Wilson was determined to get precisely the League of Nations he had negotiated for in the draft Covenant he was bringing home, and the cheering crowds that greeted him in Boston and later in Washington gave evidence that large parts of the public enthusiastically supported him. But the publication of the draft Covenant had generated a strong wave of opposition among the Republicans in Congress, led by Wilson’s old nemesis, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. The senator’s essential complaint concerned the issue of national sovereignty. Lodge was willing to concede that the world had changed, and that nations would have to find some way to work together to maintain peace; but how much would Wilson’s new League impinge on America’s freedom to pursue its own national interests?
The opposition of Senator Lodge created a problem for Wilson. The Senate would have to ratify the Covenant, and he needed all the support there that he could get. He made a token attempt to win the approval of Congress by inviting Lodge and other members of the Senate and House Foreign Affairs Committees to a dinner at the White House to discuss the proposed agreement. Lodge announced afterwards that the dinner had been “pleasant,” but emphasized that in his opinion the president had appeared singularly ill-informed on specific details of the Covenant. Later, on the floor of the Senate, he denounced the Covenant “in the form now proposed,” and suggested that a peace treaty with Germany should be negotiated and signed before considering the Covenant of the League of Nations.
Wilson refused to even discuss such a possibility, and early in March returned to Europe for further negotiations, more determined than ever to stick to his guns. But when he arrived in Paris, he discovered the other leaders at the conference table had been talking to their own constituents, and they had also been reading Lodge’s statements, and they were encouraged to note that the senator’s opinion of the Covenant closely echoed their own. In addition, a new factor had entered the political calculations of the European leaders, one that would strongly influence their determination to get the Peace Treaty they wanted, rather than the one Wilson wanted. In one country after another in the postwar world of 1919, the shadow of Lenin and his Bolshevik revolution was emerging as a powerful social and economic force, and frightened ministers were anxious to curb this new threat. “Europe is on fire,” Wilson said sadly; “I can’t add fuel to the flames!”
Sensing weakness in the President, the Allies now escalated their opposition to his idealism, demanding peace terms deliberately calculated to humiliate Germany along with ruinous reparations designed to ruin her economy. By the end of March, the conference was deadlocked. In desperation, and in order to save his precious Covenant, Wilson agreed to one demand after another—Italy’s annexation of the Tyrol, a “Polish corridor” running directly through Prussia, Japanese exploitation of the Shantung Peninsula. Very quickly, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his shining dream of a “peace without victors” collapsed in a shambles. Wilson, sick with anxiety and at the end of his tether, suffered a complete breakdown that may well have been a stroke, although it was not so diagnosed at the time. For a while he was bedridden, the side of his face numb and one eye twitching uncontrollably.
Meanwhile, back in America, far from the conference table, Franklin Roosevelt was having a grand time, busily preparing the Navy for a glorious new adventure. Josephus Daniels was in Paris with Wilson, and FDR, enjoying his temporary elevation to Acting Secretary, was riding in the open cockpit of the immense NC-2T flying boat, hurtling along at ninety miles an hour over New York harbor in early April, heading for the Narrows. The sky was gray, the wind was cold, and he was squeezed in behind two Navy pilots, but he was having the time of his life. Off to his left, four thousand feet below, Brooklyn was spread out all the way to Jamaica Bay, and he was able to pick out landmarks—Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Ebbets Field, with its baseball diamond newly spruced up for the coming season.
This was the part of his job he enjoyed above all others, where he could experience the cutting edge of naval power, where the new technologies would shape not only the future Navy, but the whole world of tomorrow. Airpower, still in its infancy, was already showing enormous promise. The British, he knew, were projecting flights to Constantinople and India in order to pioneer new global air routes, with the aim of dominating the air as they did the sea, and FDR was determined to challenge them at every step. For almost two years now, he had closely followed the development of the Navy’s giant NC flying boats, and the men in charge of the project had come to rely on his ability to cut through the red tape that had been critical to their success.
The NCs—there were four of them, the world’s largest aircraft— had originally been designed by Glenn Curtiss for long range antisubmarine patrol, but the war had come to an end before they could be put into operation. Now the Navy was preparing them for a far more ambitious goal—if all went according to plan, these monstrous four-engine, wood-and-fabric giants, each manned by a six-man crew, would become the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic.
They would have plenty of competition for the honor. In London, the Daily Mail had put up a prize of ten thousand pounds for the first pilot to make it across the Atlantic nonstop, and any number of daredevils, crackpots, and visionaries had dreams of winning. The NCs would not be competing for the prize, since they planned a two-stage flight, but the honor of being the first across the ocean was still a top Navy priority.
The race for glory began three weeks after FDR’s flight over Brooklyn. On May 8, the NC-1, NC-3, and NC-4 took off from the Naval Air Station at Rockaway on Long Island, bound for Trepassey, Newfoundland. The fourth NC flying boat, NC-2, the one FDR had flown in, would not participate in the transatlantic attempt due to last-minute design problems.
Once the three crews had assembled at Trepassey, they were held up for a week waiting for favorable weather. Finally, on the evening of Friday, May 16, they received clearance to take off. Their initial goal was the Azores, the mid-Atlantic Portuguese islands, seventeen hours distant. After reaching cruising altitude, the planes broke from formation to avoid the risk of collision, and the night passed without incident. To help guide them, the Navy had deployed a chain of twenty-one destroyers along the route at fifty-mile intervals. At dawn, the NC-3, having lost its bearings, made what the commanding officer expected to be a brief landing in the ocean in order to get a navigational sighting before taking off again, but the impact of landing on rough seas damaged the fragile craft and she was not able to take off. The crew was in no particular danger. The body of the craft was in fact a hull, and the accident had simply turned a flying boat into a floating boat. She could still navigate, powered by her four aircraft propellers.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic, the NC-1 had also made a brief landing to check her bearings, only to discover that the Atlantic’s twelve-foot-high waves made it impossible for her to return to the air.
The remaining aircraft, the NC-4, remained aloft and managed to reach the Azores on schedule. But once there, bad weather held her to her moorings for three days, during which time the crew learned that all the men of the NC-1 had been rescued by a Greek freighter, and that the NC-3, using her four propellers, had made her way into the Azorean harbor of Ponta Delgado on May 19 under her own power.
The NC-4 eventually took off on the second and final leg of her flight on May 27 and landed at Lisbon that night, eleven days after leaving Newfoundland. Lieutenant Commander A. C. Read, the navigator and commanding officer, remembered the moment proudly. “No mattered what happened—even if we crashed on landing—the transatlantic flight, the first one in the history of the world, was an accomplished fact.”
The achievement of the NC-4 made banner headlines worldwide, but its fame was fleeting. A fortnight later, two British airmen, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, flying a modified twin-engine Vickers Vimy RAF bomber, were able to take off from Newfoundland and in a single, nonstop flight land in Ireland the next morning. Their pluck and daring, accomplished without benefit of radio or a chain of destroyers, instantly captured the imagination of the world, and the more complicated American feat was quickly forgotten.
But as the Navy—and Franklin Roosevelt—never tired of pointing out, the NC-4 was first across.
Franklin Roosevelt was not by nature an impetuous person. He liked to think things through before committing himself, to weigh his options and calibrate his responses to any given opportunity before throwing himself boldly into the fray. So his casual, almost nonchalant response to an invitation to address the Democratic National Committee in Chicago on May 29, 1919 has to be considered somewhat unusual. For someone who had national political ambitions, it was an exceptional venue for a speech, where he would reach many influential party leaders. But there is no evidence that he thought his speech would be all that important to his career, and in fact he did not even start preparing his remarks until after he arrived in Chicago. The scheduled keynote speaker was to be the newly appointed attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, who at the time was making headlines battling a wave of radical terrorists. He was likely to get much more press attention than any other speaker, which may account for Roosevelt’s offhand preparation for what turned out to be a very important speech.
It was a rousing speech, a stinging attack on the Republican Party, a speech of someone who understood not only the morality of political philosophy, but the mechanics of getting out the vote, and the party leaders from across the country, already intent on the 1920 elections, took note. He pointed out that historically there were progressive elements in both major parties, which made for a certain blurring of the lines between the two, but that in recent years the Republicans had so purged themselves of the progressive influence that “by next year it will be clear to the American people that the Republican Party is the conservative party of the United States, and that the Democratic Party is the progressive or liberal party.”
He closed with a ringing affirmation of his party’s policies. “So we are approaching the campaign of 1920—approaching it with broad principles settled in advance; conservatism, special privilege, partisanship, destruction on the one hand—liberalism, common sense idealism, constructiveness, progress, on the other.”
Roosevelt’s speech was met with an outpouring of enthusiastic applause, and completely overshadowed that of the attorney general. The Chicago Tribune ran a front-page headline: PALMER LOSES PLACE IN SUN TO ROOSEVELT. History has marked it as his first great speech, and it would have important ramifications for him.
By the summer of 1919, the Versailles Treaty had been agreed to and signed. As Wilson had demanded, it included the Covenant of the League of Nations as Article One. With high hopes, Wilson returned with it from Europe and submitted it to the Senate for ratification. Predictably, Senator Lodge wanted modifications, and equally predictably, Wilson stonewalled. It quickly became clear that the Republican-controlled Senate was determined to have its way, and the angry and exhausted Wilson decided to bypass Congress and appeal directly to the public. He would mount a massive cross-country speaking tour to sell the Covenant to the nation, creating such a wave of support that the Republicans would be forced to ratify the Treaty without revision. He knew he had not fully regained his strength from his collapse in April, but his determination to force the ratification of the Treaty had taken on a messianic edge. As he told his secretary, “in the presence of the great tragedy which now faces the world no decent man can count his own personal fortunes in the reckoning.” Against the strenuous pleading of his doctor and his wife, Wilson embarked on his campaign, and over the next three weeks set out on an exhausting campaign covering eight thousand miles, speaking in twenty-nine cities and at unnumbered train stops.
On September 25, a few hours after addressing a huge audience in Pueblo, Colorado, he collapsed on board his special train with a second, more severe stroke that immobilized his left side and forced him to cancel the rest of his tour. His loyal inner circle, made up of his doctor, his secretary, and his wife, closed ranks around him. For the remaining year and a half of his term of office, he would remain in virtual seclusion, a permanent invalid guarded and protected by an unelected triumvirate who would fiercely keep secret the fact that on most days of the week, the President of the United States was no longer fit to hold office.
Since Wilson would not allow the rather modest amendments to the Covenant called for by Lodge, the Senate refused to ratify it, and the United States became the only major power that was not signatory to the League of Nations.
How did Franklin Roosevelt view the sad collapse of the man he had so eagerly sought out in Trenton in 1911? He continued to admire Wilson, and to draw inspiration from him. Doubtless he sympathized with Wilson’s idealism; but did he, like many others, wonder why the president so assiduously avoided any compromise in support of those ideals? Why, for instance, did Wilson refuse any effort to find common ground with Senator Lodge?
The president considered Henry Cabot Lodge the ultimate enemy, and treated him as such. But Roosevelt would have wondered about that. He knew Lodge. They were not friends—they were too far apart in age and worldview for that—but Lodge had been very close to Uncle Ted, and as far as FDR was concerned, Lodge was an elder statesman worthy of respect and even admiration. Wilson and Lodge were of different parties, to be sure, but their differences over the League were not all that significant. Both recognized the need for the League, and both were concerned about the issues of national sovereignty that were part of its concept. But where Lodge—and Roosevelt—both saw room for compromise, Wilson saw none.
There is no question that Roosevelt drew many lessons from Wilson’s tragic failure with the League of Nations. One has only to study the way that President Roosevelt, twenty five years later, nurtured and brought about the creation of the United Nations—the successor to the League—with his carefully orchestrated campaign to “win the peace as well as the war.”