PART I
THESIS: THE SOCIETY OF NATION-STATES DEVELOPED A CONSTITUTION THAT ATTEMPTED TO TREAT STATES AS IF THEY WERE INDIVIDUALS IN A POLITICAL SOCIETY OF EQUAL, AUTONOMOUS, RIGHTS-BEARING CITIZENS.
In the society of nation-states, the most important right of a nation was the right of self-determination. This, however, posed a conundrum for that society: given the interpenetration of national peoples in multiethnic states, when did a nation get its own state? Was it when a majority of the people of the state agreed, or when a majority of a national group—which was usually a minority of the persons in the state as a whole—demanded it? And when one national group held power, what were the limits on its treatment of other national groups (“minorities” within the nation-state), given that one purpose of the nation-state order was to use law in furtherance of the cultural and moral values of the dominant national group? Confusion arising from this conundrum led to a diffusion of international responsibility, culminating in the Third Yugoslav War in Bosnia, which finally discredited the legitimacy of a society of states built on this constitutional order.
Departure
(Southampton Docks: October, 1899)
While the far farewell music thins and fails,
And the broad bottoms rip the bearing brine—
All smalling slowly to the gray sea-line—
And each significant red smoke-shaft pales,
Keen sense of severance everywhere prevails,
Which shapes the late long tramp of mounting men
To seeming words that ask and ask again:
“How long, O striving Teutons, Slavs and Gaels
Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand? —
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”
—Thomas Hardy
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ONE AFTERNOON in the mild winter of 1991, several trustees of the university sat waiting in a Victorian parlor at Princeton. The parlor was on the second floor of “Prospect,” the Italianate mansion on campus that formerly housed the university's presidents, until in the 1970s proximity to students became more dismaying than endearing.
In this room there were two paintings: over the fireplace a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States, tenth president of Princeton, the occupant of Prospect at the turn of the century. On the adjacent wall another oil portrait hung, apparently executed at about the same time by the same artist. Its subject had a singular face, quite unlike the handsome Presbyterian features of Wilson. This other man had more delicate, less open features: a carefully clipped white mustache, rather cold gray eyes, a small chin above a high, starched white collar. He wore a broad-brimmed buff-colored hat and a long pale duster. If Wilson's face was idealistic, virile, and Miltonian, this man's face was quiet, unflappable, the face of a rather shrewd baronet.
He had not matriculated at Princeton. Nor had he been a professor or university figure. The trustees, bored by waiting, wondered who he was. No one knew: not the editor-in-chief of Time magazine, nor the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, nor the U.S. Senator, nor the university president, a polymath whose interests were almost as broad as the curriculum. Someone read the nameplate, “E. M. House,” and then some of the party recalled. “Colonel” House, as he was known to his contemporaries, had been the most famous American in the world in 1919, excepting only his ally and friend Woodrow Wilson. This fame was the result of a friendship unique in twentieth century American political history, for Wilson had devolved on the silent and mysterious Colonel the extensive powers of the U.S. presidency, though House never held any governmental office. His elusive figure was for seven years the alter ego of the president. House was often sent on missions to foreign governments though he was given no precise instructions save the president's assurance that he knew House would “do the right thing.” House bypassed the Department of State entirely and communicated directly with Wilson by a private secret code. Indeed the two men seemed always to communicate with one another in a kind of mutual but exclusive sympathy. Yet in 1919 the two parted in Paris, never to meet again: Wilson to return to the defeat of the League of Nations and the rejection of American international involvement, of which House was the principal architect; House ultimately to vanish into the obscurity with which he had assiduously cloaked his achievements. House's story is the story of how America moved from being a marginal actor on the world scene to attempting to remake that scene on the basis of American consti-tutional ideas.
Edward Mandell House was born in Houston, Texas, on July 26,1858. His father had come from England to make his fortune, first to New Orleans and then to Texas, where he fought in the Revolution. During the Civil War he was a blockade runner and there clings about Thomas House something of the Rhett Butler. Subsequently House became one of the leading citizens of Texas, a wealthy merchant, banker, and landowner. His son Edward idealized the West and its cowboy culture but he was small and after a childhood accident, rather frail. He was sent to Bath, England, for school and later to the Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut, to prepare for Yale. At Hopkins, House's roommate and closest friend was Oliver Morton (the son of Senator Morton of Indiana, Republican candidate for the nomination for president in 1876). When the nomination went to Hayes and the election resulted in a contested outcome, Senator Morton managed the Republican forces that won the White House. This was a constitutionally fraught period—in which the election was thrown into the House as the Constitution properly provides (they seemed to know better how to handle things in those days). The two teenage boys spent their time in Washington attending the sessions of the Electoral Commission on which Senator Morton was serving. This experience was a turning point for House. He became utterly absorbed by politics and he saw, he said later, that the system was actually run by a very few players in Washington.*
One of the boys failed his entrance exam to Yale; the two ended up at Cornell, where House remained until the beginning of his third year, when he left school to care for his father.
After Thomas House's death Edward married and went for a year-long honeymoon in Europe. His father had left him an independent income sufficient to ensure that he need never work, and so in 1885 he moved to Austin, the state capital, to bring himself closer to the political scene. As a youth, House had been brought close to national power, close enough to know that he wanted to surround himself with that distinctive, almost palpable aura of great things possible and great things attempted; but also close enough to realize how unlike the rest of the world such an environment is, and thus how rare and how very hard to achieve. He had been an observer on the national stage by chance. Could he now be a participant, by design?
Soon he had made his residence, invariably open to politicians, lobbyists, and journalists, into a focal point of the social and political life of the small city. House pinned his hopes on the key role Texas would play in the progressive wing of the Democratic party. For ten years, he studied Texas politics, and then in 1892 he ran the campaign of the progressive governor James Hogg.
Hogg was opposed by a coalition of railroad and corporate interests; every daily newspaper in the state was against him. When, despite this, he was re-elected, House's reputation as a campaign manager was assured. Thereafter he ran successful campaigns for the governorship in 1894, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1902, and 1904, becoming so powerful that when one incumbent attempted to stay on for another term in spite of House's advice, the sitting governor was turned out. Indeed, in each of these elections, House opposed potent political machines that he managed to overcome.
One aspect of his success is important to note. Texas at this time, like all the formerly Confederate states, was thoroughly committed to the Democratic Party. The Republicans were so identified with Reconstruction and the corrupt governments of that period that no legislature or gubernatorial office in the South was held by them for almost a century after the Civil War. This meant that once he had won the nomination (a process from which African American voters were effectively excluded), the Democratic candidate would inevitably win the general election. The successful nominee was chosen at a convention of delegates picked in local primary elections. In this way the state system actually mirrored the federal system, within which presidential candidates were elected by a college chosen on the basis of electoral victories in the states. Thus it had been possible for Tilden to win the popular vote nationwide in the 1876 election for the presidency but fail to achieve a majority in the electoral college. House's strategy of abandoning contests in constituencies that were committed to his opponents and focusing entirely on marginal contests was perfected in the Texas gubernatorial primary campaigns and would be the blueprint for electing Wilson to the presidency.
Like Theodore Roosevelt, House was attempting to put into place the policies that are the basic building blocks of the nation-state (less than a half century old at that point) in which it is assumed that the state's first duty is to benefit the mass of its people. In this his policies are to be distinguished from the old state-nation programs of the Southern Bourbons of the immediate postwar era, for this group conceived the purpose of the nation to be to serve the goals—moral, economic, or cultural—of the American state. What makes House interesting to us, however, is that he proposed an especially American constitutional vision of the nation-state to be the basis for the society of nation-states, an extrapolation that is only now basically complete just as it is about to become outmoded.
By 1908 House had grown thoroughly tired of his role in Texas politics. He had rebuffed overtures to run for governor himself in 1902 and for twelve years had bided his time as the Populist movement washed across the Democratic party. The nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and the adoption of a free silver monetary platform had doomed the Democratic party to minority status in the country at large. House waited.
In 1899 Bryan had sought a winter location in the South where he might bring his daughter, who had been ill. Hogg and House arranged for the Bryans to take a house virtually on the grounds of the House estate. As he did with so many politicians of this era, House captivated his guest with his mild manners and tough politics. Bryan was defeated for the U.S. presidency in 1900 and again in 1908, but his relationship with House grew stronger, despite the fact that House believed the Democrats had to be cleansed of the Bryan financial heresies before the party could regain the White House. Throughout this period, House cultivated the Bryans.
House had been spending his summers for some years in Magnolia, Massachusetts. Now he began spending more time in New York and, in 1910, came east to find a candidate for the presidency. Bryan had suggested Mayor Gaynor of New York City and so a dinner was arranged at the Lotos Club. But an embarrassing miscommunication between the two men involving a visit to Texas removed Gaynor from House's list.
He had decided that the nominee could not come from the South; that he must be an Eastern governor who would attract the Western vote by his liberalism. The new governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, had been touted to House by the editor of Lifemagazine. House began studying the speeches of the former university president, who was holding his first political office following a very public defeat at the hands of the Princeton trustees. Wilson had no political record and thus started with no political enemies; his troubles at Princeton had given him a national reputation as an opponent of aristocratic privilege. House went back to Texas having become convinced that he had found the right man.
Throughout the winter of 1910 – 1911 he began lining up political allies behind a Wilson candidacy. House returned to New York, where it was arranged that Governor Wilson would call on him at the Hotel Gotham.
Wilson was aware of House, because the latter—working through former Texas governor Charles Culberson, who was now a United States Senator—had skillfully deflected attacks on Wilson's party regularity that had threatened to end his candidacy even before it got off the ground. Wilson had been impressed by his reception at the time of an address to the Texas legislature, also orchestrated by House. The two had never met, however, and Wilson knew nothing of House's relationship with Bryan.
Wilson and House met in House's small hotel room on November 24, 1911, agreed to have dinner a few days later, and continued to meet alone at the Gotham as long as House remained in New York. House later wrote:
The first hour we spent together proved to each of us that there was a sound basis for a fast friendship. We found ourselves in such complete sympathy, in so many ways, that we soon learned to know what each was thinking without either having expressed himself. A few weeks after we met and after we had exchanged confidences which men usually do not exchange except after years of friendship, I asked him if he realized we had only known one another for so short a time. He replied, “My dear friend, we have known one another always.” And I think this is true.2
The next day House wrote his brother-in-law, Sidney Mezes, who was at the time the president of the University of Texas, “Never before have I found both the man and the opportunity.” That same week House wrote Culberson, “[t]he more I see of Governor Wilson the better I like him, and I think he is going to be a man one can advise with some degree of satisfaction. This, you know, you could never do with Mr. Bryan.”3
As if to test this proposition, House urged Wilson to attack the tariff and make free trade a centerpiece of his speeches. He had D. F. Houston, formerly the president of the University of Texas, at that time the chancellor of the University of Washington, come to New York to brief Wilson on tariff policy. Afterwards Houston wrote, “I can't tell you how much I enjoyed my visit with House… He has a vision. I should like to make him Dictator for a while.” Wilson did refocus his campaign on tariff reduction. Despite his reputation in subsequent years, however, Wilson was no visionary; rather, he was a quick study of other men's ideas, an eloquent and passionate advocate, a sensitive and gifted performer.
In addition to positioning Wilson on the national stage, House had two crucial tactical objectives designed to win the Democratic nomination: to bring Bryan on board and to secure the Texas delegation. Neither would be easy: in a letter to a Princeton trustee Wilson had written, “Would that we could do something at once dignified and effective to knock Mr. Bryan once [and] for all into a cocked hat,” and this letter had been leaked to the press by Wilson's opponents.
For months House had been nurturing Bryan's perception of Wilson, however. He pictured Wilson as opposed by the men who had opposed Bryan, and emphasized that the Hearst papers, who had made Bryan an object of ridicule for years, were for Champ Clark, the other liberal in the race and the other possible beneficiary of a Bryan endorsement. House depicted, accurately, the hostility Wall Street felt for Wilson and passed on stories to the populist Bryan that large slush funds were being collected to defeat Wilson. He urged Bryan's presence at a Washington banquet where Wilson praised Bryan, and he carefully maintained a separate correspondence with Mrs. Bryan, who was inclined toward the scholarly Wilson in preference to the professional politician, Clark. By June 7, he could write Wilson:
Do you recall what I told you concerning the conversation I had with Mrs. B? I have a letter this morning from her containing this most significant sentence, “I found Mr. B well and quite in accord with the talk we had [that Clark was unacceptable].” It encourages me to believe that Mr. Clark will never receive that influence and that you will.4
In Texas the governor and the chairman of the Democratic State Executive Committee—and thirty of its thirty-one members—were opposed to Wilson. This was in December of 1911; by April of 1912 House had rounded up all of the Texas delegates to the convention for Wilson. These delegates, under House's tight control, were the key to his strategy. Nomination for the presidency at this time required a two-thirds vote at the convention. Wilson couldn't hope to go in with anything like this number, so House sought pledges from delegates committed to the front-runners for the first few ballots that these delegates would vote for Wilson if their candidates faltered. By the time of the convention, Wilson's forces had lined up commitments from delegates committed to candidates other than the leading front-runner, adding up to more than a third of the total number of delegates. This meant that the leading contender—Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House—could not win the nomination.
On June 20 House wrote Wilson from the Massachusetts shore expressing his regret that he could not be at the convention; he was, he said, “physically unequal to the effort” and he was leaving for two months in Europe. “However,” he wrote, if “Clark's strength crumbles on the second and third ballot—which I hope may be the case—you will be nominated forthwith.”
It was a near run thing. Clark almost got the two-thirds vote but eventually crested just short; the Texas delegates held firm. After numerous ballots that Clark led but could not win, those votes pledged to other candidates began to drift toward Wilson. In desperation the New York delegation, dominated by the Tammany Hall machine, attacked Wilson, which had the unintended effect of bringing Bryan onto the field with a Wilson endorsement. Bryan's intervention was decisive and Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot.
The United States had been governed by the Republicans since 1860, with the solitary exception of the Cleveland presidencies. It was a Republican country. The general election of 1912, however, would be dominated by the split in the Republican party between former President Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, President William H. Taft. House reasoned that Roosevel's independent campaign would make him the lightning rod for conservative public opinion. Not only would Roosevelt cripple the Republican nominee by splitting the vote—this much was obvious to many—but he would, in House's view, legitimate the other progressive in the race, Woodrow Wilson, and make him the candidate of those who above all did not want to see a return of Roosevelt to the White House. The margin of Wilson's victory would be provided by lukewarm Taft supporters reacting to the ferocity of Roosevelt's attacks. So strong was this conviction that House did not bother to cut short his European tour and returned only at the end of the summer.
Then in October, only two weeks before the election, the country was stunned to learn that a would-be assassin had shot Roosevelt while the former president was campaigning. House immediately telephoned Wilson and persuaded him to cancel all further speaking engagements until Roosevelt recovered. Overruling the campaign committee, after some hesitation while House pressed for an immediate decision, Wilson abandoned his speaking tour for the balance of the campaign. House's appeal to Wilson's chivalry, coupled as it was with the shrewd insight of the true professional on whom Wilson could rely blindly, yielded an important public relations victory for the candidate at a crucial time. When the election returns came in on November 5, Wilson, though failing to gain a majority in the popular vote, had won an overwhelming victory in the electoral college, bringing with him large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. House immediately began planning to push through the legislative program to which he had long been committed: tariff reform, a Federal Reserve (opposed by both Wilson and Bryan), the federal income tax, and antitrust measures.
Before assuming the presidency, however, Wilson had to fill his cabinet. He had never held national office, never worked in Washington; indeed his only experience of politics was his single term as governor of New Jersey. His circle of experienced political office holders and administrators was limited. House persuaded Wilson to make Bryan secretary of state, on the grounds that this would prevent Bryan from opposing the Wilsonian legislative program. House himself resolutely refused to take any office—Wilson asked him to take any cabinet position save that to be offered Bryan—and urged instead that Wilson give Congressional leaders the largest say in appointments.
This accords with House's consistent counsel to Wilson during the latter's presidency: he repeatedly urged Wilson to pay more attention to congressional leaders, to give them a larger role in policy matters. Wilson, however, leavened the natural egocentricity of a public performer with the intellectual's contempt for politicians: of one senator he said that he “is the most comprehensively ignorant man I have ever met.” Asked by someone whether he didn't think a particular statesman the “most selfish man in America,” Wilson demurred, saying only, “I'm sorry but I am already committed to Senator ___.”5 When House did induce Wilson to invite members of Congress to the White House, they were dismayed never to be offered any alcohol to drink and not to be permitted to smoke.
House refused any appointment for himself because he knew that if he held administrative office he would be forced to take decisions that would, inevitably, be in advance of and occasionally at variance with the opinions of his chief. So long as he had no responsibility for making specific deci-sions he could defer to the president in conversation, avoiding committing himself until he and the president had come to mutual agreement. This freedom allowed him to be an ideal counselor, able to stimulate or soothe as required but never to be found in opposition once the president made up his mind. Moreover, House wanted the scope of the freelance, unconfined to any departmental duties. The historian Robert Hildebrand has written that:
House's talents complemented Wilson perfectly. The president's greatest skills were rhetorical, House's were political… House willingly shouldered the burdens of the presidency that Wilson found most odious, making himself into a much-needed buffer between the president and the everyday world of politics. Above all, House was trustworthy; the value of both his advice and his friendship depended upon his complete lack of self-interest, which inspired Wilson's confidence and liberated his facility for emotional attachment.6
House had become Wilson's “man of confidence”: anyone who wanted an appointment, who wished a change in policy, who sought a favor from the president, went to House. When the cabinet was complete, in addition to Bryan, two of House's closest associates from Texas—Burleson and Houston—were postmaster general and secretary of agriculture, while Gregory, a third friend from Austin, ultimately replaced McReynolds as attorney general. “Mr. House is my second personality,” Wilson replied when asked about his friend. “He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I would do just as he suggested… If anyone thinks he is reflecting my opinion by whatever action he takes, they are welcome to the conclusion.”7
House's dream had been realized. But there was far more to this dream than mere access to power.
Immediately after the election of 1912 a novel entitled Philip Dru: Administrator was published in New York. This novel was dedicated to “the unhappy many who have lived and died lacking opportunity because, in the starting, the world-wide social structure was wrongly begun.”
The novel tells the story of a young West Point graduate, Philip Dru, who is so moved by a public vision of the common good transcending the selfish demands of interest groups that he chivalrously champions the needs and hopes of the great mass of persons. It is a romantic novel, but Dru is far from a purely romantic figure: he is described as disappointing to look at, a “man of medium height, slender but toughly built and with a strong but homely face.” He is taciturn in the extreme and never shares his plans. While in college his interest in politics is aroused by his connection to his roommate's family, who are influential members of New York financial and political circles. After leaving the army—though invalided he refuses a pension—Dru achieves instant fame when he wins a nationwide prize for solving a military problem. He uses this celebrity to become a syndicated writer, exposing the injustices of society and contributing proposals for their amelioration.
Unknown to Dru or the general public, a talented but corrupt political manipulator, Senator Selwyn, has conspired with the boss of the Credit Trust, John Thor, to control the government through the judicious use of a $10,000,000 slush fund. With the election of a few senators and an apparently progressive president who is his creature, Selwyn effectively delivers the federal government to the gilded plutocracy that has supplied the fund. A neglected dictograph, however, discloses a conversation between Selwyn and Thor that reveals the entire scheme. When leaked to the press, a recall of the president is demanded, and eventually a new civil war breaks out in the West in revulsion at these revelations. Dru becomes a leader in this rebellion and ultimately its general. After winning a bloody victory in the battle for the Midwest, he marches on Washington, forces the government—now overtly in the hands of Selwyn—to surrender peaceably and seizes authority. He then proceeds to rule by decree, successively reforming the constitutional structure along more parliamentary lines, ending lifetime tenure for federal judges, giving the states identical and much subordinated constitutions, putting into place basic laws to protect union organizing and provide safe conditions of labor, and requiring government and labor representatives on corporate boards of directors. Dru institutes a graduated income tax and a federal inheritance tax; formulates a new banking law providing for a convertible currency administered by a federal central bank; introduces the corporate income tax, old-age pensions and unemployment insurance; abolishes tariff protection; and invigorates trust-busting. His reforms accomplished, he quits office, refuses to run in the elections he has organized, marries the love interest of the novel, and, quite literally, sails into the sunset to unknown destinations.
Philip Dru was written in the weeks before the Baltimore convention and published just after the election. “John Thor” was obviously a portrait of the financier J. P. Morgan; “Senator Selwyn” was just as obviously patterned on Senator Mark Hanna, the Ohio political boss who had engineered the election of McKinley. All this the reviewers and newspapers duly noted. But who was the author?
Philip Dru: Administrator was published with nothing to indicate the author's name. “Who Wrote ‘Philip Dru‘?” read an advertisement in the New York Times. “A forecast of the government of the United States after the Revolution…. [T]he story of the reforms he initiates is told well by one who knows politics from the inside.” The publisher's prospectus, however, listed the author only as “Anonymous.” “There will be no attempt to make capital out of this anonymity,” the press release read. “The fact is simply that it would be uncomfortable and unpleasant for the author to have his name known.”8
The press release alluded to the sophistication of the author, in contrast to “most of the utopian, forecast, prophecy and reform novels that… are written by men who have little experience in the world of practical affairs,”9 and this theme was picked up by the early reviews. The Portland Evening Telegram, for example, concluded:
Although the name of the author of this book is withheld from the public, the reader can readily judge that whoever wrote the novel knows something of the “big business” of the country and the great forces which control the Nation's policies.10
The Dallas Morning News speculated that the author was “a man of great wealth, fine ideas and a desire to be of use in the world.”11 Others were not so sure. The Hartford paper wrote, “Somehow [this plea for anonymity] strikes one as weak and a suspicion arises as to this [author]. The political boss who, concealing his name, ‘tells all he knows,’ is pretty sure to tell a great deal more than he knows.”12 Similarly the Trenton newspaper suggested that “a lack of knowledge of the author offers doubt as to this authority.”13
Generally, however, the press was enthralled. “Who wrote Philip Dru?” was the lead in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. “Men have endeavored to guess the author, but the fact that the latter makes no pretense to being a man of letters adds to the difficulty.”14The Los Angeles Times wrote in February, that the “authorship of Philip Dru still remains a puzzle.”15 The Cincinnati Inquirer suggested, “Is the writer by any chance Bryan himself”16 but the New York Times retorted that the “style, with its slight rhetorical touch may well give rise to such a supposition but the schemes suggested for governmental benefit” do not.17 The Nashville Tennessean proposed that “[a] strenuous person, brave and speechful, had a finger in the Philip Dru: Administrator pie,” alluding to former president Theodore Roosevelt, the advocate of “the strenuous life,” but to this suggestion the Los Angeles Times retorted that “if [Colonel Roosevelt] were trying his hand at fiction whatever its nature the world would not long have been left in doubt of it,”18 and a Philadelphia paper concurred: “Surely the personage referred to has not accustomed his public to anonymity, and to see in [Theodore Roosevelt] a retiring or timid author requires a flight of imagination of which few will be found capable.”19
Some papers hinted darkly at more sinister reasons for anonymity: “Even a casual survey of his pages will convince the reader that there are very good grounds for secrecy, for the plot hovers perilously near to revolutionary doctrines…”20 All were curious: “If one wants to preach his political creed through a novel, well and good. But who is the author?”21 In March the Los Angeles Times could report that, according “to reliable sources, [Philip Dru] has been read by… the President and at least three members of his Cabinet” and that suggestions that Roosevelt or Bryan had written the book were incorrect; however, the Times went on, “it is unlikely that the writer's identity will be revealed.”22
Few reviewers proposed that the book had much in the way of novelistic merit. “As a work of fiction the book is… stilted and often absurd,”23 one wrote. Walter Lippmann concluded:
Now if the author is really a man of affairs, this is an extraordinarily interesting book. It shows how utterly juvenile a great man can be. If he is really an “insider” then we who are on the outside have very little to learn. If he is really an example of the far-seeing public man, then, in all sincerity, I say, God help this sunny land. The imagination is that of a romantic boy of 14 who dreams of what he would do if he had supreme power and nobody objected.24
The writing in Philip Dru is stilted, and its hero's expressions of chivalry do sound adolescent in parts. It is unlikely, however, that Lippmann had so little to learn from its author. For by the election of 1916 the following measures dreamt of by Dru had been adopted by the Congress and signed into law: the graduated income tax; a federal inheritance tax; the Federal Trade Commission; the Glass-Owen banking act; the parcel post; a maximum-working-hour law; a significant reduction in the tariff; the creation of a Federal Reserve Bank. If nothing else, the author had proved to be a political prophet. Lane, the secretary of the interior, wrote, “All that book has said should be comes about… The President comes to Philip Dru in the end.”25 One measure proposed by Philip Dru that had not been brought into being, and to which Lippmann may have most strongly objected, was the creation of a world federation of states bound to accept arbitration in lieu of force and subordinated to international rules based on “the Anglo-Saxon” rule of law.
Wilson believed, as Dru argued, that special interests had to be excluded from government because by their nature their point of view was selfish; that government must be ruled by a spirit of charity rather than the spirit of ruthless efficiency; and that the time had come when the State was responsible for reconciling the differences among classes, sexes, the economically, physically, or mentally strong and the weak, rather than exploiting those differences for the aggregated good of the State. Like House, Wilson had come of age in the defeated South and the two men shared a lack of faith in the discarded model of the state-nation that had collapsed. But Wilson was more like Dru in that he disdained political methods; in fact that was the principal reason he relied so heavily on House. House, ironically, had a large measure of the Selwyn in him—this made him valuable to Wilson—and this difference in attitude toward the world would ultimately be felt in the Versailles negotiations that ended their friendship and their political alliance. Dru could rule by decree. He did not need to court Congress or the interest groups that elected congressmen. Dru could conquer recalcitrant foreign countries; he did not need to parley with them. Above all, Dru did not need to compromise and thus had disdain for it. He sought a spiritual transformation of the society as the basis for a new politics. Compromise was certain to entrench the old ethos; only a constitutional metamorphosis could change it, and create a structure that would embody and reflect a new ethos.
But for our purposes, the most interesting aspect of Philip Dru is its international focus, and the extrapolation to the international arena of American domestic constitutional ideas of federalism and legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed.
The novel depicts a United States that, having conquered Mexico, allows it to develop its own constitutional institutions sheltered by an American military and economic umbrella. All customs duties between the two countries are abolished and Mexico retains her armed forces, flying the American flag alongside its own. Using this loose model, Mexico then amalgamates with the states of Central America into one government, though separate states are maintained.
Under Dru the United States absorbs Canada, undertakes with Great Britain to protect the freedom of the seas, and negotiates a world federation committed to the maintenance of peace. Much of this is the standard utopian fare of the early part of the twentieth century; what is more intriguing about this dream-prophecy is its peculiar relation to the nation-state. States are to assume, vis-à-vis the international order, a role similar to that which the citizen plays in the domestic order. A constitution is envisaged that will govern the society of states, as domestic constitutions govern individual states. Each state is entitled to equality (in contrast to the great-power hierarchies of the imperial state-nations) as each sits within a kind of relaxed federalism, without “internal”—that is, international—tariffs or economic barriers. New states are encouraged to develop along their own cultural lines by means of constitutional systems of popular representation and national self-determination.
In his illuminating and thoughtful book On the Law of Nations, former senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan expresses the idea
associated primarily with Woodrow Wilson… of a world ruled by law. It is probably fair to say that at the turn of the 20th century, most statesmen in the West expected such a future for the World. It was part of the prevailing optimism of that time, closely associated with the confident expectation that liberal democracy—with its great emphasis on law as the arbiter of relations among citizens of equal rights—would become a near universal form of government.26
Philip Dru takes this expectation about the individual state and externalizes it to the society of states as a whole. When we speak of the New World Order today, it is the World, not the Order, that is new. The collapse of the Soviet empire and of European communism has made this a New World. But the order, as Moynihan points out, is Woodrow Wilson's.
Or is it? For at some point Wilson had to be persuaded to abandon the aloof, chaste isolationism with which he entered the White House and to adopt the broad internationalism with which his name is associated in the historical consciousness. We should remind ourselves that neither the tradition of the Democratic Party nor Wilson's background suggested any interest in other than domestic matters. The Democratic platform of 1912 touched on foreign affairs only in a single reference to the Philippines, and Wilson, in his first inaugural address, confined himself entirely to questions of social and industrial domestic reform. Yet by 1917 Wilson had gone to Congress and stated:
We have seen the last of neutrality. We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrongs done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among individual citizens of civilized states.27
Wilson was not persuaded by a sentimental novel to abandon the convictions of a lifetime. What had happened? And what relation do those events have to do with the larger story of the development of a society of nation-states, a society within which a civil war was fought from 1914 to 1990?
After the hard winter of 1912 – 13, during which Colonel House devoted himself entirely to currency and banking reform and the achievement of the legislative measures described above, he went to Europe on his customary annual trip. He carried with him letters of introduction from the president authorizing House to mediate a dispute between the United States and Great Britain over the Panama Canal. According to the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty, all states were to pay equal fees for the use of the canal, but in a statute, the Panama Canal Act, Congress had directed that the United States be exempted from paying any tolls and this, according to U.S. law, superseded the treaty. Great Britain protested, but there was little the international community or the U.S. president could do.
At the same time, a rift had opened up between the United States and the United Kingdom over Mexican policy. The murder of the reformer-democrat Francisco Madero had horrified Wilson. Madero's successor, his enemy General Huerta, had not been recognized by Washington. London, on the other hand, was only too willing to settle for any end to the chaos that had plagued Mexico since the beginning of the revolution and believed that in Huerta they had a man “with whom we can do business.” The end result of House's dialogue with Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, was an agreement by the British to withdraw support for Huerta in exchange for American efforts to repeal the Panama Canal Act.28 More important, House began a friendship with Grey that was to have historic consequences.
It had long been House's conviction that the Americans were uniquely suited to bringing about a period of détente, and even cooperation, between the British and the Germans. During a lunch with the German ambassador in Washington before House's departure for Europe, he had proposed that a sympathetic understanding between England, Germany, and the United States would be beneficial to all concerned. In his diary, House wrote that he told the German ambassador how
together I thought they would be able to wield an influence for good throughout the world. They could ensure peace and the proper development of the waste places, besides maintaining an open door and equal opportunity to every one everywhere.29
House discussed this plan with the American ambassador to London during his summer visit to Europe in 1913. The basic scheme was to organize a system of arms reduction, followed by cooperative efforts to develop the hitherto undeveloped regions of the world, 30 diverting competitive energies into work for the benefit of both the developed and the undeveloped world. House waited, however, before presenting the plan to Grey.
Sir Edward Grey had become foreign secretary in 1905. His appointment was not in the Lansdowne-Salisbury tradition of great wealth and aesthetic or intellectual sophistication. Indeed he had been sent down from Oxford for idleness, spoke no German and little French, and during his first nine years as foreign minister did not once go abroad. Grey vastly preferred the company of the wildfowl on his country estate to that of diplomats and, possibly, to human interaction generally. His shyness, deep sense of honor, and lay evangelical background suggest comparison with Woodrow Wilson, and like Wilson, Grey also took an instant and deeply affectionate liking to Colonel House. Indeed Grey's biographer, G. M. Trevelyan, concluded that Grey's relations with House were his greatest personal contribution to the policy that won the war and founded the League of Nations.31
Grey's policy until the outbreak of war was founded on four principles: (1) to maintain the entente developed with Britain's two ancient enemies—by Lansdowne in 1904 with France, and by Grey himself in 1907 with Russia; (2) to ensure that neither of these friendly relationships, however, slipped into an alliance that would close the door to an amicable relationship with Germany; (3) to protect the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom; and (4) to resurrect the Concert of Europe in order to guarantee European security against aggression in Europe. He pursued these objectives with courage and dexterity, but, as will be recalled from Book I, the pursuit of peace was doomed to fail. Germany, a protofascist nation-state, confronted France and Britain, two parliamentary state-nations, in a struggle to determine the grounds of legitimacy of the European state itself. There could be no Concert of Europe—the state-nation alliance of great powers—because Germany, a great power whose participation was crucial to any scheme of crisis management, was determined to destroy that Concert. Germany was too dynamic to intimidate, too ambitious to cooperate with. Inevitably, what began as an entente with France and Russia became an alliance once Germany determined on war through Belgium, whose territorial integrity was a British vital interest of long standing. German indifference to the creation of such an alliance against her is a measure of her determination to destroy the prevailing system; indeed, had Germany not attacked France through Belgium (in order to outflank French fortifications), it is unlikely that England would have intervened.
All this, however, was still to come when House contacted Grey's personal secretary in November 1913 to propose that House come to Europe on a mission of reconciliation. He hoped to achieve lower levels of armaments among the great powers in order to avert a potentially cataclysmic crisis. After wintering in Austin, House asked for Wilson's blessing for this mission and, receiving it, set out for Germany on May 16, 1914; he would be gone for two months.
On his arrival in Berlin, House was shocked and alarmed. “The situation is extraordinary,” he wrote Wilson. “It is militarism run stark mad. Unless [we take the initiative] there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it.” After lengthy interviews with a hostile von Tirpitz, the architect of German naval growth, and a somewhat more sympathetic von Moltke—the nephew of the figure discussed in Book I— House was entertained by the kaiser. For over half an hour they spoke alone, with the Kaiser presenting a classic ethno-national, fascist argument: the Russians, as Slavs, and the French, as Latins, would never be suitable allies for the English. Only an English, American, and German alliance, based on their common Anglo-Saxon racial heritage, would withstand the challenges of the new century. German political strength, the kaiser said, lay in being always prepared for war at a second's notice.32
House correctly saw that Germany lived in an excited state of fear, something the other European powers, including Austria, neglected to appreciate. From Berlin, House went to Paris, where politics was paralyzed by a cabinet crisis and the shooting of an influential newspaper editor by the mistress of a disgraced minister. After a few fruitless days, House, who fully appreciated the impact of local politics on the ability of a government to focus its attention on international issues, simply retired to London. There he lunched with Grey and told him of his discussions with the kaiser. House proposed that Grey meet with the kaiser during a regatta at Kiel, but Grey demurred on the ground that the French and Russians would be alarmed. When House suggested that Germany be permitted to aid in the development of Persia, Grey replied that it might be a good move in order to play Germany against Russia. It is clear that, at this point at any rate, Grey and House are speaking on the basis of two completely different state “paradigms,” Grey for the imperial state-nation and the balance of power on the one hand and House for the newly emerging nation-state and a scheme of collective security on the other. House later proposed a development bank funded by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany to invest in underdeveloped areas of the globe, similar to the World Bank of our day. Grey expressed enthusiastic (if mercantile) interest, but explained that quick action would not be possible. The Irish question dominated the cabinet, Grey explained, and it would not turn its attention elsewhere for the time being. Indeed, when news came of the assassination of the Austrian archduke, no anxiety was expressed in London. Only on July 3 did Grey respond to House, telling him to let the kaiser know of the peaceable sentiments of the British in order to pursue negotiations along the lines suggested by House. On the 7th House wrote the kaiser, but by the time the note was delivered, Wilhelm II was at sea, from where he was recalled by the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Wilhelm later remarked that “the visit of Colonel House to Berlin and London in the spring of 1914 almost prevented World War I.”33 The most that can be made of this statement, however, is that House might have thrown off the timing34 of the German general staff (as indeed the assassination did) had House been able to persuade the European powers that the new world of industrial warfare they were about to enter would mock their unrealistic ambitions. This was something, however, that even four years of horrific suffering could not do.
House sailed for Boston on July 21. As he was packing on the 20th a message arrived from Grey to the effect that the Serbian situation was now a source of grave concern. Despite this, and the fact that Mrs. Wilson was dying, House did not go to Washington but continued to the Massachusetts North Shore and waited to see Wilson until the latter came to New Hampshire after his wife's funeral. House's mission had been a failure owing to a lack of appreciation on all sides, including his own, of the nature of the conflict about to erupt. This failure to grasp the epochal nature of the conflict upon which the great powers were about to embark would persist throughout the next five deadly years and into the peace conference that followed. We can learn from House's vision, however, something of the world which we now inhabit at the end of that epochal war, when the conditions for that vision have finally been satisfied, even if, as will be seen, House's vision can no longer sustain the system it brought into being.
In November 1914, two months after the Battle of the Marne had claimed half a million casualties and blunted Germany's drive for a quick victory, House attempted to use the American continents as a model for the resolution of the European conflict. He presented a plan to Wilson by which North and South American signatories were to (a) guarantee each other's territorial integrity and political independence under republican forms of governance; (b) commit to settling disputes peacefully through mediation; and (c) refrain from subversion or assistance to the enemies of any other signatory state. House was convinced that the outbreak of war in Europe had resulted “primarily from the lack of an organized system of international co-operation,” which was perhaps true in a way: the competing constitutional paradigms of fascism, communism, and parliamentarianism could not coexist in a truly cooperative international security organization, as was later seen in both the League of Nations and the United Nations Security Council.
“It was my idea,” House confided to his diary in December, “to formulate a plan, to be agreed upon by the republics of the two continents, which in itself would serve as a model for the European nations when peace is at last brought about.”35 House moved quickly, getting agreement in principle from the Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean ambassadors to Washington. Already, however, he was making plans for an American mediation of the European war, and this forced him to turn over the Pan American negotiations to the State Department. This loss of momentum delayed the conference that was to produce the Pan American pact; without the pact in place, the United States lacked an international forum when Huerta's successor in Mexico was unable to prevent attacks on Texas by the Mexican partisan Pancho Villa. The U.S. intervention to capture Villa effectively killed the pact; no Latin American state could afford to be seen siding with the North Americans. In these circumstances the Chileans, who were least willing to join the U.S. initiative, pressed for further delays, and the American initiative came to nothing. The entire experience foreshadowed not only the substance of the American (as opposed to the European and espe-cially the British) idea of a League of Nations, but also the essentially premature hopes of House and Wilson, dealing as they were with a new international order of states that had not yet resolved the issue of what, precisely, constituted a “republican” form of government, an international order that would always fall back on, and fall out because of, national rivalries and ambitions. The Pan American Pact thus sounded an overture for many of the discordant themes of the Versailles Treaty, to which House and Wilson were to some degree tone-deaf.
When Grey learned that House was proposing an American mediation of the European war on the basis of a system of mutual security guarantees, he cabled through the British ambassador to Washington:
[W]hile no peace negotiation could be undertaken before Germany's evacuation and restoration of Belgium and the humbling of Prussian militarism, a negotiated peace might be possible if the U.S. were prepared to join the European Great Powers in a mutual security system and to join in repressing by force whoever broke the treaty.36
Grey had long been familiar with the idea of a World League of Peace, which had been put forward in various manifestos, editorials, and monographs since the late nineteenth century. In March 1914 he had written that “fear will haunt our gates until we have organized an international system of security and order.”37 Such a system would commit the great powers to refrain from aggression, reduce armaments, and submit disputes to peaceful arbitration; if any power refused to abide by the results of the arbitral panel and chose to resort to violence instead, “the others would join forces against” that power. The Hague Conventions would be strengthened by providing that those becoming parties would bind themselves to uphold the conventions by force.38
Grey had in mind an extension, in the twentieth century, of the Congress system initiated by Castlereagh in the early nineteenth century. This system was managed by the great powers, dealt almost exclusively with security issues, and did not differentiate—despite Metternich's earnest efforts to the contrary—among states according to their internal forms of governance. House, by contrast, sought a system that embraced specifically “republican” states on the basis of equality, in which the great powers played a cooperative rather than balancing role. He thought that the most powerful states would realize that their interests were best served by maintaining the system as a whole, even when, on particular issues, that system gave preference to smaller and weaker states that could have been easily overborne by any of the powers acting alone. Thus House's vision more nearly accorded with the constitutional order of the nation-state, which was replacing that of the imperial state-nation and whose legitimacy was based on each state's embodying the principle of service to the nation it was supposed, by the self-determination of its people, to reflect. Neither sort of league could in fact have halted the Long War in its midst: a great power like Germany or Britain (or Russia) saw no reason to acquiesce in the constraint of its sovereignty; and there was as yet no consensus on what precisely constituted the “self-determination” of a nation in choosing its State.
On January 30, 1915, Colonel House sailed for Europe on the Lusitania with an offer to mediate the conflict. Two days before, an American merchant ship carrying wheat to England had been torpedoed by a German submarine, the first such attack against American commercial shipping. On February 4, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone, threatening all shipping that approached Britain.
At this time, both Germany and Britain menaced American shipping. The British, having control of the seas, were able to stop American ships and board them unlawfully, directing them to British ports if they were thought to contain “contraband,” which included a wide range of nonlethal materials, including foodstuffs. Britain recognized that she could, over the long run, bring famine to Central Europe if she could blockade the ports to which the Germans had access. At the same time, Germany realized that her chief superiority lay in munitions. As a result, the Germans resorted to submarine attacks on all vessels bound for Britain that were thought to be transporting weapons and ammunition bound for the Allies. House's ostensible mission was to work out rules governing the compensation due to American merchants for British seizures. Actually he had been in negotiations for some months with the German and British ambassadors over American mediation of the war. The American proposal was to be based on the evacuation of Belgium by the Germans and a payment of reparations to that state; the French occupation of Lorraine, taken from France by Germany in 1870; and some guarantees against further aggression.
It is certainly open to question whether any of the European powers involved entered these talks in good faith. The Germans were anxious to separate Britain from France and Russia and doubtless hoped that effectively trilateral talks among the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany would cause disquiet and even friction within the Allied group. The British were equally anxious to string the Americans along, presenting themselves as the most reasonable of the belligerents, shaping proposals they knew the Germans could not afford to accept, hoping to entangle the Americans into nonneutral cooperation or, better, belligerency.
Grey seems to have been largely free of this: his proposals for a League of Peace served both as an instrument for forging an Anglo-American entente as well as a sincere lever to encourage U.S. mediation. Upon House's arrival in London, Grey again questioned the American about the possibility of U.S. participation in a “general guaranty for world wide peace.”
House was in London for a month and a half. He grew ever closer to Grey, writing in a memorandum in February, “If every belligerent nation had a Sir Edward Grey at the head of its affairs, there would be no war…”39 But Grey did not think that House should go on to Berlin. German armies were at that hour attempting a vast envelopment against the Russians. Until the outcome of this maneuver was known, the Germans would not think seriously about peace. At the same time the American ambassador in Berlin was urging House to put forward new peace proposals. A German indemnity was out of the question, he wrote, and the German undersecretary for foreign affairs soon wrote to say that acceptance of American terms would mean the overthrow of the kaiser and the government.40 Nevertheless, House pressed on, first to Paris then to Berlin.
In both capitals he found leaderships committed to wringing substantial territorial concessions from their enemies while insisting that peace guarantees were their ultimate objects. This was not necessarily as disingenuous as it may seem today. In both France and Germany domestic constitutional conflicts between Left and Right gave the state a constant sense of peril. It is altogether possible that sincere statesmen believed that success, the likelihood of which is usually overestimated by persons working to attain it, was the only alternative to a general settlement that no one—at least no one outside the United States—could envision. Indeed, these statesmen were entirely correct in this assessment, as the course of the Long War establishes. Only when the war aim of establishing a single legitimate form of the constitutional order was achieved—an aim that had to be a war aim because it could not be gained by negotiation as it implied the delegitimation of some of the negotiating states—could the crisis be finally resolved.
House returned on June 13 after the ruthless sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine on May 7. From this point on, he seems to have regarded American involvement in the war as inevitable, and his various peace moves all began to take on a double-edged character, on the one side asserting a more dominant role vis-à-vis prospective allies regarding peace terms, and on the other maneuvering the German government into a position of contempt before the American public. On May 9 House had sent Wilson a cable, which the president read to his cabinet:
It is now certain that a large number of American lives were lost [in the sinking]… America has come to a parting of the ways, when she must determine whether she stands for civilized… warfare. We can no longer remain neutral spectators. Our action in this crisis will determine the part we will play when peace is made, and how far we may influence a settlement for the lasting good of humanity.41
One cannot understand American policy in this period without appreciating that the deliberate determination to have a role in the design of the peace underlay every American decision. At this juncture, Wilson faced two alternatives: he could break relations with Germany on the ground that the submarine attack on an undefended ocean liner was a violation of international law and a crime against civilization itself; or he could demand an official disavowal and an assurance that such attacks would not be repeated. He chose the second course and on May 13 dispatched a diplomatic note to that effect. Wilson, as perhaps House of all most keenly appreciated, faced an uncomprehending public that would not support intervention, whatever view elite opinion might hold. Thus for the next two years House would search for peace proposals that, though they might conceivably end submarine warfare, probably had their greatest utility in uniting American opinion against the perpetrators of that warfare. While still in London, he had proposed a plan to the British cabinet by which the United Kingdom would lift its blockade if Germany abandoned submarine attacks; he suggested that it would be even better for Great Britain to propose such an initiative, putting Germany in the wrong in the eyes of the American public. The British demurred, and before the cabinet acted, the Germans replied with a refusal to consider the American proposal. House wrote that the Germans were absolutely convinced the United States would not enter the war under any circumstances and that this in his view would, ironically, ensure that an American intervention did ultimately happen. He now determined to return to America to work for that goal.
Bryan saw clearly where Wilson's policy was leading. The diplomatic note of May 13, though too timid for Theodore Roosevelt, who ridiculed it, was too aggressive for the pacifist Bryan, and he immediately resigned as secretary of state. Upon disembarkation in the United States, House was surrounded by reporters at the New York dock wanting to know if he would succeed Bryan. House took the occasion to publicly reject any possibility that he would serve as secretary of state; he rebuffed Wilson's proposal that he come to Washington, and instead retreated to Long Island, and then to the North Shore, where the President came to him on June 24.
On July 25 the American merchant ship Leelanaw, carrying flax, was sunk off the coast of Scotland by a German submarine. On August 13, the British passenger ship Arabic was sunk with Americans aboard. Wilson asked House's advice, and the latter proposed breaking off diplomatic relations with the Germans. Wilson, however, still hoped to avoid war, and before any more forceful American action was taken, Germany announced it was suspending operations against passenger liners. This was generally viewed in the United States as a triumph for Wilson and for moderation, but House knew the German policy could not hold for long. The submarine was Germany's only effective vessel to interdict the Atlantic sea lanes that her enemies controlled because the German fleet was bottled up in German ports and, except for the Battle of Jutland, played no important role in the war. While international law required belligerent ships to identify themselves in order to search neutral shipping, the lightly armored submarine was too vulnerable on the surface to risk this. Even the pledge to avoid passenger ships would have to be eventually sacrificed if the British stranglehold on German imports of foodstuffs was to be broken.
In the autumn, House came up with a new plan. The United States would propose a peace conference and fair terms for all participants. If any belligerent refused to attend, the United States would commit itself to joining that state's adversaries. It was a bold, if somewhat Machiavellian, maneuver. House moved carefully. First he wrote to Grey trying to flush out British peace terms. On September 22, 1915, Grey replied to House's inquiry whether a proposal to return to the status quo ante, followed by a broad reduction in armaments, would be welcome to the British government. Grey reported that “neither side is ready for such a proposal.” But before Grey's reply could reach House, House appended to another letter this note: “Please do not take too seriously the suggestion I made in my last letter in regard to peace. It was merely to let you know the President holds himself in readiness at any time to do what is thought best. As far as I can see, and from all that I can hear from Germany, it is utterly hopeless to think in that direction now.”42
But once House received Grey's reply, which can only be read as discouraging, he re-entered the game. Grey had added to his letter a long section devoted to postwar policy and this gave House the opening he sought. Grey asked: “Would the President propose that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side against any Power which broke a treaty; which broke certain rules of warfare on sea or land… or which refused, in case of dispute, to adopt some other method of settlement than that of war?”43
Now House wrote:
It has occurred to me that the time may soon come when this Government should intervene between the belligerents and demand that peace parleys begin upon the broad basis of the elimination of militarism and navalism…. It is in my mind that after conferring with your Government I should proceed to Berlin and tell them that it was the President's purpose to intervene and stop this destructive war, provided the weight of the United States thrown on the side that accepted our proposal could do it. I would not let Berlin know, of course, of any understanding had with the Allies, but would rather lead them to think our proposal would be rejected by the Allies. This might induce Berlin to adopt the proposal, but if they did not do so, it would nevertheless be the purpose to intervene. If the Central Powers were still obdurate, it would probably be necessary for us to join the allies and force the issue.44
Grey replied: “What is the proposal of the elimination of militarism and navalism you contemplate? Is it that suggested in [my last letter, i.e., the League of Nations]?” and House replied, “Yes.” Beneath House's copy of this note there is written in his hand, “Submitted for W's approval. Approved Nov. 11.”
Now Grey faltered. Pointing out that the French and the Russians planned winter offensives in which they had great confidence, the British foreign secretary wrote, “[T]he situation at the moment and the feelings here and among the Allies, and in Germany so far as I know, do not justify me in urging you to come on the ground that your presence would have any practical result at the moment.”
House was dejected. It seemed as if Grey did not appreciate what Britain was being offered—“the British,” House commented at this juncture, “are in many ways dull.”45 In fact, Grey saw all too clearly what was involved. For the Allies, the American goal was a war aim scarcely worthy of the name. If the Allies committed to it they would have to abandon goals that they cherished and for which millions had died. But for the Americans, a League of Nations that would end war against the democracies and outlaw war in the future was a goal worth fighting for. If the United States did not take part in the war, however, she would not be able to direct the peace. What was for Grey merely a supplementary plan that might protect postwar British interests had become, for House and Wilson, the only justifiable reason to act.
House sailed for England on December 28. His mission has been variously misconstrued by those historians who cannot quite take seriously the uniqueness of House's and Wilson's war aims. “At best his behavior in these talks could be described as duplicitous; at worst he was dishonest in his dealings with both the British and Wilson. While House was reporting to the president that the allies were sincerely interested in mediation, he was presenting his plan to the British as little more than a pretext for entering the war against Germany.”46 Such criticism ignores Wilson's objective: whether by mediation on the basis of American terms, or by American participation in the war and thus also in the postwar settlement, Wilson sought to bring into being a system of enforceable law to prevent future conflicts. Mediation—now or later—was the American war aim. With this goal in mind, House's mission was rather cleverly but hardly duplicitously devised. It failed because neither the Allies nor the Central Powers wanted an evenhanded peace nor believed they, at that point, had to accept one.
After two weeks in England, House proceeded to Berlin and then to Paris for discussions; he then returned to London, where he and Grey initialed a memorandum two weeks later. This document, however, was never approved by the cabinet nor circulated to what doubtless would have been horrified allies. The belligerents saw what the Americans had in mind; they were in no mood to have purchased what were essentially American war goals, with the suffering of their populations and the deaths of their soldiers. House returned to the States.
In late March the British liner Sussex was torpedoed with twenty-five Americans aboard.47 Throughout this period House was far more “hawkish” than Wilson, and more sensitive to the criticisms of former president Roosevelt. After the sinking of the Sussex, House rushed to Washington in order to prevent Wilson from sending a diplomatic note to the Germans that might have appeared insufficiently firm. On March 30 he spent a long afternoon meeting alone with the president, with the result that when Wilson emerged he threatened to break off diplomatic relations with Germany if submarine warfare continued. In the ensuing weeks, House undertook negotiations with the German ambassador, resulting in the May 4 “Sussex Pledge” by Germany that henceforth she would not use submarines in contravention of international law.
This success, though only temporary, as House expected, emboldened Wilson to try to resurrect the House-Grey Memorandum. The 1916 elections were approaching and Wilson was eager to bring peace to Europe lest the United States be drawn into war on terms, and for goals, that were unacceptable to the American public. The British were again cool to the Memorandum. The United States and the United Kingdom simply understood the war in different terms. For the United States, the world war was to be fought for the future of democracy. Not only would this ensure that wars did not occur—because the democracies would resort to nonviolent methods of resolving disputes—but this also meant that nation-states would derive their legitimacy from the consent of the national peoples they represented, which Wilson believed would result in a change in attitude toward war itself. Nor was Wilson naive to believe this: when one recalls nineteenth century state-nation attitudes toward war—attitudes that exalted war, as was so passionately and eloquently done by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., among others48—it is striking how much views have changed in the nation-state democracies.
For the United Kingdom and for France, both states in the midst of the transition from imperial state-nation to mass nation-state, the point of the Great War was rather different. For Premier Clemenceau, it was simply to prepare for the next war: that is, so long as there was a Germany, there would be a Franco-German conflict, and the point of the current conflict was to give the French the best position possible in the next one. For the British cabinet, the point of the war was to prevent a single continental power from dominating Europe, a war aim shared over the centuries with Pitt and Marlborough and Elizabeth's counselors. Both states—indeed, all European parties to the conflict, whether they were unreconstructed state-nations like Russia or the fascist nation-state of Germany—had war aims that sought to enhance each state's freedom of action and avoid any externally imposed constraint on that freedom. None of the European states conceived the goal of the war as achieving statehood for all national peoples, and some, like Russia and Austria, may have greatly feared this.
After refusing to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, House put forward a strategy for the Wilson campaign that proved successful. In every political campaign in the United States of any complexity, there is always a decision to determine whether to concentrate on getting out the votes you are certain to get or whether to go after marginal “swing” votes (in the wooing of which you may alienate the loyalists). What made House's strategy for Wilson successful was his embedding this question in the idiosyncrasies of that unique American institution, the electoral college. House urged Wilson to concentrate his resources on swing districts of no more than a hundred thousand voters in those states that could likely go for either candidate—the marginal districts in the marginal states. Because the result in the electoral college is calculated by state and is indifferent to the magnitude of a winner's popular vote in any particular state, a narrow win in a large state is more helpful than a landslide in a smaller state. Wilson had been elected by a minority of the voters in 1912; if the Republicans could hold their own loyalists and pick up the Republican Progressives who had voted for Roosevelt, then Wilson would be resoundingly defeated. On the other hand, if Roosevelt were not in the race, Wilson could have a free run for the Progressive vote, attacking the Republican nominee on those issues that had made him acceptable to the Republican party where Theodore Roosevelt was not, while using the war issue to drive Progressives away from the Republican party. Thus Wilson would partly stress the progressive legislation he had sponsored and signed into law, and partly he would associate Roosevelt's call for American intervention with the Republicans. If the Republican nominee disassociated himself from Roosevelt, then Wilson would be the beneficiary of one group of progressives; if, on the other hand, he endorsed intervention in an effort to propitiate TR's supporters, then Wilson would gain Western Progressives who, in contrast to those from the East, were solidly for peace.
House's strategy exploited this narrow seam in Republican solidarity. To do this successfully, however, required four conditions: (1) Roosevelt must not be nominated; (2) House must be able to tell, with accuracy, how votes in the Progressive camp were shifting and where, so that Wilson could move to capitalize on these shifts; (3) the Democrats must hold the conservative, non-Progressive South; (4) the Republican nominee must not be allowed to move left, in a Progressive direction.
When Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes was nominated by the Republicans, the first of these conditions was satisfied; Hughes's campaign satisfied the fourth. As a compromise candidate between the Republican old guard and the Progressives, Hughes was entirely unwilling to take positions that threatened to alienate either wing. He thus became a kind of stationary target for Wilson, who ridiculed Hughes's unwillingness to endorse progressive legislation passed during the Wilson administration. Wilson was careful not to alienate the South, but these votes, as House knew, had nowhere else to go, because the Republicans were so deeply identified with Reconstruction.
Everything then came down to House's strategy to organize districts of no more than one hundred thousand voters in those swing constituencies of the most important states. He thought that there were
twelve states that were debatable, and upon whose votes the election would turn. He divided each of these states into [“the smallest possible units that could be arranged with available campaign funds”49] and began by eliminating all states he knew the opposition party would certainly carry… He also ignored the states where his side was sure to win. In this way he was free to give his entire thoughts to [a very few districts]. Of [a unit of] five thousand, he roughly calculated there would be two thousand voters that no kind of persuasion could turn from the national party and two thousand that could not be changed from the opposition. This would leave one thousand doubtful ones to win over. So he had a careful poll made in each unit, and eliminated the strictly unpersuadable party men, and got down to a complete analysis of the debatable one thousand. Information was obtained as to their race, religion, occupation, and former political predilection.50
This allowed House to track the reactions among swing voters and tailor Wilson's speeches and literature accordingly. By concentrating on so few districts, the campaign was able to field an intensive organizational effort. “We must run the President,” House told Daniel C. Roper, the man in charge of organization, “for justice of the peace, and not for president; we need not consider the disposition of sixteen or seventeen million voters, but the disposition of the voters in individual precincts.”51
House gave to the president a list of favorable states that House regarded as certain. This would give Wilson 230 of the 266 electoral votes needed to be elected. Thirty-six more had to be found. Never before had a president been elected without Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Indiana, or Illinois, 52 but House's list proved accurate. Wilson narrowly won (277 to 254 for Hughes), the final tallies coming in the last hours with California's thirteen electoral votes. Wilson was the first Democratic president since Jackson to win a second consecutive term. Although today House's strategy might seem entirely routine given the techniques of snapshot polling and telephone banks, at the time it was considered highly risky and perhaps would not have been tried had Hughes not seemed so far ahead and so likely to win.
The election now over, Wilson and House turned their attention again to foreign affairs. Wilson had campaigned on a slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” though in truth he had been preparing for intervention for some months, should that ultimately become his chosen course. This did not trouble the pragmatic Colonel. Though acknowledging that he
had himself advocated a plan which under certain conditions would have brought the country into the war, [s]ince the attitude of the Allies had prevented the execution of the plan, it would have been rather Quixotic to have disregarded the political advantages resulting from the Allies' refusal.53
A stronger case can be made that House's and Wilson's war aims were not entirely the same as Theodore Roosevelt's, who wished to enter the war unequivocally in support of the allies.*
In retrospect, the obvious question that the House-Wilson war policy raises is: for what? For what did the Americans need to send 1.5 million infantrymen into battle? Surely not for the technical violations of American neutrality; American-flagged ships were in fact being used to resupply and arm a belligerent, just as the Germans claimed. When the United States finally went to war, its disregard of the rights of neutral nations was as great as that previously exhibited by the Allies, to whom the United States was constantly protesting. The Germans could hardly be blamed for halting shipping in the only way the British Royal Navy permitted them, while the Royal Navy itself stopped U.S. ships illegally and simply seized them by virtue of its command of the ocean surface. Was it for the sinking of U.S. ships by German submarines, then, that the United States went to war? Surely the remedy for this, as for the attacks by terrorist states on American civilians, is retorsion. It can hardly be proportionate, or even rational, to decide that the death of innocent Americans requires a world war for just retaliation.
America went to war in 1917 in order to create a system of nation-states whose legitimacy would be based on democracy and self-determination. Within this system all states were to be legally equal, because Wilson and House believed that such a system would prevent future wars against the democracies. This system would reflect American conceptions of the relationship between nation and state and for that reason it could call upon an American commitment to intervene if necessary to protect the system. The establishment of the League of Nations came to be America's principal war aim because it gave an institutional structure to these ideas. A world order based on a German victory would not be one that was ultimately safe for the American democracy, but neither would an Allied victory that merely reinstated in Europe the state system that had collapsed in the first place. As Lord Devlin, a Wilson biographer, shrewdly observed, “Indeed [Wilson] never lost his distrust of Allied motives… The Allies did not, he believed, genuinely care about democracy and the right to self-government.”54
And of course Wilson was right: the Allies, like the Central Powers they opposed, shared a European conception of sovereignty that held the State's authority to have come by descent from its predecessors, and not to arise directly from its people. Even democratic states like Britain and France held sovereignty to be distinct from elections; sovereignty was an attribute of the State. European states were not limited sovereigns. Because their peoples had wholly delegated their sovereignty to the State the nation could scarcely demand the creation of a new state by withholding sovereignty from that power that ruled them. Yet this was the reason America entered the Long War: to allow the democratic form to fulfill its role in creating the proper relation between a State and its nation. These are Wilson's words when he announced he was taking the United States to war:
But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have carried nearest to our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free…. [T]he day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.55
This is Professor Wilson the constitutional scholar as well as President Wilson the statesman, for he was well aware that “the principles that gave [America] her birth and happiness” were the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that is, the assertion of limited state sovereignty, and not the constitutional structure of the mass democracy of the nation-state, which had had to wait almost a century to come into being. What Wilson sought required a world of law because his vision was universal, and because it rested on legal institutions that would enforce certain grounds of legitimacy (democracy) and justification (limited sovereignty). Yet even these conditions, though necessary, were not enough. If states stood toward one another under law in the same relation that individuals stood toward each other in society, they—like individuals—would still be animated by the same drives that had brought them to war in the first place. It was necessary that the state system generate a spiritual change in its composition. As Devlin noted, “It was almost, but not quite, as if he were trying to bring Christianity into public life.”56
Wilson seems to have believed, with House, that truly democratic institutions that actually reflected the will of the people and made commensurate demands on their attention and contributions would yield just such a spiritual change in mankind. Certainly House did not believe that, absent such a transformation, these institutions could possibly prevail against the self-interests of the State and the powerful sectors that endowed the State, interests that sometimes led to war.
From 1916 on it began to be suggested that House was the author of Philip Dru.57 One newspaper learned that House had given an autographed copy of the novel to Culberson.
[O]fficial Washington is startled from its customary aplomb to find that the sphinx of Texas has treated it to a voluble discourse. Col. E. M. House, maker of governors and a President, the popularly accredited power behind the throne of the present Administration, the western Warwick, the silent Man of Mystery—and now Philip Dru: Administrator.
Most of the initial reaction tended to identify House with Dru: the newspaper that broke the news wrote, “Even the description of Dru in the novel is a description of House.”
But it was not so simple. The 1916 election campaign had uncannily followed the prescriptions not of Dru, who ruled by decree, but of Selwyn, the corrupt political boss.58 The entire organization of the campaign—the concentration on marginal states, the intense precinct focus on swing voters, the frequent polling and issue tracking—all were lifted from Selwyn's rules. Most important for our study, however, is Dru's exchange with his fiancée's wealthy and conservative father about the impossibility of the State actually serving the interests of the mass of its people by redistributing wealth. The father says:
If we had pure socialism, we could never get the highest endeavor out of anyone, for it would seem not worth while to do more than the average. The race would then go backward instead of lifting itself higher by the insistent desire to excel and to reap the rich reward that comes with success,
[to which Dru replies:] In the past… your contention would be unanswerable, but the moral tone and thought of the world is changing. You take it for granted that man must have in sight some material reward in order to achieve the best there is within him. I believe that mankind is awakening to the fact that material compensation is far less to be desired than spiritual compensation. This feeling will grow, and when it comes to full fruition, the world will find but little difficulty in attaining a certain measure of altruism. I agree with you that this much-to-be desired state of society cannot be altogether reached by laws, however drastic.59
House believed, like Hitler and Lenin, that his favored form of the nation-state would produce a spiritually renewed man, and a new society. For House, however, this would come about not through the creation and application of laws but in the private world outside law. House's new man grows from the earth of private life, not the concrete and steel of public life. That is what made House's vision uniquely American, marrying the American division between public and private, and its limitation of state sovereignty, to the parliamentary ideal of the nation-state. That is why Wilson's (and House's) League of Nations had to be a league of self-determination, of democracies, indeed, finally, of American democracies. This goal brought the United States into the world war.
House had persuaded Wilson that submarine warfare would inevitably draw the United States into the conflict and therefore the President now sought to press once more for mediation. Wilson wanted to begin by asking both sides to state their war aims, but House thought it was too late to act as an impartial broker; in the event, both the Allies and the Central Powers refused to state terms for mediation, probably on the grounds that if realistic terms were disclosed, the disclosure would endanger their war efforts. Wilson's proposal died stillborn.
On January 22 in a speech to Congress, Wilson called for a league of peace to enforce the peaceable resolution of state disputes, and he once again asked for the belligerent powers to state their terms. Then on January 31 the Germans did so, coupling their terms—which were expansive and provocative—with the announcement of the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. House went to Washington, and shortly thereafter, diplomatic relations with Germany were broken. Even now, however, Wilson did not agree with House that war was unavoidable, and left the next step to the Germans. Despite asking Congress for the power to arm merchant seamen on February 26, Wilson still maintained that no “overt act” had yet been committed. Actually that very day a German U-boat sank the liner Laconia without warning; twelve died, including two American women. Of even greater impact on the public was the sensational publication of an intercepted telegram between the German foreign office and the German minister in Mexico City instructing the latter, in case of war with the United States, to attempt to negotiate a Mexican-German alliance with the promise that Mexico would be assisted in the reconquest of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. On March 14, the American steamer Algonquin was sunk, again without warning. The next week, on March 19, three American ships were sunk within twenty-four hours by German submarines. Finally, on April 2, Wilson went before Congress, declaring that a state of war existed between Germany and the United States, though he was careful to discriminate between the hostile German state and its people. Wilson had written the pope, implying that the German regime was illegitimate and did not really represent its nation:
The object of war is to deliver the fine peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government. This power is not the German people but the masters of the German people.60
In October House sailed for Europe as head of the American mission and the U.S. representative on the inter-allied war committee. In August, he proposed to Wilson, and Wilson approved, the setting up of “The Inquiry,” which would prepare for the peace settlement. The United States had gone to war not because she was attacked but to pursue specific international, political goals at the peace settlement. Now House had to prepare to achieve these goals, which were far more complex and difficult than the mere defeat of the German forces.
American war aims were outlined in the famous “Fourteen Points” first privately formulated by House and Wilson in early January of 1917. Throughout that year the two men worked to refine a settlement proposal embodying this model for internationalism, integrating the micro and the macro aspects, as it were, of a new world order. Now House and Wilson no longer had to attempt to persuade the warring states of Europe to accept American mediation. Rather they would use U.S. intervention in the war to pre-empt the allied states of their war aims, making agreement the price of alliance, while offering to Germany a more attractive settlement option than Britain and France would be willing to give. In the past House had played this two-track strategy: proffering American assistance to the Allies if they would back American war aims while enticing Germany to mediation with the threat of American intervention. This strategy had not worked. Neither side was willing to give up its national ambitions for the mere possibility of American intervention, which, in any event, might not prove decisive.
Now House had made this strategy more potent. By actually entering the conflict, the United States could replace its passive mediation objectives with war aims enforced by the American army. In order to do this, as Walter Lippmann later observed, House persuaded Wilson that by thus joining the war the United States could prevent future wars. He supplied Wilson “with the rationalizations by means of which Wilson was able to bow to a destiny that was overbearing him, and even ultimately to sow the seed of a triumph that may make him immortal.”61
Lippmann was a member of The Inquiry, the secret project set up by House in the autumn of 1917 to collect the data that would provide the factual and analytical basis for an American-directed settlement. House chose his own brother-in-law Mezes, now president of the City College of New York, as the project's director. Although Judge Learned Hand, John Dewey, and Felix Frankfurter, among others, attempted to join the group once its existence became known—Hand asked whether he might leave the bench in order to work on the staff—appointments were tightly held, even as the group grew to 126 geographers, historians, economists, scientists, and lawyers. This group sought to determine what the map of Europe would look like based on American constitutional ideas of self-determination, and political objectives like a nonpunitive peace and an evenhanded system of free trade. No foreign ministry among the Allies— indeed, in the world—had prepared such briefs. In a letter to the secretary of war, Lippmann wrote that the American war effort was “the largest assembly of force for an entirely disinterested purpose ever known to history. The weapon is drawn by men who cannot worship it.”62 “We are fighting,” he wrote House, “not so much to beat an enemy as to make the world safe for democracy.”63
Secretary of State Robert Lansing and Secretary of War Newton Baker were entirely bypassed by Wilson, who made House his sole collaborator in the original drafting of the Fourteen Points.
“Saturday was a remarkable day,” House wrote in his diary.
I returned to the White House at a quarter past ten in order to get to work with the President. He was waiting for me. We got down to work and finished re-making the map of the world, as we would have it, at half-past twelve o'clock. We took it systematically, first outlining general terms, such as open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removing of economic barriers, establishment of equality of trade conditions, guarantees for the reduction of national armaments, [a] general association of nations for the conservation of peace; (and of course) genuine self-government on democratic principles [for the various nationalities].64
House saw clearly that a great divide had opened up between the state-nations whose empires ruled the world before the war and the nation-states whose destinies were asserting themselves. He and Wilson also saw that parliamentary democracy was only one competing candidate for the constitutional order that the nation-state would come to embody. The Fourteen Points, which some historians have ranked with the Emancipation Proclamation in importance, proposed a world order of parliamentary nation-states that was significantly at variance with the order of state-nations but that also excluded fascist and communist nation-states.
Their vision was that of a universal constitution—the original draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations used the word constitution. This constitution rested on a universal common law and various explicit enforcement mechanisms. It simply replicated, at the supranational level, the processes of law making and law enforcement that Americans are accustomed to at the federal level. There was to be a body of legal rules that governed all states equally, regardless of their rank, and all nations, regardless of their power; there was to be a judicial institution of universal jurisdiction that applied these rules to controversies, and another institution of states that enforced these rules by sanctions, including violence if necessary. States were to be held, as Wilson ceaselessly put it, to the same processes as individual citizens had been.
Unless the uniquely American constitutional basis for this world constitution is appreciated, one cannot fully appreciate the intractable differences between the United States and her allies at the peace conference, and the difficulties faced by ratification of the Treaty that emerged from that conference once it went to the U.S. Senate. The customary criticisms of Wilson during this decisive period are that he failed to fight at Versailles for his ideals or was simply outwitted by Lloyd George and Clemenceau; and that he further ruined the chances for a stable peace by refusing to compromise with the Senate on various reservations to the treaty, thus keeping the United States out of the League of Nations and opening the door to the Second World War through a weakening of deterrence against Germany. These conclusions are partly based, however, on misunderstandings of Wilson's policy and the constitutional and strategic world within which it had to operate. Though widely held, these misunderstandings treat the political conflicts at Versailles and later in Washington as if they occurred in a constitutional vacuum, rather than in an environment structured by the Long War and a society of states with competing ideas of sovereignty.
The Fourteen Points were first presented to the Congress in an address by Wilson in January 1918. They can be reduced to the following six policies, each derived from some aspect of the U.S. Constitution: (1) open treaties, “openly arrived at”—a requirement that is absurdly quixotic unless one is committed by law to the American constitutional scheme of limited government and unalienable popular sovereignty, as a consequence of which no treaty that is secret from the People can be legally binding because treaty making requires the consent of the sovereign; (2) “absolute” freedom of the seas, such that in wartime neutral states could not be restricted in their commerce with belligerents beyond those customary rules of international law governing legitimate blockades, e.g., rules against contraband (weapons, munitions, and the like) and those rules protecting the civilians of neutral states against violence on the high seas; these rules have their parallel in the neglected original intent of the declaration of war clause in the U.S. Constitution;* (3) the removal of economic barriers among states—parallel to the abolition of internal tariffs that is found in Article IV of the American constitution; (4) arms reductions to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety—a qualification on sovereignty that is entirely inconsistent with the European idea of inalienable state sovereignty; (5) the impartial adjustment of colonial claims, according a weight to the interests of the national peoples concerned equal to whatever claims of title were to be asserted by the states who governed those people—an application of the idea that runs through the remaining nine points of the declaration that legitimate states are based on the self-determination of the peoples for whose benefit the state is constituted (parallel to the tenth and fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution); thus the Fourteen Points specifically endorsed the creation of a Polish state, the independence of the Baltic states, and the readjustment of the frontiers of Italy “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality”; the people of Austria-Hungary were to be given “the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”65 And finally (6), in Point Fourteen, the creation of “a general association of nations [that] must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike”—the League of Nations, which in its structure replicates the federal and branch structures of the U.S. Constitution.
There is scarcely one of these war aims that was not as threatening to the Allies as to the Germans. If “open covenants” were to be an objective of Allied governments, what of the secret agreements they themselves had made among one another for a postwar division of the spoils? At least one state, Italy, had actually been induced to join the war on the basis of such undertakings. Great Britain had violated the well-recognized rules of international law governing free passage of neutral shipping in order to starve Germany, and indeed would do so with such success once the armistice agreement finally stilled German submarine warfare, that famine became widespread across Central Europe. Trade barriers and national protection were the policies that defined “empire”—how could they be declared unlawful without disintegrating the system of imperial preferences? Self-determination presumably applied to the Irish as well as to the Indians, Algerians, and Indochinese. And, of course, a League of Nations whose security decisions would pre-empt those of its member states had yet to be willingly achieved between Britain and France even in the European Union of the late twentieth century. What made these aims so objectionable was not simply their astonishing scope, it was that at their very basis they presumed a relationship between the State and its people that was inconsistent with European ideas of sovereignty dating back to the origin of the modern State in the fifteenth century.
When informed of the president's address, Clemenceau reacted with derision. The Fourteen Points, he said, “bore me.” “The Good Lord,” he remarked mordantly, “only had ten.” Lloyd George was in the midst of an election campaign in which he promised to make the Germans pay “the whole cost of the war.” How could he possibly accept a statement of principles that confined a postwar settlement to an evenhanded treatment of victors and vanquished alike? The German reaction was also hostile. The German chancellor, Hertling, declared that “our military situation was never so favorable as it is now,” and led the Reichstag in a rejection of the Fourteen Points.66 Nevertheless, a month later the American president declared:
There shall be no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages. Self-determination is not a mere phrase… Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states.67
There the matter lay for the early months of 1918, which the leaderships of all the European belligerents saw as absolutely decisive for the war as a whole.68 After the slaughter of British forces at Passchendaele, the disintegration of the Russian army in the East, and the Italian debacle at Capo-retto, the Allies braced for a fresh German offensive. By March 1918, the German army had a superiority of almost thirty divisions over the Anglo-French forces. If the German attack succeeded, Allied lines would be pierced and either the British forces surrounded by a sudden German move to the channel or Paris menaced by a drive on the French capital. The German high command mobilized all the resources of the state for this great gamble: if the offensive failed, German resources would be exhausted just at the time when the U.S. strength was growing from 300,000 troops at the front in April, when the attack began, to 1, 200, 000 in July.
By early June German forces had advanced to within thirty-seven miles of Paris and had inflicted enormous casualties on the Allies; their own losses, however, were just as staggering. By July, the Germans had lost about 973,000 men, and over a million more were listed as sick. On July 18, the Allies attacked at Soissons and Château-Thierry, with the Americans distinguishing themselves on the latter battleground. On August 8 an Allied offensive at Amiens achieved a breakthrough. In September, as if all at once, the German coalition collapsed. Austria-Hungary asked for a separate peace. The German High Command began pressing its government for an armistice. On October 3, a new German chancellor, von Baden, directly addressed the Americans, asking President Wilson for immediate negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Throughout the Central Powers, states were imploding, producing revolution and economic chaos.
In reply to the German plea, Wilson asked for a categorical acceptance of all the conditions laid down in the Fourteen Points. Colonel House was able to persuade Wilson to add an insistence on such military restraints as would “make the renewal of hostilities on the part of Germany impossible.” The German government gave its assent on October 12, adding that “its object in entering into discussions would be only to agree upon practical details of the application of these terms.”69
Wilson then turned to the Allies and found them far from receptive. After four years of awful slaughter, the American president who had once announced that he was “too proud to fight” now had arrived on the European scene with a peace plan, which he proposed to unilaterally negotiate with the enemy.70
On October 29, House met with the Allies. Point Seven had specified that Belgium should be evacuated and “restored”; Point Eight, that all “French territory should be freed and invaded portions restored.” The Allies insisted, not unreasonably, that they understood the term restoration to mean that “compensation would be paid by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies, and their property by the aggression of Germany…” Further, the British government announced a reservation to the requirement of freedom of the seas. On November 4, House cabled Wilson, who consented to an interpretation arrived at by House and the Allied leaders. Lansing informed Germany that the United States and the Allies were willing, subject to the reservations on reparations and freedom of the seas, to make peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points. “There can be little doubt that… by specifying ‘damage done to the civilian population' [the Agreement] clearly excluded the costs of waging the war [however].”71 An armistice was agreed to on the 11th of November.
While House was in Europe, Wilson made what House thought was the most disastrous speech of Wilson's career. It was an appeal to the public to elect Democratic congressmen and senators in the election of 1918 so as to help Wilson “win the peace.” This speech shattered the wartime coalition between the parties, and effectively eliminated almost all existing Republican support for the treaty that would emerge from the Versailles conference. This insistence not only that he be right, but that others must play their role as “wrong” proved to be a fatal handicap to Wilson once he was no longer guided by House in his relations with Congress.
At Versailles, the Americans found themselves at odds with their allies over four issues: territorial adjustments in Europe (the French wished to dismember Germany, and all the continental Allies sought some territorial compensation); German colonies (sought by Great Britain); reparations; and making the League of Nations an integral part of the Treaty itself. The familiar account of the resolution of these differences holds that a naïve and wooden American president was simply bamboozled by more sophisticated Allied leaders into conceding the first three issues, in order to gain the fourth; and that he was betrayed by Colonel House, who made concessions in Wilson's absence on all four questions. Such an account obscures the historic constitutional and strategic struggle that did take place at Versailles and that set the terms for the Western approach to the Long War that persisted throughout the twentieth century.
One basis for this erroneous account can be found in the witty, acid rendering of the Versailles negotiations by John Maynard Keynes, economic adviser to the British delegation. It is too good not to quote, but it should be borne in mind that what really gave this narrative its devastating power in the United States was its reprinting by a feline Walter Lippmann in the pages of the American liberal magazine The New Republic and the use of Keynes's descriptions by Republican conservatives in order to destroy the prospects for treaty ratification in the Senate.* Keynes believed that the punitive nature of the treaty that ultimately emerged (he called it a “Carthaginian Peace”) would drive Germany to bankruptcy and political ruin, and result in a fresh war of revenge. Lippmann and the American liberals believed this and more, that Wilson had failed to press hard enough for the ideals of the Fourteen Points and had thus betrayed his followers in the United States. The Republicans simply lifted the picture of an inept and slow-moving president being exploited by wily Europeans and used this portrayal to discredit the treaty. For the liberals, Wilson had been tricked into agreeing to an old-fashioned, great-power deal; for the conservatives, if Wilson had been tricked, it meant that he had mortgaged American national interests to European interests.
Here is Keynes's portrait of Wilson:
The first impression of Mr. Wilson at close quarters was to impair some but not all of [our] illusions. His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs, and the muscles of his neck and the carriage of his head were distinguished. But, like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated; and his hands, though capable and fairly strong, were wanting in sensitivity and finesse. But more serious than this, he was not only insensitive to his surroundings in the external sense, he was not sensitive to his environment at all. What chance could such a man have against Mr. Lloyd George's unerring, almost medium-like, sensibility to every one immediately round him? To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party. Never could a man have stepped into the parlor a more perfect and predestined victim to the finished accomplishments of the Prime Minister. The Old World was tough in wickedness anyhow; the Old World's heart of stone might blunt the sharpest blade of the bravest knight-errant. But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hand of the adversary….
The President's slowness amongst the Europeans was noteworthy. He could not, all in a minute, take in what the rest were saying, size up the situation with a glance, frame a reply, and meet the case by a slight change of ground; and he was liable, therefore, to defeat by the mere swiftness, apprehension, and agility of Lloyd George. There can seldom have been a statesman of the first rank more incompetent than the President in the agilities of the council chamber. His mind was too slow and unresourceful to be ready with any alternatives. The President was capable of digging his toes in and refusing to budge, as he did over Fiume. But he had no other mode of defense, and it needed as a rule but little maneuvering by his opponents to prevent matters from coming to such a head until it was too late. By pleasantness and an appearance of conciliation, the President would be maneuvered off his ground, would miss the moment for digging his toes in, and, before he knew where he had got to, it was too late.*
This is delightful writing, perhaps liberated by the biographical style of Keynes's Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey, but it is utterly blind to the constitutional basis of the struggle at Versailles and therefore places far too much emphasis on the purely personal elements in play.
The negotiations occurred in three crucial periods. The first culminated with Wilson's reading of the constitution of the League of Nations to the plenary session of delegates on February 14, 1919, and the adoption by that conference of the proposed League. Wilson then left for the United States in triumph, asking House to take his place until his return in mid-March.
In the second phase, during Wilson's absence, the French and British proposed a “preliminary” draft peace treaty that embodied the Allies' conditions concerning Germany's postwar military strength, frontiers, and reparations. This treaty, it was suggested, would allow a quick agreement and the more difficult question of the precise contours of League membership and operations could then be dealt with at leisure. House felt keenly that European political conditions would not tolerate for long a suspended state of settlement. An assassination attempt had been made on Clemenceau five days after Wilson's departure, and there were reports of incipient revolt in the French army which, however, couldn't be demobilized without the security assurances of the treaty. From every quarter in Europe there came fresh news of political turmoil: Bavaria had been seized by a communist putsch; soon Hungary was to follow. Poland had declared war on Russia, where a civil war raged between Whites and Reds. Throughout a Europe waiting on the treaty, famine stalked the civilian population. There was, also, the constant pressure from Allied military authorities to prevent any possibility that Germany would be able to renew hostilities, and at the same time resistance by the German army to completely abandon arms and positions in the absence of some guarantees about the eventual treaty.
Moreover, House was sensitive to the political positions of his partners: he knew that Lloyd George had a parliamentary majority that demanded far greater reparations, as the prime minister had led them to expect, than Germany could possibly fulfill. He knew that the Italian prime minister, Orlando, would not survive—as indeed he did not—without territorial accessions in the Adriatic for Italy. Above all, he knew that Clemenceau could guarantee ratification only if it was widely perceived in France that Germany would not, for the third time in a half century, invade from the Rhineland. As soon as Wilson had departed, Lloyd George met with House and
said that if I would help him out he would be extremely grateful. By “helping him out” he meant: to give a plausible reason to his people for having fooled them about the question of war costs, reparations and what not.72
It was now obvious that the treaty would not be based on the Fourteen Points. The European prime ministers made it clear that “if they yielded it would mean the overthrow of their governments.”73 House recognized that the Democratic defeats in the November elections constrained the U.S. delegation, and he closely followed the British elections and the vote of confidence sought by Clemenceau in the French Chamber of Deputies.*
It was perhaps true that “if the President should exert his influence among the liberals and laboring classes, he might possibly overthrow the governments”74 of some of the Allies. But more chaos in Europe would scarcely strengthen Wilson at home in the United States, nor would it guarantee the stability required to make a New World Order actually function. Indeed, overthrowing Allied governments might very well lead to nation-states that did not share the parliamentary ideal. Wilson was forced to commit his hopes to the League of Nations because there was no alternative: the conference would not vote for a treaty based on the Fourteen Points. Subsequent modifications to the treaty and its ameliorative application by the League might, however, ultimately achieve Wilson's goals. If the United States left the conference without a treaty, Germany was scarcely likely to be more gently treated, yet leaving the conference was the only card Wilson had to play. If Wilson left he would get neither a more humane treaty nor the League.
When the third phase of the negotiations began with Wilson's return, his first reaction was fury at House for having made concessions on Allied military pensions (allowing their costs to be counted as part of the war) and for having entertained the possibility of a Rhenish republic, effectively creating a buffer zone for France. Wilson believed that he had completely secured the position of the League before leaving when he won a vote in favor of it at the plenary session of the conference. Now he thought he would return to bargain for the rest of the Fourteen Points. In fact, by putting the League issue first, he had delayed work on other issues so that now there was even greater pressure to resolve things quickly. Consent to the League could be used by the other Allies as a bargaining chip to be cast aside if the Americans were too obstreperous. Wilson's initial reaction is the source of Mrs. Wilson's oft-quoted memory of her husband's having said, “House has given away everything that I had won before we left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again.”75
In fact, the two were soon in harness again as Wilson began to see what House already saw, the primacy of domestic politics in the new nation-state and the limited discretion it gave to political leadership. Wilson could indeed go over the heads of the delegations to their publics and possibly discredit them. He could expose the secret treaties the leaders denied having negotiated; he could make public their correspondence pleading for public support for provisions they conceded were irresponsible. Doing so, however, would not get him his League. Or he might use public opinion in a more channeled way, through the proceedings of the League. These, year by year, would build an international set of standards and practices against which the actions of states would be measured not simply by other states, but by the publics of the states concerned. This indeed was the ultimate function of the Helsinki Accords of 1975,76 and their success is as surprising to their authors as understanding Wilson's not dissimilar program has proved elusive.77
In any case, the real issue was far more complex than a simple choice between a treaty with or without a League. The European states not only wanted, they demanded a League of Nations, by which they understood a permanent, institutionalized conference of great powers to interlock the security assurances of its members, drawing the United States into a guarantee against aggression. The United States—Wilson and House—wanted a League that would, over time, move the imperial state-nations toward the model of the nation-state, move socialist and militaristic nation-states toward parliamentary models, and move the State itself from a position of absolute sovereignty to an American model of limited sovereignty. Once rights were vested in nationalities, in “peoples,” the State would be compelled to evolve in this direction by the force of public opinion.78In February, Wilson had described this process in these terms to the peace conference: “… throughout this instrument [the Covenant of the League of Nations] we are depending primarily and chiefly upon one great force, and that is the moral force of the public opinion of the world.”79
Finally, both men were well aware that only a treaty that was actually ratified would be of any good to anyone and that the threats the treaty faced at the hands of European opponents, in their respective states, were the photo negative of those faced in the U.S. Senate, so that compromise in one theater jeopardized success in the other. Promising American intervention in case of aggression made the Treaty more attractive to European governments but less attractive to the U.S. Senate, for example.
For these reasons, House wrote on March 2480 that he undertook to persuade Wilson to settle once and for all the persistent and vital question of inclusion of the Covenant in the peace treaty itself.
I advised a showdown. I suggested that he tell them [Clemenceau and Lloyd George] that the Covenant for the League of Nations would either be written into the Treaty of Peace or we would have none of it; that the only excuse we could give for meddling in European or world affairs was a League of Nations through which we hope to prevent wars.81
In the end, the Americans negotiated the various compromises necessary to win consensus. Italy was denied Fiume, despite having been promised it by the Allies in the secret treaty that brought Italy into the war; Orlando left the conference in indignation and was promptly defeated at home. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, from whom it had been taken by war in 1871; the Saar was put under French control, though not annexed; ultimately Germany lost less than 4 percent of her territory, excluding Alsace-Lorraine. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states were created. A reparations bill was presented that was completely unrealistic but, Keynes's warnings notwithstanding, the final German payments were never more than five billion pounds, largely financed by the Allies. The political and human catastrophe that followed Versailles had, in fact, little to do with the actual economic impact of the treaty.
House understood the titanic forces that were carefully if precariously balanced by the Agreement.
To those who are saying that the Treaty is bad and should never have been made and that it will involve Europe in infinite difficulties in its enforcement, I feel like admitting it. But I would also say in reply that empires cannot be shattered and new states raised upon their ruins without disturbance… The same forces that have been at work in the making of this peace would be at work to hinder the enforcement of a different kind of peace.82
There would be no final peace until nation-states had completely supplanted the state-nations that dominated the conference, until, that is, Wilson and Lenin and Hitler had destroyed the old state system, and, finally, until the new system had chosen among the three nation-state alternatives after three-quarters of a century of war.
Wilson and House had attempted to reform the deep structure of state sovereignty. Ironically, it was precisely the American system of limited sovereignty that crushed their plans, for it was the U.S. Senate's refusal to consent to the treaty that prevented ratification of the Versailles agreement and then thwarted U.S. participation in the League of Nations. The treaty came up for a vote twice, once in November 1919 and again in March 1920. The latter vote would surely have led to Senate consent had not the president instructed Democratic senators to vote against his own treaty because it was encumbered with a reservation to Article X of the provisions for the League (the Lodge Reservation). Article X empowered the League Council to advise member states to respond to aggression with sanctions and with armed force. The Lodge Reservation would have required that, in confronting a finding of aggression by the League Council, the United States could comply only if authorized to do so by Congress. As one of the members of The Inquiry had noted at Versailles, “[a treaty commitment to intervene] would be void… as Congress under the Constitution ha[s] the power to declare war. A war automatically arising upon a condition subsequent, pursuant to a treaty provision, is not a war declared by Congress.”83
This misreading of the U.S. Constitution, which in fact contemplates several legitimate routes to war in addition to that of a formal declaration, 84 was used to decisive effect by the opponents of the treaty. House, however, was willing to accept something like the Lodge Reservation on the grounds that in practice the treaty, and the League, would be construed according to necessity. It was possible the other treaty partners would reject the Reservation; it was more likely that future presidents would not accept an unconstitutional restriction on their powers and would act within the treaty's confines unfettered by the Reservation. House, however, did not know the extent of the massive stroke that Wilson had suffered in September, nor did he know that presidential affairs were being conducted by Mrs. Wilson and the president's physician. He received no reply to his frantic entreaties about ratification and, indeed from the moment of Wilson's breakdown, was never again in close communication with the president. Once Wilson lost the one political adviser capable of steering him through the system he deeply revered but could not entirely navigate, his plans for enfolding the great powers within a similar system were dashed. Without his benign Mephistopheles, Wilson was returned to his Faustian study.