The George Washington landed in France under a bright moon on March 13, 1919. Wilson’s train left for Paris at eleven o’clock, and among the miles and miles of American soldiers posted along the tracks, Edith Benham spotted a muscular sentry silhouetted against the moon—a veritable poster of America protecting the future of Europe, she thought.
Pretty as it was, the picture misled. Wilson was heading into what has been called “the dark period” of the peace conference, when most of the decisions fell far short of the ideals of the Fourteen Points. In the consuming, ultimately futile effort to bring about a just and lasting peace, he would fall ill twice. He would also lose sight of the fact that while he was away, influential Republicans who opposed American membership in the League of Nations were turning the country against the idea. Political isolation had served the United States well, the critics said. They acknowledged that while Wilson made an inspiring case for internationalism, he could not prove that it would work.
Colonel House had come out from Paris to meet the president but was dreading their reunion. He had not fared well while Wilson was away, and when they conferred in the morning, their talk went so badly that House’s diary mentions only one portion of it, a testy exchange about the White House evening with Lodge and his colleagues. Wilson was blunt: “Your dinner to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was a failure.” House countered that it had exposed the dishonesty of those who accused the president of conducting foreign affairs without the advice and consent of the Senate. Wilson conceded the point, but when House nattered on about the favorable public impression made by the occasion, Wilson made no reply that House cared to include in his diary.
Accounts by Wilson’s other intimates emphasized his consternation at the colonel’s news from Paris. Edith Wilson, who saw her husband just after the meeting, wrote that he seemed ten years older, and his jaw was set in that way it had when he was making a superhuman effort to control himself. House, he explained, had “given away everything I had won before we left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again and this time it will be harder.”
Ray Stannard Baker, press secretary of the American peace commission, noticed the new chill between the president and the colonel. Edith Wilson felt that House had betrayed her husband, but Baker blamed the backsliding on House’s middling intellect, excessive optimism, and outsized desire not to disappoint. “He liked and sympathized with people and hated to decide against them,” Baker wrote; “he wanted to get them all together, use soft words, and assure them that there were no real differences.”
There were enormous differences—between the United States and the Allies, among the Allies, and among the Great Powers and the rest of the world. For one thing, news reports of the friction at the White House dinner had emboldened Lloyd George and Clemenceau to take up Lodge’s idea of detaching the League’s covenant from the treaty. The British hoped that the excision would ensure American ratification of the treaty, and the French, fixated on securing their country against another war with Germany, had so little faith in the League that they did not care whether it was written into the treaty or not. House had put up no fight for Wilson’s position.
Nor had the colonel protested a French proposition that was anathema to Wilson, the expropriation of thousands of square miles of western Germany to serve as a barrier to another German invasion. House had promised to send Wilson a French memorandum on the subject, but he did not follow through. Nor did he reveal that he had endorsed it in a discussion with one of Clemenceau’s advisors. House’s cables to Washington had hinted at various disagreements, but he told his diary that he was saving the full report for the reunion. Because House had ingratiated himself with nearly every notable at the peace conference, Wilson had to continue using his services in Paris, but the door that had always been open to the colonel began to close. Wilson immediately stopped confiding in him.
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For the rest of their stay in Paris, the Wilsons lived at 11 Place des États-Unis as guests of the French government. Lloyd George and Balfour lived across the street, on rue Nitot, and Clemenceau’s home was a short drive away, on rue Benjamin Franklin. French officials, still on edge from the attempt on Clemenceau’s life, filled a house near Wilson and Lloyd George with gendarmes. The Wilsons found their new quarters less imposing than the Hôtel Murat, although Edith’s bathroom was the ne plus ultra of luxury: gold faucets, huge sunken tub, and walls painted with life-size apple trees in bloom. In the center of the ceiling, where the tree branches met, hung a chandelier shaped like a bough and ornamented with tiny sculptures of birds and butterflies. The artist had painted pink petals here and there in the tub inviting the bather to imagine they had fluttered down from the trees. The president’s bathroom had a green tub, half of which was set into the wall, and overhead was a puzzling little balcony. Edith Benham joked that it was for the musicians who would be called in to serenade the president as he scrubbed.
The Wilsons’ private quarters were on the ground floor. The president’s suite overlooked the garden at the back of the house, and the first lady’s looked out toward the street. Above the wall that screened the house from the sidewalk, she had a view of Lloyd George’s upper stories. Wilson’s second-floor study was handsomely paneled in dark wood and hung with masterpieces—a Rembrandt, a Delacroix, a few Goyas. Three large windows let in an abundance of light, and in four comfortable armchairs arranged in a semicircle before the hearth, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando would make the decisions that reordered the world. The room appeared to have a single entrance, but one day Ray Baker saw the president disappear through a trompe l’oeil bookcase.
The first lady would remember the president setting to work in the new house “without an hour’s delay . . . to win back what had been surrendered by Colonel House.” The next day Wilson issued a written denial of the rumors about the covenant. He reminded the world that the decision to fuse the two had been made by a plenary session of the peace conference and was therefore “of final force.” Rather than attack those who had conspired against him, he merely reiterated the reasons for the plenary’s decision, the main one being that the covenant belonged in the treaty because the treaty would be enforced by the League.
The French immediately denied Wilson’s denial. And so, wrote the Washington Post’s correspondent, “the familiar impenetrable fog of mystery again descends upon the proceedings at Paris.” Wilson had it out with Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando, and the fog seemed to lift when the French foreign minister claimed to have been misunderstood and Lord Cecil told newsmen that the British delegation supported the president. But when Lloyd George took exception to Cecil’s pronouncement, the fog rolled back in. Worried about the treaty’s fate in the U.S. Senate, Lloyd George wanted the question of inclusion left unanswered in the hope that he and Clemenceau would be able to convince Wilson that exclusion was the wiser course.
With Wilson’s return, the Great Powers were eager to draft the rest of the treaty, and for the next seven weeks, Wilson labored under enormous strain, debating the Allies by day and devoting many a night to the final draft of the covenant. The revising began with a pleasant surprise: after saying at the White House dinner that the Allies were sure to resist changes, he found them in a receptive mood. The League commission had received a sheaf of proposed amendments, a development that made it easy for him to take up suggestions from William Howard Taft and Senator Gilbert M. Hitchcock, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Foreign Relations. Both men were trying to clear the path to ratification by helping Wilson meet the most serious American objections to the draft he had shared in Washington.
Wilson seized the moment and won several critical amendments. On several points, the president faced stiff opposition. France was peeved by Wilson’s insertion of a promise that the League would respect the Monroe Doctrine, the “Keep Out” sign posted on the Western Hemisphere by the United States in 1823. Although the French appreciated that a failure to mention the Doctrine would probably doom the treaty in the United States, they noted the absurdity of granting special status to the foreign policy of a single state. They worried too that some future American administration, one without Wilson’s sense of global responsibility, might invoke Monroe as a reason for not coming to the defense of Europe. Britain decided to support Wilson. France, forced to give in, retaliated by renewing its demands for an international army. Wilson beat it back.
To defeat the Japanese, who wanted the covenant’s preamble to affirm the principle of racial equality, Wilson needed the aid of Lord Cecil. Wilson had no sympathy with the idea, nor did the U.S. Senate. Southern senators would have seen it as a threat to white supremacy, and the many states in the Far West had laws discriminating against Asians. The prime minister of Australia was virulently anti-Japanese, and England’s support of racial equality would have prompted the black, brown, and yellow subjects of the British Empire to demand independence. Cecil acknowledged the nobility of Japan’s idea but said he thought it best for the world, at least for the moment, not to mention race or religion in the covenant. Cecil’s defense of the status quo echoed the arguments that Wilson made whenever black leaders or white progressives challenged his administration’s segregation of the civil service and its general indifference to racial injustice.
The issue came to a head at the League of Nations commission’s final meeting, on April 11. After reaching agreement on changes to a dozen of the articles of the covenant, the commission turned to the preamble. Baron Makino Nobuaki, Japan’s foreign minister and chief of its delegation in Paris, made an eloquent plea for the addition of a clause affirming the equality of all races and warned that League members who felt slighted might be unwilling to send troops to defend those who considered themselves superior.
Cecil declared himself personally sympathetic but unable to endorse the principle because of his government’s belief that it infringed upon Britain’s sovereignty. The Japanese countered that they wanted nothing more than assurance that all League members would be treated equally in world affairs. They also indicated that they might refuse to join the League if the covenant failed to recognize the equality of all races.
At that point, Prime Minister Orlando of Italy spoke up in favor of the idea and was quickly joined by the prime ministers of Greece and Czechoslovakia, the two French members of the commission, and the Chinese representative. The commissioners approved the Japanese amendment by a vote of eleven to six, with Wilson and House abstaining. And then, say the minutes of the meeting, “President Wilson declared that the amendment was not adopted inasmuch as it had not received the unanimous approval of the commission.” When a French commissioner protested, Wilson replied that the group’s decisions had to be unanimous. Makino requested that the vote be recorded and announced that he would reintroduce the issue at the next suitable opportunity.
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On March 24, the Council of Ten was whittled to a Council of Four—Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando, and Wilson. Lansing and the other foreign secretaries plus Makino of Japan would meet as the Council of Five and deal with matters handed to them by the Four. Rarely consulted by Wilson and now relegated to the wings of the stage in Paris, Lansing deprecated the Four as “unsystematic . . . loose . . . inexpert.” Henry White, Lansing’s fellow peace commissioner, would come to believe that Lloyd George and Clemenceau broke up the Council of Ten because they sensed that Wilson would be more manageable alone than he was in the company of his secretary of state.
It was House who had proposed the Council of Four, and Wilson endorsed it on the assumption that four men could move more swiftly than ten. Speed was crucial. More than 160 million Europeans were on the brink of starvation, and the new states under construction on the ruins of the old empires were ill equipped to cope with food riots, shortages of coal and other necessities, labor strikes, disruptions of trade, and a resurgence of ethnic conflict. The Four were also in a state of near desperation about the spread of Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks had just taken control of Hungary and gained a foothold in the German state of Bavaria. While the Four often disagreed, they were united in their belief that Bolshevism was as great a menace to world peace as militarism had been. At the first meeting of the Four, Wilson declared that they were in a “race between peace and anarchy” and requested that they take up the thorniest issues first. With those resolved, he said, the rest of their work would go quickly.
They started with reparations. Before the Armistice, Germany had agreed to pay for damage done to civilians and their property, but by the time the victors assembled in Paris, Clemenceau and Lloyd George had promised their electorates every last mark that could be wrested from the government in Berlin. On top of compensation for actual damages, they now demanded pensions for their soldiers and war widows as well as the costs of waging the war. As one historian has written, “Their basic argument was simply: winner takes all.”
Clemenceau had an additional motive. When he looked at Germany, he saw a country stronger than France, more populous, unscarred by war, industrially intact. What good was a victory over an aggressor who could easily rise again? Reducing such an enemy to penury seemed a necessity to the French. Calculated by Clemenceau’s financial experts, the Allied bill totaled $200 billion. Lloyd George’s experts filed an estimate of $120 billion. The British wanted to include pensions and war costs, because the British Isles had suffered virtually no property damage during the war. If the Germans were required to pay only for the repair of physical damages, Britain would get nothing.
Wilson’s financial advisors, who adamantly opposed the inclusion of any costs beyond reparations, proposed a sum of $30 billion after concluding that Germany could pay no more. For months, Wilson had stood with his advisors and at one point told the Allies that it would be dishonorable to change the terms just because they had the power to do so. He understood that Lloyd George and Clemenceau were inflating the price for political reasons: both had led their constituents to believe that no tax increases would be necessary to pay for the war. At the first few meetings of the Four, Wilson continued his campaign for reparations only and warned that if they set the price too high, Germany might refuse to make peace.
Lloyd George ended the impasse in two brilliant moves. First he embraced an American proposal to establish a reparations commission, which would be given two years to set the amount and the payment schedule. He also asked General Jan Smuts, whom Wilson admired, to compose a memo aimed at persuading the president to take a broader view of reparations. Written on March 31, it argued that if French farmers who lived in the path of destruction deserved compensation for their economic losses, so did disabled war veterans and war widows.
The next day Wilson informed his financial advisors that he would support Smuts’s idea. When they noted that he was breaking promises made to the Germans in the Armistice agreement and that his new position led logically to the inclusion of all war costs, he said, “I don’t give a damn for logic.” Nor did he worry about the plan to present the Germans with a treaty demanding reparations without stating the price. He took it on faith that the reparations commission soon to be appointed would make a clear-eyed assessment of Germany’s finances and ignore the exorbitant French and British claims. As for what the term “reparations” might encompass, Wilson had decided he did not care. What did it matter if one of the Allies used its share for pensions and another allocated its funds to rebuilding?
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Wilson, accustomed to acting on his own in the realm of foreign relations, clearly disliked thrashing things out in the Council of Four. Orlando rarely spoke unless Italy’s interests were at stake, but the strain of matching wits with the agile Lloyd George and the single-minded Clemenceau was almost unbearable to Wilson. On March 28, only five days into the council’s discussions, Wilson wondered aloud if he should return to the United States. At issue in that moment was Germany’s Saar Basin, on the northern edge of Alsace-Lorraine. It was rich in coal, it had belonged to France during Napoleon’s reign, and France wanted it back. With the Saar’s coal, the French said, they could simultaneously rebuild their own steel industry and hurt Germany’s.
Wilson vehemently opposed French ambitions in the Saar because he opposed annexation in principle and because the vast majority of the region’s 650,000 inhabitants were German. When Clemenceau accused him of being pro-German, Wilson was so incensed that he again raised the possibility of going home. The Four broke for lunch, and when they returned to their armchairs in Wilson’s study, Wilson rose and delivered a sermon. If they did their work in a high-minded fashion, their names would be forever honored, he said, but if they crushed Germany, the world would turn against them. Angered by Wilson’s self-righteousness, Clemenceau started to rise, and Wilson told him to sit down and listen. Clemenceau obeyed, and by the time the sermon ended, the Tiger thought it better to purr than to growl. According to one account, he took Wilson’s hand and said, “You are a good man, and a great one.” In private, though, he continued to seethe. When an aide suggested a tête-à-tête with Wilson about the Saar, Clemenceau threw up his hands. “Talk with Wilson! How can I talk to a fellow who thinks himself the first man in two thousand years to know anything about peace on earth?”
The principals were saved by their advisors, who collaborated with less heat and more light. After a few days of quiet work, they presented a compromise giving the Saar’s coal to France for fifteen years and establishing an arbitration commission to handle disputes arising from the new arrangement. When the fifteen years were up, the inhabitants of the Saar would vote on whether to unite with France or Germany. All that remained was to choose which of the two nations would govern the Saar in the interim.
Wilson was pleased by the thought that the people of the Saar would eventually decide their political future, but he worried that allowing France or Germany to govern the territory for fifteen years would tilt the final vote in favor of the country in charge. To eliminate the problem, he said, they could let the League of Nations govern the Saar. Why not let France govern under a mandate from the League? Clemenceau asked. Wilson replied that he was striving for a mutually satisfactory solution; just as Clemenceau had to please France, he had to please the United States. Lloyd George took Wilson’s side, and Clemenceau eventually gave in. The agreement would be hailed as a victory for Wilson’s ideals, but it was also a gain for the old balance of power. Lloyd George had supported it because he did not want France to become the superpower of postwar Europe.
Though valuable for its coal, the Saar was too small to protect France against another German invasion. For that France wanted the Rhineland, ten thousand square miles of territory between the Rhine River and Germany’s borders with Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Knowing that Wilson would balk at an outright annexation, the French proposed turning the territory into an independent neutral state, the so-called Rhenish Republic. Unfortunately, the new state the French had in mind was neither independent nor republican. It would be occupied by Allied troops and live under French control. Lloyd George vigorously opposed the idea, arguing that severing the Rhineland from Germany would repeat the error the Germans had made when they helped themselves to Alsace-Lorraine. The resentment would be so lasting and deep that it might precipitate a second world war. Wilson concurred, adding that the French plan would deprive the citizens of the Rhenish Republic of the right to determine their own form of government.
Certain that France would not let go of the idea unless it had some other bulwark against Germany, Wilson and Lloyd George made a startling offer: a military alliance in the form of a treaty promising that the United States and Great Britain would come immediately to the defense of France in the event of a German attack. Clemenceau had often spoken of his wish to preserve the alliance that had defeated Germany, and Lloyd George and Wilson were offering to grant his wish if he persuaded his government to give up the idea of the Rhenish Republic.
Clemenceau was open to the idea but first had to overcome the opposition of his generals and the French political right, which would have been happy to chop Germany to pieces. Despite his age, despite his fatigue, despite frequent paroxysms of coughing caused by the assassin’s bullet lodged in his chest, Clemenceau took on his French foes and fought until they abandoned their phony republic in the Rhineland. They agreed to the military alliance and to German retention of the Rhineland as long as the peace treaty required Germany never to fortify it. They also demanded a demilitarized zone thirty miles wide and a fifteen-year Allied occupation of three strategic bridgeheads. The costs of the occupation were to be borne by Germany.
When Clemenceau took the proposition back to the Council of Four, Lloyd George and Wilson objected to the length of the occupation, and Lloyd George observed that the expense might leave Germany short of funds for reparations. No, said Clemenceau, the presence of a large armed force on German soil, ready and able to advance to Berlin, would spur the Germans to keep up their payments. Both Lloyd George and Wilson made clear that their countries’ military presence in the Rhineland would be minimal. Clemenceau shrugged. All he wanted, he said, was “one battalion and a flag.” As long as he could claim that the occupation was an international project, he could defend himself and France against charges of revenge.
Wilson’s critics wondered why he imagined that the Senate would consent to an alliance binding the United States to take part in a European war. Wilson did not explain himself, and his admirers praised him for preventing the covert annexation of the Rhineland and predicted that the United States and Britain would not have to send troops, because Germany, knowing that it would face the armed might of three powerful nations, would never again march on France. Wilson and Lloyd George had also left themselves a broad escape route: the agreement would not take effect if either the United States or Britain rejected it.
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The Saar and Rhineland conflicts raged alongside an equally fierce struggle over crime and punishment. Lloyd George had campaigned for reelection amid cries of “Hang the Kaiser!” and one of the first plenaries in Paris established a commission to fix the blame for the war, investigate war crimes, and make arrangements to bring the accused to trial. The commission concluded that all enemy offenders, including heads of state, were liable to criminal prosecution. It proposed that the accused be tried by a panel of judges from the victorious nations.
When the Four considered the question on April 2, Lloyd George remarked that holding high officials accountable would reduce the risk of future wars. But the two American members of the Commission on Responsibilities, Robert Lansing and James Brown Scott, an authority on international law, had dissented, and Wilson agreed with them. Making a spirited fight against war trials, Wilson said that it would be difficult to determine the extent of the kaiser’s culpability and manifestly unjust to try the accused before a tribunal composed entirely of enemies. He also pointed out the unfairness of arraigning a sovereign when sovereigns had traditionally enjoyed immunity from prosecution. To him, the honorable course was to establish the principle of liability first and hold it in reserve for future offenses against international law. He too wanted Germany condemned by history, he said, but he did not want history to condemn the peacemakers for abusing their power.
Lloyd George observed that history might condemn them for weakness if they let the malefactors go unpunished. Stung, Wilson swore that he felt the horrors of the war keenly—so keenly, he said, that “I struggle constantly against emotion, and I am compelled to put pressure on myself to keep my judgment sound.” Fed up with Wilson’s pieties, Clemenceau snarled that nothing could be done without emotion. “Was not Jesus Christ driven by passion on the day when he drove the merchants from the temple?” Without waiting for Wilson to defend the Lord, Lloyd George declared that the world would scoff if the peace treaty offered no more than a promise to try the war criminals of the future. Wilson hung on. “I want us to act, ourselves, in a manner which satisfies our conscience.”
For Wilson, “conscience” was an absolute. He understood the forces that drove politicians onto the low road, but he had always been repelled by men in high office who refused the dictates of conscience when faced with a great moral question. He also assumed that all nations would benefit from a peace that satisfied the world’s conscience, an assumption not shared by Georges Clemenceau. A veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, Clemenceau could not forgive Germany for its annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 or its attack on France in 1914. Lofty principles, the League of Nations, global cooperation for global good—none of these meant as much to Clemenceau as the security of France.
Wilson left the meeting profoundly upset. “I have never seen him so irritated, so thoroughly in a rage,” Edith Benham told her diary. Over lunch, he fumed about the lack of progress and confided that he had sent Clemenceau an ultimatum: if the Big Four did not soon draft a peace based on the Fourteen Points, he would leave Paris, and the United States would negotiate its own peace with Germany. Still distraught when Ray Baker came to 11 Place des États-Unis for his nightly briefing, Wilson revealed that he was contemplating a bolt if the impasse lasted another week. Wilson also shared the thought with House, who passed the word to André Tardieu, a member of Clemenceau’s inner circle. Once again House undercut his chief. Instead of telling Tardieu the truth, House said that Wilson might have to leave because of urgent business in Washington.
At the next morning’s session there was no talk of trying the kaiser, and the afternoon meeting had barely begun when Wilson was felled by a searing headache, intense abdominal pain, a violent cough, and a fever of 103°. Grayson ordered him to bed, where he stayed for four days, a victim of an unidentified respiratory virus.
Told that the president had a cold, Lansing had his doubts. He suspected fatigue and anxiety, and privately, Grayson suspected the same. A few days before sending Wilson to bed to recover, Grayson wrote his wife that the president was “showing the strain of the overwork considerably. . . . I shall be happy to get him home soon. He is showing his age more than ever.” Lansing too felt the strain. Shut out of the deliberations, he was deeply unhappy and thought again of resigning but could not bring himself to desert. “Not a word comes out of the Council,” he wrote a friend in the State Department. “They sit in as thick a cloud as that which shrouded Mount Sinai when Moses received the tablets of the law.”
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Unable to see Wilson that evening, Baker called on House, who was stretched out on a chaise longue, dictating his diary to his secretary. “I found him tonight quite cheerful: quite optimistic,” Baker wrote. “Told me that if he had it to do he could make peace in an hour!” Baker went home deeply troubled. There was House, the dilettante with nothing serious at stake, while Wilson—“gray, grim, lonely there on the hill—fights a losing battle against heavy odds. He can escape no responsibility and must go to his punishment not only for his own mistakes and weaknesses of temperament but for the greed and selfishness of the world. I do not love him—but beyond any other man I admire and respect him.”
The colonel ran afoul of Edith Wilson at about the same time that Baker wrote him off. The president’s return to Paris and the creation of the Council of Four had raised expectations for a speedy end to the peacemaking, and when the discussions dragged on with no discernible results, reporters went to House for explanations. House gave away no secrets, but the information he shared and his intimacy with the principals left two impressions: he was the mainstay of the American delegation, and the most significant U.S. contributions to peace had been made while Wilson was in Washington. The articles enraged Edith Wilson. One afternoon when she found herself alone with the colonel, who was waiting for the president, she read aloud an article she found particularly obnoxious and said she knew that he too would resent it. After listening for a bit, House turned crimson and fled without seeing the president. He occasionally returned to the house on official business but was never again allowed to see Edith Wilson.
By Sunday, April 6, Wilson’s temperature had dropped to 99°, and he told Grayson that he was going to send his colleagues, and the world, a message by summoning the George Washington to France. He wanted it on hand in order to sail home at once if he withdrew from the peace conference. Ready to issue the order, he asked Grayson for permission to hold a bedside meeting with Lansing, Bliss, and White. Grayson feared a setback but gave his consent when Wilson said that he would find it salubrious to unburden himself. The president spent two hours with his fellow peace commissioners, slept well, and early the next morning announced that the George Washington would soon cross the Atlantic. When the reporters called Lansing, he simply confirmed the announcement, but when they called House, he remarked that many orders were issued for public effect, with no thought that they would be carried out.
House was as wrong as he was disloyal. Baker, who met with Wilson that evening, found him melancholy but resolute. “I shall never forget the utter sadness of the president’s response as he stood there by his desk, his face gaunt from his recent illness,” Baker recalled. Wilson regretted having to stand alone but could see no other way, he said. “The time has come to bring this thing to a head.”
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The patient was well enough on the afternoon of April 8 to hold a Big Four meeting in his bedroom. When the group resumed its discussion of trying the kaiser and his associates, Wilson tried to end it by suggesting that the evidence needed to secure convictions had probably been destroyed. Lloyd George adroitly homed in on a point already proven: Germany’s violation of the treaties protecting the neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg. He professed not to care whether the man who broke that pact and unleashed the war stood trial or was banished to a remote island; the point was to ensure that he would never again harm the world.
Clemenceau insisted that the kaiser be brought to trial, because Germany’s crimes were so egregious that the conscience of the world would not accept less. Wilson, unimpressed by the genuflection to conscience, reverted to the legal argument: there was no precedent for such a trial. Lloyd George and Clemenceau asked the president if he meant that the kaiser should go unpunished. Wilson said that he favored a stern punishment but did not want the victors to forsake established principles of law. Nor did he think it wise to exalt the culprit by summoning him before the loftiest tribunal they could devise. He also pointed out that they had no way to force Holland to deliver the kaiser. Lloyd George suggested that they could deny Holland admission to the League of Nations.
For reasons that are not clear, Wilson dropped his opposition. In the end, the Treaty of Versailles arraigned the kaiser and called for a trial before a special tribunal of five judges, one from each of the Great Powers. Germany’s former chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, tried to spare Wilhelm with an eleventh-hour offer to stand trial himself, explaining to Clemenceau that the German constitution made the chancellor responsible for the kaiser’s political acts. Bethmann’s argument did not carry, and the five Great Powers asked the Dutch government to extradite the kaiser. Holland declined. Wilhelm, his future now settled, purchased a medieval castle near the Dutch village of Doorn, and there he remained. He lived until 1941, long enough to see Germany start World War II, a development that filled him with joy. As Hitler flattened one enemy after another, including France, the kaiser boasted that the victories were the work of generals who had been young officers under his command in World War I. Holland never sought membership in the League of Nations.
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At last able to see an end to their deliberations, the Council of Four summoned the Germans to appear at Versailles on April 25. Only two big vexations remained: the territorial claims of Italy and Japan. In a secret 1915 pact known as the Treaty of London, the Allies had coaxed Italy into the war by promising that if they won, Italy’s spoils would include the South Tyrol, the port of Trieste and, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, a generous stretch of Yugoslavia’s Dalmatian coast. There were rewards elsewhere as well, including a protectorate over Albania and pieces of Germany’s colonies in Africa. Having promised the moon during the war, Britain and France felt obliged to deliver at the peace conference.
From first to last, Wilson bungled the Italian case. Soon after his first arrival in Paris, he agreed that Italy could have the South Tyrol. The decision lengthened Italy’s line of defense along the Alps, but it also put some 200,000 Austrians and Germans under Italian rule, an outcome at odds with Wilson’s call for national self-determination. According to Colonel House, Wilson regretted the mistake but, having given his word, felt obliged to keep it.
Emboldened by the concession, Italy dared to hope for even more than the Treaty of London had promised. In particular, it wanted the eastern Adriatic port of Fiume, an enclave of 24,000 Italians in a region inhabited by 500,000 Slavs newly liberated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Slavs (Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes) had already united to form the new state of Yugoslavia, whose delegates to the peace conference were demanding the entire Dalmatian coast, including Fiume. The Italians claimed that they needed the coast to protect themselves from a Slavic invasion, an argument the Yugoslavs considered preposterous. The Adriatic gave Italy a barrier nearly a hundred miles wide, and the Dalmatian coast was part of the Yugoslavian landmass. The Yugoslavs had an equally commanding argument for keeping Fiume: the port was indispensable to the commerce of the landlocked Slavic countries to the east.
The Italians’ champion in Paris was Prime Minister Orlando, a handsome man with clear eyes, smooth skin, and a ready smile. Lansing liked him and admired the precision of his thought but pegged him as the least influential of the Big Four, in part because he was the only one who spoke no English. Forced to rely on an interpreter, Orlando spoke only when necessary. In hopes of a quid pro quo, he made himself agreeable on issues crucial to France and Britain, and he crossed Wilson only once, to side with the Japanese in their fight for recognition of racial equality. But as Orlando smiled and waited for an opportune moment to press his claims, Italian nationalists were stirring up a popular frenzy for Fiume, insisting that it was a lost province. For decades before the world war, it had been a largely autonomous entity under Hungarian rule, and with the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italians insisted that Fiume be returned to Italy. “Italia irredenta!” the patriots cried. “Italy unredeemed!” They vowed to do the redeeming if the peace conference did not.
Clemenceau and Lloyd George refused. To them, it was an open-and-shut case: Fiume was not mentioned in the Allies’ secret wartime Treaty of London, therefore Italy could not have it. Wilson agreed. But he also protested the demand for even a square inch of the Dalmatian coast, holding that the region’s inhabitants were overwhelmingly Slavic and that Italian security did not require possession of either Fiume or Dalmatia. Orlando threatened to leave Paris if he did not get Fiume.
The Big Four went round and round for days, and when Lloyd George ruefully observed that he could think of no solution, Orlando walked to a window and wept. Lloyd George proceeded delicately, praising Italy for committing itself to the war and acknowledging the difficulty of its new challenges. He also expressed sympathy for Italy’s foreign minister, Baron Sidney Sonnino, who said he was overwhelmed by the guilt he felt for ushering Italy into a war that had brought nothing but ruin. He repeated that Italy was only trying to close the door to a Slavic invasion. Wilson, who regarded the Italians as overemotional, insisted that such annexations would open the door to endless trouble.
Sonnino was in the middle of a rebuttal when Clemenceau lobbed a grenade in the form of a telegram just in from the German government: a German delegation would appear at Versailles on the night of April 25 to receive the text of the peace treaty and would depart immediately for home. In other words, the Germans wished to come and go under cover of darkness. On hearing the official titles of the emissaries, Lloyd George realized that they were underlings and protested against dealing with mere “messengers.” Together the Four drafted a demand for envoys fully authorized to deal with the treaty and sign it in the name of the German people.
In the morning, Lloyd George and Clemenceau called on Orlando and Sonnino, who warned that Italian nationalists would start a revolution unless the peace conference devised a proposal acceptable to the Italian people. Next Clemenceau and Lloyd George went to see Wilson, who said he had figured out how to end the standoff he had created: he would issue a statement. He had already drafted it, and when he read it aloud, Lloyd George pronounced it fine in the manner of a father telling a bad boy that he is a good boy in hopes of persuading him not to jump off the roof. He advised Wilson to pocket the statement for the moment. Clemenceau agreed. Wilson protested.
“It will set off a tempest in Italy,” Lloyd George warned. “Everything will be topsy-turvy.” Wilson would not let go and finally admitted why: the rumors being fed to the press made him look unreasonable. He wanted to clear the air and make his case before the Italians made theirs. “I would let them be,” Lloyd George counseled. Clemenceau suggested that Wilson wait for forty-eight hours and then decide whether the circumstances still warranted a pronouncement.
Wilson waited, nothing changed, he gave out his statement on April 23, and everything went topsy-turvy. Orlando accused him of appealing to the Italian people over the heads of their government and announced that he was going home to ask Parliament for a vote of confidence. Clemenceau wanted to know when he was coming back. The Germans were now scheduled to arrive on April 29, and if Italy was absent, Clemenceau feared that Germany would try to exploit the rift among the Allies.
Orlando offered to make the point to the Italian Parliament but refused several pleas to set a date for his return. He left Paris and entered Rome in triumph. The Italian people, who in January had welcomed Wilson with an enthusiasm verging on hysteria, now denounced him. A sign on a Roman street recently named in his honor was painted over with “Long live Fiume!” He was called out as a hypocrite for making huge concessions to Britain and France while humiliating Italy.
The British had led Wilson to expect that Lloyd George and Clemenceau would publicly state their objections to the Italians’ demand for Fiume, but at the last minute they reneged. Wilson had to take the heat alone. When he asked Lloyd George and Clemenceau about their silence, they tried to cajole him into believing that he had made the case for all of them. The ploy left him “white with anger,” according to his wife.
• • •
By turning his fury on Lloyd George and Clemenceau, Wilson absolved himself of all blame for a crisis that threatened to wreck the peace conference. He was as hard and unrepentant as he had been after urging his fellow Americans not to give their votes to Republicans in the midterm election just before the Armistice. He was also about to crack from the strain. When he got up on the morning of April 28, his right arm was trembling so badly that he had trouble shaving. He also found it difficult to sign letters. Decades later, the editors of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson noticed the deterioration in his penmanship and asked several medical experts to study the record of Wilson’s life in the spring of 1919 and offer their opinions on the state of his health. The physicians were not of one mind, but their investigations raised the possibility that Wilson suffered two small strokes, one on this day and one in early April, coinciding with his respiratory infection.
Neither episode paralyzed Wilson’s right arm—the most visible symptom of his strokes in the 1890s—and later in the day he presided without difficulty at the plenary called to approve the revised covenant of the League of Nations. With sleet pelting the windows of the Clock Room, Wilson simply catalogued the revisions and moved that they be adopted. Makino rose to say that although the Japanese were disappointed by the lack of recognition of racial equality, Japan would approve the covenant and carry its fight to the halls of the League of Nations. Among the other objectors was the progressive French statesman Léon Bourgeois, who said that while France would not try to block the approval of the covenant, it would reserve the right to seek changes in the articles vital to French security. As soon as the dissents ended, Clemenceau announced that the covenant had been unanimously adopted and adjourned the meeting.
American newspapers praised Wilson for meeting the objections of critics at home and for founding a global institution designed to maintain world peace. Taft offered his compliments and said that it gave the world a clear choice: settle differences in the League of Nations or commit suicide by war.
Wilson barely noticed. He was exhausted, and except for the covenant, the peace taking shape in Paris bore only a faint resemblance to the Fourteen Points. As he wrote his daughter Jessie on the day of the plenary, “The plot constantly thickens over here, and anxieties rather exceed satisfactions in number, but on the whole we are groping our way towards a solution which will have fewer bad elements in it, I believe, than I at one time feared.”
• • •
The day that followed was one of the most suspenseful of the peace conference. Orlando received sweeping votes of confidence from both houses of the Italian Parliament. Lloyd George dispatched an envoy to Rome in hopes of enticing Orlando back to Paris, and President Poincaré sent a message about the importance of French and Italian unity. Orlando did not yield. The Italian people were still insisting on the annexation of Fiume, he said, and he could not sign the treaty unless they got their way.
That night, two olive-drab trains still bearing the crest of the kaiser, drew into Vaucresson, an out-of-the-way stop on a branch line west of Paris. As the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent explained, Vaucresson had “no special merits that one knows of save its inaccessibility to a Paris mob.” When the Germans had disembarked, the local prefect stepped forward, bowed stiffly, and recited a chilly welcome composed at the Quai d’Orsay. A tall, distinguished-looking German in light gray, the apparent leader of the group, removed his hat for the reading, which took less than a minute. The tall man was Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the foreign minister. He offered a few words of thanks, and in a move obviously arranged in advance, his secretary told the newspapermen, “Words fail me to describe my feelings as I crossed your devastated regions. I hope the peace which we are about to sign will give satisfaction to all the nations which participated in the war.” The French had forced the German trains to cross the wasteland at a crawl.
After a day of settling in, the German diplomats exchanged credentials with a delegation from the Allied and Associated Powers. The transaction, in the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles, took only five minutes but was clearly an ordeal for Brockdorff-Rantzau. His face went white, and throughout he seemed on the verge of fainting. The newspapers referred to the encounter as the opening of peace negotiations between Germany and her enemies, a characterization that must have surprised the victors. They had no intention of negotiating. Despite Wilson’s speeches about a just and lasting peace, despite an armistice agreement based on his vision of a new world in which right would trump might, the peace being drawn up in Paris was a victors’ peace. The Germans would be allowed to review it and reply, but would be offered only one choice: take it or leave it.
• • •
On the same day, Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George settled the last major issue on their agenda, a quarrel between the Republic of China and the Japanese Empire over rights to a hundred-square-mile swatch of the Chinese province of Shantung. The quarrel had a tangled history, beginning with an economic concession reluctantly granted by China to Germany in 1898. Two weeks into the world war, Japan captured Shantung’s major port (Tsingtao) and the German naval base on Kiaochow Bay. The Japanese victory was a huge gain for the Allies, foreclosing the possibility of a German conquest of Asia. It also gave Japan a beachhead on the Chinese mainland, complete with rich deposits of coal and iron, a railway to Peking, and the right to station troops in the region.
The government of the young Chinese Republic was far from robust, and during the war, the Japanese had forced Peking to bow to a series of measures that tightened their control of the Shantung Peninsula. The Japanese had also secretly promised military and naval assistance to the British and the French in exchange for German territory in Asia in the event of an Allied victory. At the peace conference, Clemenceau and Lloyd George stood ready to honor the promises, allowing the Japanese to retain their economic privileges in Shantung and giving them Germany’s Pacific island colonies north of the equator. Wilson resisted. He had been the first head of state to recognize the new Republic of China, in 1913, and he saw Japanese imperial ambitions as a threat to China’s fledgling democracy, to peace in the Far East, and to American security in the Pacific.
In January, both the Japanese and the Chinese had presented their briefs. Japan had cited written agreements with China and made a strong legal case for its claims, while China pleaded for rights it considered “fundamental and transcendent . . . the rights of political sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Delivered by V. K. Wellington Koo, a thirty-one-year-old American-educated diplomat who was Peking’s minister in Washington, the Chinese brief dovetailed with the Fourteen Points and with established principles of international relations: by every criterion—race, language, religion, culture, and history—Shantung’s people were Chinese. The bay, port, and railhead were vital to China’s defense and commerce. The agreements with Germany and Japan had been signed under duress. Koo also pointed out that China had not granted Germany the right to transfer its lease to another power; if the peace conference permitted Japan to succeed Germany in Shantung, it would add one wrong to another.
Lansing, who rarely enthused, told his diary that Koo had “simply overwhelmed the Japanese with his argument.” Clemenceau too admired the speech, privately calling Koo “a young Chinese cat, Parisian of speech and dress, absorbed in the pleasure of patting and pawing the mouse.” But the mouse, Clemenceau added, had been “reserved for the Japanese,” and France and Great Britain felt obliged to help them get it.
The quarrel over Shantung had been set aside for months as the Four dealt with other matters, but at the end of April, with the arrival of the Germans and the urgent need to send the peace treaty to the printer, they had to render a decision. The dispute disturbed Wilson more than any other controversy in Paris. It kept him awake, and on April 30 Grayson cabled Tumulty that the days were “terrible for the president physically and otherwise.”
Wilson the idealist sympathized with China and resented being ensnared by still more secret treaties. But he did not see how the victors could arraign Germany for violating its treaty promises and at the same time break their treaty with Japan. “I admit those were unfortunate agreements,” he told Koo at a meeting with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. “But they were signed to save the world and China from German domination.” Lloyd George put the matter even more plainly: “It is impossible for us to say to the Japanese: ‘We were happy to find you in time of war; but now, good-by.’ ”
The Japanese compounded Wilson’s anxieties by threatening to withdraw from the peace conference unless their Chinese claim was honored. Lansing believed that the Japanese were bluffing, Lloyd George believed that they were in earnest, and Wilson believed Lloyd George. “They are not bluffers,” Wilson told Ray Baker, “and they will go home unless we give them what they should not have.” If the Japanese followed the Italians out the door and declined to sign the treaty, Wilson went on, Germany might also decline. And that, said Wilson, would merely encourage Japan to penetrate more deeply into Shantung. In his view, the only hope for world peace was “to keep the world together, get the League of Nations with Japan in it, and then try to secure justice for the Chinese.”
Ultimately Wilson joined Clemenceau and Lloyd George in awarding the German rights in Shantung to Japan. And in an agreement not written into the treaty, Japan promised to return the Shantung Peninsula to Chinese sovereignty and to withdraw its troops from Shantung “at the earliest possible time.” Refusing to be party to a secret agreement, Wilson persuaded the Japanese to disclose their pledges in a newspaper interview. “I suppose it could be called an even break,” he told Grayson. “It is the best that could be accomplished out of a dirty past.”
Believing that the Japanese were bluffers, Lansing was heartsick over the Shantung decision. He poured his feelings into a letter to a State Department colleague, a letter “blue enough to be written on blue paper with indigo ink,” he wrote. He also joined Bliss and White in a written protest to Wilson. And in yet another memo to himself, he voiced thoughts he did not share with the president: “Frankly, my policy would have been to say to the Japanese: ‘If you do not give back to China what Germany stole from her, we don’t want you in the League of Nations.’ If the Japanese had taken offense, I would have welcomed it, for we would have been well rid of a government with such imperial designs. But she would not have gone. She would have submitted.”
The Chinese understood exactly what had happened. As one of their delegates told a French journalist, “Japan is strong and China is weak; it is easier to sacrifice the latter than to offend the former.” Wellington Koo, bitterly disappointed, said that China had been betrayed in the house of its only friend. He informed House that he would not sign the peace treaty unless Peking insisted. The colonel tried to persuade him that if he signed, he would be a hero when Japan delivered on its promise to leave Shantung. “But I’ll be a dead hero,” Koo answered. “If I sign the treaty—even under orders from Peking—I shall not have what you in New York call a Chinaman’s chance. . . . I am too young to die. I hope they will not make me sign. It would be my death sentence.”
On May 4, the day the treaty went to the printer, thousands of Chinese students massed in Tiananmen Square to denounce their ineffectual government, its delegates to the peace conference, and the United States. The May Fourth Movement, as it came to be known, marked a turn away from the West and gave rise to the Chinese Communist Party.
There was also a backlash in the United States. Wilson’s minister to China resigned in protest, and many warm supporters of Wilson’s new world order never forgave him for “the shame of Shantung.” Wilson remained confident that he could convince the American people that he had made the right choice.
• • •
The president of the United States had insisted to the prime minister of Great Britain and the premier of France that they could not have their peace treaty unless he got his League. But after they paid his price, he was obliged to pay theirs, compromising again and again, for without the treaty, there would be no League. Solely to spare Lloyd George and Clemenceau the wrath of their electorates, Wilson agreed to demand the kaiser’s trial and force Germany to sign a blank check for reparations. With an assist from Lloyd George, Wilson prevented the creation of a bogus republic in the Rhineland, but he also committed American troops to the occupation demanded by the French. In dealing with the Italians, he confused the world by standing for self-determination in Fiume but not in the South Tyrol. In the dispute over Shantung, he abandoned self-determination altogether, bowing to the Great Power politics he abhorred.
Wilson would put a good face on the Four’s decisions, but Lansing could not. Writing an old friend on May 5, he blamed the defects on Wilson’s willingness to confer with the Allies in secret: “In this form of negotiation, which involves intrigue and deception and continual bargaining, the president has been no match for Lloyd George and Clemenceau, especially since they would arrange a course of action before going into conference. The result is that the president has been outplayed and persuaded to do a lot of things he would six months ago have flatly refused to do.” The British and French had given Wilson a League of Nations, but it was hardly a league of equals. With their permanent majority on the Executive Council, the Great Powers would always dominate. “The distressing thing,” Lansing wrote, “is that the high principles upon which we announced our intention to negotiate peace have simply been shot to pieces to gain unanimous support for the League of Nations. . . . We have the great powers dictating a peace, a victor’s peace; we have them organizing a League ruled by them; we have a treaty drafted by them, of which the lesser powers do not even know the terms, nor will they, except in the form of a summary, until the German delegates receive the text. . . . I wonder what verdict history will pass upon this epoch-making Congress of the Nations.”
