Just as Trotter was stepping onto a train in Boston on February 15 bound for New York City to begin his quest to travel to France, President Wilson was boarding the George Washington in France, bound for Boston. After eighty-four days away from his country, the American president was returning home, though to stay for only nine days. In that time, he intended to speak at the last session of the Sixty-fifth Congress, to sign the bills of the expiring Congress, to appoint a new attorney general, and even to unveil the first draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations—a major accomplishment in the first phase of the Paris Peace Conference. So too he would commence his campaign to win national approval of the realization of his dream: a global league to oversee a permanent peace. And, to the many Americans who still believed that the man who was the hope of the world was also omnipotent, there was the expectation that, brief though his visit may be, Wilson would wave his magisterial wand and solve the mounting domestic problems that now beset his nation.
This was the time of trains and ships, when travel slowed the pace of life and long hours, or days, between destinations deferred the demands of busy schedules. For Wilson to spend ten days suspended between Europe and America on the luxury liner in his quiet, spacious three-room suite was a gift from a generous god. In fact, his physician, Admiral Cary Grayson, would always believe that the respite on board the Washington was crucial to maintaining the president’s fortitude while under the extreme strain of the struggles in Paris. It even may have prolonged his life, for despite his aura of power and intellectual stamina, the president was not a physically strong man. As the journalist Ray Stannard Baker once wrote, Wilson was “a 600 horse-power motor in a frail, light, delicate chassis.” Beset with physical limitations, the president had suffered a series of minor strokes at the turn of the century that affected his right arm, a retinal hemorrhage in 1906 that left him partially blind in his left eye, extremely severe headaches, and chronic hypertension. By the time Wilson was elected president, Dr. Grayson, who then became his doctor, was unnerved by the number of medicines he was taking. And by the time he began his second presidential term, Wilson’s kidneys were showing signs of malfunctioning. He was also a workaholic—an addiction well served by the peace conference but at war with his body.
Indeed, Wilson began the February voyage home in a state of extreme exhaustion. Fortunately, despite heavy fog off the coast of Newfoundland nearly forcing the ship aground, the trip was for the most part a relaxing one. The president spent his days with Edith, his second wife, reading, playing shuffleboard, and conversing with the relatively few passengers—typically about topics other than world peace, self-determination, and the partisan struggles of launching the League. On board this time were congressmen from Kansas, Ohio, and North Dakota; the American ambassador to Russia and his wife; Dr. Grayson, of course; Ray Stannard Baker; and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “This young assistant secretary of the Navy had great charm of presence and of manner” wrote Baker of Roosevelt. “He was enthusiastic and earnest, and a mine of information regarding ships and the sea.”
Probably the passengers most keenly aware of the stresses of Wilson’s life in Paris were Dr. Grayson, Mrs. Wilson, and Baker. All three understood that Wilson’s mission to break down old-style diplomacy and replace it with democratic processes was a quest that could break down the president himself. Wilson had gone to Paris not only to negotiate the terms of peace with Germany but also to launch a new international organization that would secure a permanent peace. “It was inevitable that President Wilson should be forced at Paris to bear the brunt of the heavy fighting—fighting that would have worn out a stronger, more robust man than he,” Baker wrote later that year.
Baker was a writer renowned for his groundbreaking magazine pieces, which, with the work of his former colleagues Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, had defined the journalistic skill known as muckraking. Now, at the peace conference the forty-nine-year-old journalist was working for Wilson as head of the Press Bureau which consisted of 150 American correspondents. He organized information coming out of the many meetings of the American Peace Commission, packaged it, and disseminated it to the press corps. As a veteran journalist, he was also keeping a detailed diary with his usual keen observations of the world around him. His office was at No. 4 Place de la Concorde and he knew most of what occurred a few doors down the street at the Hôtel de Crillon, where the many members of the American Peace Commission lodged and worked. Baker was also privy to all the intrigue, struggle, and contention taking place two miles away at the Palais Murat, the eighteenth-century mansion where President Wilson lived and worked, and which was connected to the Hôtel de Crillon and to Baker by an extensive phone system and postal service.
Baker witnessed firsthand the reasons for Wilson’s extreme exhaustion that February. He knew the daily and nightly tugs-of-war between Wilson and the other representatives of the Allied nations. He saw the fierce struggle between the vision of a peace based on principles promoted by the president of a nation that was thousands of miles from the battlefields and the demands for a peace based on the special interests of the leaders of those nations devastated by the war and still fearful of their neighbor Germany. Wilson demanded a settlement based on the principles set out in the Armistice, which in turn were based on his Fourteen Points, while the others wanted material reimbursements and the assurance of a crippled Germany. “So many of the discussions,” wrote Baker of the early days of the conference, “seemed to be mere jockeying for position among groups of clever diplomatic traders, and to have behind them no clearly held principles or objectives, let alone any that were inspired, as had been President Wilson’s recent addresses, by a passion for the general good of mankind.”
When the Armistice was signed, the Allies appeared to be unified in the hope and excitement of a new world order. But by the time the peace conference began on January 18, 1919, the ambitions and power mongering that had inspired the onset of the Great War itself were resurfacing. America’s European Allies seemed to be reverting to the old world order, like wolves returning to their den, dragging with them carcasses to divide and pick apart. For them, to decide the peace meant to divide the spoils of war and to punish Germany so severely that there would never be a reason to fear German militarism again. But for Wilson, the only way to end war was to prevent war, “peace without victory”—in other words no single nation or group of nations should dominate because of winning the war.
Wilson had told the public many times that he believed that no one class or nationality was better than another. It was this perhaps that drew the masses to him. In Brest when the George Washington had docked in mid-December, acclaim turned to frenzy and the crowd roared its reverences until the voices gave out. In London, thousands of schoolgirls with baskets of flowers lined the streets scattering roses in Wilson’s path, and a meeting run by Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden—future leaders of England—endorsed Wilson’s plan for a permanent peace. In Italy, where Wilson’s picture hung on the walls of many houses, the press pondered whether the triumphs of the Caesars had inspired crowds so large as the ones greeting this American, who they believed would slay the dragons of their darkness.
But while Wilson was performing his role as the man who would be God and greeting the workingmen and women on the streets of Europe, he was denounced in the parlors of the ruling class—ridiculed actually for what they perceived as his naïveté. Indeed, Europe’s rulers were plotting to undermine his cause. Georges Clemenceau, France’s premier, was telling his advisers that the old system of alliances was the only way to safeguard the world. In England, Wilson’s opponents, the ones staunchly supporting a punitive peace and strong reparations against Germany, had just won seats in Parliament. In Italy, Benito Mussolini, the Italian editor of the Milan Il Popolo d’Italia, echoing the ruling class, called Wilson “a dangerous radical.” And Wilson’s own loss of power in the 1918 Congressional elections diminished his stature among the leaders with whom he would be negotiating.
The negotiations took place at various palatial buildings in the vicinity of the Place de la Concorde, in particular the residences of the Big Four representatives of the Allied Powers. It was these four men on whom humanity was depending to reconstruct the world: David Lloyd George, the fifty-six-year-old prime minister of England, who was a liberal politically and an opportunist at heart; the fifty-nine-year-old Italian premier, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, who was a liberal and a pragmatist; Clemenceau, the seventy-eight-year-old French premier, known as “the Tiger” and conservative to the core; and Wilson, a liberal politically and an idealist at heart. From the start, the three Europeans appeared to believe they could run roughshod over Wilson—perhaps mistaking his understated demeanor and rather fragile physique as a signal to do so. Americans were too innocent for international politics, after all, and Wilson must be simplistic and naïve to believe in a plan to end all wars. When asked by a journalist about Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Clemenceau responded “Le bon Dieu n’avait que dix” (“God had only ten”).
By the time Wilson docked in Boston on the 24th of February, the conference had considered such questions as what to do about Poland, about Russia, and about revision of the Armistice terms. But center stage in the early weeks had been two issues: what to do with the German colonies and whether to include the League as part of the peace treaty or work on it after the treaty was signed. The colonial powers wanted to annex the German colonies as spoils of war. Wilson wanted to present a new principle of world policy. The League of Nations, he proposed, would assign trustees or mandatories to the colonies temporarily while the inhabitants of the colonies prepared to take control of their own lands.
Wilson warned that if their first act in negotiating a peace settlement was to divide up the spoils of war, then the world would immediately lose faith in the conference. Besides, annexation was contrary to the principles outlined in the Armistice itself, said Wilson, who was flayed by the foreign press for his stand. In the end, Wilson won the battle, thus persuading the delegates to adopt the principle that all German colonies would be treated as wards of the new League of Nations.
Even the Republican delegate Henry White, whom Wilson’s nemesis Henry Cabot Lodge had enlisted to help in undermining the president in Paris, agreed with Wilson’s proposal and said as much in a February 10 letter to Lodge. “I cannot but feel from what I have already seen at the Conference of the tendency of every nation, excepting perhaps Great Britain, to grab all that it can get,” White wrote, “that the only way to stop that tendency is the proposed mandate of the League of Nations, which while giving the government of colonies or backward countries into the charge under such mandate of a nation which would otherwise have annexed them, is the only way to stop the tendency to which I have referred.”
Wilson’s opponents claimed that his principled approach stymied the peace process and delayed the signing of a treaty that would block Germany from breaking out upon the world once again. Germany must be stopped from renewing its strength, they said, and thus a speedy treaty enforcing the punitive peace was imperative. This indeed was one reason his adversaries in both Europe and America argued for postponing the formation of a League of Nations until after the peace treaty was signed. Settling the military and naval terms, fixing reparations, and establishing boundaries would be difficult and time-consuming enough without the added struggle of working out the details of the League.
Lodge, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, led the slowly strengthening opposition to Wilson back home. Wilson and Lodge had been bitter rivals for years. Now they were at the pinnacle of their political careers and their enmity too was rising to its most intense level yet. The quintessential realist, Lodge was now, after the November 1918 elections, the Senate majority leader and the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. Lodge believed Wilson’s “peace without victory” was poppycock.
In these early days of the peace negotiations, Lodge’s greatest concern was that Wilson would place more importance on perfecting the League proposal than on designing physical guarantees against a German military remobilization, effectively that his idealism would endanger the world. In the memo he had secretly given to Henry White before White’s departure to Paris, and which White never did deliver to Clemenceau or anyone else at the conference, Lodge had written: “under no circumstances must provisions for such a league be made a part of the peace treaty which concludes the war with Germany. Any attempt to do this would not only long delay the signature of the treaty of peace, which should not be unduly postponed, but it would make the adoption of the treaty, unamended, by the Senate of the United States and other ratifying bodies, extremely doubtful.”
Lodge believed that the League was not as simple as it sounded in Wilson’s lofty speeches. And he felt certain that the concept of the League would break down when practicality and reality entered the discussion, and thus the peace conference would last for a dangerously long time. Was it even possible to convert Wilson’s high aspirations for such a League into law? Back in December, around the time Wilson had arrived in Europe, Lodge decried the League in a speech to the Senate. It is easy, he said, “to talk about a league of nations and the beauty and necessity of peace but the hard practical demand is, are you ready to put your soldiers and your sailors at the disposition of other nations?”
Lodge demanded definitions and facts. Would the League have a military force of its own or would the armies of its members be on call to be summoned by the authority of the League at any time? Was America willing to enter into “a permanent and indissoluble alliance?”
“The attempt to form a league of nations” he told the Senate, “and I mean an effective league, with power to enforce its decrees—no other is worth discussing—can tend at this moment only to embarrass the peace that we ought to make at once with Germany.”
Lodge frequently quoted his friend Theodore Roosevelt these days, who in the last weeks of his life was outspoken against the League. As Roosevelt understood it, the League would require each member nation to fight battles in which it had no material interest and it was his experience with the American people that they “do not wish to go into an overseas war unless for a very great cause or where the issue is absolutely plain.” There were others in the Senate who agreed.
But Wilson, demonstrating his dedication as well as his unbending nature, clung to his belief that creating a vehicle for lasting peace must be part of the treaty itself or it would not be a peace treaty at all. Only in a world secured against international aggression could peace be lasting. And for Wilson, the League was that security. Further, if the task of working it out were left for last, after the treaty was signed, the delegates would be eager to return home and the organization of the League could be postponed—perhaps never again approached.
“The constitution of that League of Nations and the clear definition of its objects must be a part, in a sense the most essential part, of the peace settlement itself,” Wilson said in a speech in New York shortly before the end of the war. “It is not likely that it could be formed after the settlement. It is necessary to guarantee the peace: and the peace cannot be guaranteed as an afterthought.”
On February 14, in Paris, after days and nights of working and reworking the structure of the League Covenant—effectively the constitution of the League—the conference delegates voted to approve the inclusion of the League in the peace treaty. That day in a room filled with dozens of men in three-buttoned cutaway coats, white vests, and pin-striped trousers, men who represented half the nations of the world—and one woman, Edith Wilson—the president read out loud the Covenant.
“A living thing is born,” he said. “While it is elastic, while it is general in its terms, it is definite in one thing that we are called upon to make definite. It is a definite guaranty of peace. It is a definite guaranty by word against aggression.”
Observing Wilson that day in Paris was the American journalist William Allen White, who wrote that Wilson’s audience, which comprised the full peace conference, listened as if they were hearing a new declaration of independence. White called it a declaration of “international interdependence.” This, said White, was the apex of Wilson’s career. “Two or three hundred newspaper men, standing on their chairs and on the table, stood on tiptoes to see the President’s face as he read the words before him; words of tremendous import, it seemed, for we were hearing, for the first time, the Covenant of the League of Nations as the President read it to the Peace Conference,” White later wrote.
Now Wilson was coming home to gain approval from his own nation and to show the American public and the leaders of Congress what he had done at the peace conference to set his convictions into motion and to justify the war they had just endured. When the Washington docked in Boston on the 24th of February, a considerable crowd greeted the president. The first news he received was that he had a new grandson. And then he was told about the arrests the day before in New York of fourteen Spanish immigrants, all young men in their early twenties, who allegedly were conspiring to assassinate Wilson.
The government told the press that Secret Service agents had determined that the would-be assassins were Bolshevik sympathizers who had planned to throw a bomb at Wilson as he walked off the boat at Boston. The bomb was made in Philadelphia, the agents said, where two of the Spaniards had lived since their arrival in the United States only eighteen months before. This was also where the plot was allegedly hatched. No bomb had yet been found. Ten of the men were arrested at a Spanish club in New York City on Lexington Avenue at 108th Street, where agents confiscated many copies of El Corsario, a radical Spanish newspaper found in a pile of miscellaneous radical “paraphernalia,” including IWW membership cards and flyers to aid “American political prisoners.”
This was the second plot to kill the president that the government had revealed to the public in February. On the 12th, a man was arrested in Cleveland who allegedly headed up a “band of Nihilists” who, while at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, had plotted to kill the president. The Secret Service revealed to the press that at Leavenworth the men, twenty in all, had drawn lots to determine who would be the assassin, and that they would kill the assassin if he did not follow through. The man who drew the killer ballot was Pietro Pierre, who was in jail for violating the Selective Service Act. Two of his Italian cell mates exposed the plot, which included a scheme to kill William G. McAdoo, former secretary of the treasury and son-in-law of President Wilson. From the moment Pierre left Leavenworth on October 14, 1918, the Secret Service was tailing him. The trail was long, from Kansas to Division Street in Chicago, then to Michigan, to Virginia, Minnesota, back to Michigan, and finally to Cleveland. In both Chicago and Cleveland Pierre had paid a visit to IWW headquarters. After his rearrest, the police raided IWW headquarters in both Chicago and Cleveland. Headlines then read: “I.W.W. in Plot to Kill Wilson.”
The night of his safe landing in Boston, Wilson spoke at Mechanics Hall downtown, which was the unofficial beginning of his campaign to persuade America to accept the League. Baker wrote later that it was one of the finest speeches of Wilson’s career. Wilson seemed unstoppable. He had effectively won the first two battles of the peace conference and the American public appeared to be enthusiastic about his League. But, because of the Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, to secure ratification would be a bigger battle than the peace conference itself.
Landing at Boston harbor first, before going to New York, the usual port of arrival, was part of Wilson’s strategy to win that contest. Boston was home to Lodge, the man as determined to kill the League as Wilson was to create it. And the resounding crowd greeting Wilson in Boston made it politically difficult for Lodge to eviscerate the president, especially because the Massachusetts governor, Calvin Coolidge, though a Republican, asked Lodge to restrain from vitriol.
But Wilson’s main plan for winning the upcoming battle was to avoid describing to the public the details of the League, thus speaking in exalted tones and keeping on the high ground of his ideals where his popularity dwelled. The public was uninformed about the practical workings of his idea, a situation that opened the door for Lodge’s own strategy for crushing Wilson’s dream: to inform the public about every complicated, contradictory, and imposing detail of it. Knowing what demands the League would require of Americans, such as protecting other nations from aggressors, Lodge believed the public would never allow its congressmen to support it. After all, the winds of war might have the effect, especially now, of bending Americans in the direction of isolationism.