Tirol up to the Brenner Pass, a region populated by German-speaking Austrians. He was violating the same principle that he was upholding in resisting Italy’s demands for Fiume and the Dalmatian coast, something for which he would soon be roundly condemned. Several weeks later, when Baker asked him about the South Tirol, he regretted the move: “I was ignorant of the situation when the decision was made.” He was also tired and wanted to show sympathy toward Italy.35

In the afternoon on April 14, Wilson dealt with the home front of peacemaking. Frank Hitchcock, who had been postmaster general under Taft, came to assure the president of his support. Wilson thanked Hitchcock but told him that Taft and Lowell were objecting to the wording of the Monroe Doctrine amendment; Hitchcock said he would work on them. Meanwhile, House was receiving a visit from Clemenceau, who said he would agree to Wilson’s terms for the protection of France and the west bank of the Rhine: “It was not what he wanted but with the [guarantee] of the United States he thought it sufficient.” It was interesting that Clemenceau chose to tell House first. “Colonel House is practical, I can understand him,” the colonel recorded Clemenceau saying to someone else, “but when I talk with President Wilson, I feel as if I am talking to Jesus Christ.” Clemenceau added, “The Almighty gave us Ten Commandments, but Wilson has given us Fourteen.”36 Despite such cracks, it was clear that the president’s firm stand and possibly his implied threat to withdraw from the conference were what had brought the Tiger of France to heel. This French concession would ease relations between Wilson and Clemenceau during the rest of the conference.

The Council of Four now moved with dispatch through the Saar and Rhineland arrangements. Wilson, Clemenceau, and Balfour, who was substituting temporarily for Lloyd George, felt confident enough to lay plans for inviting the Germans to come to Paris to receive preliminary terms later in the month. Other areas, however, continued to be worrisome: Italy, Russia, eastern Europe, Syria and Mesopotamia, and East Asia. The Japanese were pressing for cession of the German possessions in China that they had conquered and now occupied: the port of Kiaochow and the Shantung Peninsula. The Chinese delegation, led by the young Columbia-educated V. K. Wellington Koo, had already made representations to Lansing and Wilson for the return of those territories. “My sympathies are on the side of China,” Wilson declared in the council on April 15, “and we must not forget that in the future the greatest dangers for the world can arise in the Pacific.” Two days later, he received a visit from Koo and the Chinese delegation, who presented him with an eighty-seven-page memorandum stating their nation’s case for the restoration of Shantung.37

The Chinese were not the president’s only visitors on April 17, which Grayson called “the busiest day which he has put in since he left Washington, having approximately eighteen engagements, which covered every conceivable problem dealing with the Peace situation.” The doctor did not exaggerate. The Big Four did not meet, but Wilson’s foreign visitors that day included officials from Syria, Dalmatia, Albania, Greece, Portugal, Serbia, and Armenia, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, and an English journalist. From home, a delegation of Irish Americans urged the president to push for an independent Ireland, something a group of Democratic senators had also just written to him to advocate. Secretary of War Newton Baker came to lunch and shared his assessment of League support at home, prohibition enforcement, and small matters, such as repainting the White House and the lonesomeness of the sheep on the grounds. When Baker asked how he was handling the workload, Wilson smiled and said, “After all this ocean of talk has rolled over me, 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.”38

Starting on April 19, Orlando and Italy’s foreign minister, Baron Giorgio Sidney Sonnino, argued and re-argued their case for Fiume for six days. “Orlando finally broke down and wept copiously,” Wilson told House. Wilson did not budge, but House suggested to the Italians that Fiume and Dalmatia might be set aside for future negotiations. The suggestion backfired. Ray Stannard Baker noted in his diary, “The rift between the President & Col. House seems to be widening. The Colonel compromises everything away.” Baker thought House had “such immature ideas, not thought out, poorly considered,” and his suggestion “served to fan the flame of Italian nationalism & make it harder for Wilson.” Baker did not present these remarks as Wilson’s views, but it seems certain that he picked them up in the house on la place des États-Unis. Edith later recalled that around this time she had exploded to her husband, “Oh, if Colonel House had only stood firm while you were away none of this would have to be done over. I think he is a perfect jellyfish.” To this, she said he replied, “Well, God made jellyfish, so, as Shakespeare said about a man, therefore to let him pass, and don’t be too hard on House.”39 That sounds like a gentler version of what Baker was writing in his diary.

Wilson got some rest during the Easter weekend. On Saturday night, he and Edith saw a play, and on Sunday afternoon they took a ride in the countryside. The following morning, he stayed in his study to draft a public statement about the Adriatic dispute. Although he repeatedly expressed profound sympathy for Italy’s sacrifices in the war, he asserted that Fiume was necessary as a seaport for “the states of the new Jugo-Slav group.”40 Before he released the statement to the press, he consulted with Clemenceau and Lloyd George, who told him that they felt obliged to stand by their treaty obligations to Italy. He nevertheless issued the statement on April 23. Orlando and Sonnino in turn made good on their earlier privately aired threats to withdraw from the conference, and after an emotional meeting of the council they left Paris the following day. This was the first public break among the leaders at the conference.

The day after the Italians left, what some observers now called the Big Three took up the Shantung question. In the morning, the Japanese delegates made their case, and in the afternoon the Chinese delegates made theirs. To the Japanese, Wilson said there was “a lot of combustible material in China” and warned them against inflaming it. Baron Makino answered that it would be a very grave matter if his country’s claims were not met. To the Chinese, Wilson maintained that he had presented their case forcefully. Koo answered that with regard to the peace commission, his people were “now at the parting of the ways.” After the Chinese left, Wilson admitted to Lloyd George and Clemenceau that he might have to seem to contradict his resistance to Italy’s claims because having Japan join the League was of paramount importance. Lloyd George, who had told the Japanese that he would stand by Britain’s treaty obligations to them, now called this “one of the most unscrupulous proceedings in all history, especially against a gentle and defenseless people.” Wilson agreed but said he did not want a rift with the Japanese.41

Shantung confronted him with the most anguished choice of the whole peace conference. He told Grayson that if he followed “the principles of what is just and right,” the Japanese would refuse to sign the peace treaty. When Baker pointed out to him the similarity between the Adriatic and Shantung, he replied, “[W]hen you lay down a general truth it may cut anywhere,” adding that “he could not see clearly just where his principles applied.” Baker reminded him that public opinion at home and abroad favored China, and Wilson asked, if the Italians and Japanese pull out, “what becomes of the League of Nations?” As Baker put it, “He is at Gethsemane.” On April 30, after wrestling with this dilemma for more than a week and suffering at least one sleepless night, he decided in favor of Japan. He told Baker he knew the decision would be unpopular and that he would “be accused of violating his own principles—but never-the-less he must work for world order & organization against anarchy & a return to the old [unilateralism].”42

Wilson did suffer for this decision. Shantung would hurt his campaign to gain support in America for the treaty and the League more than any other single issue, with the possible exception of Ireland. In the longer run, this decision would open him to the charge that he placed too much faith in the League of Nations. When the preliminary terms of the peace treaty became known two weeks later, critics would maintain that he had given away too much on territorial, colonial, and financial matters in order to gain support for the League. Those charges would be wrong. Shantung offered the sole example of Wilson’s consciously making a concession for the League, and he also decided as he did because of the realistic calculation that he could not force the Japanese out. He did compromise on other matters but, except for this one time, never for the sake of his new institution for maintaining peace.

Unfortunately for Wilson, the Shantung decision overshadowed the unveiling of the final version of the League Covenant on April 28. This document incorporated the revisions intended to appease critics at home: a clearly specified procedure for withdrawal, exemption of the Monroe Doctrine, and the right to declare domestic questions off-limits. In presenting this Covenant to the full conference, the president confined himself to a drab recital of those and a few other changes, and he made some factual slips in discussing them, which caused him to backtrack. Those slips were not like Wilson, nor were his abrupt delivery and his failure to toss out even a morsel of eloquence, as he had done with the Draft Covenant. The omission of eloquence was doubly curious because just the week before, he had said at a Big Three meeting, “The central idea of the League of Nations was that States must support each other even when their interests were not involved. When the League of Nations was formed then there would be established a body of partners covenanted to stand up for each other’s rights.” Some interpreters would later speculate that Wilson’s slip and omissions in presenting the Covenant stemmed from his having suffered a small stroke.43

The beginning of May brought no relief. Although May Day was a holiday in Paris, the Big Three met to discuss some difficult questions. They considered the rights of minorities in eastern Europe, with Wilson expressing concern about Germans and Jews who would be living in Poland. When Lloyd George remarked on Jews’ reported lack of loyalty to Poland, Wilson shot back, “It is the result of a long persecution. The Jews of the United States are good citizens.”44 They also discussed the Italians and the Germans, and Lloyd George’s erratic behavior particularly irked Wilson. All the wrangling wore on him, and Grayson persuaded him not to attend services the next day in the cold, damp Scottish church in Paris. Instead, after sleeping late, he joined Edith, Grayson, and Baker for a long ride in the country and went to bed early.

Wilson needed to be well rested because the inner circle was again about to be the Big Four, and the Germans were coming to receive the preliminary peace terms. Public opinion in Italy appeared to support Orlando and Sonnino’s walkout, and, having said they felt vindicated, they were returning to Paris. The real reason the Italians came back was that they wanted to be present for the appearance of the Germans. How the Germans would react worried Wilson. He admitted to Grayson that the terms were harsh, “but I have striven my level best to make them fair.”

He told Baker, “If I were a German I think I should never sign [the treaty].”45 He tried and failed to get reporters admitted to the session at which they received the terms.

The presentation occurred on May 7, on a beautiful spring afternoon, with chestnut trees and lilacs blooming in the gardens of the Trianon Palace at Versailles; by coincidence, not design, this was the fourth anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania. The German delegation took seats in the middle of a horseshoe arrangement of tables, which they later claimed made them feel like prisoners in the dock. Clemenceau stood and crisply outlined the terms, giving the Germans two weeks to respond. The German foreign minister, Count Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, a slender, haughty Prussian aristocrat, replied, “We know the force of the hatred which confronts us here. … We are required to admit that we alone are war-guilty; such an admission on my lips would be a lie.” This demonstration of defiance made a bad impression, as did the rest of the speech and, especially, Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau’s remaining seated while he spoke. Some observers thought—correctly—that this was a deliberate insult; others noted—also correctly—that he gripped the table tightly and his knees trembled the whole time. Despite the lovely setting, this first encounter between victors and vanquished set an ugly tone for the last phase of peacemaking in Paris.46

Some on the American delegation recoiled at the preliminary terms. Baker called it “a document of retribution to the verge of revenge.” Herbert Hoover was so upset when he read an advance copy early in the morning on May 7 that he went out for a walk, on which he met up with Keynes and Smuts, who reacted the same way he did to the terms. A dozen younger members of the staff, some of whom remembered Wilson’s promises on board the George Washington, resigned in protest. Most kept their disagreements private, but not the irrepressible William Bullitt, who was back from his abortive mission to Moscow and now gave a letter to reporters in which he charged the president with having “consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections and dismemberments—a new century of war.” Some reactions in America echoed those sentiments. The Nation had already accused Wilson of dealing in “intrigue, selfish aggression, and imperialism.” The New Republic had condemned Article X of the Draft Covenant as a pledge “to uphold injustices.” When the preliminary terms were published, The Nation issued a series of we-told-you-so editorials, while The New Republic emblazoned the cover of its May 24 issue with the headline THIS IS NOT PEACE. Those magazines’ reactions did not reflect wider editorial sentiment, most of which approved of these peace terms, but they revealed an erosion of support in quarters where Wilson had formerly enjoyed enthusiastic backing, and their defection would add intellectual firepower to the opponents of the League in the upcoming debate at home.47

Wilson could have anticipated those reactions. He had worried about excessive expectations, and he had largely refrained from appearing to promise a brave new world; yet his wartime rhetoric and moral standing had fed high hopes, and he had played upon those hopes. Baker had tried to forestall disillusionment by urging Wilson to negotiate more openly and take reporters into his confidence. The president had responded not only by pointing to the other leaders’ insistence on secrecy but also by arguing that such delicate matters as the Japanese push for a racial-equality clause could not be discussed in public. He was following the same instinct that had led him to cancel press conferences after the sinking of the Lusitania. Whether greater publicity would have arrested the loss of support from progressives and idealists is an open question, but there was no doubt that Wilson was once more passing up an opportunity to educate the public about his programs and the obstacles he faced—omissions that would hurt him on the domestic front of peacemaking.

Disillusionment with Wilson for infidelity to the Fourteen Points and hopes for a peace of forgiveness would shape future views of what he and the other leaders had wrought at Paris in 1919. Their negative model, and Wilson’s, was the Congress of Vienna—an example of how not to make peace—yet those perfumed aristocrats and reactionaries of the preceding century had crafted a settlement that lasted for many decades. By contrast, the handiwork of these men would crumble in little more than one decade and give way to another world war exactly twenty years later. Their settlement would come to bear the stigma of “the peace that failed.” In the eyes of many future interpreters, much of the blame for the failure would fall on Wilson’s head: he had not prevented the Allies from exacting vengeance and dividing the spoils, and he had compounded these iniquities with lofty rhetoric and excessive reliance on the feeble, doomed instrument of the League of Nations.

Most of Wilson’s detractors forgot how limited and specific most of the Fourteen Points were. They forgot, too, that he had not coined the term self-determination or laid it down as a general principle. His most glaring violations of that line of policy occurred either as a mistake, as with the South Tirol, or as a calculated risk, as with Shantung. Widespread severing of ethnic and linguistic groups from their homelands in Central and eastern Europe came from conditions created by the new states there: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Yugoslav kingdom. Wilson’s preferred solution—to replace the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a federation of autonomous nationalities—might have mitigated some of that splintering and preserved greater stability, but it had become impossible because of factors over which the peacemakers had little or no control. The “acid test,” Russia, was already what Churchill would later call “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” and it should have surprised nobody that the peacemakers merely fumbled with the situation there. The idea of talks with the Bolsheviks, which Wilson initially favored, drew vehement opposition from Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Wilson did not try hard to rebut them, but he did stand firm against schemes for military intervention hatched by Churchill and Foch and the food blockade put forward by Hoover.48

Outside Europe, the mandate system struck many critics as a fig leaf to cover an imperialist grab for colonies. Like Shantung, other former German possessions wound up in the hands of the respective Allied belligerents that had seized them during the war, and those conquerors were not about to give them up. The designation of those territories as mandates under the League was, however, more than empty symbolism. The mandatory powers promised to improve transportation, utilities, sanitation, health care, and education for the indigenous peoples, and they pledged to prepare them for eventual independence. Such a pledge was something that no power besides the United States had yet made regarding its own colonies. The mandate system sufficiently impressed W. E. B. DuBois—who had been in Paris earlier in 1919 organizing the first Pan-African Congress—that he would support the League and the treaty in spite of his own history of bitter disappointment with Wilson. With former parts of the Ottoman Empire, mandates did mainly cloak a division of territory between the British and the French, although Wilson worked to prevent the Allies from carving up Turkey proper, and at times he considered an American mandate in Constantinople and Armenia.49

His decisions on nonterritorial matters such as reparations, disarmament, and the League sprang from his deep-seated preference for dynamic processes over fixed terms. Despite Keynes’s excoriation, leaving amounts and schedules of reparations payments to regular review by an international commission was a reasonable approach. Another economic aspect of the settlement that Keynes would condemn, severing the coalfields of the Saar from the iron deposits of Lorraine, was addressed by the arrangement to keep the Saar and its mines under French administration. Some observers might be disappointed that the peace settlement did not prescribe set reductions of arms on land and sea, but all the peacemakers agreed that the wiser course lay in future negotiations, some of which would bear fruit. In his approach to reparations and disarmament, Wilson was not sweeping problems under the rug or betraying principles. If he had wanted to do those things or if he had really cared only about the League of Nations, he would not have subjected himself to the grueling negotiations among the Big Four.50

Wilson regarded the League as more important than the specific terms of the treaty because he grasped where the core problem in maintaining the peace lay: the defeated must bow to their defeat, and the victors must uphold their victory. This war had left sore losers and disgruntled, divided winners. The Germans’ real complaint was that they had lost the war, and since crushing them was now no longer an option, it was doubtful that gentler terms would have made them more willing to accept their defeat. Conversely, Italy and Japan harbored unsatisfied expansionist urges, and they would switch sides in the next war. Nor were the Big Three of one mind about how to uphold the peace terms. The only way out of this situation lay, Wilson believed, in establishing a new forum for dealing with these problems. In the coming months, he would readily admit that the settlement had flaws that would need mending, but he would argue that only vigilant, constructive engagement by all nations, especially the great powers and most especially the United States, could manage this situation and thereby maintain peace. For him, the sole available path to such engagement lay through the League of Nations.

The pace of negotiations in Paris slackened for a while after presentation of the preliminary terms. On May 8, Wilson accepted a suggestion by Grayson to go to the famous Longchamp racecourse. He also attended his first formal dinner in weeks and gave his first speeches in more than two months. On May 9, at an international gathering attended by dignitaries interested in international law, he showed signs of fatigue as he rambled and inadvertently seemed to insult his formally clad listeners: “And when I think of mankind, I do not always think of well-dressed persons. Most persons are not well-dressed. The heart of the world is under very plain jackets.” The following afternoon, however, to a group of French academics, he spoke crisply and quipped, “[I]f a man is a fool, the best thing is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.”51

While they awaited the Germans’ reply to the preliminary terms, the Big Four turned to other matters, chief among them Italy. Orlando pressed claims not only to the Adriatic coast but also to islands in the Aegean with Greek populations, parts of Turkey, and territories in Africa. Although House continued to believe he could easily resolve things, Wilson remained adamant about not giving in to the Italians. Eastern Europe, particularly the borders of Austria, Hungary, and Poland, likewise demanded their attention, as did Russia. Lloyd George and Clemenceau wanted to reach out to the Whites, the Bolsheviks’ adversaries in the civil war raging there, but Wilson disagreed, telling Grayson the Whites were “a pig in a poke.”52 Over all those discussions hung the question of how the Germans would respond. Their delegation asked for and got a one-week extension, which pushed the deadline to May 28.

Concerns from home also intruded. A delegation of Irish Americans came to Paris and met with Wilson, and Congress demanded his attention. The need to enact appropriations legislation and the prospect of completing the peace treaty impelled him to call the new Republican-controlled Congress into session on May 19. Regretting that for the first time he was not addressing the two houses in person, Wilson sent a message announcing that he hesitated “to venture any opinion or press any recommendation with regard to domestic legislation” and then did just that. He urged passage of legislation to aid labor and help job seekers and maintain taxation along progressive lines. He warned the Republicans not to try to raise the tariff, pleaded for passage of the woman suffrage amendment, and recommended an end to the wartime prohibition on wine and beer. He made only one glancing allusion to foreign policy because, as he told Grayson, “I am leaving my real message until my return home.”53

Wilson did not stick to that resolve. On May 30, Decoration Day, he went to the American military cemetery on a hillside outside Paris at Suresnes, where he appealed to the spirit of these honored dead: “The thing that these men left us … is the great instrument of the League of Nations. The League of Nations is the covenant of governments that these men shall not have died in vain.” He asked the soldiers at the cemetery what their fallen comrades would say to the peacemakers, and he answered: “Be ashamed of the jealousies that divide you.” Echoing the words and spirit of both Luther and Lincoln, he vowed, “Here stand I, consecrated in spirit to the men who were once my comrades and who are now gone, and who have left me under eternal bonds of fidelity.” Baker saw tears in the eyes of people around him and felt them in his own eyes, and he called this Wilson’s greatest speech. It was also the opening gun of his rhetorical campaign on the peacemaking home front.54

At first, his health appeared to be bearing up better. Although the Big Four met as often as before, he made time to take rides with Edith and Grayson, and the doctor persuaded him to go for morning walks. Family visits heartened him too. His daughter Margaret had come earlier, between singing engagements, and Stockton Axson arrived and reportedly added to the spice of after-dinner conversations. Those measures of relief could go only so far. Baker noticed that Wilson looked tired and that he had a facial tic and often could not recall the day’s discussions among the Big Four. The facial tic was probably less serious than Baker thought, but the memory lapses may have stemmed from effects of arteriosclerosis. Grayson, on the other hand, made no comment about his health at this time, and the president clearly rallied his powers for the Decoration Day speech at Suresnes.55

The German foreign minister’s written reply to the preliminary terms on May 29—a day late—touched off the final crisis of the peace conference. Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau charged the victors with reneging on their promised peace of justice and maintained that the exactions of the treaty were more than the German people could bear. This reply reinforced doubts and second thoughts that had been percolating in Paris during the past three weeks. No criticisms carried greater weight than the ones that came from Smuts, who put them in writing to Wilson and Lloyd George. Conveniently overlooking his own part in reparations decisions and colonial issues, the South African denounced those and other provisions and threatened not to sign the treaty. Wilson promised to restudy the treaty, while Lloyd George—who had qualms of his own and was hearing doubts from members of his cabinet—called his delegation together on June 1 to reconsider the terms. Smuts’s impassioned arguments carried the day. The British delegates unanimously instructed the prime minister to seek to soften the terms on German borders and reparations, the Rhineland occupation, and other matters and to propose early membership for Germany in the League.56

Lloyd George tried to prepare the way for his about-face by meeting with Wilson and asking the president to serve as mediator between him and Clemenceau. Wilson would sometimes serve in that capacity in the Big Four during the next two weeks, but he had no intention of playing into Lloyd George’s hands. On June 3, he met for two hours with the entire American delegation to hear their views, which inclined mostly against changes in the treaty and deplored the British loss of nerve. Their stance suited Wilson, who declared, “I have no desire to soften the treaty,” and said about the British, “[I]t makes me a little tired for people to come and say now that they are afraid that the Germans won’t sign, and their fear is based upon things that they insisted upon at the time of the treaty; that makes me very sick.”57

The ensuing debates in English among the Big Three—Orlando attended only occasionally, to discuss Italy’s claims in the Adriatic—pitted Lloyd George against an alternately icy and acerbic Clemenceau, with Wilson considering but rarely favoring changes in the treaty. The one modification that did emerge from these tense discussions was to order a plebiscite to determine whether Upper Silesia would go to Germany or Poland. Why Wilson did not side with Lloyd George is a pertinent question. After all, the prime minister was trying to rewrite the treaty along lines that were closer to the president’s own thinking. Wilson’s resistance to making changes stemmed in part from impatience with Lloyd George’s constant shifts of position and more from his ever-present bane—fatigue.

That fatigue got striking visual confirmation in a portrait painted at this time. An artist commissioned by the British government to paint portraits of leaders at the conference, Sir William Orpen, told House early in June that the president was refusing to sit for him because he did not have time. “What damned rot!” House answered. “He’s got a damned sight more time than I have. What day do you want him to come to sit?” The colonel did arrange four or five half-hour sittings, but his remark gave another indication of his estrangement from Wilson. House’s loss of influence was common knowledge and a topic of gossip among the staff of the American delegation.58 Orpen’s portrait depicts Wilson from the waist up against a light background that makes his long jaw and nose stand out, although his glasses are nearly invisible. In contrast to the Sargent portrait of eighteen months earlier, his face appears less smooth, and lines of age and fatigue are striking. His expression is calm and determined, almost but not quite grim. Wilson did not like this second portrait, but it would become one of the best known and most widely reproduced portraits of him.

Impatient and tired though he was, Wilson held out against revisions in the settlement, and finally, on June 16, after last-minute delays during what Baker called “dull but expectant days,” the Council of Four dispatched the terms, only slightly revised, to Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau and his delegation. The Germans were given a deadline of three days—later extended to a week—to accept the treaty. The interlude offered a chance for Wilson to make a two-day state visit to Belgium. Met at the border by the king and queen, he and Edith spent the first day with the royal couple on a long, often dusty motor ride through some of the most war-ravaged parts of Flanders, viewing the ruins of Ypres and other towns. Crowds once more packed the streets and lined the roads. Children thrust flowers at the First Lady and the queen, who, Edith recalled, sneezed violently because of her allergies. In the evening, a train took them from Bruges to Brussels, where the Wilsons stayed at the royal palace.59

The next day, the Wilsons witnessed more evidence of German destruction, including the ruins of the library at the University of Lou-vain, and they called at the home of Cardinal Mercier, the hero of the occupation, who showed them where he had sheltered wounded and orphaned children during the war. The Belgian trip had especially great emotional impact because accompanying them was Hoover, whose leadership of the Commission for Relief in Belgium from 1914 to 1917 had made him the most beloved American in the country. As on his earlier visits to Britain and Italy, Wilson gave only short speeches and confined himself mainly to praising the part played by his hosts in the war—with one exception. Speaking to the Belgian parliament, he declared, “The League of Nations is the child of this great war for right … and any nation which declines to adhere to this Covenant deliberately turns away from the most telling appeal that has ever been made to its conscience and its manhood.”60 He was aiming those words at America.

The trip did him good, and he needed these newfound good spirits because nearly all signs indicated that the Germans would refuse to accept the peace terms. The government in which Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau served resigned rather than sign the treaty, and the commanders of the German fleet anchored at Scapa Flow, off the Scottish coast, scuttled their ships rather than turn them over to the Allies. The Big Four met at least twice, and sometimes four times, a day to discuss contingency plans if the Germans would not sign the treaty and to deal with eastern Europe, Turkey, and, as usual, Italy and the Adriatic. Finally, on June 23, just two hours before the deadline, a newly formed German government cabled its acceptance. Wilson issued a brief statement commending the treaty for compensating victims of the war and providing security against another war, but he added that its greater work lay ahead, with the League.61

The French took great pride in their arrangements for the signing of the peace treaty. The event was to be an exercise of two qualities at which they excelled—grandeur and revenge. On June 24, Clemenceau took Wilson on a tour of Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, showing the president where he had given his first speech as an officeholder in 1871. That was the year the victors had crowned the first emperor of the newly unified German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors; this grandest room in the palace was where the Germans, now the vanquished, would sign the new peace treaty. To underscore the symbolism, the French arranged for them to sign the treaty on Louis XIV’s council table, the same table on which the Germans had made the French sign the peace treaty after their defeat in 1871.62

The Council of Four continued to meet regularly, mostly in a last, fruitless stab at untangling the Adriatic imbroglio. The main business of Paris, however, was celebration, and Wilson nearly marred the festive mood by refusing to attend a formal dinner given on June 26 by the president of France, but Henry White got him to relent. At the dinner, he saluted the friendship between France and America. Giving measured praise to the work of the conference, he concluded, “As I go away from these scenes, I think I shall realize that I have been present at one of the most vital things that has happened in the history of nations.”63

The signing was to be on June 28: by another coincidence, this was the fifth anniversary of the assassination in Sarajevo that had sparked the crisis that led to the war. The day before, Wilson at last did what Baker had been begging him to do for months: he met for more than an hour with fifty American reporters. The meeting harked back to the easy give-and-take of the press conferences during his first two years in the White House. He gave bantering replies to some questions and conceded about Shantung, “That seemed the best that could be got out of a complicated situation.” He said the treaty was “rough on Germany,” but he also emphasized that it should never be forgotten “that Germany did an unpardonable wrong.” He answered the only query about the League by saying that the question of American forces under its command had never been raised, and he claimed that the treaty adhered to the Fourteen Points “more closely than I had a right to expect.” Baker was delighted and wrote, “I wish he would do this oftener: but he dreads it.” This performance could have helped in informing opinion back home, but like all of his press conferences, it was off the record and served only to enlighten the journalists who were there.64

The appointed day for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles started out overcast but turned sunny and warm by afternoon. Delegates, reporters, photographers, movie cameramen, and spectators holding coveted tickets began to gather in the Hall of Mirrors before two in the afternoon. Of the Big Four, Clemenceau arrived first and shook hands as he made his way to the center seat at the arrangement of tables. Wilson arrived next and jovially made his way through a throng of autograph seekers. Then came the British and the Italian representatives. Taking his place and chatting with people nearby, the president noticed a stir around the entrance as French officers escorted a four-man party of Germans to seats facing the Big Four. Clemenceau stood and spoke briefly, stating that the treaty was ready and the Germans should sign it. After his remarks were translated into English and German, the moment arrived.65

Two members of the new government, Foreign Minister Hermann Müller and Transportation Minister Johannes Bell, went and sat at the Louis XIV table to affix their signatures to the document. “It was as if men were called upon to sign their own death warrants,” Lansing noted. “With pallid faces and trembling hands they wrote their names quickly and were then conducted back to their places.” In the painting he made of the ceremony, Orpen caught the moment as one of the Germans slumped in a chair with an anxious-looking aide hovering beside him while the Big Four and others stared at them. At a signal, cannons on the palace grounds began booming, followed by guns all over France. The victors then came up to sign the treaty, starting with Wilson. “I did not know I was excited until I found my hand trembling when I wrote my name,” he told Lansing. The delegates spent the better part of an hour taking their turn signing while the rest milled around and chatted. The painter Orpen for one found the scene repellent; using a figure of speech he had picked up from soldiers at the front that referred to statesmen by the coats they favored, he wrote later, “All the ‘frocks’ did their tricks to perfection.”66

Not all the victors signed the treaty or did so cheerfully. The seats assigned to the Chinese delegation remained empty; its members refused to sign because they were not allowed to register their reservations about Shantung. Smuts stated his dissatisfaction with some of the clauses regarding Germany but signed because he held hopes for the League of Nations and future cooperation in the rebuilding of Europe. Wilson did not speak at the ceremony, but he issued a brief statement to the press to be released in the United States: “It is a severe treaty in the duties and penalties it imposes upon Germany, but it is severe only because great wrongs done by Germany are to be righted and repaired.” He stressed that it was much more than a peace treaty with Germany: it liberated peoples, abolished the right of conquest, put small nations on an equal footing with great ones, established the League of Nations, and was withal “a great charter for a new order of affairs.”67

After everyone present had signed the treaty, the Big Four walked out onto the terrace for photographs. Then Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau went inside for a final meeting, at which they issued an appeal to Italy to settle the Adriatic dispute. When the three came out into the square in front of the palace, the crowd shouted “Vive Wilson” and rushed forward to shake the president’s hand while women cried out that they just wanted to touch him. The crowd nearly pushed the president into a fountain, and bodyguards had to surround him. The Wilsons drove back through cheering crowds to the house on la place des États-Unis, where they ate a quiet dinner and Lloyd George came over to say a private and effusive farewell. Shortly after nine o’clock, they went to la gare des Invalides for the overnight train to Brest, where the George Washington waited to take them back to America. French dignitaries filled the platform to see them off. “In saying good-bye to the President I am saying good-bye to my best friend,” Clemenceau gushed to Grayson. As a military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the doctor noted, “[W]e steamed slowly out of Paris, the work of seven months finally accomplished.”68

Wilson may have thought that too, but his mind was already on affairs at home. Earlier that day, he had cabled Tumulty about issuing an amnesty for anyone convicted during the war of expressing a dissenting opinion. Tumulty replied that the new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, advised waiting until the president returned. In the evening, House had been among the party at the station, where the two men had what turned out to be their final face-to-face meeting. With unconscious prescience, the colonel recorded in his diary, “My last conversation with the President yesterday was not reassuring.” He urged Wilson to adopt the same conciliatory approach and spirit of compromise that he claimed both of them had used with foreign leaders in Paris. Wilson had replied, “House, I have found one can never get anything in life that is worth while without fighting for it.”69 He knew he had as hard a struggle awaiting him as the one he was leaving behind, and he was girding himself for the home front of peacemaking.

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