As the presidential train rolled out of Gare des Invalides, Edith and Woodrow Wilson stood at a window and watched Paris fade into the summer night. For a time they were lost in separate thoughts, and when she finally turned his way, he said, “Well, little girl, it is finished, and, as no one is satisfied, it makes me hope we have made a just peace. But it is all on the lap of the gods.”
So far the gods had been kind to Wilson, granting his wish for the League of Nations and carrying him safely through the grueling work of the peace conference. Grayson was enormously grateful, and his relief was complete when he and the Wilsons boarded the George Washington to head for home. Ten days at sea offered the First Patient a chance to relax and recover his strength. Or so Grayson hoped. In his diary the doctor did not confess to anxiety about the president’s health during the voyage, but the facts recorded there leave no doubt that Wilson was physically and mentally depleted. He slept in, napped often, and had an uncharacteristically hard time composing the speech he would give when he submitted the treaty. Unaware that his arterial disease was affecting his mind, he blamed his struggle on the complexity of the material as well as his low regard for the audience, which would be filled with antagonists. As he told Grayson, it was “impossible to reason out of a man something that had not been reasoned into him.”
Wilson completed the address on the morning of the Fourth of July. A day later, still fretting over the speech, he summoned several advisors, read his draft aloud, and invited suggestions. A long discussion produced a handful of small changes. Of the three advisors who wrote about the meeting in their diaries, not one praised the speech. A fourth, Bernard Baruch, waited for a private moment to urge Wilson to seize the day. Put your critics on the defensive, or they will put you there, Baruch advised. He wanted Wilson to make an unassailable case for the League and explain how membership would serve the United States. But before the end of the voyage, Baruch could see that Wilson did not feel up to the fight he faced. On a walk around the deck, the financier found the president alone at the rail, staring at the sea. When he looked up, he said, “You know, Baruch, only a god could perform what is expected of me.”
On July 8 hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers jammed the streets to greet the president, and thousands more cheered his energetic speech at Carnegie Hall. He looked in the pink, and the warm reception appeared to revive his morale. Speaking of his commitment to the peace made in Paris, he vowed to give his all to see that it endured.
Wilson began by giving up his prized seclusion and inviting twenty-eight senators (twenty-four of them Republican) for individual conferences at the White House. All but two accepted. He also invited the members of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations. And on July 10 he held his first White House press conference in two and a half years. He did not answer every question the press corps asked, but he made himself clear on Article X, which was already raising senatorial hackles.I If the League’s Executive Council advised member states to take action against an aggressor, Wilson said, every nation would decide for itself whether it wished to do so. In the case of the United States, the decision to go to war would be made as it had always been made, by Congress. By the time he came home from Paris, he had no doubts about the rightness of the covenant (Articles I through XXVI of the treaty) and no room for the doubts of others. He was absolutely sure that the covenant would transform the world. For the first time in history, the nations of the world would be organized for peace rather than war and small states would have protection from aggression by the strong.
Wilson had persuaded himself that ratification was inevitable. For one thing, the Senate had always ratified peace treaties. He also assumed that any changes made to the treaty would require a two-thirds majority, and a two-thirds majority would be impossible to muster because his party still held nearly half the seats in the Senate. And even if the Republicans could achieve the impossible, it seemed to Wilson that they would not dare go that route, because every change would have to be submitted to the treaty’s other signatories, a process that would cause an unconscionable delay in making peace with Germany.
Unfortunately, all of these calculations were wrong. The leaders of the Senate in 1919 felt no obligation to honor the historical pattern. Ratification required a two-thirds majority, but treaty reservations needed only a simple majority. And not every change would require the approval of the other parties to the treaty. Amendments needed it, but reservations did not. As the assistant solicitor of the State Department explained, reservations merely notified the other signatories of the U.S. government’s position on the issues in question.
The president’s arrival in the Senate Chamber set off long waves of cheers and applause, but as he waited for the ovation to subside, he could see that the Republicans were sitting in silence. Wilson began promisingly, placing himself at the disposal of the senators and their Committee on Foreign Relations. He spoke as if he assumed that the Senate shared his desire for a speedy ratification of the treaty as it stood. Ignoring Baruch’s advice, he devoted most of his thirty-seven minutes to the scope and purpose of the treaty. From time to time he stumbled over his words, and at some points he could not be heard in the galleries.
Only in the final minutes did Wilson reach the heights of his finest speeches. On the battlefield and in the peacemaking, the United States had won the confidence of the world, he said. “There can be no question of our ceasing to be a world power. The only question is whether we can refuse the moral leadership that is offered us, whether we shall accept or reject the confidence of the world. . . . The stage is set, the destiny disclosed.”
Most Republicans agreed with Senator Frank B. Brandegee of Connecticut, who complained that Wilson had offered only soap bubbles and soufflé. Most Democrats praised the speech as a stirring call to a new duty. But one Democrat, Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst, told his diary that the lack of detail left him “petrified with surprise.” It was “as if the head of a great corporation, after committing his company to enormous undertakings . . . should arise before the board of directors and tonefully read Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life.’ ” Ashurst was also alarmed by the Republicans’ delight in Wilson’s poor performance and by the president’s physical condition. As Wilson deposited the treaty on the rostrum, Ashurst noticed “a contraction of the back of his neck and a transparency of his ears; infallible indicia of a man whose vitality is gone.” (The editors of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson speculate that the contraction and the verbal stumbles might have been symptoms of a headache. The translucency of his ears signified inadequate blood flow to the head.) Ashurst was no physician, but his layman’s observations were dead-on. The president had gone into a serious physical decline, and his oratorical power—his greatest political gift—had gone with him.
• • •
For the next six weeks, Wilson divided his attention between the treaty and a host of domestic problems. The country had not made a smooth transition from war to peace, and much of the federal government’s business had been put on hold while he was abroad. By the summer of 1919, the woes included runaway inflation, a recession, labor unrest, race riots, and the so-called Red Scare, which set off a Justice Department witch hunt for anarchists and for radicals who shared Lenin’s dream of a worldwide revolution. The hunt had begun in the spring, with the discovery of a plot to send letter bombs to three dozen well-known businessmen and public officials. On the night of June 2, eight bombs had gone off in eight cities, one of them at the home of the attorney general of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer and his family escaped unharmed, but the house was badly damaged and the explosion shattered windows up and down the block. The bomber, a man of Italian extraction who sympathized with the revolutionaries but had no known ties to radical groups, was found in pieces on the street.
Palmer immediately added an intelligence division to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation and put twenty-four-year-old J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Over the next two years, Hoover and his agents amassed files on sixty thousand radical aliens and arrested ten thousand men and women suspected of advocating violence against the U.S. government. The attorney general reported that 90 percent of the communist and anarchist agitation was traceable to aliens. He was hoping for mass deportations under the Immigration Act passed during the war.
Each of the race riots (there were twenty) began with an act of white violence against blacks. Washington offered no redress. Palmer’s Justice Department was alarmed not by violence against blacks but by the supposed dangers of black radicalism. Hoover maintained that white radicals “looked upon Negroes as particularly fertile ground” for the spreading of doctrines at odds with the Justice Department’s notion of true Americanism. Hoover made his case in a report that reprinted page after page of disillusioned commentary from the black press, concluding that there was “a dangerous spirit of defiance and vengeance among the Negro leaders, and, to an ever-increasing extent, among their followers.”
The Wilson administration appeared oblivious to it, but the commentary also showed that African Americans were bitterly disappointed when they found that their fight to make the world safe for democracy had not made America safe for them. Challenge, a black monthly, painted a bleak picture: “We are ignored by the president and lawmakers. When we ask for a full man’s share, they cry ‘Insolent.’ When we shoot down the mobist that would burn our properties and destroy our lives, they shout ‘Bolshevist.’ When a white man comes to our side armed with the sword of righteousness and square dealing, they howl ‘Nigger lover and bastard.’ If we take our grievances to Congress they are pigeonholed. . . . We are abandoned, cast off, maligned, shackled, shoved down the hill toward Golgotha in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ ”
Palmer figured in yet another postwar contretemps with American progressives, the continued imprisonment of those who had protested the war. Just before leaving Paris, Wilson had asked Tumulty to speak to Palmer about reprieves for Americans jailed for their antiwar speeches and writings, saying that he thought it would be “a very serious mistake to continue to detain anyone merely for the expression of opinion.” When Tumulty shared Wilson’s concern with Palmer, Palmer said that no one had been convicted simply for voicing an opinion. Palmer’s claim was debatable, and Wilson tried again, after hearing from prominent liberals urging the release of the war’s best-known protester, the Socialist Party leader, Eugene V. Debs. Palmer temporized, and Debs would remain in prison for the rest of Wilson’s presidency.
By early August, Wilson was mired in an economic crisis. Since the war’s end, thousands of factories had closed or sharply curtailed production. Unemployment was on the rise, veterans could not find work, and the cost of living, which had marched steadily upward during the war, continued to climb. Wilson went to the Capitol on August 8 to promise that his administration prosecute all who conspired to control supplies and prices. He also exhorted producers, wholesalers, and retailers to deal fairly with customers, and he predicted that “the more extreme leaders of organized labor” would soon realize that the strikes they had in mind would not solve their problems.
But government action and the forces of supply and demand could not effect a complete cure, Wilson said. Referring obliquely to the ratification of the treaty, he said that the world was waiting to know when it would have peace and what kind of peace it would be. “Politically, economically, socially the world is on the operating table, and it has not been possible to administer any anesthetic,” he said. Until peace was firmly established, business could not make intelligent plans and governments could not provide sound direction to economic affairs.
Members of both parties found much to praise in Wilson’s program, though some Republicans resented his suggestion that the Senate was dragging its feet on the treaty. Lodge noted that the treaty, which had been seven months in the making, had come to the Senate only four weeks before and the Committee on Foreign Relations was still waiting for the president to submit documents crucial to the committee’s deliberations. (Wilson forwarded a few and explained why he could not furnish more: many were still in Paris, and many were confidential.) Lodge neglected to tell reporters that he had frittered away two weeks by reading the treaty aloud to the committee. Toward the end of this marathon, Lodge was the only one in the room.
• • •
On July 31 Lodge had convened hearings that would drag on for six weeks. Scrutiny was justifiable in light of the treaty’s departures from the American tradition of standing apart from conflicts outside the Western Hemisphere, but Lodge was also stalling to give the treaty’s opponents time to prepare for their war on Wilson. Nearly all of the treaty’s opponents were Republican, and some Democrats suspected that the critics were less interested in improving the treaty than in using it to discredit Wilson and recapture the White House in 1920.
There were broad grounds for such suspicions. Since February, Lodge had been speaking out against American membership in the League of Nations, arguing that it would compromise American sovereignty and draw the United States into uncountable wars. And he recognized that if he made a frontal assault on the League, he would find himself at odds with the vast majority of Americans, who thought of it as humanity’s best hope for preventing another world war. A poll of 1,377 American newspaper editors, conducted as the League of Nations commission was putting the last touches on the covenant, found 87 percent in favor.
Lodge understood that his fellow citizens were drawn to the notion of eternal peace, but he was determined to convince them that Wilson’s League of Nations would be bad for the United States. When a like-minded senator asked him how they could defeat an idea as popular as the League, Lodge laid out his strategy in a two-hour disquisition that came down to one word: reservations. Observing Wilson’s hypersensitivity to any criticism of the League, Lodge deduced that the president would have no tolerance for reservations and guessed that he would rather destroy the treaty than consent to any changes in the League covenant. With that insight, Lodge had his strategy: he would defeat the treaty by loading it up with reservations.
The senator had found the president’s Achilles’ heel.
• • •
Ratification required sixty-four of the Senate’s ninety-six votes, but as things stood in the summer of 1919, Wilson could count on only sixty-one. Foes as well as friends warned him that the treaty would be rejected unless he agreed to a handful of reservations, and Ambassador Jusserand assured him that France and Britain would accept the kinds of reservations the Republicans had in mind. To Jusserand’s astonishment, Wilson replied that he would “consent to nothing. The Senate must take its medicine.” Wilson seemed to believe that he would prevail because he was right.
Wilson’s refusal to bend has been attributed to everything from his stubbornness and outsized pride in the League of Nations to his deteriorating health and a fear that accepting one reservation would trigger demands for more. Wilson laid his refusal to the urgent need for peace in Europe. Pointing to a proliferation of pro-League editorials, letters to the editor, and polls of newspaper readers, some of his allies encouraged him to hold fast, but others, including Tumulty and McAdoo, soon realized that Wilson could gain command of the fight only if he showed a willingness to consider reservations on the articles most troubling to the Senate.
Wilson occasionally claimed to be open to talks with his most reasonable opponents, the so-called Mild Reservationists, but he balked when Lansing warned that if he did not strike a bargain with them, they would join forces with the senators demanding strong reservations. “[H]is face took on that stubborn and pugnacious expression which comes whenever anyone tells him a fact which interferes with his plans,” Lansing wrote in a note on the meeting. “. . . The way I see it, the president is ‘riding to a fall’ and a pretty bad one too.”
The next day Lodge attacked the treaty, calling for five reservations and savagely mocking Wilson’s internationalism. He wanted to clarify the terms of withdrawal from the League (Article I); spell out that Congress, not the League, would decide when to use force abroad (Articles X and XI); state explicitly that only the U.S. government would set policy on its domestic issues (Article XV); and exempt the Monroe Doctrine from interpretation by the League (Article XXI).
As for internationalism, Lodge called it a sorry substitute for nationalism. Nationalism was not the same as isolationism, he said. He did not want the United States to become a hermit, but he saw a vast difference between “bearing a due responsibility in world affairs and plunging the United States into every controversy and conflict on the face of the globe.” Although Wilson had explained that the United States would never commit troops without the consent of Congress, Lodge objected to the very idea of responding to such a call from a foreign body. Americans did not need foreigners to tell them when or where to exert military force, he said.
Lodge went on, equating all internationalism with the Bolsheviks’ drive for world domination and ridiculing Wilson’s vision of a peaceful international order maintained by the League of Nations. “We are told that we shall ‘break the heart of the world’ if we do not take this league just as it stands,” Lodge said. But visions were merely rhetorical tricks, “as unreal and short-lived as the steam or canvas clouds, the angels suspended on wires, and the artificial lights of the stage. They pass with the moment of effect and are shabby and tawdry in the daylight. Let us at least be real.” To Lodge, the notion that the League deserved support because of its ideals was pure cant. “We too have our ideals, even if we differ from those who have tried to establish a monopoly of idealism. Our first ideal is to our country, and we see her in the future, as in the past, giving service to all her people and to the world . . . of her own free will.” A stupendous ovation followed, and when Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi accused Lodge of showing off, the crowd in the galleries hissed.
Wilson replied that he did not understand those who drew a distinction between nationalism and internationalism. To his way of thinking, “The greatest nationalist is the man who wants his nation to be the greatest nation, and the greatest nation is the nation which penetrates to the heart of its duty and mission among the nations of the world.” Wilson took for granted that the nation which carried out its duty to the world would have more power and influence than could ever be attained by force or wealth. Sadly, Wilson did not voice the thought for weeks and then offered it only as an aside.
• • •
To beat back Wilson’s foes, Senator Hitchcock, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Foreign Relations, immediately demanded that the treaty be reported out of committee and sent to the Senate floor for debate. Furious with Lodge’s temporizing, Hitchcock said it was pointless for the hearings to continue when every member of the committee had already decided how he would vote.
Lodge, master of the game, took immediate action, but it was action calculated to prolong the hearings while appearing to hasten them. He asked Wilson to meet with the Committee on Foreign Relations. Wilson granted the request, and as Lodge prepared for the session, he wrote a friend that he and his colleagues were going to the White House only in search of facts. “We shall not inquire as to his views, because we do not care what his views are,” Lodge said. “We have heard them stated many times and are wearied by his chatter about ‘voices in the air’ and ‘visions’ and ‘lights on the path’ and the ‘dawn of a new day.’ ”
Sixteen of the seventeen members of the Committee on Foreign Relations were shown into the East Room at ten o’clock on August 19. Wilson opened the session by reading a statement addressing their principal concerns. Much of it was a recitation of his oft-stated reasons for expeditious ratification of the treaty as it was. He added that he was not dead set against reservations but insisted that they be put into a separate document. Only if they were separate, he said, would they not require the approval of others. (Lodge and Senator Philander C. Knox of Pennsylvania, a former secretary of state, would correct him, to no avail.) Wilson professed bafflement over some senators’ confusion as to the meaning of certain articles pertaining to the League of Nations. He reminded the visitors that suggestions made by members of Congress during his winter visit to the United States had been adopted.
For three and a half hours, the president and the senators went round and round, devoting more time to the military obligations that might arise from Article X than to any other subject. Wilson had already described the obligations as moral rather than legal, and Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio raised a basic question: if League members had only a moral obligation to commit troops, what good was Article X? Wilson was taken aback. Harding persisted. Suppose a League member was under attack and every other member said, Well, this is only a moral obligation, and we don’t think this situation merits our participation. What then? Harding asked.
It was a matter of “national good conscience,” Wilson said. “When I speak of a legal obligation, I mean one that specifically binds you to do a particular thing. . . . Now a moral obligation is of course superior to a legal obligation and, if I may say so, has a greater binding force; only there always remains in the moral obligation the right to exercise one’s judgment.” Harding went on. (“To clear my slow mind,” he explained.) What would happen, he asked, if a Balkan state attacked Italy and the League recommended that members send troops? “We would be our own judges,” Wilson replied. He was trying to assure the senators that the United States would decide, case by case, whether or not to take up arms, but he had not come close to dispelling the confusion over what, if anything, a moral obligation entailed.
Senator William E. Borah of Idaho inquired whether the second treaty that Wilson had submitted, the one promising that the United States and Britain would rush to the defense of France in the event of another German invasion, imposed a moral obligation or a legal obligation. Moral, Wilson replied. He was mistaken, but no one bothered to correct him. Lodge had already stuffed the treaty into a pigeonhole from which it would never emerge. In a book published after Wilson’s death, Lodge maintained that even a discussion in committee would have been pointless, as few senators would have supported any agreement binding the United States to go to war.
When the senators mentioned that Lansing had told the committee that Japan would have signed the peace treaty even if Shantung had been returned to China, Wilson said the minutes from the Council of Four’s deliberations showed otherwise. But the senators would have to take him at his word, he said, because the minutes were confidential. They would also have to take on faith—as he had—that Japan would restore China’s sovereignty as soon as practicable. Lodge did not take it on faith, and on August 23 proposed an amendment to immediately restore China’s sovereignty over the Shantung Peninsula. The vote in the committee was nine to eight, with all but one of the Republicans favoring the change and every Democrat against it. Discussing the vote with Lansing, Wilson said that if the Republicans wanted war, he would “give them a bellyful.” Before the week was out, the White House announced that Wilson would spend most of September on the road, explaining the treaty and the League to his fellow citizens across the country. Following the fight from London, James Bryce, who had known Wilson for decades, wondered why he persisted in “stroking the cat the wrong way.”
• • •
Afraid that the president was not up to the strains of barnstorming, Edith Wilson and Cary Grayson begged him to wage his fight from the White House. Wilson insisted on going for the sake of peace and for the American soldiers who had believed him when he said that they were going to war to end all war. If he did not fight wholeheartedly for the treaty, he told his wife, “I will be a slacker and never be able to look those boys in the eye.”
Tumulty drew up a schedule calling for a four-week run of ten thousand miles, with fifty speeches in twenty-one states. As Grayson noted, “The president was endeavoring to do in less than one month what no one else, not even William Jennings Bryan, the noted transcontinental tourist, had ever attempted in less than sixty days.”
Though Wilson had not given a memorable speech since his European travels in January, he still had faith in his oratorical powers and in oratory itself. Oratory had carried him into the governorship of New Jersey, helped him win the White House twice, and persuaded Congress to enact an unprecedented number of major economic reforms. His allies, remembering his successful 1916 tour to win the country’s support for expanding the army and navy, now hoped that he would be able to turn the general goodwill toward the League into a roar the Senate could not resist.
But this time Wilson was swimming against a strong Republican current, and neither his mind nor his body was up to the task he had set for himself. His coronary artery disease, which had progressed beyond the point where a good night’s sleep could cure his fatigue, had also begun to cloud his judgment. With a clearer head, he might have ruled out the tour on the basis of an observation he had made in his last scholarly book, Constitutional Government in the United States: when congressional opposition drove a president to take his case to the people, he would stand a greater chance of success against a truculent House than a truculent Senate. Facing reelection every two years, congressmen were more susceptible to public pressure than senators, who held their seats for six years.
To say that Wilson’s illness affected his judgment is not to say that he was now mentally incompetent. Though less swift and agile than it had been, his mind was still capable of complex thought. If his memory had holes, it was still prodigious. He remained commanding onstage. And strange as it sounds, the growing stubbornness that pained his allies in Washington would be an asset on tour. While they feared that obstinacy would doom his great cause, his audiences would see a man aglow with high ideals, conviction, and hope.
Wilson set out on the night of September 3. The first lady and Grayson and Tumulty went with him, as did his valet, Edith’s maid, a porter, two cooks, three stenographers, a Secret Service detail, and a large contingent of reporters, photographers, and newsreel men. The president and his party traveled at the end of the train in the Mayflower, a car with a sitting room, kitchen, office, and four bedrooms. The Wilsons used two bedrooms and gave the others to Grayson and Tumulty.
The president had not had time to prepare even one speech, yet he mustered the energy to mix his ideas afresh for every audience. From Columbus to Seattle, down the length of the Pacific Coast and then north and east through the Rockies, Wilson found a dozen ways to say that he had come to explain the treaty, not debate it. In St. Louis and elsewhere he pointed out the economic consequences of delaying ratification: uncertainty was bad for business, and the United States was falling behind its rivals in rebuilding trade with Germany. He admitted the treaty’s imperfections but characterized them as minor when set against the magnitude of the settlement. It was one of the world’s great charters of liberty, he said, because the victorious Great Powers had taken an unprecedented step: they made a solemn covenant to protect the weak. He confessed his disappointment in the Shantung decision. He conceded that the League of Nations would not prevent all wars but argued that some insurance was better than none. More than once he detailed the ruinous costs, human and financial, of the world war. After reciting the grim statistics for an audience of businessmen in San Francisco, he said that the peacemakers in Paris had given the world nothing less than an alternative to war.
Wilson was at his most eloquent in pleading for American membership in the League of Nations. Calling it the climax of the grand drama that had begun with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of a government based on the consent of the governed, he said he could not believe that the American people of 1919 would refuse to complete the revolution they had begun in 1776. Pointing out that the world war had liberated millions from imperial subjection and given life to a host of democracies, he asked what true American would not want these new democracies to thrive. And who could fail to see that the League’s protection against international aggression was critical to their survival? Arguing the case in Oregon, Wilson said that the United States had sent its army to Europe to beat back the advances of the Central Powers, and the army had succeeded. But what “is the use clearing the table if you are going to put nothing on it?” he asked. The destructive work of war had to be followed by the constructive work of peace.
From first to last, Wilson asserted that if the United States left the job unfinished, “we are of all men the most unfaithful.” Such rhetoric was uplifting, but Wilson never got around to telling his fellow citizens why they should believe it or why his unadulterated treaty would serve the United States better than a treaty with the reservations proposed by his critics. In place of rebuttals, he had only insults for “the gentlemen” who questioned the wisdom of a treaty without reservations. The slight irritated senators of both parties, and a steadfast Wilson supporter alerted Tumulty that the president’s speeches were having no effect on Capitol Hill “except perhaps to stiffen opposition.”
But Wilson continued to stroke the cat the wrong way. What were the gentlemen afraid of? he taunted. Had the gentlemen not read the covenant, or could they not understand plain English? The time had come to “put up or shut up,” Wilson said. “If the gentlemen who don’t like what was done at Paris think that they can do something better, I beg that they will hold their convention soon and do it now.”
Wilson seldom asked anything of the audiences on his tour, and when he did exhort, he spoke as a clergyman might: “let us—every one of us—bind ourselves in a solemn league and covenant of our own that we will redeem this expectation of the world . . . so that men shall always say that American soldiers saved Europe and American citizens saved the world.” There was no call to action, no suggestion for sympathizers who wished to further the cause. The crowds were receptive, but few of his listeners went home and wrote their senators.
• • •
Senators hostile to the League were not idle during Wilson’s tour. They gave numerous speeches on the Senate floor, and the most vociferous traveled in Wilson’s wake to warn that the League of Nations would injure the United States. A week after Wilson left Washington, Lodge counted forty-nine Republicans and six Democrats against ratifying the treaty as it stood. Sixteen of them, the so-called Irreconcilables, vowed to vote against the treaty in any form. Far more numerous were the Reservationists (Mild and Strong). All of the Reservationists claimed to want to ratify the treaty but only after attaching their conditions. While differing on many points, they unanimously opposed Article X. They could not picture a day when Congress would vote to send troops to assist Japan in a dispute with China, for example. Nor could they imagine the United States taking up arms to help the British quell an uprising in Ireland. They found it hard to believe that any nation would heed a call for military assistance unless its own interests were threatened. And that being so, the hope offered by Article X was an illusion, the Reservationists said.
On September 10 the Committee on Foreign Relations forwarded the treaty to the full Senate along with transcripts of the committee’s hearings to date, the reservations, and a blistering six-page report authored by Lodge. Writing on behalf of the majority of the committee, he denied Wilson’s continuing accusations of delay, denounced his case against reservations, and damned the League.
Lodge’s reservation to Article X was not a reservation at all; it frankly declared that the United States would not abide by it. Talking about his handiwork with a newspaper reporter, Lodge boasted, “I mean to kill Article X or kill the treaty.” The final slap at Wilson was a demand that the reservations be part of the resolution of ratification.
A day later, Senator Hitchcock, Wilson’s chief advocate for an unchanged treaty, submitted the committee’s minority report. Rather than reply point by point to Lodge, Hitchcock called for swift ratification of the existing treaty and catalogued the virtues of the League: it would—for the first time in history—organize the nations of the world for peace rather than war, it had comprehensive plans for universal disarmament, it established machinery for the peaceful resolution of disputes, and it would strive to spare the world the horror of war and the ruinous expense of large armies and navies.
Caught in the middle was William Howard Taft. He had embraced the League of Nations and recruited prominent members of his League to Enforce Peace on behalf of Wilson’s league. After reading Lodge’s report, Taft wrote a friend that “Never in the history of all American citizenship have we had such an egregious exhibition of blind, selfish, conceited, unwise opportunism and real Prussianism as Lodge has given. The tone is flippant, cheaply sarcastic and brutal.” At the same time, Taft feared that Wilson’s tour was hurting his cause. He could scarcely believe that the president was speaking so contemptuously of men whose votes he needed, and Wilson’s insistence on a treaty without reservations struck Taft as suicidal. He could also foresee that Wilson’s decision to ignore the Mild Reservationists would drive them into the arms of the most reactionary Republicans.
With the treaty now on the floor of the Senate, the battle lines were drawn, and it was clear that Wilson’s forces were outnumbered. This could not have surprised the president, but he was completely unprepared for the testimony of a witness who appeared at the final session of the Committee on Foreign Relations hearings, on September 12. William C. Bullitt, the young aide who had showily resigned from the staff of the American peace commission in Paris, read part of a memorandum composed just after his exit interview with Lansing. When Bullitt mentioned his moral compunctions about the treaty, Lansing had confided that he too regarded many of its provisions as “thoroughly bad.” According to Bullitt’s notes of the conversation, Lansing had said, “I consider that the League of Nations at present is entirely useless. The great powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves.” Lansing had also mused that if the Senate and the American people fully grasped the consequences of the treaty, it would not be ratified.
Lansing’s candor, which made Wilson look like a dunce, was front-page news across the country. In a telegram to the president, Lansing admitted sharing his concerns with Bullitt. But, Lansing said, he had also described the problems as “probably unavoidable,” given the conflicting aims of the Great Powers. He also said he had told Bullitt that nothing ought to stand in the way of a speedy peace. Lansing offered to make a public statement if Wilson thought it would aid their cause, and he expressed deep regret that he had ever had any conversation with that “disloyal young man.”
Lansing’s telegram caught up with Wilson on Sunday, September 21, when the Wilsons were looking forward to a quiet day at their hotel in Los Angeles. Exhausted by nearly three weeks on the road and coughing fits that interfered with his sleep, plagued by headaches so intense and persistent that he could hardly eat, the president was in terrible shape—gaunt, easily agitated, and empty of nearly every strength but his formidable will. After reading the telegram, Wilson said, “Think of it! This from a man whom I raised from the level of a subordinate to the great office of secretary of state of the United States. My God!” He wanted to fire Lansing but felt he could not do so while he was on the road.
Although Grayson witnessed the outburst, his diary makes no mention of it. But what he did record was alarming: Wilson had turned white, flecks of saliva appeared at the corners of his mouth, and his mouth trembled. Those symptoms in combination with the others suggested that a stroke might be imminent. Hoping to calm his patient, Grayson changed the subject and tried to amuse him. He also began thinking about how to persuade Wilson to abandon the rest of the tour.
• • •
Coming on top of Lodge’s unremitting campaign against the League, the revelation of Lansing’s disloyalty seems to have hardened Wilson’s resolve to win the fight on his own terms. The Senate had homed in on Article X, and Wilson followed suit. In Reno, recalling the courage and endurance of American soldiers in France, he told his audience that the Americans were legendary for their refusal to retreat. Now some gentlemen wanted to turn tail, he said, but he believed that the American people would insist on continuing the march toward the League. Forward was the only choice, he said, for no other direction led to peace.
In Salt Lake City, Wilson went further. Senators from both parties were trying to draft a compromise reservation to Article X—a version less drastic than the one put forward by Lodge—and after reading the latest iteration aloud, Wilson called it a knife in the heart of the covenant. Without the original Article X, he said, “the whole treaty falls to the ground.” Ridiculing the gentlemen’s fear that the United States would be dragged into foreign wars in every quarter of the globe, he said, “If you want to put out a fire in Utah, you don’t send to Oklahoma for the fire engine.”
The next day, at Cheyenne, Wilson was anxious, drained and, said Grayson, “suffering a great deal.” But when Edith suggested that they rest for a few days, Woodrow refused, saying that the people were with him, and it would be a dereliction of duty to cancel any speeches. Picking up where he had left off in Salt Lake City, Wilson told the citizens of Cheyenne about the heroism of the American soldiers at Belleau Wood and the Argonne. They had had no reservations about their service, he said. “They never thought of saying, ‘We are going to do this much of the job and then scuttle and leave you to do the rest.’ . . . And I am not going to turn back any more than they did. I am going to keep my face just as they kept their face—forward towards the enemy.” Vowing not to surrender, he issued a warning: if the Senate attached a reservation to Article X, he would regard it as a repudiation of the entire treaty. In Denver on September 25, Wilson pushed even harder, challenging the Senate to hold an up-or-down vote on the treaty as it was.
Later in the day, as he was about to speak at Pueblo, Wilson stumbled. Jimmie Starling of the Secret Service put a hand on his arm, and Wilson allowed it to stay. He needed it to climb the stairs to the platform. Standing close behind him in case he collapsed, Starling noticed that Wilson spoke with difficulty, mumbling, pausing, and saying certain words as if for the first time. It seemed to Starling that every phrase was an effort for his whole body.
Wilson defended his hard line by reminding his listeners that he had come home in the middle of the peace conference, met with the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs, and taken their suggestions back to Paris, where they were written into the League covenant. “What more could I have done?” he asked. Telling of his visit to the American military cemetery at Suresnes, Wilson said that he wished the gentlemen opposing the peace for which American troops had died could visit the cemetery and feel what he had felt, “the moral obligation that rests upon us not to go back on those boys, but to see the thing through, to see it through to the end and make good their redemption of the world.”
At the end of the speech Wilson took shelter in his faith in the idealism of his fellow Americans and in the promise of the Twenty-third Psalm. He believed that men would see the light. “There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace,” he said. “We have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us, the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.” In the supreme test of his religious faith, Wilson’s father had waged an enormous struggle with his doubts about God’s love after losing a political quarrel at the seminary where he taught. Joseph Wilson had emerged victorious by refusing to give in to his doubts. Woodrow Wilson clung to his faith in the better angels of humankind, and even as the nonbelievers in the Senate gathered their forces against him, he continued to hope that they would see the light.
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Soon after the train left Pueblo for Wichita, Wilson complained of another severe headache. Grayson ordered an unscheduled stop in order to take the president and first lady for a walk. Starling, who followed them, would remember Wilson in the slowest of trudges, his feet moving “as if they were weighted and shackled.” Refreshed by the exercise and the mountain air, Wilson ate heartily for once and retired early, hoping that a long sleep would end the headache. But in the middle of the night he roused Edith to report that the pain was unbearable. His face twitched, he struggled for breath, and he was agitated and nauseated. When Grayson was summoned, he told Wilson that it was time to give up the tour and go home. Wilson protested, and it took Grayson hours to get him to sleep. Watching over him, Edith sensed that life would never be the same. Reconstructing that night two decades later, she wrote, “[S]omething had broken inside me; from that hour on, I would have to wear a mask—not only to the public but to the one I loved best in the world; for he must never know how ill he was, and I must carry on.”
Woodrow woke at seven and announced that he had to get ready for the day’s engagements in Wichita. Edith, sure that he could not make another speech, saw him to his room and sat down with Grayson and Tumulty to cancel the rest of the tour. In the middle of their conversation, Wilson came in, freshly dressed and shaved but looking “piteously ill” to his wife. When the conspirators suggested a vacation, Wilson said no. When they urged it, he said no. Grayson argued that carrying on might prove fatal. “No, no, no,” Wilson said. “I must keep on.” Not until Edith declared the tour over did he give in. He looked at Tumulty and said, “My dear boy, this has never happened to me before. I felt it coming on yesterday. I do not know what to do.” He turned away and began to cry.
Just after nine o’clock, Tumulty gathered the press corps and in a shaky voice read Grayson’s official statement canceling the trip because of the president’s “nervous exhaustion.” “His condition is not alarming,” the statement read, “but it will be necessary for his recovery that he have rest and quiet for a considerable time.”
I. The text of Article X:“Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.”
