The election results gave Wilson a momentary twinge, but he voiced no regret over his appeal to voters, and he shrugged off the defeat as a natural reaction to a long period of progressive reform. Nor was he visibly troubled by the Republicans’ claim that the vote amounted to a repudiation of his leadership. He was still president, he would be president for another twenty-seven months, and the president, as he never tired of saying, was the only public servant elected by all the people.
Wilson’s refusal to reckon with the consequences of the election would exact a high price, but he was momentarily spared by events in Europe, where the war was rushing to an end. On November 9, the kaiser’s generals persuaded him to go into exile in order to prevent a revolution in Germany. Before he could abdicate, he was deposed, and before the sun came up again, he and his entourage had left the German army’s Belgian stronghold at Spa for a Dutch village near Maastricht.
As the kaiser’s exit was being arranged, the Allies allowed a small motorcade from the new German government to travel across Allied territory to the French city of Compiègne to hear the Allied proposition for an armistice.I Among other things, it required Germany to evacuate its occupied territories, make reparations, surrender or disable most warships and aircraft and heavy artillery, and cancel its confiscatory peace treaty with Russia. Prisoners of war and captured merchant vessels were to be returned, and the British blockade would remain in place. The German envoys were also informed that the offer of an armistice would expire at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
The White House learned of the signing a few hours after the fact, at 3:00 a.m. Washington time. Recalling the moment in her memoir, Edith wrote that she and Woodrow “stood mute—unable to grasp the full significance of the words.” The president declared a holiday for federal employees and spent the morning in his study, writing the address he would deliver to Congress that afternoon.
Millions of Americans took to the streets, hollering with joy and banging cowbells, gongs, and garbage can lids. They fired pistols into the air, waved flags, threw confetti, sang, wept, and marched behind makeshift bands. Church bells rang, and factory whistles were cocked open to blow nonstop. Effigies of the kaiser were dragged through the streets and hanged. Soldiers in uniform were carried aloft.
The president was cheered by a throng outside the Capitol, and the cheering inside the House chamber began as soon as he was announced. The New York Times correspondent, expecting Wilson to show signs of strain, seemed relieved to report that he was “the personification of physical vigor.” But he was not in a celebratory mood. After a somber recitation of the terms of the Armistice, he offered a somber assessment of the state of the world. The military autocracy of Germany had been destroyed, and the victors had committed themselves to a peace that he said would “satisfy the longing of the whole world for disinterested justice.” With the British blockade in mind, he said, “Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the ugly distempers that make an ordered life impossible.” He assured the vanquished that the victors had hearts as well as minds and that they had resolved unanimously to do everything possible to supply the defeated peoples with food and other necessities. The future, he said, would belong to those who showed themselves friends of mankind through their example and assistance. But he frankly admitted that he did not know what would happen next.
• • •
The Allies’ unanimous support of the kind of peace Wilson described had been secured only at the last minute, in a tense week of negotiations in Paris between Colonel House and the leaders of Britain, France, and Italy. In late October, a few days after Germany agreed to make peace on the basis of Wilson’s program, House began pressing the Allies to follow suit. When they balked, House took a firm stand. If their peace conditions did not square with Wilson’s, he said, Wilson would probably go to Congress and ask whether the United States should continue to stand with the Allies.
Panicked by the prospect of a U.S. withdrawal, the Allied leaders agreed to the Fourteen Points with two reservations. Lloyd George would not consent to Wilson’s demand for absolute freedom of the seas. The most he would give was a promise of further discussion. Clemenceau inserted a clause entitling the Allies to make claims for reparations, a term not used in the Fourteen Points. “If I do not hear from you to the contrary, I shall assume that you accept the situation as it now is,” House wrote Wilson. “This I strongly advise.”
Wilson agreed and directed Lansing to notify the Germans of the U.S. acceptance and add a clarification on the matter of reparations: the Fourteen Points had called for the restoration as well as the evacuation of Germany’s occupied territories, and the Allies wanted it understood that “restoration” meant compensation for all damage done to their civilian populations and their property during the war.
In a note to Wilson, House praised his hard-won agreement and speculated that the prime ministers had no idea how far they had committed themselves to the American peace program. But in agreeing to continue the discussion of freedom of the seas, Lloyd George had conceded nothing, and in establishing the Allies’ claim to reparations without setting any limits, Clemenceau had opened the door to financial demands far in excess of actual damages.
If the colonel’s triumph was not as grand as he made it out to be, it was, without a doubt, significant. After the United States entered the war, Wilson had shared the Allies’ wholehearted commitment to victory but had blazed his own trail in the matter of peace. While the Allies’ notions of peace were thought out with an emphasis on national interests and a division of the spoils, Wilson had been working for a peace that would benefit all nations. He had an unshakable faith in the idea that what was best for the world would be best for the United States. He dreamed of going to the peace talks and saying, “Gentlemen, I am here to say for the United States that I don’t want anything out of this. And I am here to see that you don’t get anything out of it.” In gaining the Allies’ endorsement of the Fourteen Points, House had forced them to consider American desires alongside their own; had House failed, Wilson’s ideals would have counted for nothing.
• • •
A day after his speech to Congress, Wilson informed the cabinet that he intended to go to Europe for the peacemaking. Lansing begged him to stay in Washington, arguing that the Fourteen Points had made him the hope of the world and that he could virtually dictate the terms of the peace if he kept out of the quarrels sure to erupt among the Allies. Wilson’s face “assumed that harsh, obstinate expression which indicates resentment at unacceptable advice,” Lansing wrote after the meeting. “He said nothing, but looked volumes.”
From Paris, House reported that Clemenceau opposed Wilson’s coming for a different reason: the French, the British, and the Italians would be represented by their prime ministers, and Wilson, as a head of state, would outrank them. The British had the same objection, House added. The colonel wished that the president would leave the peacemaking to him and McAdoo and Hoover, but he contented himself with a smaller suggestion: announce a decision to take part in the preliminary talks on the treaty but say nothing about staying for the peace conference itself. “That can be determined later,” House said.
Wilson took the advice but suspected that the British and the French were probably less concerned about titles than about the possibility that he would rally the smaller nations against them. He was right. Lloyd George, foreseeing the hero’s welcome awaiting the president in Europe, blanched at the thought that Wilson would galvanize world opinion in favor of a peace more generous than the one the Allied governments had in mind.
The debate on the wisdom of Wilson’s decision proceeded politely until the end of November, when the White House announced the names of the five men who would represent the United States at the peace conference: President Wilson, Secretary of State Lansing, Colonel House, General Bliss, and Henry White, a retired career diplomat who had been ambassador to France and Italy. The press release was given out on a Friday night, a ploy often used to bury bad news. Washington immediately noticed and immediately took umbrage.
Republicans felt insulted yet again. Yes, Henry White was a Republican, but he was inconsequential in party circles and virtually unknown to the American public. Party leaders had not expected Wilson to name Lodge or Roosevelt, his fiercest critics, but they were incensed that he had overlooked Taft and Root. Both were widely respected, experienced in foreign affairs and international law, and ardent in their desire for a postwar association of nations. The Senate, the body responsible for ratifying treaties, was also irritated. President McKinley had appointed three senators to the commission that negotiated the peace after the Spanish-American War, but Wilson had not selected one. In choosing four compliant men, Wilson was saying that he was the only American peace commissioner who mattered.
Three days later, when the president delivered his State of the Union address to Congress, his stock fell again. “Republicans had said they would give him an ice bath and they were sullen and quiet,” Josephus Daniels told his diary. “It was the most unhandsome performance—churlish.” The president took his humiliation in silence.
After a lengthy review of domestic issues, Wilson spoke briefly about his trip, acknowledging that his absence would inconvenience the country. But, he said, the Allies wanted his counsel, and he wanted to give it, in the interest of a lasting peace. More than fifty thousand Americans had fought and died for the ideals in the Fourteen Points, which were the ideals of the United States. “It is now my duty to play my full part in making good what they offered their life’s blood to obtain,” he said. “I can think of no call to service which could transcend this.” He asked for their support.
Roosevelt responded with his umpteenth complaint about the vagueness of the Fourteen Points and warned Wilson not to try to play referee between the Allies and the Central Powers. “It is our business to stand by our Allies,” he wrote. Taft, the only sympathetic Republican of any prominence, announced that he was for Wilson’s trip and against sniping at the president while he was abroad.
• • •
Wilson sailed for France on December 4 aboard the USS George Washington, one of the German liners repurposed and renamed by the U.S. Navy during the war. Among the 113 members of the president’s party were Edith Wilson and her social secretary, Dr. Grayson, Secretary Lansing, Ambassador White, George Creel, Jimmie Starling and seven other Secret Service agents, two stenographers, the chief usher of the White House, a handful of servants, a trio of reporters from American wire services, and twenty-three members of the Inquiry. Since its founding in the fall of 1917, the Inquiry had worked largely in secret, compiling facts for American use at the peace conference. Numbingly thorough, the 150 scholars assigned to the project amassed so many maps, books, bibliographies, articles, reports, and statistics that three army trucks were needed to deliver them to the George Washington.
The Wilsons were no more hospitable at sea than on land, although they were often seen walking the decks and watching the movies shown nightly in the ship’s main dining room. On Grayson’s orders, Wilson spent most of his time resting. He held few meetings, and by all accounts was still in a defiant mood. With the Republicans out of his way for the time being, he was girding himself for a showdown with the Allies. Four days out, he summoned the reporters to discuss a wireless message from Colonel House, who had just learned that the Allied prime ministers were bent on squeezing every last pfennig out of Germany.
“I am absolutely opposed to this,” Wilson told the reporters. If the peacemakers delivered a treaty filled with spoliation, it would go down in history as a scourge. If the Allies insisted on egregious financial or territorial demands, he would withdraw from the conference. Wilson was also put out with the British for promising to continue the discussion of the freedom of the seas and simultaneously promising the people of Britain that His Majesty’s government would never relinquish its naval supremacy. If the British did not abandon the idea of controlling the seas, Wilson told the reporters, he would vow to build a navy even larger than Britain’s.
At one of the movie screenings, William C. Bullitt, the State Department’s brash young advisor on Russian affairs, took a seat next to Wilson and told him that he ought to convene the Inquiry men and share his thoughts on the policies he meant to pursue at the peace conference. Because they had no idea what the president planned to do in Paris, Bullitt explained, they were growing cynical.
Wilson saw ten of the Inquiry scholars the next day, and he was at his best—frank, engaging, warm, and good-natured. The gathering was less conversation than lecture, with Wilson behind a desk and his listeners seated in a semicircle before him. He talked for an hour. Of the League of Nations, he said he pictured a council of representatives from member states, watching the world and proposing a course of action if war seemed imminent. If the world war had shown anything, it was that any war could quickly engulf the world, he said. Would-be disturbers of the peace would be kept in line with a threat of an economic boycott—no international trade, no trains or ships crossing the border, no telephone or telegraph links to other countries.
The president also gave the Inquiry a long description of his general approach to the conference, beginning with his oft-stated idea that the United States would be the only nation present not seeking material gain from the war. Throughout the negotiations, he said, the only American question would be, “Is it just?” He was confident that Europe would heed the wishes of the United States for two reasons: a just peace was the surest way to prevent the discontent that fueled the spread of Bolshevism, and it would be unjust to ignore the U.S. contributions to victory. “It is not too much to say that at Château-Thierry we saved the world, and I do not intend to let those Europeans forget it,” Wilson said. It was too much to say that the AEF had saved the world at Château-Thierry, but the sheer size of the American army in the summer of 1918 (two million men in the field and two million more in training) had forced the Germans to abandon their hope of winning the war.
The Inquiry men were thrilled by the president’s last remarks: “You are, in truth, my advisers, for when I ask information, I will have no way of checking it, and must act on it unquestioningly. We shall be deluged with claims plausibly presented, and it will be your job to establish the justice or injustice of these claims, so that my position may be taken intelligently.” What he wanted was simple, he said. “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it.”
• • •
Sensing that the Paris mission would be the riskiest of his career, Robert Lansing had been trying for two months to get Wilson to divulge his plan for the League of Nations and for making peace. Just after the Armistice, Lansing sent him a list of thirty-three questions. Which nations would come to the conference? Would all the belligerents attend? What voice should provisional governments have? What instructions should be given to the American commissioners? And so on. Obviously hoping to make the exercise an easy one, Lansing confined himself to mechanics and left space between the questions for the president’s answers. Wilson did not reply.
As Lansing submitted his questions, he gave some thought to the role of the peacemakers and concluded that they would have to succeed at two monumental tasks: devising a treaty that would last and constructing a new political foundation for the world. In place of the old balance of power, which had been destroyed in the fall of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, he envisioned a world order resting firmly on justice “between nations, between society and its members, and between individuals. It is international, social, and industrial justice.”
On that he and Woodrow Wilson agreed. But Wilson placed his hopes for a just world on the Allies’ acceptance of the Fourteen Points, and Lansing had little confidence that the unity would hold. The Allies had come together to defeat the Central Powers, but now that the danger had passed, Lansing wrote a friend, “the tendency will be to fly apart. Conflicting interests will come into play.”
Lansing boarded the George Washington in an anxious frame of mind. At sea he had time to read for pleasure and catch up on his sleep, and he and his wife thoroughly enjoyed their meals in the dignitaries’ dining room. But he was hardly relaxed. Wilson had only an hour’s talk with him and White about the League, and while White was pleased to find that Wilson had no rigid ideas on the workings of the new organization, Lansing felt as frustrated as ever. When he tried to point out some of the hazards, Wilson said brusquely that arrangements could be made to obviate the risks. With the American landing in France only five days away, the question was, when would Wilson be ready to make any arrangements, even provisional arrangements, for negotiating any of the issues sure to arise at the peace conference?
Lansing was not the only baffled member of the presidential party. The spell that Wilson cast over the Inquiry men wore off in a day or two, leaving most of them wondering how the president would be able to put his ideals into practice. Wilson unburdened himself to George Creel on an evening walk around the deck. “It is to America that the whole world turns today, not only with its wrongs, but with its hopes and grievances,” Wilson said. “The hungry expect us to feed them, the roofless look to us for shelter, the sick of heart and body depend upon us for cure. All of these expectations have in them the quality of terrible urgency. There must be no delay. It has been so always. People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately. Yet you know, and I know, that these ancient wrongs, these present unhappinesses, are not to be remedied in a day or with a wave of the hand. What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope that I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment.”
I. An armistice is more formal and generally longer lasting than a ceasefire or a truce. Typically an armistice is negotiated by the warring parties. But sometimes, as in 1918, it is dictated by the victors. Armistices aim to prevent hostilities during the months often required to formulate and agree upon a peace treaty. A war does not officially come to an end until the enemies sign the treaty.
