It was called the Great War, and its costs were horrific, its consequences profound. Between August 1914 and November 1918, the European powers fought it out across a blood-soaked continent. Harnessing modern technology to the ancient art of war, they created a ruthlessly efficient killing machine that left as many as ten million soldiers and civilians dead, countless others wounded and disfigured. The war inflicted huge economic and psychological damage on people and societies; it shattered once mighty empires. It coincided with and in important ways shaped the outbreak of revolutionary challenges to the established economic and political order. Together, the forces of war and revolution unleashed during the second decade of the twentieth century set off an era of conflict that would last nearly until the century's end.
Woodrow Wilson once declared that it would be an "irony of fate" if his presidency focused on foreign policy.1 Indeed, it seems more than a twist of fate if not quite predestination that placed him in the White House during this tumultuous era. He brought to the office an especially keen sense of his own calling to lead the nation and of America's destiny to reshape a war-torn world. From his first days as chief executive, he confronted revolutions in Mexico, China, and later Russia. Initially content to follow the traditional path of U.S. neutrality in Europe's wars, in the face of Germany's U-boat attacks he eventually—and reluctantly—concluded that intervention was necessary to defend his nation's rights and honor and assure for himself and the United States a voice in the peacemaking. Once at war, he gave urgent and eloquent expression to a liberal peace program that fully reflected American ideals dating to the beginning of the republic. He enjoined Americans to assume a leadership position in world affairs. Committing himself and his nation to little short of revolutionizing the international system, he learned through bitter experience that the world was less malleable than he had assumed. He met frustration abroad and bitter defeat at home, a failure that took the form of grand tragedy when a new and even more destructive war broke out less than two decades hence. Yet the ideas he set forth have continued to influence U.S. foreign policy throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
Wilson towers above the landscape of modern American foreign policy like no other individual, the dominant personality, the seminal figure. Born in the South shortly before the Civil War, the son of a Presbyterian minister, from his youth he assiduously prepared himself for leadership—"I have a passion of interpreting great thoughts to the world," he wrote even as a young man.2 After studying law, he earned a doctorate in history and political science at Johns Hopkins University. He became a "public intellectual" before the phrase was coined, establishing a national reputation through his writing and speeches as a keen student of U.S. history and government. Drawn to the world of action, he shifted to university administration and then to politics, as president of Princeton University and subsequently governor of New Jersey demonstrating brilliant leadership in implementing sweeping reform programs against entrenched opposition. Much has been made of his moralism. Like many of his contemporaries, he was a deeply religious man. Religion gave a special fervor to his sense of personal and national destiny. He was also a practical person who quickly grasped the workings of complex institutions and learned how to use them to achieve his goals. Somewhat forbidding of countenance, with high cheekbones, a firm jaw, and stern eyes, he was a shy and private man who could come across as cold and arrogant. Yet among friends he was capable of great warmth; among those he loved, great passion. He was an accomplished and entertaining mimic. His practiced eloquence with the written and spoken word gave him a capacity to sway people matched by few U.S. leaders. Those who worked with him sometimes complained that his absorption in a single matter limited his capacity to deal with other issues. His greatest flaws were his difficulty working with strong people and, once his mind was made up, a reluctance to hear dissenting views.3
Wilson prevailed in 1912 mainly because Republicans were split between party regulars who supported Taft and progressives who backed the increasingly radical Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Socialist Eugene V. Debs won 6 percent of the vote in this most radical election in U.S. history. Wilson came to power fully committed to his New Freedom reform program that sought to restore equality of opportunity and democracy through tariff and banking reform and curbing the power of big business.4
He also brought to the presidency firm convictions about America's role in the world. He fervently believed that foreign policy should serve broad human concerns rather than narrow selfish interests. He recognized business's need for new markets and investments abroad, but he saw no inherent conflict between America's ideals and its pursuit of self-interest, believing, in biographer Kendrick Clements's phrase, that the United States "would do well by doing good."5 He shared in full measure and indeed found religious justification for the traditional American belief that providence had singled out his nation to show other peoples "how they shall walk in the paths of liberty."6 He had watched with fascination his nation's emergence as a world power, and he perceived that this new status put it in a position to promote its ideals. He shared the optimism and goals of the organized peace movement. At first opposed to taking the Philippines, he went along on grounds that nations like the United States and Britain that were "organically" disposed toward democracy should educate other peoples for self-government.7 An admirer of conservative British political philosopher Edmund Burke, he feared disorder and violent change. As at home, he viewed powerful economic interests as obstacles to equal opportunity and democratic progress in other countries.8
Wilson's views were influenced by Col. Edward M. House (the title was honorific), a wealthy Texas politico who without official position remained his alter ego and closest adviser until the last years of his presidency. Small of stature, quiet and self-effacing, House was a shrewd judge of people and a skilled behind-the-scenes operator. His aspirations were revealed in his anonymously published novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, the tale of a Kentuckian and West Point graduate who after corralling the special interests at home launched a crusade with Britain against Germany and Japan for disarmament and the removal of trade barriers.9
Wilson's genuine and deeply felt aspirations to build a better world suffered from a certain culture-blindness. He lacked experience in diplomacy and hence an appreciation of its limits. He had not traveled widely outside the United States and knew little of other peoples and cultures beyond Britain, which he greatly admired. Especially in his first years in office, he had difficulty seeing that well-intended efforts to spread U.S. values might be viewed as interference at best, coercion at worst. His vision was further narrowed by the terrible burden of racism, common among the elite of his generation, which limited his capacity to understand and respect people of different colors. Above all, he was blinded by his certainty of America's goodness and destiny. "A new age has come which no man may forecast," he wrote in 1901. "But the past is the key to it; and the past of America lies at the center of modern history."10
As a scholar, Wilson had written that the power of the president in foreign policy was "very absolute," and he practiced what he had preached, expanding presidential authority even beyond TR's precedents. He was fascinated by the challenge of leading a great nation in tumultuous times. Early in his presidency, he wrote excitedly to a friend about the "thick bundle of despatches" he confronted each afternoon, a "miscellany of just about every sort of problem that can arise in the foreign affairs of a nation in a time of general questioning and difficulty." He distrusted and even had contempt for the State Department, complaining on one occasion that dispatches written there were not in "good and understandable English." Like the professor he had been, he corrected and returned them for resubmission. He composed much diplomatic correspondence on his own typewriter and handled some major issues without consulting either the State Department or his cabinet.11
Wilson's early forays into the world of diplomacy suggest much about the ideas and ideals he brought to office. His naming of William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state was politic in light of the Great Commoner's stature in the Democratic Party and crucial role in the 1912 campaign. It followed a long tradition of appointing the party leader to that important post. Bryan had traveled widely, including an around-the-world jaunt in 1906. In this respect, at least, he was better qualified than Wilson to shape U.S. foreign policy. Even more than Wilson, Bryan believed that Christian principles should animate foreign policy. A longtime temperance advocate, he set the diplomatic community abuzz by refusing to serve alcohol at official functions (the Russian ambassador claimed not to have tasted water for years and to have survived one event only by loading up on claret before he arrived).12 Wilson and Bryan negotiated a treaty with Colombia apologizing and offering monetary compensation for the U.S. role in the Panamanian revolution. This well-intentioned and truly remarkable move quite naturally provoked cries of rage from the Rough Rider, Theodore Roosevelt, and sufficient opposition in the Senate that it was not ratified. It won warm applause in Latin America. In a major speech at Mobile, Alabama, in October 1913, Wilson explicitly disavowed U.S. economic imperialism and gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, linking the exploitative interests that victimized other peoples to the bankers and corporate interests he was fighting at home and promising to replace those old "degrading policies" with a new policy of "sympathy and friendship."13
As war enveloped Europe, Wilson and Bryan sought to implement ideas long advocated by the peace movement. Bryan's agreement to serve had been conditioned on freedom to pursue "cooling off treaties." During 1913–14, ironically as Europe was rushing headlong toward war, he negotiated with twenty nations—Britain and France included—treaties designed to prevent such crises from escalating to military conflict. When diplomacy failed, nations would submit their disputes for study by an international commission and refrain from war until its work was completed. Dismissed by critics then and since as useless or worse, the treaties were indeed shot through with exceptions and qualifications. Bryan nevertheless considered them the crowning achievement of his career. Wilson took them more seriously after the Great War began, even concluding that they might have prevented it. The Bryan treaties marked Wilson's initial move toward an internationalist foreign policy.14
The quest for a Pan-American Pact reveals in microcosm Wilson's larger designs and the obstacles they encountered abroad. Originally proposed by Bryan in late 1913, the idea was embraced by the president after the outbreak of war in Europe. Viewing it as a means to preserve peace following the war, he rewrote it on his own typewriter. It called for mutual guarantees among hemispheric nations of political independence and territorial integrity "under republican government" and for member governments to take control of the production and distribution of arms and munitions. He later linked the pact with U.S. efforts to expand trade in Latin America. Presented first to Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, it drew suspicion. Chile especially feared that its consent would affect its ongoing border dispute with Peru. More important, politicians were alarmed by the huge expansion of U.S. trade and feared that, despite his soothing words, Wilson no less than his predecessors wished to dominate the hemisphere economically and might use the provision calling for republican government to impose U.S. values. Chilean objections delayed consideration of the treaty; U.S. military intervention in Mexico doomed it. It became the basis of Wilson's later proposals for a League of Nations15
From the outset, Wilson grappled with the complex issues raised by revolution. These early twentieth-century upheavals erupted first in East Asia and Latin America. Although they shared the aim of overthrowing established orders, they were as diverse as the nations in which they occurred. In China, reformers inspired by Japan and the West sought to replace a monarchical, feudal order with a modern nation-state. In Mexico, middle- and lower-class revolutionaries challenged the power of entrenched economic and political interests and the Catholic Church. In each case, nationalists sought to eliminate or at least curb the power of foreign interests that had undermined their country's sovereignty and economic independence.
Wilson's response to these revolutions revealed his good intentions and the difficulties of their implementation. Traditionally, the United States had sympathized with revolutions at least in principle, but when they turned violent or radical or threatened U.S. interests, it had called for order or sought to channel them in moderate directions.16 With China and Mexico, Wilson plainly sympathized with the forces of revolution. He understood better than most Americans the way in which they expressed the desire of people for economic and political progress. Even in Central America, he hoped to seize the opportunity to improve the lot of the peoples involved. Wilson's "ethnocentric humanitarianism" failed to recognize that in seeking to direct the future of these nations he limited their ability to work out their own destiny. His presumptuous interference overlooked their own national pride and aspirations.17
After a decade of agitation, nationalist reformers in late 1911 overthrew the moribund Qing regime. Upon taking office, Wilson responded enthusiastically and optimistically to the Chinese Revolution. True to his reformist instincts and taking his cues mainly from missionaries, he concluded that China was "plastic" in the hands of "strong and capable Westerners." He and Bryan believed that the United States should serve as a "friend and exemplar" in moving China toward Christianity and democracy. They also agreed that "men of pronounced Christian character" should be sent there.18 Wilson took bold steps to help China. In March 1913, without consulting the State Department, he withdrew the United States from the international bankers' consortium formed by Taft and Knox to underwrite loans to China. Certain that the Europeans preferred a weak and divided China, a week later and without consulting them he recognized strongman Yüan Shih-k'ai's Republic of China. The open door, he proclaimed, was a "door of friendship and mutual advantage . . . the only door we care to enter."19
Wilson's gestures did nothing to alter the harsh realities in China. In its early stages, the revolution brought little substantive change. The masses were not involved. Leaders sought to advance their own power rather than build a modern state. Reformers fought with each other; Yüan's government was shaky at best. The powers sought to exploit China's weakness to expand their influence. Continued U.S. involvement in the consortium might have helped check Japanese and European ambitions. Wilson's well-intentioned withdrawal thus did as much harm as good. He subsequently rejected China's request for loans, making clear the limits of American support.
The outbreak of war in Europe exposed even more starkly the limits of U.S. helpfulness. "When there is a fire in a jeweler's shop the neighbours cannot be expected to refrain from helping themselves," a Japanese diplomat candidly admitted.20 Japan immediately joined the Allies and took advantage of Europe's preoccupation to drive the Germans from Shandong province. In early 1915, Tokyo presented the embattled Chinese government with its Twenty-One Demands, which sought mainly to legitimize gains made at Germany's expense and expand Japanese influence in Manchuria and along the coast. Even more intrusively, Tokyo demanded that China accept Japanese "advisers" and share responsibility for maintaining order in key areas.
The Chinese sought U.S. support in resisting Japan. Some nationalists saw the United States as little different than other imperial powers; others admired and hoped to emulate it. Still others viewed it as the least menacing of the powers and hoped to use it to counter more aggressive nations. Yüan hired an American to promote his cause and used missionaries and diplomats to gain support from Washington. Working through the U.S. minister, he appealed to the United States to hold off Japanese pressures.
Although deeply concerned with Japanese actions, Wilson and his advisers were not inclined to intercede. State Department counselor Robert Lansing concluded that it would be "quixotic in the extreme to allow the question of China's territorial integrity to entangle the United States in international difficulties."21 True to his pacifist principles, Bryan gave higher priority to avoiding war with Japan than to upholding the independence of China. He made clear the United States would do nothing. Preoccupied with the European war and the death of his beloved wife, Ellen, Wilson at first did not dissent. He continued to sympathize with China, however, informing Bryan that "we should be as active as the circumstances permit" in championing its "sovereign rights."22 Wilson's firmer stance combined with British protests and divisions within the Tokyo government led Japan to moderate its demands.
Wilson continued to take limited measures to help China. In 1916, he encouraged private bankers to extend loans, both to preserve U.S. economic interests and to counter Japanese influence. Soon after, he retreated from his 1913 position by authorizing a new international consortium of bankers to provide loans, even agreeing to help them collect if the Chinese defaulted. Alarmed by America's more assertive stance, Japan sent a special emissary to Washington in the summer of 1917. Kikujiro Ishii's discussions with Lansing, who was by this time secretary of state, revealed major differences, but the two nations eventually got around them by agreeing that Japan's geographical propinquity gave it special but not paramount interests in China. In a secret protocol, the United States again pushed for the open door. The two nations agreed not to exploit the war to gain exclusive privileges. Wilson's position revealed his continuing concern for the Chinese Revolution and Japanese intrusion but made clear to both nations his unwillingness to act.23
Closer to home, the United States had no such compunctions. In Central America and the Caribbean, revolution was an established part of the political process, its aims, at least in U.S. eyes, less about democracy and progress than power and spoils. The growing U.S. economic and diplomatic presence had further destabilized an already volatile region while the opening of the Panama Canal and the outbreak of war in Europe heightened U.S. anxiety about the area. The United States had vital interests there. It also had the power and was willing to use it to contain revolutions and maintain hegemony over small, weak states whose people were deemed inferior. "We are, in spite of ourselves, the guardians of order and justice and decency on this Continent," a Wilson confidant wrote in 1913. "[We] are providentially, naturally, and inescapably, charged with maintenance of humanity's interest here."24
During the campaign and the early days of his presidency, Wilson had denounced Taft's dollar diplomacy and military interventionism and spoken eloquently of treating Latin American nations "on terms of equality and honor."25 He and Bryan genuinely hoped to guide these peoples—"our political children," Bryan called them—to democracy and freedom. They sought to understand their interests even when they conflicted with those of the United States. However they packaged it, the two men ended up behaving much like their predecessors. Wilson deemed it "reprehensible" to permit foreign nations to secure financial control of "these weak and unfortunate republics." But he endorsed a form of dollar diplomacy to control their finances.26 He and Bryan looked upon them with the same sort of paternalism with which they regarded African Americans at home. They assumed that U.S. help would be welcomed. When it was not, they fell back on diplomatic pressure and military force.27
The result was a period of military interventionism exceeding that of Roosevelt and Taft. During its two terms in office, the administration sent troops to Cuba once, Panama twice, and Honduras five times. Wilson and Bryan added Nicaragua to an already long list of protectorates. Despite his anti-imperialist record, Bryan sought to end a long period of instability there with a treaty like the Platt Amendment that would have given the United States the right to intervene. When the Senate rejected this provision, the administration negotiated a treaty giving the United States exclusive rights to the Nicaraguan canal route, a preemptive move
depriving Nicaragua of a vital bargaining lever, and providing for a Dominican-type customs receivership that facilitated U.S. economic control and reduced Nicaragua to protectorate status.28
Because of its position astride the Windward Passage, the island of Hispaniola was considered especially important. Dollar diplomat Jacob Hollander boasted in 1914 that the U.S. protectorate had accomplished in the Dominican Republic "little short of a revolution . . . in the arts of peace, industry and civilization."29 It had not produced stability. Efforts by the United States in 1913 to impose order through supervised elections, the so-called Wilson Plan, provoked the threat of a new revolution and civil war. Dominicans ignored Bryan's subsequent order for a moratorium on revolution. All else failing, Wilson ordered military intervention in 1915 and full-scale military occupation the next year.30
The administration also sent troops to neighboring Haiti. Partly by its own choice, the United States traditionally had little influence in Haiti, although it had coveted the Môle St. Nicolas, one of the Caribbean's finest ports. Historically, the black republic had been most influenced by France; after the turn of the century, German merchants and bankers secured growing power over its economy. Wilson viewed rising European influence as "sinister." United States officials ascribed more credence than warranted to rumors of German establishment of a coaling station at the mole and to the even more bizarre report—after the outbreak of World War I—of a joint French-German customs receivership. Bryan set aside his anti-imperialist views long enough to try to take the mole "out of the market" with a preemptive purchase. He subsequently attempted to head off any European initiative by imposing on Haiti a Dominican-type customs arrangement. Haiti defiantly resisted U.S. overtures, but an especially brutal revolution in which the government massacred some 167 citizens and the president was killed and his dismembered body dragged through the streets provided ample reason for U.S. intervention. In July 1915, allegedly as a strategic measure and to restore order, the United States placed Haiti under military occupation. Wilson admitted that U.S. actions in that "dusky little republic" were "highhanded," but he insisted that in the "unprecedented" circumstances the "necessity for exercising control there is immediate, urgent, imperative." The better elements of the country would understand, he hoped, that the United States was there to help, not subordinate, the people.31
Whatever Wilson's intentions, the military occupations on Hispaniola represent major blots on the U.S. record. The United States imposed at the point of a gun the stability it so desperately sought, but at great cost to the local peoples and to its own ideals. In the Dominican Republic, the U.S. Marines fought a nasty five-year war against stubborn guerrillas in the eastern part of the country, often applying brutal methods against those they contemptuously labeled "spigs." Using models developed in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, U.S. proconsuls implemented technocratic progressive reforms, building roads and developing public health and sanitation programs. The reforms benefited mainly elites and foreigners. Little changed as a result, and when the marines withdrew in 1924, life quickly reverted to normal. The Americans bequeathed to Dominicans a keen interest in baseball. The domineering presence of outsiders certain of their superiority also created a nascent sense of Dominican nationalism. Perhaps the main result of the occupation, an unintended consequence, was that the Guardia Nacional established to assist in upholding order would become the means by which Rafael Trujillo maintained a brutal dictatorship for thirty-one years.32
In Haiti, the marines also encountered stubborn resistance, making it impossible for Wilson to remove them when he was so inclined in 1919. The United States systematically eliminated German economic interests and gained even tighter control over Haiti's finances and customs than it had of the Dominican Republic's. But it could not attract much investment capital, and the country remained impoverished. There was no pretense of democracy: Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was jokingly called "Josephus the First—King of Haiti." The U.S. financial adviser employed the threat of not paying the salaries of Haitian officials to gain veto power over legislation. The racism of occupying forces was even more acute where the people were stereotyped like African Americans—"the same happy, idle, irresponsible people we know," as a marine colonel put it. United States officials imposed the Jim Crow style of segregation already in place in the American South. They promoted a Tuskegee-type educational system emphasizing technical education and manual labor. Once the marines left, as in the Dominican Republic, the roads (built with forced labor) fell into disrepair and public health programs languished. The blatant racism of the occupation forces pushed a local elite in search of its identity to look back to its African roots.33
Wilson's problems in Central America paled compared to the challenges posed by Mexico. The most profound social movement in Latin American history, the Mexican Revolution was extremely complex, a rebellion of middle and lower classes against a deeply entrenched old order and the foreigners who dominated the nation's economy followed by an extended civil war. It would be six years before the situation stabilized. The ongoing struggle created major difficulties for Wilson. His well-intentioned if misguided meddling produced two military interventions in three years and nearly caused an unnecessary and possibly disastrous war. The best that can be said is that he kept the interventions under tight control and learned from his Mexican misadventures something of the limits of America's appeal to other nations and its power to effect change there.
For thirty-one years, Porfirio Díaz had maintained an open door for foreign investors. Under his welcoming policies, outsiders came to own three-fourths of all corporations and vast tracts of land—newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst alone held some seven million hectares in northern Mexico. United States bankers held Mexican bonds. British and U.S. corporations controlled 90 percent of Mexico's mineral wealth and all its railroads and dominated its oil industry. Díaz hoped to promote modernization and economic development, but the progress came at enormous cost. Centralization of political control at the expense of local autonomy caused widespread unrest, especially in the northern provinces, provoking growing anger toward the regime and its foreign backers. Foreigners used Mexican lands to produce cash crops for export, disrupting the traditional economy and village culture and leaving many peasants landless. Mexican critics warned of a "peaceful invasion." Díaz's policies, they charged, made their nation a "mother to foreigners and a stepmother to her own children."34 Mexico's economy was at the mercy of external forces, and a major recession in the United States helped trigger revolution. In 1910, middle and lower classes under the leadership of Francisco Madero rose up against the regime. In May 1911, they overthrew Díaz.
Counterrevolutions quickly followed. Madero instituted a parliamentary democracy but maintained the status quo economically, disappointing many of his backers. Díaz's supporters plotted to regain power. In his last years in office, Díaz had balanced rising U.S. power in Mexico by encouraging European and especially British economic and political influence. When Madero sustained this policy, U.S. businessmen who at first welcomed the revolution turned against him. They gained active support from Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, a conservative career diplomat friendly to U.S. business interests and skeptical of the revolution. A heavy drinker, something of a loose cannon, and meddlesome in the worst tradition of Joel Poinsett and Anthony Butler, Wilson sought to undermine official support for Madero and sympathized with plots to get rid of him.General Victoriana Huerta overthrew the government in February 1913 and brutally murdered Madero and his vice president. Out of negligence and indifference, Ambassador Wilson bore some responsibility for this gruesome outcome. Madero's corpse was scarcely in the grave when his supporters launched a civil war against Huerta.35
In one of his first ventures in diplomacy, President Wilson set a new subjective standard for recognizing revolutionary governments. Responding to the French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson had established the precedent of recognizing any government formed by the will of the nation. The United States traditionally had recognized governments based simply on whether they held power and fulfilled their international obligations. With Mexico, Wilson introduced a moral and political test. Huerta was indeed a despicable character, crude, corrupt, cruel, "an ape-like man" who "may be said almost to subsist on alcohol," a presidential confidant reported.36 Wilson was appalled by the murder of Madero and indignantly vowed that he would not "recognize a government of butchers." He also suspected Huerta's ties to U.S. and especially foreign businessmen. In view of the importance of the Panama Canal, he told the British ambassador, it was vital for Central American nations to have "fairly decent rulers." He "wanted to teach those countries a lesson by insisting on the removal of Huerta."37 He hoped, in his own pretentious and oftquoted words, to teach U.S. neighbors to "elect good men." Aware that recognition might cripple the opposition, he withheld it in hopes of bringing to power a more respectable government. In so doing, he created yet another instrument to influence the internal politics of Latin American nations.38
Wilson also dispatched two trusted personal emissaries to Mexico to push for a change of government. Neither was up to the task. William Bayard Hale was a journalist and close friend; John Lind, a Minnesota politician. Neither spoke Spanish or knew anything about Mexico; Lind indeed considered Mexicans "more like children than men" and claimed they had "no standards politically."39 Their mission—to counsel Mexico "for her own good," in Wilson's patronizing words—was a fool's errand. They were to persuade Huerta to hold elections in which he would not run and all parties would abide by the result. The president authorized Lind to threaten the stick of military intervention and dangle the carrot of loans before those Mexican leaders who went along.
Predictably, the ploy failed. The crafty Huerta dodged, feinted, and parried. At first flatly rejecting proposals he deemed "hardly admissible even in a treaty of peace after a victory," he then appeared to acquiesce, promising to give up the presidency and hold elections in late October.40 After a series of military defeats, however, he arrested most of the congress and in what amounted to a coup d'état established a dictatorship. Huerta's opposition responded no more positively to U.S. interference. Constitutionalist "First Chief" Venustiano Carranza expressed resentment at Wilson's intrusion and angrily insisted that he would not participate in a U.S.-sponsored election.
Admitting to a "sneaking admiration" for Huerta's "indomitable, dogged determination," Wilson stepped up the pressure.41 He blamed the British for Huerta's intransigence and combined stern public warnings with soothing private explanations of U.S. policy. He seriously considered a blockade and declaration of war, again claiming it to be his "duty to force Huerta's retirement, peaceably if possible but forcibly if necessary."42 Ultimately, he contented himself with measures short of war, warning the Europeans to stay out, sending a squadron of warships to Mexico's east coast, and lifting an arms embargo to help Carranza militarily.
If Wilson was looking for a pretext for military intervention, he got it at Tampico in April 1914 when local officials mistakenly arrested and briefly detained a contingent of U.S. sailors who had gone ashore for provisions. The officials quickly released the captives and expressed regret, but the imperious U.S. admiral on the scene demanded a formal apology and a twenty-one-gun salute. A Gilbert and Sullivan incident escalated into full-scale crisis. Undoubtedly seeking to gain diplomatic leverage, Wilson fully backed his admiral. Huerta at first rejected U.S. demands. Sensing an opportunity for gainful mischief, he then cleverly proposed a simultaneous salute and next a reciprocal one. Wilson rejected both; Huerta rebuffed America's "unconditional demands."43
Seizing what he called a "psychological moment," Wilson ordered a military intervention at Veracruz to promote his broader goal of getting rid of Huerta.44 He pitched his actions on grounds of defending national honor. He easily secured congressional authorization to use military forces, although some hotheads, including his future archenemy, Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, preferred all-out war, military occupation of Mexico, and even a protectorate. To demonstrate his good intentions, the president recruited veterans from Philippine nation-building to show the Mexicans and others through the U.S. occupation the values of progressive government. "If Mexico understood that our motives were unselfish," Colonel House affirmed, "she should not object to our helping adjust her unruly household."45
It was a very big "if," of course. For the short term, at least, the intervention failed on all counts. Instead of welcoming the North Americans as liberators, Mexicans of varied political persuasions rallied to the banner of nationalism. In Veracruz, civilians, prisoners quickly released from jails, and soldiers acting on their own fiercely resisted the invasion. It took two days to subdue the city. More than two hundred Mexicans were killed, nineteen Americans. Across Mexico, newspapers cried out for "Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!" against the "pigs of Yanquilandia." In several cities, angry mobs attacked U.S. consulates. Even Carranza demanded U.S. withdrawal.46
United States forces took control of the city in early May, remained there for seven months, and performed numerous good works—with ephemeral results. The military government implemented progressive reforms to show Mexicans by "daily example" that the United States had come "not to conquer them, but to help restore peace and order." Occupation troops built roads and drainage ditches; provided electric lighting for streets and public buildings; reopened schools; cracked down on youth crime, gambling, and prostitution; made tax and customs collection more equitable, efficient, and lucrative for the government; and developed sanitation and public health programs to transform a beautiful but filthy city into "the cleanest town in the Republic of Mexico." As in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, within weeks after the marines left it was hard to tell that Americans had been in Veracruz.47
The intervention contributed only indirectly to the removal of Huerta. At first, the dictator used the U.S. presence to rally nationalist support. Shaken by Mexican resistance, saddened by the loss of life, and increasingly fearful of a Mexican quagmire, Wilson as a face-saving gesture accepted in July a proposal from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to mediate. While Wilson and Huerta's representatives quickly deadlocked in the surreal and inconclusive talks at Niagara Falls, New York, the civil war intensified. Now able to secure arms, Carranza's forces steadily gained ground and in mid-1914 forced Huerta to capitulate. Chastened by the experience, Wilson confided to his secretary of war that there were "no conceivable circumstances which would make it right for us to direct by force or by threat of force the internal processes of a revolution as profound as that which occurred in France."48 In November 1914, with Carranza firmly in power, the president removed the occupation forces.
A year of relative quiet followed. In Mexico itself, the civil war raged on, rival factions under populist leaders Emiliano Zapata in the south and Francisco "Pancho" Villa in the north challenging Carranza's fragile government. To promote order and perhaps a government he could influence, Wilson tried to mediate among the warring factions, issuing at least a veiled threat of military intervention if they refused. Carranza and Zapata flatly rejected the overture. Villa's fortunes were obviously declining, and he appeared receptive, opening a brief—and fateful—flirtation with the United States. Carranza continued to gain ground militarily, however. Increasingly preoccupied with the European war, having just weathered the first U-boat crisis with Germany, and fearful of growing German intrigue in Mexico, Wilson did an abrupt about-face. Even though he considered Carranza a "fool" and never established the sort of paternalistic relationship he sought, he reluctantly recognized the first chief's government. He even permitted Carranza's troops to cross U.S. territory to attack the Villistas.49
Villa quickly responded. To the end of 1915, he had seemed among various Mexican leaders the most amenable to U.S. influence. A sharecropper and cattle rustler before becoming a rebel, the colorful leader was a strange mixture of rebel and caudillo.50 At first viewed by Wilson and other Americans as a dedicated social reformer, a kind of Robin Hood, he sought to secure arms and money by showing restraint toward U.S. interests in areas he controlled. He refused even to protest the occupation of Veracruz. As his military and financial position worsened, however, he began to tax U.S. companies more heavily. Several major military defeats in late 1915 and Wilson's seeming betrayal caused him to suspect—incorrectly—that Carranza had made a sordid deal with Wilson to stay in power in return for making Mexico an American protectorate.51
Denouncing the "sale of our country by the traitor Carranza" and claiming that Mexicans had become "vassals of an evangelizing professor," Villa struck back.52 He began to confiscate U.S. property, including Hearst's ranch. In January 1916, his troops stopped a train in northern Mexico and executed seventeen American engineers. Even more boldly, he decided to attack the Americans "in their own den" to let them know, he informed Zapata, that Mexico was a "tomb for thrones, crowns, and traitors."53 On March 9, 1916, to shouts of "Viva Villa" and "Viva México," five hundred of his troops attacked the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. They were driven back by U.S. Army forces after a six-hour fight in which seventeen Americans and a hundred Mexicans were killed. Villa hoped to put Carranza in a bind. If the first chief permitted the Americans to retaliate by invading Mexico, he would be exposed as a U.S. stooge. Conflict between Carranza and the United States, on the other hand, might permit Villa, by defending the independence of his country, to promote his own political ambitions.54
Wilson had little choice but to respond forcibly. He may have feared that Villa's actions would have a domino effect throughout Central America in a time of rising international tension. In the United States, hotheads who had demanded all-out intervention since 1914, including oilmen, Hearst, and Roman Catholic leaders, grew louder. This first attack on U.S. soil since 1814 provoked angry cries for revenge that took on greater significance in an election year. Wilson may also have seen a firm response to Villa's raid as a means to promote his plans for reasonable military preparedness and strengthen his hand in dealing with European belligerents. He quickly put together a "punitive expedition" of more than 5,800 men (eventually increased to more than 10,000), under the command of Gen. John J. Pershing, to invade Mexico, capture Villa, and destroy his forces. United States troops crossed the border on March 15.55
The expedition brought two close, yet distant, neighbors to the brink of an unwanted and potentially disastrous war. Pershing's forces eventually drove 350 miles into Mexico. Even with such modern equipment as reconnaissance aircraft and Harley-Davidson motorcycles, they never caught a glimpse of the elusive Villa or engaged his troops in battle. Complaining that he was looking for a "needle in a haystack," a frustrated Pershing urged occupation of part or all of Mexico. All the while Villa's army, now estimated at more than ten thousand men, used hit-and-run guerrilla tactics to harass U.S. forces and seize northern Mexican cities. On one occasion, Villa reentered the United States, striking the Texas town of Glen Springs.56
Although Wilson had promised "scrupulous respect" for Mexican sovereignty, as Pershing drove south tensions with Carranza's government inevitably increased. Mexican and U.S. forces first clashed at Parral. On June 20, a U.S. patrol engaged Mexican troops at Carrizal. Americans at first viewed the incident as an unprovoked attack and demanded war. Wilson responded by drafting a message for Congress requesting authority to occupy all Mexico. Now embroiled in yet another dangerous submarine crisis with Germany, he also mobilized the National Guard and dispatched thirty thousand troops to the Mexican border, the largest deployment of U.S. military forces since the Civil War.
Cooler heads ultimately prevailed. Peace organizations in the United States, including the Women's Peace Party, pushed Wilson for restraint, and when they publicized evidence that Americans had fired first at Carrizal, he hesitated. Carranza's freeing of U.S. prisoners helped ease tensions. Wilson admitted shame over America's first conflict with Mexico in 1846 and had no desire for another "predatory war." He suspected that it would take more than five hundred thousand troops to "pacify" Mexico. He did not want one hand tied behind his back when war with Germany seemed possible if not indeed likely.57 "My heart is for peace," he told activist Jane Addams. In a speech on June 30, 1916, he eloquently asked: "Do you think that any act of violence by a powerful nation like this against a weak and distracted neighbor would reflect distinction upon the annals of the United States?" The audience resoundingly answered "No!"58 After six months of tortuous negotiations with Mexico, the punitive expedition withdrew in January 1917, just as Germany announced the resumption of U-boat warfare.
Wilson's firm but measured response helped get military preparedness legislation through Congress in 1916, strengthened his hand with Germany during yet another U-boat crisis, and aided his reelection in November. Mobilization of the National Guard and the training received by the army facilitated U.S. preparations for war the following year.59 On the other hand, the failed effort to capture Villa left a deep residue of ill will in Mexico. Only recently dismissed as a loser, the elusive rebel joined the pantheon of national heroes as the "man who attacked the United States and got away with it."60 Carranza moved closer to Germany, encouraging Berlin to explore with Mexico the possibility of an anti-American alliance.
Wilson's Mexican policy has been harshly and rightly criticized. More than most Americans, he accepted the legitimacy and grasped the dynamics of the Mexican Revolution. He deeply sympathized with the "submerged eighty-five percent of the people . . . who are struggling towards liberty."61 At times, he seemed to comprehend the limits of U.S. military power to reshape Mexico in its own image and the necessity for Mexicans to solve their own problems. But he could not entirely shed his conviction that the American way was the right way and he could assist Mexico to find it. He could never fully understand that those Mexicans who shared his goals would consider unacceptable even modest U.S. efforts to influence their revolution. Conceding Wilson's good intentions, his actions were often counterproductive. He averted greater disaster mainly because in 1914 and again in 1916 he resisted demands for occupation, even the establishment of a protectorate, and declined to prolong fruitless interventions.62
If Mexico, by Wilson's admission, was a thorn in his side, the Great War was far more, dominating his presidency and eventually destroying him, politically and even physically. On the surface, Europe seemed peaceful in the summer of 1914. In fact, a century of relative harmony was about to end. For years, the great powers felt increasingly threatened by each other, their fears and suspicions manifested in a complex and rigid system of alliances, an arms race intended to gain security through military and naval superiority, and war plans designed to secure an early advantage. Unstable domestic political environments in Germany and Russia cleared the path to war. When a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo in June, what might have remained an isolated incident escalated to war. Its honor affronted, Austria-Hungary gained German support and set out to punish Serbia. Russia responded by mobilizing behind its Serbian ally, an act designed to deter Germany that instead provoked a declaration of war. Britain joined Russia's ally France in war against Germany. None of the great powers claimed to want war, but their actions produced that result. Expecting a short and decisive conflict, Europeans responded with relief and even celebration. Young men marched off to cheering crowds with no idea of the horrors that awaited them.63
The conflict that began in August 1914 defied all expectations. Technological advances in artillery and machine guns and an alliance system that encouraged nations facing defeat to hang on in expectation of outside support ensured that the war would not be short and decisive. The industrial revolution and the capacity of the modern nation-state to mobilize vast human and material resources produced unprecedented destructiveness and cost. Striking quickly, Germany drove to within thirty miles of Paris, reviving memories of its easy victory in 1870–71. This time French lines held. An Allied counteroffensive pushed the Germans back to France's eastern boundary, where they dug into heavily fortified entrenchments. By November 1914, opposing armies faced each other along a 475-mile front from the North Sea to the Swiss border. The combatants had already incurred staggering costs—France's battle deaths alone exceeded three hundred thousand, and its losses from dead, wounded, or missing surpassed nine hundred thousand. Despite huge casualties on both sides, the lines would not move significantly until March 1917. These first months destroyed any illusions of a quick end and introduced the grim realities of modern combat.64
Conditioned by more than a century of non-involvement in Europe's quarrels, Americans were shocked by the guns of August. The outbreak of war "came to most of us as lightning out of a clear sky," one thoughtful commentator wrote. They also expressed relief to be remote from the conflict. "Again and ever I thank God for the Atlantic Ocean," the U.S. ambassador in Great Britain exclaimed.65 Americans were not without their prejudices. More than one-third of the nation's citizens were foreign born or had one parent who was born abroad. A majority, including much of the elite, favored the Allies because of cultural ties and a belief that Britain and France stood for the right principles. German Americans, on the other hand, naturally supported the Central Powers, as did Irish Americans who despised Britain, and Jewish and Scandinavian Americans who hated Russia. "We have to be neutral," Wilson observed in 1914, "since otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other."66
Whatever their preferences, the great majority of Americans saw no direct stake in the struggle and applauded Wilson's proclamation that their country be "neutral in fact as well as in name . . . , impartial in thought as well as in action." Indeed, in terms of the nation's long tradition of non-involvement in Europe's wars, the seeming remoteness of the conflict, and the advantages of trading with both sides, neutrality appeared the obvious course. The president even wrote a brief message to be displayed in movie theaters urging audiences "in the interest of neutrality" not to express approval or disapproval when war scenes appeared on the screen. From the outset, Wilson also saw in the war a God-given opportunity for U.S. leadership toward a new world order. "Providence has deeper plans than we could possibly have laid ourselves," he wrote House in August 1914.67
As a neutral, the United States could provide relief assistance to wartorn areas, and its people responded generously. The American Red Cross shipped supplies worth $1.5 million to needy civilians; its hospital units cared for the wounded.68 Belgian relief was one of the great humanitarian success stories of the war. Headed by mining engineer and humanitarian Herbert Hoover, the program found ingenious ways to get around the German occupation and the British blockade to save the people of Belgium. Admiringly called a "piratical state organized for benevolence," Hoover's Commission for Belgian Relief had its own flag and cut deals with belligerents to facilitate its work. It raised funds from citizens and governments across the world, $6 million from Americans in cash, more than $28 million in kind. The commission bought food from many countries, arranged for its shipment, and, with the help of forty thousand Belgian volunteers, got it distributed. It spent close to $1 billion, fed more than nine million people a day, and kept a nation from starving. Known as the "Napoleon of mercy" for his organizational and leadership skills, Hoover became an international celebrity.69
The implementation of neutrality policy posed much greater challenges. It had been very difficult a century earlier for a much weaker United States to remain disentangled from the Napoleonic wars. America's emergence as a major power made it all the more problematical. Emotional and cultural ties to the belligerents limited impartiality of thought. Wilson and most of his top advisers, except for Bryan, favored the Allies. The United States' latent military power made it a possibly decisive factor in the conflict. Most important, its close economic ties with Europe and especially the Allies severely restricted its ability to remain uninvolved. At the outbreak of war, exports to Europe totaled $900 million and funded the annual debt to European creditors. Some Americans saw war orders opening a further expansion of foreign trade. At the very least, maintaining existing levels was an essential national interest. That this might be incompatible with strict neutrality was not evident at the beginning of the war. It would become one of the great dilemmas of the U.S. response.
In reality, trade was so important to Europe and the United States itself that whatever Americans did or did not do would have an important impact on the war and the domestic economy. Attempts to trade with one set of belligerents could provoke reprisals from the other; trading with both, as in Jefferson and Madison's day, might result in retaliation from each. A willingness to abandon trade with Europe might have ensured U.S. neutrality, but it would also have entailed unacceptable sacrifices to a nation still reeling from an economic downturn. The United States could not remain unaffected, nor could it maintain an absolute, impartial neutrality.
Although legally and technically correct, Wilson's neutrality policy favored the Allies. Seeking to establish the "true spirit" of neutrality, Bryan, while the president was absent from Washington mourning the death of his wife, imposed a ban on loans to belligerents on the grounds that money was the worst kind of contraband. The consequences quickly became obvious. The Allies desperately needed to purchase supplies in the United States and soon ran out of cash. Bryan's strict neutrality thus threatened the Allied cause and U.S. commerce. Drawing a sharp distinction between public loans, by which U.S. citizens would finance the war with their savings, and credits that would permit Allied purchases and avoid "the clumsy and impractical method of cash payments," Wilson modified the ruling in October 1914.70 In the next six months, U.S. bankers extended $80 million in credits to the Allies. A year later, the president lifted the ban on loans entirely. Wilson correctly argued that loans to belligerents had never been considered a violation of neutrality. The result, House candidly admitted in the spring of 1915, was that the United States was "bound up more or less" in Allied success.71
Far more difficult to explain, Wilson also acquiesced in Britain's blockade of northern Europe. Employing sea power in a manner sanctioned by its gloried naval tradition, Britain set out to strangle the enemy economically, seeking to keep neutral shipping from entering north European ports and threatening to seize contraband. British officials used precedents set by the Union in the Civil War. Sensitive to history, they also applied the blockade in ways that minimized friction with the United States. In marked contrast to Jefferson and Madison, Wilson acquiesced, an "astonishing concession" of neutral rights, in the words of a sympathetic biographer.72 His position may have reflected his pro-Allied sympathies. More likely, he perceived that, in part because of the British blockade, U.S. trade with Germany was not important enough to make a fuss over. His acquiescence reflected a pragmatic response to a situation he realized the United States could not change. A historian himself, at the start of the war he appears mostly to have feared drifting into conflict with England over neutral rights like his fellow "Princeton man" James Madison a century before.73 He worried that getting drawn into the war might compromise his role as a potential peacemaker. He informed Bryan in March 1915 that arguing with Britain over the blockade would be a "waste of time." The United States should simply assert its position on neutral rights and in "friendly language" inform London that it would be held responsible for violations.74 Acceptance of the blockade tied the United States closer to the Allied cause. It also encouraged British infringements on U.S. neutral rights, leading to major problems in 1916.
By contrast, Wilson took a firm stand against the U-boat, Germany's answer to the British blockade. In February 1915, Berlin launched a submarine campaign around the British Isles and warned that neutral shipping might be affected. Wilson responded firmly but vaguely by holding the Germans to "strict accountability" for any damage done to Americans. A hint of future crises came in March 1915 when a U.S. citizen was killed in the sinking of the British freighter Falaba, an incident Wilson privately denounced as an "unquestionable violation of the just rules of international law with regard to unarmed vessels at sea."75
On May 7, 1915, a U-boat lurking off the southern coast of Ireland sent to the bottom in eighteen minutes the British luxury liner Lusitania, taking the lives of twelve hundred civilians, ninety-four of them children (including thirty-five babies), from injuries, hypothermia, and drowning. Bodies of victims floated up on the Irish coast for weeks. One hundred and twenty-eight U.S. citizens died. The sinking of the Lusitania had an enormous impact in the United States, becoming one of those signal moments about which people later remember where they were and what they were doing. It stunned the United States out of its complacency and brought the Great War home to its people for the first time. It propelled foreign policy to the forefront of American attention.76 Some U.S. citizens expressed great moral outrage at this "murder on the high seas." Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt condemned German "piracy" and demanded war. After days of hesitation and a careful weighing of the alternatives, Wilson dispatched to Berlin a firm note reasserting the right of Americans to travel on passenger ships, condemning submarine warfare in the name of the "sacred principles of justice and humanity," and warning that further sinkings would be regarded as "deliberately unfriendly."77
Wilson's strong stand derived from a rising fear of Germany and especially from concern for his own and his nation's credibility. Suspicion of Germany had grown steadily in the United States since the turn of the century, especially with regard to its hostile intentions in the Western Hemisphere. German atrocities in neutral Belgium, exaggerated by British propaganda, their crude and shocking efforts to bomb civilians from the air, and rumors, sometimes fed by top Berlin officials, of plans to foment rebellion within the United States provoked fear and anger among Americans, the president included. U-boat warfare further called into question basic German decency. The submarine had not been used extensively or effectively in warfare prior to 1915. This new and seemingly horrible weapon violated traditional rules of naval warfare that spared civilians. It killed innocent people—even neutrals—without warning. Britain could compensate U.S. merchants for property seized or destroyed, but lives taken by submarines could not be restored. Most Americans held to what Wilson called a "double wish." They did not want war, but neither did they want to remain silent in the face of such a brutal assault on human life. Republicans appeared ready to exploit the sinking of the Lusitania if the president did not uphold the nation's rights and honor. Wilson also did not want war, but he recognized that to do nothing would sacrifice principles he held dear and seriously damage his stature at home and abroad.78
Wilson's tough line on the Lusitania provoked crises in Washington and Berlin. Still committed to a strict neutrality, no matter the cost, Bryan insisted that Americans must be warned against traveling on belligerent ships. Protests against U-boat warfare must be matched by equally firm remonstrances against British violations of U.S. neutral rights. When Wilson rejected his arguments, the secretary resigned as an act of conscience, removing an important dissenting voice from the cabinet. The Germans also claimed that equity required U.S. protests against a blockade that starved European children. They insisted, correctly as it turned out, that the Lusitania had been carrying munitions. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg nevertheless recognized that it was more important to keep the United States out of the war than to use submarines without restriction. When a U-boat sank the British ship Arabic in August, killing forty-four, two Americans included, Wilson extracted from Berlin a public pledge to refrain from attacks without warning on passenger vessels and a commitment to arbitrate the Lusitania and Arabic cases. The president weathered his first crisis with Germany, but only because of decisions made in Berlin. He perceived that at some future date Germany could force on him a painful choice between upholding U.S. honor and going to war.79
After a respite of nearly a year, Wilson in the spring and summer of 1916 faced neutrality crises with both Germany and Britain. On March 24, 1916, a U-boat torpedoed the British channel packet Sussex, killing eighty passengers and injuring four Americans. Following a month's delay, the president and Robert Lansing, Bryan's successor as secretary of state, sternly responded that Germany must stop submarine warfare or the United States would break diplomatic relations, a step generally recognized as preliminary to war. After a brief debate, Berlin again found it expedient to accommodate the United States. Bethmann-Hollweg's Sussex pledge of early May promised no further surprise attacks on passenger liners. Wilson won a great victory, but in doing so he further narrowed his choices. Should German leaders decide that use of the U-boat was more important than keeping the United States out of war, he would face the grim choice of submission or breaking relations and possibly war. The United States' neutrality hung on a slender thread.80
In the meantime, tensions with Britain increased sharply. A crisis had been averted the previous year when London after declaring cotton contraband bought enough of the U.S. crop to sustain prices at an acceptable level. Britain's brutal suppression of the Irish Easter Rebellion in the spring of 1916 and especially the execution of its leaders inflamed American opinion, even among many people normally sympathetic to the Allies. In the summer of 1916, the Allies tightened restrictions against neutral ships and seized and opened mail on the high seas. In July, London blacklisted more than eighty U.S. businesses charged with trading with the Central Powers, thereby preventing Allied firms from dealing with them. Wilson privately fumed about Britain's "altogether indefensible" actions, threatened to take as firm a position with London as with Berlin, and denounced the blacklist as the "last straw." Meanwhile, U.S. bankers financed Britain at a level of about $10 million a day. Britain bought more than $83 million of U.S. goods per week, leaving the nation more closely than ever tied to the Allied cause.81
The neutrality crises provoked sweeping reassessments of the most basic principles of U.S. defense and foreign policies. In 1915–16, Americans heatedly debated the adequacy of their military preparedness, the first time since the 1790s that national security concerns had assumed such prominence in U.S. political discourse.82 Preparedness advocates, many of them eastern Republicans representing the great financial and industrial interests, insisted that America's defenses were inadequate for a new and dangerous age. Claiming that military training would also Americanize new immigrants and toughen the nation's youth, they pushed for expansion of the army and navy. They promoted their cause with parades, books, and scare films such as Battle Cry for Peace, which portrayed in the most graphic fashion an invasion of New York City by enemy troops unnamed but easily identifiable as German by their spiked helmets.
On the other side, pacifists, social reformers, and southern and midwestern agrarians denounced preparedness as a scheme to fatten the pockets of big business and fasten militarism on the nation. They professed to favor "real defense against real dangers, but not a preposterous 'preparedness' against hypothetical dangers." They warned that the programs being considered would be a giant step toward war.83 Popular songs such as "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" expressed their sentiments. The divisions were reflected in Congress, where by early 1916 Wilson's proposals for "reasonable" increases in the armed services were mired in controversy.
Fearful that America might be drawn into war and facing reelection, Wilson in 1916 belatedly assumed leadership of a cause he had previously spurned, breaking one of the most difficult legislative logjams of his first term. To build support for his program, he went on a speaking tour of the Northeast and Middle West, seeking to educate the nation to the dangers posed by a world at war. To thunderous ovations, he called for increased military expenditures—even at one point for "incomparably the greatest navy in the world." Returning to Washington, he skillfully steered legislation through a divided Congress. "No man ought to say to any legislative body 'You must take my plan or none at all,' " he proclaimed on one occasion, a striking statement given the stand he would take on the League of Nations in 1919. The National Defense Act of June 1916 increased the regular army to 223,000 over a five-year period. It strengthened the National Guard to 450,000 men and tightened federal controls. A Naval Expansion Act established a three-year construction program including four dreadnought battleships and eight cruisers the first year. Ardent preparedness advocates such as Theodore Roosevelt dismissed Wilson's program as "flintlock legislation," measures more appropriate for the eighteenth century than for the twentieth. "The United States today becomes the most militaristic naval nation on earth," critics screamed from the other extreme. In fact, Wilson's compromise perfectly suited the national mood and significantly expanded U.S. military power. A remarkably progressive revenue act appeased leftist critics by shifting almost the entire burden to the wealthy with a surtax and estate tax.84
The Great War also sparked a debate over basic foreign policy principles that would rage until World War II and persist in modified form thereafter. Breaking with hallowed tradition, those who came to be called internationalists insisted that the American way of life could be preserved only through active, permanent involvement in world politics. Conservative internationalists such as former president William Howard Taft and senior statesman Elihu Root, mostly Republicans and upper-class men of influence, had long promoted international law and arbitration. In response to the war, they embraced still vague notions of collective security. Generally pro-Allied, they saw defeat of Germany as an essential first step toward a new world order. In June 1915, during the Lusitania crisis, Taft announced formation of a League to Enforce Peace to promote the creation of a world parliament, of which the United States would be a member, that would modify international law and use arbitration to resolve disputes. The conservatives also supported a buildup of U.S. military power and its use to protect the nation's vital interests. Progressive internationalists, on the other hand, fervently insisted that peace was essential to ensure advancement of domestic reforms they held dear: better working conditions for labor; social justice legislation; women's rights. Liberal reformers such as social worker Jane Addams and journalist Oswald Garrison Villard vigorously pushed for ending the Great War by negotiation, eliminating the arms race and economic causes of war, compulsory arbitration, the use of sanctions to deter and punish aggression, and establishing a "concert of nations" to replace the balance of power.85
In response to the new internationalism, a self-conscious isolationism began to take form, and the word isolationism became firmly implanted in the nation's political vocabulary. Previously, non-involvement in European politics and wars had been a given. But the threat posed by the Great War and the emergence of internationalist sentiment gave rise to an ideology of isolationism, promoted most fervently by Bryan, to preserve America's long-standing tradition of non-involvement as a way of safeguarding the nation's way of life.86
While Democratic Party zealots during the election campaign of 1916 vigorously pushed the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Wilson began to articulate an internationalist position and also the revolutionary concept that the United States should assume a leadership position in world affairs. In a June 1916 speech Colonel House described as a "land mark in history," he vowed U.S. willingness to "become a partner in any feasible association of nations" to maintain the peace.87 "We are part of the world," he proclaimed in Omaha in early October; "nothing that concerns the whole world can be indifferent to us." The "great catastrophe" brought about by the war, he added later in the day, compelled Americans to recognize that they lived in a "new age" and must therefore operate "not according to the traditions of the past, but according to the necessities of the present and the prophecies of the future." The United States could no longer refuse to play the "great part in the world which was providentially cut out for her. . . . We have got to serve the world."88
Shortly after his narrow reelection victory over Republican Charles Evans Hughes, a gloomy Wilson, fearing that the United States might be dragged into war, redoubled his efforts to end the European struggle. Twice previously, he had sent House—"my second personality"—on peace missions to Europe. His hands strengthened by reelection, he began to promote a general peace agreement including a major role for the United States. In December 1916, he invited both sides to state their war aims and accept U.S. good offices in negotiating a settlement.
In a dramatic January 22, 1917, address to the Senate, Wilson sketched out his revolutionary ideas for a just peace and a new world order. To the belligerents, he eloquently appealed for a "peace without victory," the only way to ensure that the loser's quest for revenge did not spark another war. In terms of the postwar world, a "community of power" must replace the balance of power, the old order of militarism, and power politics. The equality of nations great and small must be recognized. No nation should impose its authority on another. A new world order must guarantee freedom of the seas, limit armaments, and ensure the right of all peoples to form their own government. Most important, Wilson advocated a "covenant" for an international organization to ensure that "no such catastrophe shall ever overwhelm us again." Speaking to his domestic audience, the president advanced the notion, still heretical to most Americans, that their nation must play a key role in making and sustaining the postwar settlement. Without its participation, he averred, no "covenant of cooperative peace" could "keep the future safe without war." He also stressed to his domestic audience that his proposals accorded with American traditions. The principles of "President Monroe" would become the "doctrine of the world." "These are American principles, American policies . . . ," he concluded in ringing phrases. "They are the principles of mankind and must prevail."89
Wilson's speech was "at once breathtaking in the audacity of its vision of a new world order," historian Robert Zieger has written, "and curiously detached from the bitter realities of Europe's battlefields."90 His efforts to promote negotiations failed. His equating of Allied war aims with those of Germany outraged London and Paris. When the blatantly pro-Allied Lansing sought to repair the damage with an unauthorized public statement, he infuriated Wilson and aroused German suspicions. In any event, by early 1917, none of the belligerents would accept U.S. mediation or a compromise peace. Both sides had suffered horribly in the rat-infested, disease-ridden trenches of Europe—"this vast gruesome contest of systematized destruction," Wilson called it.91 The battles of attrition of 1916 were especially appalling. Britain suffered four hundred thousand casualties in the Somme offensive, sixty thousand in a single day, with no change in its tactical position. Germans called the five-month struggle for Verdun "the sausage grinder"; the French labeled it "the furnace." It cost both sides nearly a million casualties. German and French killed at Verdun together exceeded the total dead for the American Civil War.92 By the end of the year, both sides were exhausted.
As investments of blood and treasure mounted, attitudes hardened. In December 1916, David Lloyd George, who had vowed to fight to a "knock-out," assumed leadership of a coalition government in Britain and responded to Wilson's overture with a list of conditions unacceptable to the Central Powers. The Germans made clear they would state their war aims only at a general conference to which Wilson would not be invited. In the meantime, more ominously, German leaders finally acceded to the navy's argument that with one hundred U-boats now available an all-out submarine campaign could win the war before U.S. intervention had any effect. On January 31, Berlin announced the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare.93
Wilson faced an awful dilemma. Stunned by these developments, he privately labeled Germany a "madman that should be curbed." But he was loath to go to war. He still believed that a compromise peace through which neither side emerged triumphant would be best calculated to promote a stable postwar world. It would be a "crime," he observed, for the United States to "involve itself in the war to such an extent as to make it impossible to save Europe afterward." In view of his earlier threats, he had no choice but to break relations with Germany, and he did so on February 3. Despite the urging of House and Lansing, he still refused to ask for a declaration of war. He continued to insist that he could have greater influence as a neutral mediator than as a belligerent. He recognized that his nation remained deeply divided and that many Americans opposed going to war. As late as February 25 he charged the war hawks in his cabinet with operating on the outdated principles of the "Code Duello."94
Events drove him to the fateful decision. The infamous Zimmermann Telegram, leaked to the United States by Britain in late February, revealed that Germany had offered Mexico an alliance in return for which it might "reconquer its former territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona." The document fanned anti-German sentiment in America and increased Wilson's already pronounced distrust of Berlin.95 In mid-March, U-boats sank three U.S. merchant vessels with the loss of fifteen American lives. For all practical purposes, Germany was at war with the United States. Reluctantly and most painfully, Wilson concluded that war could not be avoided. The Germans had repeatedly and brutally violated American rights on the high seas. A failure to respond after his previous threats would undermine his position abroad and open him to political attack at home. Wilson had long since concluded that the United States must play a central role in the peacemaking. Surrender on the U-boat issue would demonstrate its unworthiness for that role. Germany's own repeated violation of its promises and its intrigues as evidenced in the Zimmermann Telegram made clear to Wilson that it could not be trusted. Only through active intervention, he now rationalized, could U.S. influence be used to establish a just postwar order. War was unpalatable, but at least it would give the United States a voice at the peace table. Otherwise, he told Addams, he could only "call through a crack in the door."96 Moving slowly to allow public opinion to coalesce behind him, Wilson concluded by late March that he must intervene in the war.
On April 2, 1917, the president appeared before packed chambers of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. In a thirty-six-minute speech, he condemned Germany's "cruel and unmanly" violation of American rights and branded its "wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of non-combatants" as "warfare against mankind." The United States could not "choose the path of submission," he observed. It must accept the state of war that had "been thrust upon it." He concluded with soaring rhetoric that would echo through the ages. "It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war," he conceded. But "the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried dearest 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." As critics have repeatedly emphasized, Wilson set goals beyond the ability of any person or nation to achieve. Perhaps he felt such lofty aims were necessary to rally a still-divided nation to take action unprecedented in its history. He may have aimed so high to justify in his own mind the horrors he knew a war would bring. In any event, he set for himself and his nation an impossible task that would bring great disillusionment.97
Germany's gamble to win the war before the United States intervened in force nearly succeeded. Adhering to the nation's long-standing tradition of non-entanglement and in order to retain maximum diplomatic freedom of action, Wilson and General Pershing insisted that Americans fight separately under their own command rather than being integrated into Allied armies. It took months to raise, equip, and train a U.S. army and then transport it to Europe. A token force of "doughboys" paraded in Paris on July 4, 1917, but it would be more than a year before the United States could throw even minimal weight into the fray. In the meantime, buoyed by promises of future U.S. help, France and Britain launched disastrous summer 1917 offensives. French defeats provoked mutinies that sapped the army's will to fight. Allied setbacks in the west combined with the Bolshevik seizure of power in late 1917 and Russia's subsequent withdrawal from the war gave the Central Powers a momentary edge. Facing serious morale problems at home from the Allied blockade, Germany mounted an end-the-war offensive in the spring of 1918.
It was a transformative moment in the war.98 The German army again drove close to Paris, but it could not break through Allied lines and suffered irreplaceable losses. The addition of 850,000 fresh U.S. troops made possible an Allied summer counteroffensive. More important, as the German high command conceded, huge numbers of Americans arriving at the front produced foreboding of defeat.99
Long before the fighting ended, Wilson had begun to fashion a liberal peace program to reshape the postwar world. The ideas he advanced were not original with him. Even before the founding of the nation, Americans believed they had a special destiny to redeem the world. Prior to 1914, European, British, and American thinkers had dreamed of reforming international politics, a task made urgent by the horrors of the Great War. But Wilson promoted these ideas with a special fervor and eloquence and made himself their leading spokesman. In the process, he formulated and articulated a set of principles that would bear his name—Wilsonianism—and would influence U.S. foreign policy and world politics for years to come.
In Wilson's view, the war provided that opportunity for world leadership for which Americans had been preparing themselves since the birth of the nation. The death and destruction visited upon Europe made clear the bankruptcy of the old order. Scientific and technological advances created the means to uplift the human race. The United States must therefore take the lead in building a better world. "We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world," Wilson affirmed in 1916. Replacing traditional American unilateralism with a universalist view, he insisted that "the interests of all nations are our own also. We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind is inevitably our affair."100
Wilson insisted that a just and lasting peace must be constructed along American lines. He assumed the superiority of Western civilization and the continued dominance of the West. But he believed that European imperialism had exploited helpless peoples and generated explosive tensions among the great powers. Old World diplomacy had produced only "aggression, egotism, and war." Economic nationalism, with its tariff wars and exclusive, monopolistic trading arrangements, had exacerbated international conflict. Wilson found equally abhorrent the radical notions of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who had seized power in Russia in late 1917, that the international system could be freed of war only by a worldwide revolution that eliminated capitalism. He firmly believed in American exceptionalism. Only a world reformed along liberal-capitalist lines would serve the United States and the broader interests of mankind. Economic nationalism must give way to a commercial internationalism in which all nations had equal access to the markets and raw materials of the world, tariff barriers were eliminated, and freedom of the seas guaranteed. Colonial empires should eventually be dissolved and all peoples given the right to determine their own destiny. Power politics must be replaced by a new world order maintained by an organization of like-minded nations joined to resolve disputes and prevent aggression—"not a balance of power but a community of power."101
In a series of public statements, most notably in his Fourteen Points address of January 8, 1918, Wilson molded these broad principles into a peace program. Called by the New York Herald "one of the great documents in American history," the speech responded to Lenin's revelations of the Allied secret treaties dividing the spoils of war and his calls for an end to imperialism as well as a speech by Lloyd George setting out broad peace terms. Wilson sought to regain the initiative for the United States and rally Americans and Allied peoples behind his peace program. He called for "open covenants of peace, openly arrived at." He reiterated his commitment to arms limitations, freedom of the seas, and reduction of trade barriers. On colonial issues, to avoid alienating the Allies, he sought a middle ground between the old-style imperialism of the secret treaties and Lenin's call for an end to empire. He did not use the word self-determination, but he did insist that in dealing with colonial claims the "interests" of colonial peoples should be taken into account, a marked departure from the status quo. He also set forth broad principles for European territorial settlements—a sharp break from the U.S. tradition of non-involvement in European affairs. The peoples of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires should be assured "an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development." Belgium must be evacuated, territory formerly belonging to France restored. A "general association of nations" must be established to preserve the peace.102
Germany was the key, and here Wilson had to balance his desire for an early end to the war against the need to keep the alliance together and palliate the Allies and Republican war hawks at home. As a belligerent, he abandoned of necessity his "peace without victory" stance of 1917. He came to blame Germany more for the origins of the war and view German autocracy and militarism as threats to the peace. While continuing to seek "impartial justice," he concluded that Germany must be defeated and its government purged of autocratic and expansionist elements. A reformed Germany could be reintegrated into the community of nations.103
From the time the United States entered the war, Wilson worked tirelessly to achieve a peace along these lines. Recognizing their mutual dependence and hoping to establish a solid basis for postwar collaboration, he actively promoted cooperation with the Allies, pushing his military leaders to work closely with the British and French and agreeing to a unified command. American and Allied scientists shared information and collaborated in solving problems such as the U-boat, chemical warfare, camouflage, and signals.104 Aware, on the other hand, of the Allied secret treaties and deferring to America's unilateralist tradition, he carefully maintained his freedom of action, making clear that his nation was fighting for its own reasons, refusing to join a formal alliance, and even referring to the United States as an "Associated" rather than "Allied" power. In the best tradition of the 1776 Model Treaty, he declined to appoint a political representative to the Allied Supreme War Council.105
The administration in late 1917 mounted a major overseas propaganda program, the first such effort in U.S. history.106 Under the leadership of the zealous journalist George Creel, a Committee on Public Information (CPI) had already begun drumming up support for the war at home. Wilson soon extended the program abroad to counter German propaganda and educate world opinion about his peace principles. In the major cities of Europe and Latin America and in revolutionary Russia and China, hastily established CPI offices translated stories from the U.S. press for placement in local newspapers, distributed photographs and war posters, and in some areas showed films such as America's Answer, a depiction of the arrival of U.S. troops in France and their movement to the western front. Wilson's speeches were translated and widely distributed in books and pamphlets.107 The CPI campaign won some support for the Allied cause and for Wilson's peace aims. It also raised hopes among peoples throughout the world. Abroad as at home, Wilson conceded to Creel, U.S. propaganda had "unconsciously spun a net for me from which there is no escape," high expectations that could lead to a "tragedy of disappointment."108
Wilson also had to contend with a Russia torn by war and revolution. He cheered the overthrow of the tsarist regime in March 1917, declaring the newly formed and moderate Provisional Government a "fit partner" for a "league of honor" and quickly recognizing it. He also sought to boost its prestige by sending to Petrograd a mission headed by Elihu Root. With characteristic American optimism and abysmal misunderstanding of what was happening, Root reported that the government could survive and even continue the war with limited U.S. assistance. Wilson promised $450 million in aid (of which $188 million was actually transferred) and dispatched transportation experts to keep the railroads going, a YMCA mission to boost army morale, and a Red Cross team to provide relief and, on the side, encourage the people to back the government and continue the war. Such well-intentioned gestures had little impact on a complex and fluid situation. Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew the shaky Provisional Government in November, sparking a prolonged civil war. The new rulers in March 1918 negotiated a separate peace, allowing Germany to shift forces to the western front.109
After six months of relentless pressure from the Allies and much "sweating blood" on his part, Wilson in July 1918 reluctantly agreed to interventions in Siberia and North Russia.110 The operations occurred under very confused circumstances; the motives behind them and Wilson's support for them remain elusive. In early 1918, the Allies began to advocate intervention in Siberia to keep the eastern port of Vladivostok open and vital supplies out of German hands. Subsequently, they pushed for intervention at the northern ports of Murmansk and Archangel and urged support for a seventy-thousand-man Czech Legion committed to fighting the Central Powers—and also the Bolsheviks. Stunned and outraged by Lenin's separate peace, Allied leaders desperately sought to sustain some kind of eastern front against Germany.
Wilson sympathized on this point. As much as he understood Bolshevism, moreover, he despised it. He never felt Lenin's regime represented the Russian people. He refused to recognize it. Following the November Revolution, the administration continued to channel funds and supplies to anti-Bolshevik forces through the Provisional Government embassy in Washington and reimbursed the British for their aid. But Wilson was keenly aware from his own travails in Mexico the limits of military force in solving complex political problems. He feared that interference in Russia, as in Mexico, might actually solidify Bolshevik control. In June 1918, precisely when German forces advanced to within artillery range of Paris, he acceded to Allied pressure. Wilson wanted to demonstrate that he was a "good ally," thus establishing a basis for postwar cooperation.111 He also hoped that the twenty thousand U.S. troops he sent to Siberia would help thwart any Japanese ambitions in that region. When the Czech Legion reached Vladivostok in June, threw out the Bolshevik government, and vowed to fight with the Allies, he saw the "shadow of a plan" for a viable eastern front and felt a moral obligation to aid the Czechs. If Russians rallied around their "slavic kinsmen" against the Bolsheviks, so much the better, although he placed strict limits on the number of U.S. troops and the ways they could be used. He convinced himself that limited and indirect Allied aid might inspire representatives of the "Real Russia" to rally against the Bolsheviks and would thus be an act of liberation rather than interference.112 The United States did not intervene sufficiently to influence events in Russia. Its intervention did feed the myth among Soviet propagandists and some revisionist historians that Wilson had sought to overthrow the Bolshevik government.
The autumn of 1918, in historian Arthur Walworth's apt phrase, was "America's moment."113 By the summer, the United States had more than a million troops in Europe, with another three million in training. At Château-Thierry in June, U.S. forces helped blunt the German drive toward Paris. In the late summer and early fall, the doughboys played a key role in the Allied counteroffensive that forced the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line. The mere presence of huge numbers of fresh U.S. troops had a hugely demoralizing effect on an exhausted German army.114 The United States thus determined the outcome of the war. And under Wilson's leadership, it was poised to shape the peace. Inspired by the president's vision of their nation's new role and by the chance for leadership and constructive achievement, Americans excitedly took up the challenge. As early as January 1918, preparing for the Fourteen Points address, House boasted of "remaking the map of the world" in two hours. A "remarkably productive morning!" he added.115 Lansing's nephew Allen Dulles waxed eloquent about "pulchritudinous [American] youth" taking up the "greatest obligation and opportunity that a nation ever had. . . . We are called to put the world in order again."116 The Americans would soon learn that huge expectations and intractable problems were an integral part of their new world role.
Negotiations for an armistice with Germany revealed the challenges that lay ahead and the conflict between Wilson's hopes for an enduring peace and his appeals for a crusade against German autocracy. Seeking to divide the Allies and salvage some semblance of victory, a dispirited Germany in early October approached Wilson directly for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. A new parliamentary government sought to avoid the punitive terms favored by Britain and France and was prepared to make concessions.
Wilson's position was extremely delicate. He still believed that a fair peace was the best way to end the war. At home, however, he faced congressional elections that would affect his ability to negotiate a settlement and sell a League of Nations to his own people. His Republican foes vigorously pressed for a hard line against Germany. Wilson also recognized that the Allies wanted a victor's peace, sought territorial gains at Germany's expense, and preferred to leave the armistice to the military to ensure that Germany could not use a cease-fire to prepare for resumption of the war. He proceeded with great caution, exploring Germany's commitment to the Fourteen Points and its willingness to evacuate territory then held. He told a skeptical Democratic senator that he was thinking of "a hundred years hence." When advised that if he was too conciliatory he might be destroyed politically, he retorted that "I am willing if I can serve my country to go into a cellar and read poetry for the remainder of my life."117 Under pressure from the Allies and critics at home and eager to gain control of the peace process, he gradually toughened his stance, at one point even acceding to Allied occupation of German territory and insisting that Germany's "military masters and the monarchical autocrats" must go.118 He sent House to deal with the Allies, instructing him only that he would know what to do.
The armistice emerging from these confused triangular discussions ended the fighting but also set the tone for what would follow. House confronted vengeful Allies who feigned ignorance of the Fourteen Points. After difficult negotiations, he secured their agreement in principle, but Britain reserved the right to interpret freedom of the seas, and France insisted that Germany must compensate the Allies for civilian and property losses. The military was to handle the armistice, opening the way for occupation of German territory. House claimed a "great diplomatic victory." Under the circumstances, he may have got as much as could be expected. But it was not what Wilson had envisioned, and it opened the way for more serious problems. The fundamental contradiction between Wilson's desire to join with the Allies in defeating Germany and mediate between the two sides made it difficult if not impossible for him to achieve his lofty goals.119
Greater challenges awaited in Paris, where the peace conference opened on January 12, 1919. In heading the U.S. delegation himself, Wilson broke precedent, becoming the first president to go to Europe while in office and personally to conduct major negotiations. He remained abroad for more than six months, with only a two-week interlude in the United States, suggesting the extent to which foreign relations now dominated his agenda. The president has often been criticized for this initial venture in summit diplomacy. To be sure, his deep personal involvement deprived him of the detachment that can be invaluable in negotiations and severely strained his already frail constitution. Given the urgency of the negotiations, his personality and leadership style, and the fact that British and French heads of government were leading their delegations, it is impossible to envision him acting any other way.120
The peacemakers confronted monumental problems. Europe lay devastated, "a laboratory resting on a vast cemetery," Czech leader Thomas Masaryk observed.121 Old boundaries were torn asunder, leaving intractable territorial problems. The German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires lay in ruins, raising hopes of nationhood for peoples throughout Central Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East and leaving a powder keg of conflicting nationalist and ethnic aspirations. Anarchy prevailed in many areas. The threat of revolution hung like a storm cloud over Germany and Central Europe. A truly daunting agenda included disarming the losers, reviving European economies, confronting the Bolshevik challenge, and creating new states in Europe and the Middle East.
The passions set loose by four years of fighting further complicated the peacemaking. Excluded from the conference, the defeated Germans nervously awaited their fate, while among the victors a spirit of revenge prevailed. France had lost two million men, the most of any belligerent, suffered massive destruction to its territory, and was intent upon avenging its losses. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau embodied his nation's spirit. "I had a wife, she abandoned me," he once snarled; "I had children, they turned against me; I had friends, they betrayed me. I have only my claws, and I use them."122 The seventy-seven-year-old "Tiger" survived an assassin's bullet during the conference. He expressed open cynicism for the Fourteen Points. Britain too had suffered enormous losses, and although its government and its prime minister, the charming, shrewd, and hard-bitten Welshman David Lloyd George, supported much of Wilson's program, they could not go too far toward conciliating Germany without risking domestic political backlash. The Allies had sweeping imperial goals. On the other side, the war and Wilson's rhetoric raised hopes of freedom among nationalities and oppressed peoples across the world. Representatives of many different peoples—African Americans included—came to Paris in search of guarantees of racial equality. Chinese nationalists looked to the peace conference to end great-power domination of their country. The young Vietnamese patriot Nguyen Tat Than (later to adopt the sobriquet Ho Chi Minh) rented a tuxedo to present a petition to the conference for his country's independence. Spokespersons for Haiti and the Dominican Republic appealed to Wilson in Paris for self-determination.123
In dealing with these formidable problems, Wilson was hampered by an inadequate advisory system and his own leadership style. He had never liked or trusted Lansing; during the long stay in Europe, his relationship with Colonel House suffered an irreparable break. The peace commission he chose to accompany him was not a distinguished group—ex-president Taft called them a "bunch of cheapskates"—and did not play a major role. At the president's direction, House in the fall of 1917 assembled a group of scholars to analyze postwar problems, a significant and innovative effort to bring scholarly expertise to bear on foreign policy issues. The so-called Inquiry employed 150 people and produced more than three thousand papers and reports. Its Red and Black Books were extensively used in resolving numerous specific issues, especially the territorial settlements that recast the maps of Europe and the Middle East. As Wilson relied even less on the State Department, the Inquiry's importance grew.124
Ultimately, as was his custom, Wilson depended mainly on himself. Especially after he broke with House, he was largely on his own. Most decisions were made in small groups, the Council of Four and the Council of Ten. The so-called Big Four met 140 times between January and May. The negotiations were arduous and tension-ridden, with frequent threats from various quarters, Wilson included, to bolt the conference. On one occasion, Clemenceau and Lloyd George came close to fisticuffs. After his February trip to the United States, Wilson also recognized that he would face stern opposition from Senate Republicans. He was sixty-three years old, in poor health, and the strain told on him. He became seriously ill in March, largely because he had pushed himself beyond normal limits. His illness may have affected his ability to function in the last stages of the conference. At times, he displayed odd behavior. He took a more hostile position than previously toward Germany; once, oddly, when Lloyd George sought to soften the Allied stand on a particular issue, he sided with Clemenceau.125
Wilson's triumphant arrival in Europe could not but have led him to overestimate the leverage he would have in dealing with his Allied counterparts. His ship, the George Washington (a captured and renamed German luxury liner), docked at Brest on December 13, 1918—the president considered thirteen his lucky number. Banners welcomed the "Champion of the Rights of Man," the "Founder of the Society of Nations." The moaning sounds of bagpipes resounded amidst shouts of "Vive l'Amérique! Vive Wilson!" According to one observer, the president's reception in Paris, where crowds lined the Place de Concorde and the Champs-Elysées to view him, was "the most remarkable demonstration of enthusiasm and affection . . . that I have ever heard of, let alone seen."126 This scene was replicated in London and Manchester, Rome, Genoa, Milan, and Turin. Hailed across the Continent almost as a messiah, Wilson, according to British economist and future critic John Maynard Keynes, "enjoyed a prestige and moral influence throughout the world unequaled in history."127 The exuberant greeting misled him to believe that Allied peoples supported his aims regardless of where their leaders stood.
Wilson in other ways seems to have exaggerated his bargaining power. Early in the war, he had confidently predicted that the Allies would be "financially in our hands" and thus could be brought around "to our way of thinking." The Allies in fact owed more than $10 billion to the U.S. government and private bankers, but such leverage worked both ways. The U.S. economy came to depend on war orders from Britain and France. European debts provided useable leverage only if the United States was willing to forgive them, which was never an option.128 At times, Wilson seemed to believe that the threat of a separate peace with Germany might force the Allies to go along with his proposals, but once the armistice had been arranged this weapon lost its potency. Wilson's negotiating position had been compromised before he arrived in Europe. Responding to pleas from fellow Democrats and seeking to build support for his peace plans, he made a blatantly partisan appeal for the election of a Democratic Congress. Republican victories in the 1918 elections weakened him in dealing with European leaders. His commitment above all to a League of Nations and his insistence on including its charter in the treaty gave his adversaries precious leverage over him. The United States emerged from the war relatively much stronger, but it was not powerful enough to impose its will on other nations. The Allies were in a position to ignore him when they so chose.129
Amidst these difficulties, Wilson sought to negotiate a lasting peace. Germany was the most difficult problem, and the terms eventually settled upon represented a compromise between France's quest for vengeance and future security and Wilson's pleas for a just peace. Clemenceau ultimately yielded his demands for dismemberment of Germany and permanent occupation of parts of it. But the Allies agreed to fixed limits on German military power, temporary occupation of the Rhineland and the Saar Basin, and an Anglo-American pledge (quite unprecedented for the United States) to aid France in the event of German attack. Wilson refused Allied demands that Germany pay the entire cost of the war. Under enormous pressure from France and Britain, however, and in his anti-German phase, he went along with the notorious "war guilt clause," drafted by another Lansing nephew, future U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles, which placed responsibility on Germany for all the damages caused by the war. He reluctantly agreed that Germany should pay extensive reparations, the figure to be fixed by a separate commission. He made such concessions mainly because Clemenceau and Lloyd George repeatedly insisted that their people demanded them. He also needed to give them something to secure their support for changes Americans such as Taft insisted must be made in the League of Nations. When Lloyd George belatedly tried to soften the terms, Wilson stood firmly with Clemenceau, indicating his belief that Germany had earned a "hard peace."130
In disposing of the German and Ottoman empires, Wilson confronted stiff resistance from the Allies, who had made secret commitments to each other and Japan. To avert the seemingly inevitable land grab, he proposed that the former German and Ottoman colonies should be governed through "mandates," by which advanced nations operating under the aegis of the League of Nations would serve as trustees to prepare the colonial areas for independence. The European allies and Japan at first adamantly resisted but eventually went along, perhaps confident that mandates could be used to advance their aims. In the Middle East and Africa, the Allies snapped up former enemy colonies. The mandate system proved little more than annexation in disguise.
Wilson's most damaging concession politically was on the Chinese province of Shandong, which Japan had seized from Germany in 1914. Chinese nationalists demanded restoration of the birthplace of Confucius, "the cradle of Chinese civilization," they called it, a "dagger pointed at the heart of China."131 Throughout the world, Shandong became an emotionally charged symbol of Wilson's failure to honor self-determination. Already angry that the Big Four had rejected their proposal for a clause on racial equality, the Japanese threatened to leave the conference and stay out of the League if they were not permitted to "carry out their obligations to China."132 To secure their endorsement of the treaty, Wilson accepted their verbal assurances that Chinese sovereignty would be restored by 1922. It was the "best that could be accomplished out of a 'dirty past,' " he told his physician.133 On the other hand, the president resisted Italy's demands for Fiume on the Adriatic and appealed to the Italian people over the heads of their leaders, provoking anti-American demonstrations across Italy and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando's departure from Paris.
Redrawing the maps of Central Europe and the Balkans posed special problems. The term self-determination had never been defined with any clarity, and its practical application in regions of mixed nationalities and ethnic groups proved nightmarish. Wilson admitted that he had no idea what demons the concept would unleash. The peacemakers established a number of new independent nations, including Poland, to which Wilson was deeply committed, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, not only to satisfy nationalist aspirations but also to create buffers between Germany and Russia. They attempted to draw boundary lines on the basis of ethnic considerations and collaborated in containing a Communist revolution in Hungary. But large numbers of Germans still lived in some of the new states; some also included ethnic groups that despised each other. The settlements left old problems unresolved and created new ones, setting off conflicts that would vex international relations into the next century.134
Although it was not on the agenda, the Russian problem, in delegate Herbert Hoover's words, was "the Banquo's ghost sitting at every conference table."135 Preoccupied with other issues, the Allies never developed a consistent policy toward revolutionary Russia. Efforts to arrange meetings with Bolshevik leaders failed, in part because of Big Four absorption in matters deemed more pressing. Russia's exclusion from the conference seriously weakened the settlement. The end of the war eliminated much of the rationale for the military interventions. Confronted with rising political opposition at home and declining morale and even the threat of mutiny among the troops, Wilson withdrew U.S. forces from North Russia in June 1919. Americans remained in Siberia for almost another year.
Wilson could never quite make up his mind what to do with Bolshevik Russia. He had learned from Mexico the limits of military intervention. He stubbornly rejected various Allied proposals, including one by British cabinet officer Winston Churchill, to eliminate the Bolshevik government through a full-fledged military effort—"trying to stop a revolutionary movement by troops in the field is like using a broom to hold back a great ocean," he snapped.136 He distrusted opposition leader Adm. Alexander Kolchak and feared a return to traditional Russian autocracy. Yet, as in Mexico, he continued to delude himself that limited intervention was not intervention at all. He may have hoped that the Bolshevik government would collapse of its own weight. He persisted in sending clandestine military aid to opposition forces through the still-functioning Washington embassy of the Provisional Government. Persuaded that food was "the real thing" to combat Bolshevism, he also authorized the American Red Cross and Hoover's American Relief Administration to distribute food and other relief supplies to anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region. The United States did just enough to anger the Bolsheviks but not nearly enough to achieve the aim of a non-Communist Russia.137
Committed above all to establishing a workable League of Nations, Wilson justified concessions on other issues to attain that goal. He also hoped that a strong League in time would modify the harsh terms of the treaty and resolve issues left unsettled. In designing an international organization, the president had to struggle with people like Lansing, who opposed any commitments, and with the French, who preferred to maintain the wartime alliance. He finally secured Allied agreement to a League composed of an Assembly of all nations and a Council made up of the five victorious powers and four other nations elected by the Assembly. It would be empowered to supervise the mandated territories, encourage peaceful resolution of disputes through arbitration and adjudication—the key peacekeeping provisions, in Wilson's mind—and employ economic and military sanctions against aggressors. The most controversial provision was a collective security mechanism that Wilson hoped would "disentangle all the alliances in the world." Article X provided that member nations would "respect and preserve as against external aggression the political integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League."
Although painfully aware of the treaty's shortcomings, Wilson was pleased with his accomplishment. The League was a "living thing . . . ," he said, "a definite guarantee of peace . . . against the things which have just come near bringing the whole structure of civilization into ruin."138
The peace settlement evoked cries of protest from many quarters. Having never seen Allied armies or experienced occupation, most Germans deluded themselves that they had not been defeated. They viewed the treaty as vengeful and punitive and claimed to have been betrayed. Flags flew at half mast. Germans angrily protested a "shameful treaty," "the worst act of world piracy under the flag of hypocrisy."139 Liberals across the world expressed shock and bitterness at Wilson's seeming abandonment of the Fourteen Points. Disillusioned American progressives shared dismay at the terms of the treaty. Bolting the conference, Wilson's young, idealistic adviser William Bullitt told reporters he was going to the Riviera to lie on the beach and watch the world go to hell.140
Disappointment was especially keen among colonial peoples. The peacemakers in Paris focused mainly on European issues. Wilson gave little attention to the application of self-determination elsewhere. Recognizing the explosive potential of the issue, he refused to take it up with the Allies. Although sharply qualified, his rhetoric of self-determination, disseminated across the world by modern communications techniques, inspired among peoples under colonial rule hopes for freedom. Nationalists adopted his words to legitimize their cry for independence. The struggle for independence became internationalized and Wilson its unwitting champion. Oppressed people across the world looked to Paris for realization of their aspirations. Failure of the peacemakers even to acknowledge their demands naturally sparked widespread disillusion and anger. Mass protests erupted in India, Egypt, Korea, and China, among other places. "So much for national self-determination," a young library assistant, Mao Zedong, protested. "I think it is really shameless!" Across the world, an anti-colonial movement began to form that in time would achieve what Wilson had spoken of.141
Wilson recognized the limits of his handiwork, but he felt, probably correctly, that it was the best that he could accomplish given the formidable obstacles he faced and the limits of his power. He hoped that a League in operation could remedy the treaty's defects. He signed the document in the ornate Hall of Mirrors of the palace at Versailles, the very symbol of the old order he sought to displace, on June 28, 1919, the anniversary of the assassination in Sarajevo that had sparked the conflagration. Exhausted from his labors, still not recovered from a debilitating illness, he hastened home to secure ratification of the treaty. Speaking before Congress on July 10, he issued a ringing challenge: "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"142
For the next eight months, the nation engaged in yet another great debate over its role in the world. The carnage of the war gave a special urgency to the discussions. They took place in a politically supercharged environment, against the backdrop of strikes and labor violence, race riots, and the notorious Red Scare, with a presidential election just a year away.
The struggle contained many interlocking elements. Wilson had stretched executive powers before and during the war. At one level, it represented a clash between competing branches of government. It was also an intensely personal feud between two men who despised each other. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had disliked Wilson from the start. By 1915, he called the president, except for James Buchanan, "the most dangerous man that ever sat in the White House" and confided in Roosevelt that he "never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson."143 Lodge set out to defeat and humiliate his archenemy over the League issue. The president was determined not to let his foe thwart his great cause.
It was a fiercely partisan battle. There was no tradition in U.S. politics of bipartisanship on major foreign policy issues. On the contrary, since the Jay Treaty in 1794, parties had fought bitterly over such matters. Raised in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilson was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. Republicans resented his success and were out to get him. They launched fierce partisan attacks on his internationalist proposals even before he went to Paris. The president's own actions helped to ensure greater opposition. He had done little during the war to build a bipartisan coalition behind his proposals. His appeal for the election of a Democratic Congress in 1918 gave them an opening they readily exploited. He had not taken a leading Republican with him to Paris or consulted closely with the opposition in formulating his peace proposals.
The battle centered around what part the United States should play in the postwar world. It was not primarily a debate between isolationists and internationalists, as it has often been portrayed, although inflated rhetoric on both sides sometimes made it appear so. Rather, it focused on the extent and nature of the commitments the United States should assume. "Internationalism has come," Democratic Senate leader Gilbert Hitchcock observed, "and we must choose what form the internationalism is to take." The debate marked a "great historical moment," historian John Milton Cooper Jr. has concluded, and "elicited a breadth and depth of discussion" of fundamental foreign policy issues "that had not risen before and that remained unmatched since."144
By the time Wilson returned home, the lines had formed. Polls of newspaper editors and resolutions from state legislatures, the only measures of public opinion at the time, indicated strong support for the president's proposals, but opposition had developed. Progressive internationalists, Wilson's key allies in 1916, were profoundly disillusioned by his wartime acquiescence in the suppression of civil liberties. They were also angered by the "madness at Versailles," Wilson's seeming abandonment of the Fourteen Points and his support for a League that seemed better designed to uphold rather than reform the old order of world politics. Their ranks included some of the nation's leading intellectuals, who provided highly articulate arguments that other opponents used with devastating effect.145 Ethnic groups poured out resentment against the treatment of their homelands: German Americans castigated the punitive treaty and the "League of Damnations"; Italian Americans denounced Wilson's opposition to Italy's territorial claims; Irish Americans attacked him for failing even to consider freedom for their homeland and warned that Article X would be used to suppress legitimate nationalist movements and keep U.S. money from being sent to Ireland.146 Their passions still aflame from the fervor of the Great Crusade against autocratic Germany, nationalists warned in overblown rhetoric that Wilson's League would surrender U.S. sovereignty to a world body.
The issue would be decided in the Senate, where a particularly complex array of forces was at work. The Republicans had a majority of only two. While most of them accepted involvement in some form of international organization—indeed, their party had pioneered such efforts—they were not disposed to accept Wilson's proposals uncritically or hand him a major victory on the eve of a presidential election. Many Republicans resented Wilson's aloofness and arrogance and distrusted what progressive senator George Norris branded his "anxiety for power."147
Most important, Republicans differed with the president on key substantive questions. Fourteen Republican senators, the so-called Irreconcilables, opposed entry into the League in any form. They represented different geographical regions and political philosophies and opposed Wilson for various reasons. Some, like Norris, felt the United States should use its influence to promote disarmament and help oppressed peoples. The Nebraskan had originally supported Wilson's peace efforts, but he became disillusioned by the terms of the treaty, particularly Shandong, which he condemned as the "disgraceful rape of an innocent people."148 He feared the league would perpetuate the status quo and bind the United States to the reactionary great powers. Conservative nationalists like former secretary of state Philander Knox viewed the League as hopelessly utopian and argued that U.S. interests could best be protected by using military power in cooperation with friendly states. Staunch unilateralists like senators Hiram Johnson of California and William Borah of Idaho expressed horror at the thought of surrendering U.S. freedom of action to a world organization. "What we want," Borah asserted, "is . . . a free, untrammeled Nation, imbued again with the national spirit; not isolation but freedom to do as our own people think wise and just."149
Most Republicans accepted a League in some form. A group of mild reservationists, mostly from the Middle West and moderate in view and demeanor, sought only minor changes that would protect U.S. sovereignty and clarify and limit obligations under Article X. These Republicans provided the basis for a compromise, but they could not go too far for fear of undercutting their party's interests. A larger group of strong reservationists headed by Lodge raised searching questions about the League. Some doubted it would work: Nation-states could not be expected to transfer sovereignty to an untested international organization and would not send troops to implement Article X unless their vital interests were threatened. Others warned that the League would involve the United States in disputes that were not its concern, undermine its preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, threaten control of domestic issues such as immigration and tariff policy, and take from Congress the power to declare war. While willing to endorse U.S. participation in a League, they wanted stronger reservations to protect its sovereignty and weaken obligations under Article X, which they viewed as an unacceptable departure from U.S. tradition.150
The opposition seized the initiative before Wilson returned from Paris. Amply financed by millionaire industrialists Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon, the Irreconcilables launched a nationwide campaign, sending out thousands of pamphlets denouncing the "Evil Thing with a Holy Name" and making hundreds of speeches, many of them appealing to the racial and nationalist prejudices of Americans. Senator Joseph Medill McCormick of Illinois warned that Wilson's superstate would lead to "efficient and economical Japanese operating our street railways . . . Hindoo janitors in our offices and apartments . . . Chinese craftsmen driving rivets, joining timbers, laying bricks in the construction of our buildings." Borah claimed that through the League the United States would "give back to George V what it took away from George III."151
In the meantime, Foreign Relations Committee chairman Lodge stacked his committee with anti-League Republicans, including six Irreconcilables. His strategy was to stall, allowing opposition to build, and then secure defeat of the treaty or its approval with major reservations. Lodge consumed six weeks reading the massive document aloud to his committee. He invited large numbers of witnesses to testify, most of them hostile, including Lansing, who had broken with Wilson in Paris, and representatives of disgruntled ethnic groups.
Wilson was not uncompromising at the start of the fight. During his trip back from Europe in February, he had met with members of the foreign affairs committees of both houses of Congress, explained his proposals for a League of Nations, and attempted to address objections. While responding firmly to hard-core foes like Lodge, he sought to palliate moderates like Taft. Indeed, he had taken back to Paris for discussion with his counterparts proposals set forth by the former president. But there were limits beyond which he would not go, most notably the obligations under Article X. And at times he breathed defiance to his critics. In a dramatic meeting on August 19, the only time a congressional committee has ever subjected a president to direct questioning, the Foreign Relations Committee met with Wilson at the White House for three hours. The tone was civil, although some senators sought to extract from the president information that could be used against him. But the meeting changed no minds and produced no movement toward compromise.152
Facing possible defeat and persuaded—mistakenly—that an outpouring of popular support might move the recalcitrant senators, an already feeble Wilson, against the advice of his wife, Edith (whom he had married in 1915), and his personal physician, decided to take the fight to the nation. McKinley had done the same thing in 1898 to gain backing for the Treaty of Paris. In 1916, Wilson had used a similar trip to secure preparedness legislation. In September, at Columbus, Ohio, he launched a ten-thousand-mile swing through the West. He delivered forty-two speeches in twenty-one days, all without benefit of microphone, and made numerous other public appearances. Speaking to large and generally enthusiastic crowds, he passionately defended the League of Nations—"the only possible guarantee against war," he called it. The alternative, he warned, would be more foreign wars and a national security state that might threaten American democracy. He sought to ease fears about Article X, noting on one occasion that U.S. troops would not be sent to the Balkans or Central Europe—"If you want to put out a fire in Utah, you don't send to Oklahoma for the fire engine." Often, he touched the emotions of his listeners, singling out in the audience mothers of young men killed in battle. He appealed to Americans to accept the responsibilities of world leadership.153
By the time the president reached Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25, he was exhausted and suffering from severe headaches. After what turned out to be the last speech of the tour, he collapsed. Reluctantly admitting that he could not go on—"I just feel as if I am going to pieces"—he looked out the window of his train and began to weep. A week later, back in Washington, he suffered a massive stroke that left him partially blind and paralyzed on the left side.154
During the next two months, the treaty went down to defeat. The speaking tour had been a personal success in many ways, but it changed nothing in the Senate. Wilson could barely function. Although his wife and his physician shielded him from problems and hid from the government and the nation the extent of his incapacity, he could not provide leadership during the most critical stage of one of the most important political struggles in U.S. history. His illness may have made him less disposed to compromise.155
Ironically, although an overwhelming majority of senators favored a League in some form, friend and foe combined to keep the United States out. While Wilson was on tour, the Foreign Relations Committee submitted a majority report proposing forty-five amendments and four reservations. Democrats and mild reservationists defeated the amendments, but the votes were close, suggesting the difficulties ahead. In October, Lodge reported the treaty with fourteen reservations—the number was not coincidental! Ratification would depend on acceptance by three of the four Allied powers. The most significant reservations excluded the Monroe Doctrine and domestic issues from League jurisdiction, allowed member nations to withdraw, and severely restricted U.S. obligations under Article X. The United States would accept no obligation to defend the territorial integrity or political independence of any country. United States naval or military forces could not be deployed without the explicit approval of Congress. The reservation effectively gutted the key collective security provision. It exceeded what the mild reservationists wanted, but they went along rather than bolt the party on a crucial issue.156
The threat of defeat raised the possibility of some sort of compromise, but Wilson refused to go along. Hitchcock approached him on the eve of the vote and found him unmoveable. He insisted that Article X—what he had called the "king pin of the whole structure"—was essential to the concept of collective security. Without it, there would be no new world order, only a reversion to old-style power politics. He vowed that if the treaty passed with reservations, he would kill it by pocket veto. He seemed almost to welcome defeat. The onus would be squarely on Lodge and the Republicans. Believing that the public still supported him, Wilson speculated that the 1920 election could then be made a "great and solemn referendum" on a noble cause. At times during these weeks, he even toyed with running for a third term. He seemed to have lost touch with the political mood of the nation, even with reality.157
Wilson's adamancy sealed the fate of the treaty. Before packed chambers, on November 18 and 19, among the most dramatic days in the Senate's storied history, thirty-four Republicans and four Democrats voted for the treaty with reservations. The remaining Democrats combined with the Irreconcilables for fifty-five votes against. In a second roll call shortly after, the Irreconcilables joined with the strong reservationists to defeat the treaty as Wilson had presented it, 38 for, 53 against.158
The shock of outright defeat generated pressures in Congress and the country for compromise, but they came to nothing. Wilson had begun to recover from the stroke, but his improvement did not bring a return to full leadership or a willingness to compromise. He saw his opponents as seeking to destroy his internationalist program. The qualified commitment they proposed was completely unacceptable to him. A young and healthy Wilson might have salvaged something of his brainchild, but the first stages of recuperation seem to have heightened his defiance. Denouncing the opposition as "nullifiers," he vowed he would "make no compromise or concession of any kind," leaving with Republicans "undivided responsibility" for the fate of the treaty. In a letter to Hitchcock released to the press on March 8, he insisted that any reservation that weakened Article X "cuts at the very heart and life of the Covenant itself," that any agreement that did not guarantee the independence of members was a "futile scrap of paper."159 The mild reservationists pressed Lodge to compromise, but the Irreconcilables threatened to leave the party and the Massachusetts senator held firm. Some Democrats eventually broke with Wilson, preferring a modified treaty to none at all, but it was not enough. When the final vote was taken on March 19, 1920, the eight dissident Democrats and reservationist Republicans failed by a mere seven votes to get the two-thirds majority needed to pass the treaty with Lodge's reservations.160
At the time and since, blame has been variously cast for the outcome of 1919–20. Lodge and other Republicans have been charged with rabid partisanship and a deep-seated personal animus that fueled a determination to embarrass Wilson. It can be argued, on the other hand, that they were simply doing the job the political system assigned to the "loyal" opposition and that the Lodge reservations were necessary to protect national sovereignty. The Democrats have been criticized for standing firmly—and foolishly—with their ailing leader, instead of working with Republicans to gain a modified commitment to the League of Nations. Wilson himself has been accused of the "supreme infanticide," slaying his own brainchild through his stubborn refusal to deal with the opposition. There is much truth here also, although as his defenders have pointed out, he passionately believed that the treaty as he had crafted it was the only way to mend a broken world. There has also been much speculation about the way his mental and physical health influenced his actions of 1919–20, even a psychoanalytic study by no less than Sigmund Freud. The ultimate reason appears much more fundamental. Throughout his career and especially in the Great War, Wilson acted with rare boldness in seeking to reshape a war-torn world and educate Americans to a new leadership role. His aspirations are understandable given the gruesome destruction caused by the war. What he sought may indeed have been necessary to avert the disaster that lay ahead. Still, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he aimed too high. In Paris, his European counterparts took the Fourteen Points apart. Americans were simply not ready to undertake the huge break from tradition and assume the sort of commitments he asked of them.161
The defeat of Wilson's handiwork leaves haunting if ultimately unanswerable questions. The Wilson of 1919–20 believed that vital principles were at stake in the struggle with Lodge and that compromise would render the League of Nations all but useless. Would a more robust and healthy Wilson—the artful politician of his first term—have built more solid support for his proposals or found a middle ground that would have made possible Senate approval of the treaty and U.S. entry into the League of Nations? Could a modified League with U.S. participation have changed the history of the next two decades?
Whatever the answers to these questions, it is strikingly clear that the Great War and Woodrow Wilson transformed U.S. foreign policy dramatically. As a result of the war, the United States became a major player in world politics and economics. The more Europe indulged in self-destruction, the greater America's relative power. Americans still did not see themselves as threatened by events beyond their shores and hence remained unwilling to take on the sort of commitments Wilson asked of them. But they began to recognize their changing position in the international system. In trying to establish for his nation a leadership role, Wilson articulated a set of principles that in various forms would guide U.S. foreign policy for years to come. The venerable Elihu Root observed in 1922 that Americans had "learned more about international relations within the past eight years than they had learned in the preceding eighty years." And they were "only at the beginning of the task," he presciently added.162