In the fall of 1917, as Wilson tended the home front, Colonel House headed to Europe. Once again he would serve as Wilson’s personal envoy, but for the first time he was traveling as head of a delegation, the American equivalent of the European missions that had come to Washington in the spring. Determined to speed the transport of American troops to Europe, the British offered the visitors every comfort. House was put up in a handsome home on loan from a duke.
The Royal Navy was finally sinking U-boats faster than they could be replaced, but the Allied armies had had a devastating year. Hoping to end the standoff on the Western Front, the French and the British launched massive offensives in the spring and summer. Their ground gains were negligible, their casualties appalling—in the range of 500,000. House and his entourage reached London on the heels of two more catastrophes. The Austrian army had just plowed through the Italian line at Caporetto, inflicting 40,000 casualties and taking 265,000 prisoners. Fifteen hundred miles to the north, in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government of Russia and announced that Russia would leave the war. On its first full day in office, the new regime issued a decree calling on all the peoples and governments at war to open negotiations for a peace without territorial annexations or financial indemnities.
The Allies responded to the Italian disaster by creating the Supreme War Council and devising a unified military strategy. Heretofore, each country had planned its own operations. General Pershing supported the change, as did General Tasker H. Bliss, who was traveling with House and would soon give up his post as the army’s chief of staff in order to represent the United States in the new council.
The Italians regrouped, but even if the Allies managed to hang on, casualties were likely to be high, and nearly every able-bodied Frenchman and Briton had already been called up. In Berlin, as in London and Paris, all eyes were on the Americans, and the question was whether Germany could destroy the Allies before the Americans’ long-promised million-man army was ready to fight.
The danger was acute, Pershing wrote Washington at the end of November 1917. With their reinforcements from the Russian front, the Germans would outnumber the Allies by five to three on the Western Front. A German offensive would further thin the Allied ranks, he wrote, “and the longer the war continues the greater will the demands on America become.” If the Allies and the United States did not find more ships to carry American troops to France, the war would probably be lost.
Bliss agreed with Pershing. Neither the president nor the secretary of war disagreed with the generals, but the United States and Britain would haggle for months over which ships would be diverted for troop transport, which troops would be sent first, and where the Americans would serve. Pershing was still determined to build an army as independent as those of the French and the British, and he wanted his 27,000-man divisions to travel intact, train intact, and fight intact. The French and British begged Pershing for the troops they needed most, battalions of infantry and artillery. The Allies promised to give the Americans a few weeks of instruction and experience, then return them to the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). When House and his delegation got to France, Georges Clemenceau, the new premier, warned the colonel that if the American troops did not study with the French army, they would learn the hard way, at the hands of the Germans.
Wilson had authorized Pershing to put his troops into the Allied lines if he thought it necessary, but Pershing refused for a host of reasons, all of them hypothetical: The American people would not like their soldiers fighting under foreign flags. The popular disapproval would stir political opposition to the administration’s conduct of the war. German propagandists would ridicule the world’s largest democracy for putting its troops into armies fighting for monarchs and colonial empires. Moving battalions from one army to another and back would slow the work of fine-tuning the operations of the AEF. National differences in military methods would sow confusion.
Pershing also feared that if his infantrymen and machine-gunners went into French or British lines, he would never get them back. The writer John Dos Passos, who drove a field ambulance and served as an army medic during the war, explained why: “None of the Allies wanted an independent American army; what they wanted was American cannon fodder.”
House understood the Allies’ desperation, but during his travels in England and France he seemed more concerned with peace than war. While the Allied governments wondered how their armies could survive the next German onslaught, House was dreaming of peace and imagining that if the right words could be found, he could hasten the war’s end. In meetings with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and others, he campaigned for a high-minded joint statement assuring the world that they were fighting not for selfish interests but for the end of militarism and a future in which all nations would have the right to live as they saw fit, as long as they did not threaten the world’s peace. The French told him that it was premature to speak of peace. As Clemenceau would soon put it, “My home policy: I wage war; my foreign policy: I wage war. All the time I wage war.”
The colonel decided to urge the president to make the declaration on his own. In House’s mind, Wilson was the ideal spokesman for a just peace because the United States was the only Great Power not hoping for spoils of war. Still, the Allies’ rejection stung, and his diary grew increasingly critical of their conduct of the war. On December 1, at the first meeting of the Supreme War Council, he watched in frustration as Britain and France quarreled over whose general ought to be in charge of the unified command. For House, the quarrel summed up the central military problem of the war: the German army was not inherently superior, but it was better organized and more methodical.
But even as the colonel privately lambasted the Allied leaders for putting national interests ahead of their urgent common need, he followed their example. When Lloyd George suggested that the United States join the Allies in appointing a permanent representative to the political wing of the Supreme War Council, House declined, not wanting to drag the United States into squabbles that might jeopardize the independence it enjoyed as an Associate. Bliss readily agreed when House suggested that they attend the council’s meeting as observers, gathering information but taking no positions.
The colonel sailed home on December 8 with mixed feelings about his mission. The Allies had showered him with praise. But his dealings with the Allied leaders had left him discouraged. “The armies and navies are fighting with courage and tenacity,” he told his diary, “. . . but what is lacking is some great executive mind at the head to bring together these elements of strength and make them as great a force against the Germans as is necessary to win the war.” House believed that the great executive mind belonged to Woodrow Wilson.
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On December 17, two days after reaching the United States, the colonel was at the White House, hoping to talk the president into making the declaration that the Allies had spurned. Wilson agreed at once. “I never knew a man who did things so casually,” House marveled in his diary. “We did not discuss this matter more than ten or fifteen minutes when he decided he would take the action.”
But there was nothing casual about Wilson’s decision. He had refused to recognize the Bolsheviks’ government and had been fretting about their leaders for weeks. He thoroughly disapproved of their communism, their coup, their seizure of American property in Russia, and their renunciation of the treaties and the debts of their predecessors. Russia and Germany had just signed an armistice, and Wilson shared the Allies’ worry that Germany’s Eastern armies would reach the Western Front before the AEF was ready to fight. He could not singlehandedly speed American troops to France, but he could give an address aimed at rousing the conscience of the world and persuading the Russians to stand by the Allies.
The president asked the colonel for a memorandum on the issues most likely to arise when the Allies and the United States sat down to discuss their peace terms. House knew that the Allies’ secret treaties about the spoils of war would figure in any peace talks, and he offered to list these and other issues off the top of his head. Wilson, wanting details and recommendations in hand, asked House to get them from the Inquiry, a study group organized to collect and analyze information for Wilson’s eventual use at a peace conference. House was the nominal head of the Inquiry, and he had delegated its management to his brother-in-law, Sidney Mezes, president of City College in New York.
House summoned the Inquiry’s secretary, Walter Lippmann of The New Republic, and explained that Wilson wanted material for an address that would lay out general terms for a lasting peace and try to persuade Russia to return to the war. Years later, describing the task, Lippmann said that he and his colleagues were asked to “take the secret treaties, analyze the parts which were tolerable, and separate them from those which we regarded as intolerable, and then develop an American position which conceded as much to the Allies as it could, but took away the poison. Each point was constructed for that purpose. It was all keyed upon the secret treaties.” By working around the clock, the Inquiry team completed its assignment in three days.
The colonel carried the memorandum to Washington two days before Christmas, but Wilson was preoccupied with the Senate’s investigation of the war effort, the coal shortage, and the emergency nationalization of the railroads. Wilson faced every challenge without flinching and was keeping himself in good physical shape on the golf course, but the pressures were sometimes unbearable. In early December, for example, he was undone by the congressional reaction to his State of the Union speech. “[W]asn’t it horrible?” he asked a young aide after the speech. “All those congressmen and senators applauding every wretched little warlike thing I had to say, ignoring all the things for which I really care. I hate this war! I hate all war, and the only thing I really care about on earth is the peace I am going to make at the end of it.” By the end of his protest, Wilson was in tears.
Surrounded by his family, Wilson rested during the Christmas holidays and was in good spirits when House returned to Washington, on Friday, January 4. The negotiations for a permanent peace between Russia and Germany had broken down, fueling Wilson’s hope of inspiring the Russians to return to the battlefield. The colonel reached the White House after dinner, and he and the president pored over the Inquiry’s memorandum and a thick stack of supporting material until nearly midnight.
On Saturday morning, the two picked up where they had left off. “We actually got down to work at half past ten and finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it, at half-past twelve o’clock,” House boasted in his diary. On Sunday, the president refined the ideas in a shorthand draft and converted the shorthand to typescript. On Monday Lansing reviewed the speech. On Tuesday Woodrow and Edith started the day with a round of golf, and at ten-thirty he asked his office to notify Congress that he wished to speak to a joint session at twelve-thirty. Speaker Clark and Vice President Marshall had to scramble to draw up the resolution necessary for a presidential address and secure its approval before Wilson arrived.
The novelty of Wilson’s presidential addresses to Congress had worn off by the time he delivered his Fourteen Points speech, and newspaper correspondents no longer bothered to set the scene or comment on the president’s demeanor. They still listened closely to his words, however, and on this day, January 8, 1918, they were astounded. Woodrow Wilson remapped the world, proposed a world order that rested on the equality of all nations rather than the power of a few, committed the United States to the preservation of peace, and presented America’s war aims.
The chief end of the American program, he said, was peace. To secure it, he proposed six ideas that he believed would revolutionize the conduct of world affairs: “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”; freedom of the seas even in wartime; free trade for nations committed to world peace; armies and navies large enough for self-defense but no more; an adjudication of colonial claims that would give due consideration to the interests of the subject populations; and an association of nations charged with preserving the territorial integrity and political independence of all member states. There followed eight territorial proposals. While there was no mention of secret treaties, Wilson made sure that none of his proposals conflicted with the terms the Allies had worked out among themselves.
As for postwar Germany, Wilson said, the United States had no wish to interfere with her legitimate exercise of political power or block her trade if it joined the other peace-loving nations of the world in “covenants of justice and law and fair dealing. We wish her only to accept a place of equality . . . instead of a place of mastery.”
Wilson’s peroration emphasized the underpinnings of the Fourteen Points: “justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak. Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could act upon no other principle; and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything that they possess.”
The Fourteen Points address won the applause of Republicans, Democrats, and internationalists of both parties. Even Theodore Roosevelt pronounced himself pleased. The most perceptive praise appeared in the New-York Tribune, a paper that rarely endorsed any emanation from Wilson. The editors likened the speech to the Emancipation Proclamation and predicted that it would become “one of the great documents in American history and one of the permanent contributions of America to world liberty.” Wilson had not only drawn a new map of the world, the Tribune said; he had also written its constitution. The Tribune also noted that he had broken with the tradition of American isolation: “He has carried the United States back to Europe; he has established an American world policy and ideal of international policy throughout the civilized world. . . . He has made us prouder of being Americans, because he has made America mean something more than it ever did before for us and for the world.”
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The day after the speech, Ambassador Spring Rice made his last visit to the White House. His thyroid imbalance had grown steadily worse, and he was being replaced. Despite his malady and despite his occasional quarrels with the State Department, Spring Rice had endeared himself to many in the capital, and no one was better at explaining Washington to London and vice versa. His instruction continued to the last. When London failed to compliment the president on his Fourteen Points, the ambassador gently reproved his superiors in a cable saying, “I gather that the president would have been glad of an expression of opinion from H.M. Government about his speech.” London explained that H.M. Government could not oblige because Lloyd George’s war aims did not exactly match Wilson’s. On the eve of his departure from Washington, Spring Rice stole a moment to forward a compliment from Lord Balfour, the foreign secretary—a gesture obviously intended to keep Britain in good standing with the president. Four weeks later, Spring Rice died of a heart attack.
To judge by the London press, Wilson’s standing with the British had never been higher, and even as the Senate bared the shortcomings of the War Department, the president continued to assure the Allies that the AEF was coming and would help them win the war. But huge obstacles remained. For lack of training camps, the vast majority of the AEF was still awaiting instruction. For lack of weapons, the instruction was woefully inadequate. For lack of ships, most of the troops who had completed their training were stranded in the United States. As for the 177,000 American soldiers in France at the end of 1917, only a handful had ever seen combat. None had had sufficient training in the ways of war on the Western Front.
In a February 3 meeting at the White House, Sir William Wiseman of the British embassy tried to persuade the president and the secretary of war to do what Pershing would not: temporarily assign troops to the Allied armies. Wilson resisted. But he was less adamant than Pershing had been, and he confided that he was not standing in Pershing’s way.
The American strategy of professing military cooperation while withholding it had no practical consequences during the winter, when the fighting was in abeyance, but the stakes rose considerably in early March, when Russia and Germany signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks had surrendered one million square miles of territory along with a vast cache of war matériel: guns and ammunition, grain and oil, and enough locomotives and trucks to carry it all away. In a single stroke, the treaty paved the way for Germany’s subjugation of Russia, ended the crippling shortages caused by the British blockade, and freed 350,000 German soldiers for duty in France.
Meanwhile, on the Western Front, the Germans were moving into position to play what they called “the last card,” an all-out offensive designed to win the war before the great influx of American troops. The German General Staff had calculated that if Germany did not defeat the Allies in the first half of 1918, its forces would be outnumbered. Secretary Baker arrived in Paris on March 10 for a tour of American military operations and visits to the headquarters of the Allied armies. On the morning of March 21, as he and Pershing motored over to Compiègne for lunch with General Henri Philippe Pétain, they heard the fire from Germany’s heavy guns build and build until there was no lull between shots. To one of the Americans in Baker’s party it sounded like “ten thousand breakers on an uneven shore, a roar that was so widespread that it seemed to extend beyond the curve of the earth.” The German offensive had begun.
Within forty-eight hours, the British government cabled its new ambassador in Washington, Lord Reading, and begged him to impress upon the president that the battles now in progress might well decide the war. The Germans had struck first against the British, who were strung out along a hundred miles at the northwestern end of the front. Casualties were heavy, they would worsen, and Britain no longer had enough men to replace the dead and wounded. Nor would the British army be able to spare troops to move eastward to assist the French, who were certain to be hit as soon as the Germans exhausted the British. Reading was instructed to ask Wilson to rush American infantrymen to France. The situation was critical, the cable said, “and if America delays now she may be too late.”
At the White House, Reading and his aide Sir William Wiseman found Wilson in shock. He had been warned of the all-out offensive, but recent reports of rising antiwar sentiment in Germany had encouraged him to think that the kaiser and his generals were losing their hold on the government. Reading and Wiseman left the White House with radically different impressions of Wilson’s intentions. Reading reported to Lloyd George that Wilson was anxious to do all he could. But according to Wiseman, Wilson had insisted that the United States was already doing its utmost. Wiseman warned London against pressing him too hard: “we must have his cordial personal cooperation if we are to secure the last ounce of American effort. Expediency demands that we should help the president in order that he will help us.”
The Supreme War Council met the emergency by promoting General Ferdinand Foch of France to Marshal and giving him command of the coalition’s armies. Pershing favored the idea but still refused to compromise the independence of the AEF. Bliss, who believed that the crisis trumped Pershing’s ideal, turned to Baker, who told Pershing that the time had come to put the AEF into action. Wilson concurred.
