The Moralist

Still hoping to convince the French that he felt the depths of their suffering, Wilson did his best to link the sacrifices of two nations devoted to liberty. The Americans buried in France were in a foreign soil but not an alien one, he said. “They are at home, sleeping with the spirits of those who thought the same thoughts and entertained the same aspirations.” All had died for a great cause, Wilson said, “and they have left us to see to it that that cause shall not be betrayed, whether in war or in peace. . . . So it is our duty to take and maintain the safeguards which will see to it that the mothers of America and the mothers of France and England and Italy and Belgium and all the other suffering nations should never be called upon for this sacrifice again. This can be done. It must be done. And it will be done. . . . The League of Nations is the covenant of governments that these men shall not have died in vain.”

For the Americans present, Wilson drew a parallel between the troops who had fought for the preservation of the Union in the American Civil War and those who had just fought for the freedom and unity of the world. And to the League’s opponents he sent a warning: “I look for the time when every man who now puts his counsel against the service of mankind under the League of Nations will be just as ashamed of it as if he now regretted the union of the states.”

Ray Baker had wondered when Wilson would engage his enemies at home, and with the address at Suresnes, the battle was joined. As for the enemies, they immediately declared that they would not tolerate such abuse, that Congress had declared war not to create a League of Nations but to defend American rights trampled by Germany, and that Wilson’s call for membership in a league sure to compromise American sovereignty was an insult to the war dead.

The Wilsons had a quiet weekend. Edith was recovering from a foot infection, and Dr. Grayson had urged her to stay off her feet. At Suresnes, she had listened from the car, and after dinner the two of them retired to her suite, where she rested and he indulged in a favorite pastime, solitaire. It was the perfect game for Wilson, who enjoyed his work most when he could do it alone. He understood the necessity of cooperation in politics and in Paris often spoke of the importance of teamwork, but group effort gave him no pleasure. From the beginning of his presidency, he delegated the courting of congressmen and senators to more sociable men—Tumulty, Burleson, McAdoo, and the oleaginous House. When circumstance forced Wilson to do the asking, he did not ask as one man to another, much less as a man in need. He asked from the mountaintop of the presidency, summoning carefully chosen members of Congress to the White House or using the Capitol as a stage for an address to the nation. Wilson’s arguments on these occasions often left the impression that congressmen and senators who failed to cooperate with the president would be guilty of betraying the American people.

Strained to the limit in Paris, Wilson increasingly sought refuge in the company of his wife and physician, who devoted themselves to his well-being. There is no sign that Edith worried about Wilson’s growing isolation, but Grayson mentioned it to him. Unfortunately, the doctor spoke so obliquely that Wilson seemed not to understand that he was being given a hint. He merely agreed that Grayson had accurately perceived an aspect of his character.

• • •

Lloyd George’s weekend provoked the most serious crisis of the peace conference. British opinion had been turning against the idea of a harsh treaty, and the prime minister was deluged with pleas for a softer peace. Fearing that Germany would not sign and that he would be turned out of office if he ignored the calls for moderation, he held four meetings with cabinet ministers, his advisors at the peace conference, and delegates from the British dominions. As he put it to one of his aides, the time had come to decide whether the world was to have a “hell-peace” or a “heaven-peace.”

General Jan Smuts made the argument: an exorbitant reparations bill would kill the goose that was supposed to lay the golden eggs. The long occupation of the Rhineland was dangerously provocative and, in light of the British and American pledges to defend France, superfluous. The clause empowering any of the victors to demand that Germany surrender any suspected war criminal at any time, along with the evidence to be used in his trial, was outrageous in its sweep. Smuts contended that the Germans were right to reject a treaty that violated the Wilsonian principles accepted by both sides before the Armistice. He warned that ending the war in the way that Germany had begun it, with a breach of a solemn international agreement, would be a wrong even worse than the original “because of all that has happened since August 1914 and the fierce light which has been concentrated on this very point.”

In the end, Lloyd George was not for heaven or hell but for what Winston Churchill, now secretary of state for war, called a “split-the-difference” peace. The prime minister asked for and received a unanimous mandate to press for a handful of changes, including Germany’s admission to the League of Nations once the German government proved that it was making an earnest effort to carry out its treaty obligations.

Wilson maintained the appearance of calm, writing Smuts a friendly note to say that the peacemakers would be willing to reconsider some of their conclusions. But by June 2, when the Big Four resumed their discussions, the lines had been drawn: Lloyd George wanted concessions, Clemenceau would not hear of changing a comma, and Wilson would not referee. Lloyd George took them to the brink. If the British demands were not met and Germany refused to sign, he said, Britain would oppose a resumption of either the fighting or the blockade.

The crisis drove Wilson to convene the only meeting he ever held with the American Commission to Negotiate Peace and its three dozen technical advisors. When they gathered in Lansing’s office on June 3, Wilson genially explained that he had come not to talk but to hear their thoughts on the new British demands. The financial advisors argued again for putting a price on reparations. Without it, they said, Germany would be unable to obtain the credit needed to revive its industrial life, and without that, there would be no money for reparations.

House said little, perhaps fearing that he would give himself away. In private meetings with Lloyd George and Robert Cecil, he had told the British, Yes, you are right: the treaty is too severe. But he had told the French that they were right: the treaty should not be altered in any major way. Admitting the duplicity in his diary, he blamed it on Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau, all of whom had ignored his pleas for a less draconian peace.

To Wilson, the essential question was not how or whether to modify the treaty but how to resolve the eleventh-hour crisis without dividing the Great Powers. He was willing to eliminate any flagrant injustice but dead set against making revisions solely to win Germany’s acceptance.

One of the advisors interjected that some of his British counterparts blamed Wilson for giving in too easily to Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Wilson kept his composure. He had made concessions, but he firmly believed that they had been necessary to preserve the peacemakers’ unity against Germany. And he took it on faith that the mistakes made in Paris would soon be corrected by the League of Nations.

• • •

Lloyd George’s sparring with Wilson and Clemenceau yielded only one significant change to the treaty, permission for the two million inhabitants of Upper Silesia to decide whether they wished to be part of Germany or Poland. Both Wilson and Clemenceau were furious with Lloyd George’s last-minute demands, Clemenceau because they would come at the expense of France and Wilson because of a fear that any concession would trigger unending calls for more. Clemenceau, asked to shorten the fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland, retorted that he would not even consider a reduction to fourteen years and three hundred sixty-four days. Wilson decided to stand with Clemenceau, forcing Lloyd George to choose between giving in or going home. He gave in for unity’s sake, just as Wilson had done.

The victors’ reply, delivered to the Germans at 6:45 p.m. on Monday, June 16, ran to eighty pages but came down to a few stern points. The first had been made by President Poincaré at the opening session of the peace conference: Germany would have justice, but there would be justice for all—the dead and wounded, the orphaned and bereaved, the millions whose property and livelihood had been destroyed. Next came a flat denial of the German accusation that the Treaty of Versailles violated the Wilsonian principles written into the pre-Armistice agreement. The victors also denied that the treaty would crush Germany. Praise for Germany’s decision to transform itself into a republic came wrapped in a surly reminder that the German people had supported the kaiser until the moment they realized that the war was lost. As for immediate membership in the League of Nations, the victors claimed that it was “impossible to expect the free nations of the world to sit down immediately with those by whom they have been so grievously wronged.” Apart from minor adjustments, the treaty must be accepted or rejected as it stood, the victors said. And rejection would mean that the Armistice was at an end and Germany’s enemies would take whatever steps they considered necessary to enforce their terms.

Brockdorff-Rantzau left for Germany that night and for the next ten days the world gaped in disbelief as one disturbance followed another. The count was delivered safely to his train, but the twenty-two automobiles in his entourage traveled in a hail of bricks thrown by French hooligans. By June 17, when the Germans reached Weimar, Brockdorff-Rantzau had studied the reply and was unwilling to bow to the terms. He tried to persuade the German cabinet to bide its time and bank on the groundswell of British resistance to the treaty. He believed that the protest would split the Great Powers and force them to negotiate with Germany. Against him in the cabinet was a contingent with a formidable list of reasons for signing: peace, order, the resumption of business as usual and with it the return of prosperity. The count’s opponents also argued that a failure to sign would mean more war, a total blockade, and the aggravation of tensions already threatening to provoke a civil war. Seven cabinet ministers voted for signing, seven against.

On June 18 the victors let it be known that Marshal Foch was touring the Allied encampments on the Rhine, where 600,000 troops—French, British, American, and Belgian—were preparing to march on Berlin if the German government rejected the treaty.

On June 19 Vittorio Orlando was forced out as prime minister by a parliament tired of waiting for Paris to reach a decision on Italy’s claims to Fiume and Dalmatia. Baron Sonnino succeeded Orlando as head of the Italian delegation to the peace conference.

At two o’clock in the morning on June 20, the chancellor of Germany resigned. Still in favor of rejecting the treaty, he and his allies were now outnumbered. When the chancellor stepped down, Brockdorff-Rantzau and the rest of the cabinet went with him. Wilson went to the Crillon to tell his fellow peace commissioners that he was confident that the new German government would sign and to urge them to project the same confidence.

On June 21, hundreds of miles to the north, Vice Admiral Ludwig von Reuter ordered the scuttling of seventy-four German warships interned by the British at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands. Fifty-two of them were on their way to the bottom before the Royal Navy reached the scene. Publicly the Admiralty denounced the sabotage as a violation of the Armistice, but privately it exulted. Under the treaty, the vessels were to have been parceled out among the victors. Reuter had spared Britain the unpleasant task of sharing the ships with rival navies.

That evening, the new chancellor, Gustav Bauer, sent word to the German delegation at Versailles that his government was ready to sign the treaty but could not accept the clauses blaming the war on Germany and forcing the surrender of German officials for trial. The note was forwarded to Clemenceau, who dispatched copies to Wilson and Lloyd George on the morning of June 22. They met at five o’clock and sent the Germans a stiff reply: the Allied and Associated Powers would accept no reservations. Germany must accept or reject the whole by 7:00 p.m. on June 23. If Germany refused to sign, Marshal Foch would order his armies to advance.

The morning of June 23 began with a German request for an extension, a request promptly denied. The next news—unofficial—came at four after the British intercepted a German message indicating Germany would sign because it had no choice. Cannons boomed, sirens wailed, and the streets were soon packed with men and women shouting their joy. Clemenceau ordered Foch to stand down, and Wilson, who had been indoors all day, headed out for a drive. He was cheered again and again by the crowds in the streets, an experience he had not had since his first days in Paris.

Three days passed before the Germans appointed new plenipotentiaries. No one wanted to bear the stigma of signing the treaty, but the duty fell to one official in no position to resist, Hermann Müller, the new foreign minister, and to another whose department had been rendered superfluous by the demise of the German Empire, Johannes Bell, minister of colonial affairs. They reached Versailles at three o’clock in the morning on June 27.

• • •

With the signing set for the following afternoon, Wilson seized the moment to meet with reporters at the Crillon. All things considered, he told them, the Treaty of Versailles was “a wonderful success.” It was rough on Germany, he admitted, but Germany had wronged the world. The war and the treaty had liberated more than a hundred million people from imperial rule, bringing nine new nations into the world.^II It banned wars of conquest. It declared that all nations were equal. And it had established the League of Nations to keep the world’s peace by taking on those who would disturb it. It was, said Wilson, “a colossal peace.”

Was he proud of it? a reporter asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I am proud of it.” Still, he was anticipating a fight with the Senate, and he fired the first shot: “The American people have been misled, not to say lied to, about the treaty.”

Which parts?

“Pretty nearly every part—especially about the League of Nations.” Asked how closely the treaty conformed to the Fourteen Points, Wilson gave a cagey answer: “more closely than I had a right to expect.”

While it was true that Wilson’s agenda was not entirely abandoned by the peace conference, it had been cut to the bone. “Open covenants, openly arrived at” survived as “open covenants,” meaning that diplomats could go on negotiating in secret but would have to register their signed international agreements with the League of Nations. With Britain’s flat refusal to consider freedom of the seas, it disappeared from the agenda. In place of universal disarmament there was German disarmament. Germany’s colonial possessions were disposed of by fiat, not by the “free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment” urged in the Fourteen Points and promised in the pre-Armistice agreement.

In calling for national self-determination, Wilson had imagined that drawing national boundaries along ethnic lines would eliminate a major cause of war, but the Council of Four had allowed political and strategic aims to trump ethnic considerations in Shantung, Poland, and elsewhere. Most notably, the treaty prohibited the union of Germany and the new state of Austria despite the fact that Austria was inhabited almost entirely by Germans. As for the quarrel over Fiume and Dalmatia, Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George had given up. The failure to reach an agreement had forced Orlando out of office on June 21, and Italy and Yugoslavia would fight over Fiume for years. The unfinished business also included Russia, where a bloody civil war made it impossible for the peacemakers to tell who represented the Russian people. Nor could anyone say what would emerge from the new mandate system set up to govern the millions who lived in Germany’s colonies and the Middle Eastern territories of the defunct Ottoman Empire.

Still, Wilson had reason to be proud. Among other things, he and Lloyd George forced France to settle for less than it wanted in the Saar Valley. Thanks to Wilson, the reparations bill would be a small fraction of the sums initially demanded by France and Britain. Neither Wilson nor Lloyd George wanted the occupation of the Rhineland, but they acquiesced because it was a decided improvement over the original French plan to sever the territory from Germany and turn it into a buffer state.

For all their differences, the Big Four had maintained the united front necessary to impose their peace on Germany, and all would be subjected to criticism by constituents unhappy with the outcome. The question of whether Wilson could have accomplished more at the peace conference invites more questions: What else might he have won, and how might he have won it? Having cast the United States as the white knight who had fought selflessly to rescue the world from autocracy and war, he did not go to Paris in search of money or territory. He took for granted that Americans would fare well in a peaceful world with free markets, and he believed that the treaty and the League of Nations put such a world within reach. He might have made American financial assistance contingent on Allied acceptance of universal disarmament and other ideals. But he declined to use that club. He also ignored one of the fundamentals of negotiation: every compromise presents an opportunity to press for something in return.

Wilson was made for oratory, not negotiation, and as Walter Lippmann observed, “a closed conference was, of course, the most unfavorable terrain for the exercise of Mr. Wilson’s virtues. If there is one thing you cannot do to an old salt like M. Clemenceau it is to intoxicate him with visions and eloquence. That inimitable old man has none of the qualities of a crowd; as an audience he must be thoroughly disconcerting; and as a debater he will drive through a generalization like a tank through a rosebush.”

• • •

The treaty was signed on June 28, the fifth anniversary of an event inextricably linked to the outbreak of the world war: the assassinations of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Between the assassinations and the formalities at Versailles, four empires, including the one Franz Ferdinand did not live to inherit, disappeared. Twenty-three nations and a long list of colonies mobilized 65 million men and pitched them into the most hellish battles in history. The death tolls were unprecedented: seventeen million, nearly half of them civilians.

That the signing occurred on the anniversary of the assassinations was pure coincidence, but there was nothing accidental about the site chosen for the occasion. In 1871 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had proclaimed the birth of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, and in 1919 France would have the satisfaction of burying it on the same spot. Clemenceau did not hide his glee. “It is a great day for France,” he told Lansing before the ceremony. Lansing replied that it was a great day for the world, but he softened the retort by extending his hand. Clemenceau, not to be one-upped on his day of glory, said, “No, give me both your hands. That is the way France and America should greet each other today.”

Outside the palace, France had mounted a military spectacle, lining the approach to Versailles with twenty thousand of its soldiers—cavalrymen bearing long lances decked with streamers and behind them a double row of poilus standing shoulder to shoulder. On the staircase in front of the palace stood the elite Garde Républicaine in gleaming black boots, white breeches, dark blue jackets, drawn sabers, and silver helmets. Inside, the Hall of Mirrors was so crowded with the delegations, their guests, and four hundred members of the press that almost no one but the principals had more than a sliver of a view. The most unsettling sight in Lansing’s field of vision was a contingent of twenty French soldiers, all of them hideously disfigured by the war. Cadres of American and British soldiers were also present, along with a group of elderly French veterans of the Franco-Prussian War.

Müller and Bell and their three colleagues were waiting in the wings. When they were ushered into the Hall of Mirrors at three o’clock, no one rose. The Germans were seated among their enemies, between the delegations of Japan and Brazil. Clemenceau stood and in thirty seconds rasped out the purpose of the gathering. As he spoke of Germany’s obligation to honor the treaty, Müller nodded. Lansing was pained by Clemenceau’s severity and by the sight of the Germans. “They were nervous and unquestionably felt deeply the humiliation which they . . . had to bear,” he wrote.

Two French officials escorted Müller and Bell to a Louis XV table where the treaty lay open to the page for their signatures. After hastily writing their names, they were ushered back to their seats. The news was announced by cannon fire from a nearby fort. The American delegation went next, with Wilson in the lead. He signed his first name with ease but had trouble with his last, a difficulty he attributed to excitement rather than his neurological troubles. As House approached the table, his wife got to her feet, startling Edith Wilson. “Please,” Mrs. House said, “just let me stand long enough to see my lamb sign.” In the space of thirty-seven minutes, all signatures had been entered. Clemenceau spoke again, for perhaps ten seconds: “The signature of the conditions of peace between the Allies and the Associated Powers and the German Empire is now an accomplished fact and the proceedings are thus closed.”

Awed by the majesty of Versailles and the military pomp, several American reporters portrayed the occasion as a brilliant pageant, but a French observer found it “brief, dry, and ungenerous.” Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson were all smiles as they came out onto the terrace at the rear of the palace, and the thousands who had turned up to see them shouted “Vive Clemenceau!” “Vive Lloyd George!” and “Vive Wilson!” But many of the Americans and the British who served their governments at the peace conference were as heartsick as Lansing. General Smuts had signed but issued a statement protesting the harshness of the treaty and calling on the British Empire and the United States to spare no effort in repairing the war’s damage to Europe. Like Wilson, Smuts counted on the League to correct the errors made in Paris.

Three days before the ceremony at Versailles, Wellington Koo had tried to persuade Wilson that China should be allowed to sign with reservations on the articles pertaining to Shantung. Wilson turned him down, explaining that he was going to insist that the U.S. Senate accept the treaty whole. Rebuffed, Koo notified Clemenceau that the Chinese delegation would abstain from signing, and he issued a statement saying that the treaty denied justice to China. Koo spent June 28—“a day of sorrow,” he called it—wandering the streets of Paris alone.

The Wilsons left Paris as quickly as decorum permitted. They made a brief appearance at President Poincaré’s reception at the Élysée Palace, hurried through dinner at home, and spent a few minutes with Lloyd George, who dropped by to congratulate the president on the treaty and on the new closeness of Britain and the United States. At Gare des Invalides by 9:45 p.m., the Wilsons walked the red carpet one last time and said farewell to Poincaré, Clemenceau, and the rest of the French cabinet. When Clemenceau said, “I feel as though I were losing one of the best friends I ever had,” Wilson beamed. The League of Nations would have been stillborn without Clemenceau’s support, and Clemenceau had backed it despite serious doubts about its value. Clemenceau was even more indebted to Wilson—for his concessions to France, the new military alliance with the United States and Britain, and his decision to stand with France rather than Britain in the last Allied battle of the peace conference.

House too had come to say bon voyage and urge Wilson to treat the Senate cordially. “House,” Wilson replied, “I have found one can never get anything in this life that is worthwhile without fighting for it.” House retreated into platitudes about fighting as a last resort and compromise as the cornerstone of civilization. If Wilson offered a further thought, House did not record it. The two men never spoke to each other again.