Whatever James Weldon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover were saying about African-Americans that November was far from the thoughts of Woodrow Wilson as he sat in his sickroom at the White House. Although he was physically weak and emotionally fragile, his mind was still sharp. And he was more rigid in his thinking than ever before. He spoke to few people and focused intently on one issue: the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.
The battle over the treaty had narrowed to what Wilson called the “heart of the Covenant,” Article 10. Although Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, a Democrat from Nebraska, had countered Lodge’s reservations with five of the Democrats’ own more moderate reservations, Lodge had prevailed. The choice before the U.S. senators was to approve the treaty without the Republicans’ restrictions or the treaty with them or to reject the treaty altogether. Thus, as the day of the Senate vote drew near, it was abundantly clear that if Wilson was unwilling to accept Lodge’s stipulations, which effectively nullified Article 10, then it was highly possible that the treaty would be defeated. For Wilson, forsaking Article 10 meant ruining the cornerstone of the League and betraying his promise to the American public, whose wishes he considered himself to be still representing. This he could not do.
And thus, on November 17, Wilson informed Senator Hitchcock of his decision to reject the version of the treaty that would include any of Lodge’s changes. On the 19th, the Senate indeed voted to defeat the treaty with the Lodge reservations: 39 yeas and 55 nays. But then when the call came out for the vote on the treaty alone the vote came in at 53 nays and 38 yeas, falling far short of the two-thirds majority vote necessary for ratification.
For the next several months both political parties would struggle to come to a compromise solution, and in February the Senate would vote to reconsider the treaty. But what happened in November was effectively the end. Wilson would never move from his resolute position. And although many Democrats would defy his stand and vote in favor of the treaty with the Lodge reservations, the Senate vote in March would never reach the two-thirds majority needed to ratify the treaty.
Five days after the November vote, a new book appeared in bookstores and newsstands nationwide: What Wilson Did at Paris. For its author, Ray Stannard Baker, the publication was a bittersweet occasion. Critics hailed the book as a timely work and praised Baker for raising the curtain on the drama of the peace conference. By telling the stories of the crises Wilson had faced at Paris and by bringing alive such details as the president’s dawn-to-midnight schedule of meetings with thousands of people, from kings and diplomats to sheepherders and fishermen, Baker, in his 113-page book, the critics wrote, skillfully revealed the dogged determination of the president to force upon the peace conference the ideals he had so strongly represented to the world. “A little book of great immediate and historic value,” wrote the New York Times reviewer, and “a valuable aid for the proponents of the League.”
But by the end of November Baker knew that despite the success of his book, despite the wide circulation of his autumn articles upon which the book was based and which had reached an audience of ten million American readers, despite the fact that the American public would now know far more than ever before about their president and what he had done in Paris, the drama was effectively over. “I had tried to help him with my little book—all to no purpose, as it seemed to me,” he wrote in his journal.
The president whom Baker deeply respected was now a broken man whose own distorted judgments and perceptions of the real world would hinder, not help, the cause of ratifying the treaty and bringing America into the League. Wilson believed that the people were still cheering and worshipping him as they had on that December 4 morning, only one year ago, when he left for France the first time. Baker, however, understood that no matter what the public knew or didn’t know at this point about their president, they were no longer behind him. Baker could see that Wilson lived in an unreal world. So unreal in fact that Wilson would try to turn the next presidential election into a single issue referendum: the treaty. And he would attempt to put himself in the running for a third term. But the harder Wilson pushed for success, the faster he seemed to sink into a quicksand of failure.
In the aftermath of the vote, letters inundated the White House. Some stood by Wilson; some were alarmed by the thought that America might not ratify the treaty of peace; and some bemoaned the Senate’s disloyalty to the president’s League. But many criticized Wilson’s stubborn stand against the Lodge reservations and just as many denigrated the treaty for its deviation from the Fourteen Points. “Your acts will one day be judged by an all-seeing eye,” wrote a man from Sandusky, Ohio. “Do not plead for justice and deny it at the same time. Do not cry liberty and in its name defend despotism.”
Among his most resentful critics were African-Americans. In a letter dated November 25, William Monroe Trotter, who had in August publicly spoken out against the League, urged the president to use his power to end lynching and segregation in America. Showing his bitter disappointment in the League Covenant, he told the president in his letter that the racial inequities in America were the greatest “violation” of Wilson’s idealism and thus, “Your League of Nations Covenant, void of measures or of declarations against these undemocratic conditions…deserved its fate.”
Cruelty and indignation abounded in the coming weeks as the battle continued. Wilson’s opponents even sent back to the White House the official copy of the treaty with the League Covenant, the one that Wilson had brought with him from France the previous February. It was an ugly gesture that Baker characterized as “the cruelest, most despicable act ever committed in American politics.” How was it possible that a man once so revered was now so scorned?
For Baker, the publication of his new book in combination with the Senate’s rejection set off a reel of painful memories. He recalled moments with an eager, hopeful Wilson on the deck of the USS George Washington on the first voyage back from France the previous February. The purpose of the trip had been to unveil to Congress the first draft of the League Covenant. It was a stormy voyage and one day Baker was walking on the deck just as the president was about to climb the stairs to the ship’s bridge. The wind was so strong that it blew open the president’s coat where, as Baker saw for a swift second, the Covenant itself was stuffed neatly inside Wilson’s breast pocket. “It was the most cherished thing in his life,” Baker wrote.
Baker also remembered the extremely violent weather the night before landing at Boston on that February trip. On the morning of their return, Baker learned that the ship was late and that it had lost its course during the night. The first person Baker met on the deck that morning who knew what had happened was a young man who was well informed about the ways of ships and sailing, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt. What had happened in the night? Baker asked. Roosevelt told him that he believed that the ship had come very close to the rocks of Gloucester, narrowly escaping disaster.
And now ten months later, Baker could not block from his mind the image of Wilson with the precious document tucked in his breast pocket on the ship that stormy night. What if the boat had crashed into the rocks and the president had died that night? It was an uncanny thought, he well knew, silly and unprofessional—one that historians would not respect. But still, he could not stop wondering if such a tragedy had occurred, what would have happened to the treaty and the League? If the president had been a martyr for his cause, instead of an insistent and petulant crusader, would things have been different? In his diary Baker wrote, “But [Wilson] did not go down with the ship. He lived to struggle, and suffer, and fail. Few great Americans, I think, ever suffered more.”
Even Wilson pondered the same possibility. Baker could barely listen the day that the president’s physician told him that Wilson, in the aftermath of the Senate’s rejection had said, “It would probably have been better if I had died last fall.”
Baker was witnessing the slow, agonizing deaths of both a vision and its visionary. Among his most haunting and persistent memories of Wilson would always be a line from the president’s speech in Omaha in August during the national tour: “I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.”