In a cable dispatched on his last day in Paris, Wilson asked Tumulty to arrange a White House dinner with the members of the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs. House had suggested the dinner, Wilson had reluctantly agreed, and the invitation had all the charm of an arrest warrant. There was no sense that the host looked forward to seeing his guests, no hint of the pleasure he would take in sharing his experiences abroad, no flattering suggestion that he might need their advice. They were told to turn up at eight o’clock on February 26, asked not to debate the League’s covenant before then, and informed that debate would prove superfluous because there was “a good and sufficient reason for the phraseology and substance of each article.”
The Wilsons left for Brest that night, and the next morning the George Washington set sail for Boston. The original itinerary called for a New York landing without ceremony in order to speed Wilson to his duties in Washington. But in early January, just after Lodge gave a long speech critical of the League, it occurred to Tumulty that Wilson’s enemies could use the lack of fanfare as evidence of his waning influence in the United States. Picturing a Boston arrival with a public celebration and a presidential speech, Tumulty predicted in a telegram that it “would make ovation inevitable throughout New England and center attack on Lodge.”
A few days before landing, Wilson notified Tumulty that he did not want an elaborate reception in Boston. He was willing to speak informally, he said—on the pier, perhaps, or at the train station. Not possible, Tumulty replied. Arrangements had been made, and an eleventh-hour change “would be open to mischievous misconstruction.” Wilson finally confessed his fear that an extravaganza in Boston would antagonize Congress. Tumulty held firm.
As radiograms flew back and forth between the George Washington and the White House, the Wilsons lunched with David Francis, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. When Francis volunteered his opinion that Americans would support the League of Nations, Wilson, perhaps with his new worries in mind, replied, “The failure of the United States to back it would break the heart of the world.”
Eleanor Roosevelt was impressed by the depth of feeling in Wilson’s remark but otherwise found him a puzzle. She could scarcely believe his indifference to the entertainments staged for him by the crew and was shocked by his admission over lunch that he had not read a newspaper since the beginning of the war. He relied on Tumulty to clip the essential articles for him, he said. Wilson’s approach was efficient and perhaps necessary, but it was not customary among the public men of Wilson’s day, and Eleanor Roosevelt was not alone in wondering how a president could govern without reading the news. She did not inquire, but he had recently explained to the first lady’s social secretary, Edith Benham, that he felt that the newspapers spoke for the moneyed classes rather than the general public, so he gathered his impressions from other sources. He also reminded her that he had saturated himself in American political history. Benham, who wanted to understand how he got from a welter of impressions to the fully formed ideas expressed in his speeches, asked, “Don’t you go deeper than that?” Wilson reflected for a moment, then said that he felt so imbued with American thought that when a new idea occurred to him, he just tried to voice it in a way that resonated with the people.
• • •
On February 24 Boston gave Wilson an exuberant welcome, with twenty-one-gun salutes, ear-splitting boat whistles, and daredevil aviators somersaulting across the sky. A few days earlier, Clemenceau had been shot in an assassination attempt, prompting Boston to assign thousands of policemen and armed soldiers to the president’s route. Their presence did nothing to dampen the celebration. Set against the flags rippling on every storefront, the men in blue and khaki registered as one more salute to the president.
At the city’s largest auditorium, Wilson declared that the United States had a responsibility to do more than sign a conventional peace treaty. Apparently afraid to utter the words “League of Nations” or “covenant” on Lodge’s home ground, he spoke of guaranteeing the peace “by the united forces of the civilized world” and of the “utter blackness that would fall on the world” if America stood aside.
Headlines labeled the speech “defiant,” and the editors of The New York Times called it “a threat aimed at the Senate.” Lodge complained about it (privately) for months. He resented being attacked in his own backyard, but even more he resented Wilson’s hypocrisy. As he put it in a letter to a friend, it might be acceptable “under the modern fashion” for a president to speak out after asking others to remain silent, but it violated the code of conduct he had learned in his youth.
Wilson reached Washington on February 25 and planned to stay until March 4, the last day of the Sixty-fifth Congress. Waiting for him was a note from a friendly Democratic senator, Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, who urged him to confer with a half-dozen members of Congress sympathetic to the League of Nations. Together, Walsh said, they could scrutinize the covenant clause by clause, as they did with bills in committee. Reminding Wilson that they had used the same approach to polish the Federal Reserve bill, Walsh said that a collaborative effort would make the covenant’s language more precise and address the most serious objections raised by its congressional critics. Wilson declined, pleading a lack of time and confessing that it would prove virtually impossible to revise the covenant agreed upon in Paris.
The following evening, thirty-four members of the House and Senate committees on foreign affairs complied with their summons to the White House. (There were three absentees: a Democratic congressman who was ill and two Republican senators, William E. Borah of Idaho and Albert B. Fall of New Mexico, who found themselves implacably at odds with Wilson’s internationalism.) Lodge’s notes on the evening describe the dinner as “very pleasant” but omit the fact that he was given the honor of sitting next to the first lady. His courtesy led her to think that he would eventually support the League and enabled him to suppress his annoyance as she gushed about his hometown’s enthusiastic reception of her husband. Later he could not resist telling a fellow Republican, Senator Frank B. Brandegee of Connecticut, that Edith Wilson’s fingernails were “black with dirt.”
After dinner, the guests were ushered into the East Room and seated in a semicircle facing the president, who announced that he would be happy to answer their questions about the covenant. Lodge gave him high marks in goodwill but did not think that Wilson grasped the covenant’s impact on American foreign policy. Brandegee, who took the lead in quizzing Wilson, failed to elicit anything but shibboleths. “I feel as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter,” he told the New York Sun.
Years later, Edith Wilson would reveal that Woodrow had ended the conversation by inviting his guests to send him their suggestions on the covenant. She missed the hollowness of asking for improvements to a document said to be beyond revision, and neither she nor her husband seemed to catch the subtlety of Lodge’s last remarks of the evening. The president had pulled the senator aside to promise that he would do his best for the United States at the peace conference and to ask whether Lodge thought that the covenant as it stood would be approved by the Senate. Lodge replied that if the Committee on Foreign Relations approved it, it would undoubtedly be ratified. According to Edith’s account, Woodrow had responded, “Very well then, I consider that, armed with your approval, I can go back and work feeling that you and your associates are behind me.” Lodge nodded. But a nod can signal comprehension rather than agreement, and Wilson had missed the import of Lodge’s “if.”
Although there is no transcript of the evening’s discussion of the covenant, it is known that the senators and congressmen present were most concerned about Article X, which authorized the Executive Council of the League to call on members for troops whenever they were needed to defend a member from foreign aggression. From interviews with several of the guests, the New-York Tribune’s Washington correspondent cleverly distilled Wilson’s other comments into fourteen points. Among them: Joining the League would require some surrender of sovereignty, but Wilson claimed that every treaty had that effect. The League’s recommendations on the size of each member’s defense establishment would be purely advisory. The League’s success would depend on the good faith of its members. The League could not prevent all wars. The current draft of the covenant would be approved by the peace conference, and it would be incorporated in the treaty. A day after giving the president his say, the Tribune compiled the reactions of the guests, which came down to one point: Wilson had failed to win over the skeptics, not all of whom were Republican.
• • •
On February 27, Wilson went up to the Capitol to offer his help with the raft of bills awaiting passage before the end of the session. Republicans, claiming that the dillydallying of the Democrats had caused the logjam, demanded that the president call an extraordinary session to take care of the unfinished business. Wilson refused. Barring an emergency, he said, he would wait until his final return from Paris to ask for a special session. Twice during his presidency Wilson had asked for such sessions, once to pass the Federal Reserve Act and once for war legislation. Calling extra sessions was a presidential power, and when Wilson declined to exercise it in March 1919, Washington understood that he was denying his Senate opponents the opportunity to use their dignified chamber as a stage for a sustained attack on his great cause while he was away.
With time running out, Lodge made two provocative moves. The first, on the morning of February 28, was a long speech to an overflow crowd in the Senate. He reminded the president that Democrats were not the only champions of world peace. “Everybody hates war,” he said. Walking his listeners through the covenant, Lodge praised some articles and pointed out the hazards he saw in others. He was not advocating a wholesale rejection of the covenant, he said. What he wanted was careful debate of every article—by the Senate, the press, and the American people.
Lodge’s argument rested on the wholesome assumption that when a great political issue is thoroughly examined, the people and their elected representatives will make intelligent decisions. As a student at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson had cherished the same assumption and honed his verbal talents in hopes of someday making a name for himself in the debates of the Senate. A few years later, in Congressional Government, he lamented that the tradition of public debate in the Capitol had given way to unsavory bargaining in committee rooms, where self-interest mattered more than the good of the Republic. As president, Wilson could rely more on oratory than debate, and he grew ever more impatient with Lansing and others who felt obliged to argue with him. But Lodge’s call for free and full discussion invoked a democratic ideal that Wilson could not easily disown.
Meeting with the Democratic National Committee later in the day, Wilson tried to appear unconcerned about Lodge’s speech, but it quickly became apparent that he had no intention of trying to win Republicans to his cause. He implored the Democratic leaders to expose the Republicans’ shortsightedness and urged them to send speakers on tour to make the case for U.S. participation in the League of Nations. “[T]he civilized world cannot afford to have us lose this fight,” he said. “I tried to state in Boston what it would mean to the people of the world if the people of the United States did not support this great ideal . . . but I was not able to speak when I tried to fully express my thoughts. I tell you, frankly, I choked up; I could not do it. The thing reaches the depth of tragedy.”
Faced with a tragedy, Wilson was also faced with a choice: he could try to win over his opponents, or he could try to annihilate them. Certain that he owned the high ground, he chose annihilation. Put on your war paint, he told the Democrats. Not for the party but for the good of the country and the world. “[G]et the true American pattern of war paint and a real hatchet and go out on the war path and get a collection of scalps that has never been excelled in the history of American warfare.”
• • •
Lodge’s second move, made in collaboration with Brandegee, was a frontal assault on the covenant. They spent March 2 and 3 drafting a resolution declaring that the present draft ought not to be accepted by the United States, that the American delegation in Paris ought to focus on making peace with Germany, and that the covenant ought to be removed from the treaty and considered after the peace was made. Rather than submit the resolution on their own, Lodge and Brandegee decided to make it a round-robin, with signatures from as many Republican senators as possible.
Until the round-robin, the American public knew that some senators opposed the League of Nations, but Lodge’s maneuver showed that the president lacked the two-thirds majority required to ratify a treaty. With thirty-nine of the Senate’s ninety-six members against any treaty containing the current draft of the covenant, Wilson had fifty-seven votes. He needed sixty-four. The round-robin was not a lethal blow to Wilson’s hopes. It was merely a tally of Republican opinion in the Senate as of March 3, 1919. But it did make clear that no matter how many battles Woodrow Wilson won in Paris, he would be defeated at home unless he convinced sixty-four senators that U.S. participation in the League of Nations would serve American interests better than the policies laid down by George Washington and James Monroe.
• • •
Wilson left Washington on March 4 and headed for New York, where he would show off a formidable new ally in the fight for the League, William Howard Taft. Former president, respected Republican, and longtime advocate of international arbitration and a world court, Taft had agreed to join Wilson onstage at the Metropolitan Opera House and speak in favor of the League of Nations and the covenant. For four years, Taft had led the League to Enforce Peace (LEP), which advocated a global peacekeeping organization consisting mainly of a world court and an international army. Disputes between nations would be adjudicated by the court and, if necessary, enforced by the army. In early February Taft and several other prominent Americans had set off on a four-week speaking tour to promote the LEP across the country, but as soon as they read the Paris covenant, they threw their support behind Wilson and the League of Nations. As Taft explained to his wife, “It is a real League with cinch and clinch in it. It does not quite come up to the League to Enforce Peace program but it is very near it.”
Convinced that the League was essential and that the covenant did belong in the peace treaty, Taft accepted Wilson’s invitation and braced himself for abuse from the Republicans who were leading the attack on Wilson. “It is hard for me to be patient with that kind of partisanship,” he wrote one of his sons. “It is not only narrow but it is blind; but whatever they say I am going ahead as I think it wise.” Still, he was bothered by Wilson’s unwillingness to court the Senate and a sense that Wilson wanted all the credit for the covenant and the League.
The sight of a Democratic president and a Republican ex-president walking onstage arm in arm brought the audience to its feet and set off a long roar of applause. Taft spoke first, pronouncing the covenant indispensable to the treaty, arguing that the work of preserving peace in Europe was vital to the security of the United States, and contesting the claim that the League would be a super-state capable of overriding the sovereignty of its members. The covenant, he said, put the people of the world in sight of the Promised Land, and the president deserved the support of every American.
Wilson, looking pale and drawn, launched his speech by taking a cue from the popular wartime tune “Over There,” which the Marine Band played just before he spoke. “I accept the intimation of the air just played,” he said. “I will not come back ‘till it’s over, over there.’ ” And as soon as he reached the other side of the water, he said, he would report that an overwhelming majority of Americans favored the League of Nations. (Opinion polls had shown this to be true.)
He professed to be amazed—“not alarmed, but amazed”—by the “comprehensive ignorance” of certain Americans. How could they be so out of touch with the currents of the world? The world wanted and needed the League of Nations, the world would have it, and those who stood against the tide would be swept away, he said. He accused his opponents of partisanship, of indifference to the hopes of the world, of betraying the boys in khaki. “And do you suppose that, having felt that crusading spirit of those youngsters who went over there . . . I am going to permit myself for one moment to slacken in my effort to be worthy of them and their cause?” He vowed again not to come back until it was over over there and said that his work in Paris would end only when the world was assured of lasting peace. “And when that treaty comes back,” he said, “gentlemen on this side will find the covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the covenant that you cannot dissect the covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.”
A disappointed Taft wrote a friend that Wilson’s speech at the Metropolitan Opera had the same flaws as all his other speeches. “He never answers any argument at all. He usually defies his opponent in many different ways, and makes a number of taking apothegms and epigrams, states a few high ideals and lets it go at that.” But Taft had no thought of abandoning the president. He hoped that Wilson would revise the covenant, and he guessed that the Allies would cooperate in securing the changes Wilson needed to eliminate the major hurdles to ratification. If that happened, Taft thought, “the Senate will have to take the burden of postponing peace in order to defeat the covenant, [and] I don’t think they will be so anxious to rush into the breach.”
