Worldmaking (22 page)

At the crisis of his fortunes the President was a lonely man. Caught up in the toils of the Old World, he stood in great need of sympathy, of moral support, of the enthusiasm of masses. But buried in the Conference, stifled in the hot and poisoned atmosphere of Paris, no echo reached him from the outer world, and no throb of passion, sympathy, or encouragement from his silent constituents in all countries.
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Wilson reluctantly acceded to the French and British insistence that all war guilt be placed on Germany's shoulders and that the nation pay massive reparations for Allied losses. The Treaty of Versailles redrew the maps of Europe on broadly ethnic lines (although a large population of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland became citizens of Czechoslovakia), sliced Germany in two with the creation of the so-called Polish corridor to permit Warsaw access to the sea at the newly created free city of Danzig, provided for the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland, and added significant heft to the French and British Empires in the transfer of “mandates.” On the cavalier way national boundaries were redrawn, and former Central Power colonies parceled out, Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, “But darling, it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake … Isn't it terrible—the happiness of millions being decided in that way.”
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Finally, Germany was compelled to pay $33 billion in war reparations—equivalent to more than $400 billion in today's terms.

On the Treaty of Versailles, George Kennan later wrote: “Truly, this was a peace which had the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil's own hand.”
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Soon after it was signed, John Maynard Keynes described the peace as Carthaginian, redolent of the brutal peace that Rome imposed on the Phoenician city of Carthage in 146
B.C.
following the Punic Wars. This description takes things a little too far—Clemenceau for one was disappointed that the treaty did not treat Germany more harshly—although there is little doubt that Versailles bore scant relation to the treaty Wilson envisioned when he declared war on Germany in 1917. The president made a series of vitally important concessions to his fellow negotiators, seemingly resigned to the fact that Britain and France's huge losses accorded them the right to play a larger role in punishing their tormentor. Unsurprisingly, Progressive support for Wilson at home evaporated. The cover of
The New Republic
blared:
THIS IS NOT PEACE
.
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Resigned to strong Republican opposition, Wilson had now provoked the ire of Progressives, who had played such a strong supporting role in the election of 1916 and who backed his subsequent rationale for war. The president's political and diplomatic options were narrowing to a needle's eye.

The president instead vested all hope on a single thread: the creation of an all-powerful League of Nations. On this matter he received strong support from the British diplomat Lord Robert Cecil and General Jan Christian Smuts, who would soon become prime minister of the Union of South Africa. The drafting of the League of Nations Covenant, which was presented to the conference on February 14, 1919, was a remarkable achievement for which Wilson may claim preponderant credit. In theory, the League of Nations was vested with sufficient potency to eradicate “balance-of-power” diplomacy from international affairs. Article X guaranteed the independence and territorial integrity of all established nations. Article XI held that the league possessed the right to intervene in the event of “war or threat of war” anywhere in the world. Articles XII to XV laid out procedures for arbitration, which would be channeled through a Permanent Court of International Justice. Article XVI asserted the league's authority to impose economic boycotts, and resort to the use of military force, to dissuade nations with warlike intentions.

If all the world's leaders had possessed Wilson's faith in the League of Nations, then the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles might have been softened over a period of sustained peace; the world might well have transcended its hardwired tendency toward conflict. General Smuts credited Wilson with drafting “one of the great creative documents in human history.”
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Yet the success or otherwise of the covenant's bold creativity was predicated on unanimity of international support and a common understanding of what membership in the league entailed. And each leader understood the League of Nations in different ways, stretching its meaning to justify individual goals and proclivities. In September 1918, Lloyd George had announced, “I am for a League of Nations,” which must have appeared encouraging from Wilson's perspective. But the British prime minister continued: “In fact the League of Nations has begun. The British Empire is a League of Nations.”
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The response to these words is immediate: How could it ever have succeeded? Many intellectuals and nationalist leaders in Asia had been impressed by Wilson's references to “self-determination” and the “equality of nations.” The historian Erez Manela identifies a “Wilsonian Moment” of high expectations that coursed through those nations colonized by the Old World, a point at which freedom from European rule appeared tantalizingly close and Wilson appeared their best hope. A major Shanghai newspaper printed the text of the Fourteen Points, describing Wilson's ideas as “a beacon of light for the world's peoples.” A little after the armistice, a nationalist publisher in India, Ganesh, printed a collection of Wilson's speeches under the adulatory and hopeful title
President Wilson: The Modern Apostle of Freedom
.
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Ultimately those hopes were dashed, as the victorious European nations retained their empires and carved up those of their adversaries for good measure under the so-called mandate system. The ephemerality of the Wilsonian moment caused profound disillusionment in Asia and elsewhere. One young Vietnamese nationalist, who would later take the name Ho Chi Minh, was deeply affected by America's failure to live up to its Universalist rhetoric.

While it was embraced by much of the colonized world, the covenant of the League of Nations met a more hostile response in the United States. William Borah, the isolationist senator from Idaho, observed, “If the Savior of mankind should revisit the earth and declare for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it.”
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Henry Cabot Lodge criticized the covenant for undermining the Monroe Doctrine, constraining America's freedom of action, and opening the door for partisan attacks on the United States—afforded the imprimatur of “international law.”
The New Republic
observed that “the League is not powerful enough to redeem the treaty. But the treaty is vicious enough to incriminate the League.”
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A degree of disillusionment was setting in at home of which Wilson, sequestered in Paris, was largely oblivious. For their part, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were happy to sign on to Wilson's cherished project, satisfied to varying degrees that Anglo-French objectives had been met in respect to the president's earlier concessions. Neither man believed as truly as Wilson in the league's epoch-redefining potential, but failing its full effectiveness, French and British interests would hardly be impeded by working through a League of Nations in which they would exert significant clout. Wilson was generally pleased with what had been achieved in Paris, even though the Treaty of Versailles bore little relation to his Fourteen Points. All that remained was to secure ratification of the peace treaty in its original form, the difficulty of which scarcely seemed to occur to the president. The day before he set sail, Wilson told the French president, Raymond Poincaré, that while a fierce battle awaited, it would be over in just one day.
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*   *   *

On July 8, 1919, Wilson returned to the United States, where a ticker-tape parade in New York City carried the president to Carnegie Hall for a brief speech. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., where one hundred thousand well-wishers met his train at midnight. When asked at a press conference in Washington on July 10 if the Senate would ratify the treaty on acceptable terms, Wilson tartly replied, “I do not think hypothetical questions are concerned.
The Senate is going to ratify the treaty.
”
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Later that same day, Wilson presented the treaty to a packed chamber in the Senate. Declining to dwell on the minutiae of the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson emphasized the League of Nations' vast potential. The president presented the negotiation of the treaty as a zero-sum game by asking, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” As Wilson continued his speech, religious invocations began to inhabit the space where substance would have better resided: “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.”
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While Wilson's speech was greeted with rousing applause in the chamber, astute observers noticed that only one Republican—the iconoclastic League of Nations enthusiast Porter McCumber from North Dakota—applauded. Even Democrats were worried by the hollowness of Wilson's words. Henry Ashurst of Arizona likened Wilson's effort to a businessman explaining his primary functions to a board of directors by reciting “Longfellow's Psalm of Life … His audience wanted red meat, he fed them cold turnips.”
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To leave so many people disappointed was hugely damaging, but one significant extenuating circumstance partly explains his stuttering performance. In the weeks prior to the speech, Wilson had been suffering from headaches and tight neck muscles that we now know were early signs of a stroke that would hit him three months later. A combination of combativeness, ill-advised appropriation of higher powers, and debilitating health all served to undermine Wilson's formidable communicative skills at a critical juncture.

Wilson had refused to invite two groups of individuals to accompany him to the negotiations in Paris: senators and Republicans. That both groups possessed absolute power over the fate of the Treaty of Versailles in the United States—and would indeed “break the heart of the world” in the due course of time—illustrates the magnitude of Wilson's error. The president had reasoned that accommodating Republicans within his negotiating team would circumscribe his freedom of action, precluding the conjuring of radical initiatives to realize his ambitions. Propelled forward by absolute belief in the righteousness and logic of his ideas, Wilson at Paris was intent on realizing his thesis: the creation of a collaborative world system. Yet he was dangerously insulated from the reality of a domestic political calculus that was stacked against him, particularly after Democrat losses in the midterm elections. Surrounded by friends, Wilson failed to see that a world governed by a League of Nations was an abstraction, not an actionable reality. The flight of Wilson's intellectualism—his scientism—took him away from what was politically possible. That this astute student of American politics failed to finesse the limitations of his approach is testament to two things: the seductiveness of crafting grand strategy and the fiendish nature of the war that had just visited the world.

Wilson compounded his initial errors regarding the composition of the delegation with an adamant refusal to negotiate with those Senate Republicans who were amenable to a watered-down version of the treaty, in which American sovereignty was better protected. For perhaps understandable reasons, Wilson despised Henry Cabot Lodge and his cohort of Senate allies and press admirers. The president's press secretary, Ray Stannard Baker, observed that Wilson was “a good hater,” an attribute that doesn't help when the political chips are down.
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Edward House was well aware of the strengths and limitations of his president's style of decision making: “Whenever a question is presented he keeps an absolutely open mind and welcomes all suggestion or advice which will lead to a correct decision. But he is receptive only during the period that he is weighing the question and preparing to make his decision. Once the suggestion is made it is final and there is an absolute end to all advice and suggestion. There is no moving him after that.”
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That this approach was antithetical to steering a revolutionary treaty through a recalcitrant Senate scarcely needs emphasizing.

The Senate's opposition to the treaty was divided into “irreconcilables,” cross-party isolationists who opposed all aspects of the treaty; “strong reservationists,” who might vote for the treaty in a much reduced form; and “mild reservationists,” composed mainly of Republican internationalists who supported the crux of the treaty but wanted some changes before their vote could be assured. As is well known, Wilson's stance toward those who opposed the treaty, to whatever degree of reservation, was uncompromising. In a barb directed at the “strong reservationist” Lodge—in a speech provocatively delivered in Worcester, Massachusetts, the senator's home state—Wilson warned that “any man who resists the present tides that run in the world will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from his human kind forever,” which more or less captures Wilson's views on political compromise circa 1919.
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Which is not to say that Wilson did not try to talk down his opposition. The president held a series of face-to-face meetings with his opponents in the Senate but was unable to convince them to back down. Steadfast in his aversion to negotiation, and warming to a very different tack, Wilson at the end of August decided to embark upon a nationwide speaking tour, designed to build public support for the treaty, which in turn would convince hold-out senators that ratification was in their political interests. Wilson's new wife and doctor expressed deep concerns about how a tour of this nature might impact his health. From a different perspective, members of his administration struggled to imagine how a public-speaking tour at this stage might translate into Senate votes. But detecting a specious parallel to his previous nationwide speaking tour, which had drummed up critical support for his preparedness agenda, Wilson rejected these reservations and took his message above the heads of the senators whom he most needed to convince.