THE SS GEORGE WASHINGTON pulled away from the flag-draped pier in the late morning of December 4, 1918. Warships in New York Harbor fired salutes to the little liner, once German-owned and now part of the spoils of war. Crowds were gathered at Battery Park and on Staten Island to see the ship off. As she passed the submarine net and the old Civil War ironclad that guarded the Narrows, passengers on board could make out children waving flags all along the shore. Once in the lower harbor, the George Washington was met by her escort: the battleship Pennsylvania, a dozen destroyers, plus airplanes and a navy dirigible. They all had assembled to see President Woodrow Wilson off for Europe on what all expected would be a historic mission.
The President had decided to break all precedent and personally represent the United States at the peace conference convening in Paris. Wilson was convinced, as he told reporters aboard the ship, that the Allied heads of state had already decided together to impose “a peace of loot or spoliation” upon Germany, and that only his on-the-spot intervention could redirect the conference to a program for lasting peace. Beyond that reason, however, was Wilson’s obvious, burning desire to participate in what promised to be the most important international meeting in over a century. “The plot is thickening,” he told newsmen with obvious relish. Wilson could no more have stayed away from Paris than Theodore Roosevelt could have sat out the 1912 election.
The President brought with him to Europe only a relatively small entourage: his second wife, Edith Galt Wilson; his physician, Admiral Cary Grayson; two typists; and most of the members of the Inquiry. As formal Peace Commissioners, Wilson appointed Colonel House and General Tasker Bliss (Wilson’s able liaison to the Allied Supreme War Council), who already were in Europe. The other two commissioners accompanied him—Secretary of State Lansing and Henry White, a nominal Republican and experienced diplomat long friendly with Roosevelt and Lodge.
Life aboard ship quickly settled down to routine. Most of the time the President remained isolated, talking and dining only with the members of his immediate circle. George Creel was on board, personally supervising the movie that the Committee on Public Information was making about the peace mission. Evenings Wilson and his wife joined the other passengers to enjoy the film exploits of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks before returning to affairs of state.
The President had only one extensive conference with the members of the Inquiry during the trip. He was quite frank and specific in laying out his views and goals. While the Americans had no selfish objectives to pursue at Paris, he said, the Allied leaders were bound to each other by a web of secret deals and thus “did not represent their own people.” He discussed animatedly his ideas for a league of nations. A permanent league, whose exact political structure could evolve with experience, was in his view the only guarantee of both “elasticity and security” in the wake of the World War. He foresaw this league deterring future aggressors by cutting them off from trade and communications while world public opinion was roused against them; military force would be necessary only as a last resort. In the meantime, the organization would promote international commerce and administer the colonies of the defeated Central Powers.
Wilson heartened his advisors by calling on them to guide him on the specific economic and territorial issues involved. “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it,” he concluded.
His associates tried to take the measure of this American scholar-turned-politician who sought to redirect the destiny of the world with the hammer blows of his ideals. James Shotwell, a historian attached to the peace commission, was struck by the contradictions in Wilson’s appearance and actions. Close up the President had warm eyes and an engaging smile, but from the side his face appeared severe and determined. Wilson remained aloof from the other officials on the ship, yet on Sunday he unselfconsciously joined the sailors singing hymns in their mess hall. Watching Wilson watch a movie, Shotwell saw powerful emotions being held under tight control.
Escorted by Allied warships, the George Washington moved through mists as it approached the coast of France; then the skies cleared and the liner pulled into Brest harbor in mid-December 1918. The President and his party went immediately to the train that was waiting to carry them to Paris, but Shotwell took a few minutes to walk around the town. He noticed the slate-roofed stone houses, the many women dressed in black among the crowds, and the groups of American soldiers everywhere waiting for orders to sail for home. Most of all, Shotwell was struck by the wall placards that announced the coming of Wilson. One, a “red splash of color on a gray stone wall,” called upon “one and all, without distinction of party” to praise the leader who had arrived “to found a new order on the rights of peoples, and to stop forever the return of an atrocious war….”
No American President had ever before met with a foreign leader while in office. Grant and Roosevelt, after they left the White House, did visit a number of heads of state during their travels, but those were social calls rather than serious diplomatic missions. Now Wilson was about to meet with the assembled premiers and foreign ministers of every European power—except defeated Germany and Bolshevik Russia—as well as leaders from nations on five continents. They had gathered to address issues of sovereignty, disarmament, and trade that spanned the globe.
The global problems were staggering. The war had left 50 million soldiers and civilians dead or maimed; blasted into ruin large stretches of France, Belgium, and Eastern Europe; sent 13 million tons of shipping to the bottom of the sea. Now starvation and typhus—which would kill another 6 million people over the next year—stalked Europe in its first winter of peace since 1914. Nor was there even peace in the east, where Poles clashed with Czechs, Bolsheviks with czarist Whites, Slavs with Italians, Turks with Greeks, and Arabs with Jews amidst the ruins of the old autocratic empires. The leaders of Europe’s three powerful democracies—Britain’s David Lloyd George, France’s Georges Clemenceau, and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando—had been united by the war but now were divided on how best to cope with its chaotic aftermath. The three were hard-pressed to make common cause with one other; how would they deal with the professor-politician-president from the west?
Clemenceau was the first to greet the American President. The French premier—still vigorous at seventy-eight, broad of chest, with short legs and a yellowish complexion that struck Lansing as the “face and figure [of] a Chinese mandarin”—had earned the nickname “Le Tigre” for his tenacious attacks on any and all political opponents. It had been Clemenceau who had published Emile Zola’s impassioned defense of Alfred Dreyfus, kept the “Affaire Dreyfus” alive year after year in the French press and Chamber of Deputies, and finally won exoneration for the wronged Jewish officer. A cold, ruthless idealist, not much liked but infinitely respected, Clemenceau had been uncompromising in prosecuting the war against the Central Powers, and now he called for peace terms that would prevent Germany from ever again being strong enough to invade France.
The first meeting between Wilson and Clemenceau went surprisingly well, mainly because both leaders strove to be conciliatory. Much to the annoyance of Colonel House, who still hoped to head the American delegation, Wilson convinced the Frenchman that the President should sit in on the peace talks as America’s chief spokesman; in return, Wilson happily agreed that Clemenceau should preside over the conference. Neither professed to see any conflict between their main aims—for Clemenceau French security, for Wilson the league—and both later took House aside to express their delight at the way things had begun.
With some days still remaining before the conference opened, Wilson’s next stop was Britain. There he met with the Royal Family, paraded through the streets of London, and joined the leaders of Britain’s Liberal party in following the returns of the elections in progress. Lloyd George, Wilson’s host, was tremendously heartened by the results as they were telegraphed in to the group gathered around the Cabinet table at 10 Downing Street. The white-maned Prime Minister—devious in his political dealings but unshakable in his commitment to his working-class constituents—was receiving a tremendous popular mandate for his party’s promise to squeeze Germany “until the pips squeak.” Any private doubts Lloyd George might have had about the wisdom of a punitive peace were not visible that night—but Wilson’s were, as he glumly sat watching the British politicians celebrate.
From England, Wilson traveled to Italy, for his most enthusiastic public greeting of all. The cheering crowds, however, could not dispel the tension in Rome. Italy’s leaders—the short, tenacious Orlando and his Foreign Minister, the “protractedly unreliable” Baron Sidney Sonnino—were determined to gain major concessions of territory as their price for Italy’s fighting on the Allied side. Wilson had already balked at some of their demands, and now the President sparred with his hosts about travel plans and access to the Italian public.
To varying degrees, therefore, the four democratic leaders—soon dubbed “the Big Four”—were divided by their aims before the talks even began. Once the conference convened, the confusions and cross-purposes were multiplied a hundredfold as each nation and group arose to plead its case. Lawrence of Arabia was on hand to speak for the Iraqis; Ho Chi Minh tried vainly to gain a hearing for Vietnamese independence; the Czechs and Poles sent representatives to argue over the coal mines of Teschen. British diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson remembered the bedlam of “the machine-gun rattle of a million typewriters, the incessant shrilling of telephones, the clatter of motor bikes … the cold voices of interpreters … and throughout the sound of footsteps hurrying” down the mirrored halls of Versailles. It reminded him, Nicolson wrote, of a “riot in a parrot house.”
Amidst the multiplicity of issues, Wilson did not take his eye off his main concern for a league of nations. Within a week of the conference’s formal opening, he arose to advocate “that a League of Nations be created to promote international cooperation, to ensure the fulfillment of accepted international obligations, and to provide safeguards against war.” Speaking from a draft resolution prepared in consultation with the British, the President declared that the “League should be created as an integral part of the general Treaty of Peace, and should be open to every civilized nation….” The conference voted unanimously to establish a committee, with Wilson as its head, to draft a constitution for the League.
Over the next two weeks, Wilson attended the general meetings of the conference and also chaired the League committee. In drawing up the covenant of the League, the President worked closely with Colonel House and Lord Robert Cecil of Britain, both ardent advocates of the proposed organization. Even more, Wilson relied on his own ability to lead debate and shape compromise. “The President excels in such work,” House recorded in his diary. “He seems to like it and his short talks in explanation of his views are admirable. I have never known any one to do such work as well.” High praise indeed from a self-styled master of quiet political manipulation—yet House’s opinion seemed warranted. Wilson made important concessions, giving up his own proposal for a statement on religious tolerance (and helping to beat down a Japanese plank on racial equality), and in turn blocked a French call for an international standing army. Overall, the nineteen-man committee took on the air of a college seminar, with several of the brighter pupils making important contributions—Cecil provided a working draft of the covenant, and Jan Smuts of South Africa devised the mandate procedure—but the terms of the discussion clearly being set by Professor Wilson.
After just ten meetings, the committee’s work was done. On February 14, Wilson addressed the general session of the conference, reading and commenting upon the finished covenant. “A living thing is born,” he concluded. “It is definitely a guarantee of peace.” H. Wickham Steel wrote in the Paris Daily Mail that Wilson’s presentation had “lifted” the affairs of the world “into new dimensions. The old dimensions of national individualism, secrecy of policies, competitive armaments, forcible annexations … were raised, if only for an instant, to a higher plane on which the organized moral consciousness of peoples, the publicity of international engagements and of government by the consent of and for the good of the governed, became prospective realities.”
The only question, wrote Steel, was “How long will the instant last?”
While Wilson framed his plan for the League, the other American delegates and experts were left largely to their own devices. With the President’s consent and some general supervision by House, the Inquiry members gradually became negotiators, in their own right, on the questions falling within their special spheres of expertise. Shotwell and the others found themselves engaged in days of exhausting but exhilarating work on issues of finance, navigation and trade, territorial adjustment, and the like.
Amidst the “whirlpool of political intrigue” slowly engulfing the delegates, the issue of Russia loomed large. None of the Western democracies had yet extended recognition to the Bolshevik regime in Moscow. Instead, France and Britain were helping to finance various of Lenin’s adversaries in the civil war engulfing the country. The Allies maintained a blockade of Russia’s ports and even landed troops to fight the Bolsheviks. While the World War was still on, the British and French had persuaded Wilson to send a small expeditionary force to northern Russia and a second force to Vladivostok on the Pacific—an intervention by the United States that was, in one scholar’s words, both “extremely reluctant and severely restrained,” though from Moscow’s standpoint, of course, a flagrantly hostile act. With public clamor to bring their troops home increasing, the Allies and Americans now sought a way out of the imbroglio in the East, a way out of the intervention of which George F. Kennan would say later, “never, surely, in the history of American diplomacy has so much been paid for so little.”
On January 22, Wilson proposed that the various warring factions in Russia meet with Allied representatives at Prinkipo, in Turkey, to attempt to hammer out their differences. The Bolsheviks hedged their reply to Wilson’s proposal, but the anti-Bolsheviks rejected it outright. Then young William Bullitt stepped into the breach. Meeting with House and with Lloyd George’s private secretary, Philip Kerr, Bullitt won approval for a fact-finding mission to Moscow. Accompanied by Lincoln Steffens and two military men, and armed with a set of general proposals suggested by Kerr and House, Bullitt left Paris on February 22.
One week earlier Wilson too had left, traveling in the opposite direction. The Congress was about to end its session, requiring him to return to Washington to sign legislation. Even more important, the League Covenant was completed, ready for presentation to the American people. Already the President was hearing in Paris echoes of opposition to the League building among politicians back home, and he sought to forestall his critics from organizing the public against his proposal. Before sailing from France, Wilson cabled the members of the Foreign Relations Committees of both houses of Congress, inviting them to meet with him at the White House to discuss the League Covenant.
Wilson clearly needed to mend his fences with the Congress—particularly with those Republicans whose votes would be necessary if the League were to gain two-thirds approval in the Senate—largely owing to his own political miscalculation. The previous October, in an effort to strengthen his hand before the Paris negotiations opened, Wilson had called upon the public to return a Democratic majority in the upcoming congressional elections. The call backfired, galvanizing Republican opposition; the GOP swept into control of the House by fifty seats, and acquired a precarious majority of two in the Senate. That slim majority elevated Wilson’s arch-opponent Henry Cabot Lodge to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Debate on the Covenant began while Wilson was still in transit, with opponents labeling it everything from “an international quilting society” to “the most impudently un-American proposal ever submitted to the American people by an American President.” Landing in Boston on February 23, Wilson fired back at the critics, saying that in defense of this cause it was a pleasure to indulge his “fighting blood.” Three days later, however, he adopted a conciliatory tone in meeting over dinner with the congressional leaders. Those who had come to the White House determined not to be convinced by Wilson went away unmoved; Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut described the session as a “tea with the Mad Halter.” Another Republican, however, John Jacob Rogers of Massachusetts, carried away a much more favorable impression.
“I thought the President appeared extremely well,” Rogers wrote to Henry White in Paris. “He submitted himself to quite rigorous cross-examination for two hours, answering every question, easy or difficult, as fully as possible and with apparent candor…. There was no suggestion of a feeling of militant arrogance about him. He apparently tried to give the impression that he really was one of the circle in the East Room, who was answering rather than asking questions only because he had been so recently in Paris, and had been a factor in the preparation of the instrument under discussion.” Even Lodge admitted to Henry White that Wilson had patiently answered questions for two hours—but added, “We learned nothing.”
Where would Lodge stand on the President’s proposal? The senator’s personal antipathy toward Wilson was well known; so too, however, were his wartime statements in favor of the general idea of an international council or league. During the early stages of the Paris negotiations, Lodge hedged on the question, pleading ignorance of the President’s intentions, while touching base behind the scenes with TR and other Republican leaders inclined to distrust Wilson. Now, two days after the White House conference, he stated his position to the Senate. Lodge noted that America was being asked “to give up in part our sovereignty and independence and subject our own will to the will of other nations.” He continued: “I am not contending now that these things must not be done…. What I ask, and all I ask, is consideration, time, and thought.”
Fair words, spoken in a moderate tone—but Lodge had already made up his mind. At the suggestion of Brandegee, he now drew up a resolution urging that “the constitution of the league of nations in the form now proposed to the peace conference should not be accepted by the United States.” Securing in a single feverous day the signatures of thirty-seven senators—enough to block the passage of any treaty—Lodge rose in the Senate just before midnight on March 3 to read his “Round Robin” into the record. Next morning, the editors of the New York Sun chortled: “Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations died in the Senate tonight. Henry Cabot Lodge … read the death warrant of the League.”
Wilson’s response to the Senate Round Robin was swift. Previously he had tended to slight the efforts of ex-President Taft and other Republicans who had been stumping the country in support of an international peacekeeping body; now Wilson telegraphed Taft, asking that he appear with the President to speak in favor of the League. The Republican leader raced northward by train to New York, meeting Wilson just hours before he was scheduled to sail back to France. The two then addressed a cheering crowd of League supporters gathered at the Metropolitan Opera House. Taft spoke first, calling the League “the living evidence of the united power of Christian civilization to make this treaty a real treaty of peace.” Wilson then followed with a combative defense of his plan. To Lodge’s suggestion that the League be considered separately from the peace treaty, Wilson replied, “Gentlemen on this side will find the Covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the Covenant that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.”
The next two months were to be among the most difficult of Woodrow Wilson’s life. Immediately upon his return to Paris, he received a nasty jolt: during his absence the Europeans and House, for reasons of their own, had proceeded to detach the League plan from the peace treaty—just as Lodge had suggested. With Ray Stannard Baker, the President drew up a statement reiterating his commitment to making the Covenant an integral part of the treaty, a statement so strong that Baker feared it would “break up the Conference then and there.”
Over the next weeks, the differences between Wilson and the European leaders became starkly apparent. In particular, the rigid Clemenceau clashed repeatedly with the idealistic President. Relations between the two men, which had once seemed so promising, reached such a low that at one point Wilson prepared to abandon the talks and return to America. Gone were the happy days of the League-committee “seminar.” The conference now revolved around the daily meetings of the Big Four, and their increasingly acrimonious debates over military and territorial questions. During part of this time, Wilson was prostrated by an attack of influenza, the debilitating effects of which lingered through the spring and summer. He also became increasingly distant from Colonel House, whom he began to suspect of pursuing his own separate program at the conference. “I seldom or never have a chance to talk with him seriously,” House lamented, “and, for the moment, he is practically out from under my influence.”
At this critical juncture, Bullitt returned from Moscow, afire with a proposal from Lenin for a truce in the Russian Civil War and negotiations to resolve the Bolsheviks’ differences with the West. Wilson, in the thick of a fight to keep his Covenant in the treaty, could spare only brief attention for Bullitt’s report. More important, the young emissary’s two original supporters, House and Lloyd George, now backed away from the prospect of dealing directly with Lenin. The Russian offer was allowed to lapse; when Bullitt repeated it to Harold Nicolson, the Englishman “blinked politely.” Wilson, meanwhile, went ahead with a unilateral withdrawal of the American forces in northern Russia, and with the promotion of his supreme goal of the League.
In the end, Wilson preserved the Covenant by compromising on a number of issues less important to him. He accepted some of Clemenceau’s proposals for weakening Germany, agreed to British suggestions on disarmament and reparations, yielded to the Commonwealth nations on mandates, and let the Japanese retain control of Shantung. At the same time, in spite of the defiant speech he had made in New York, Wilson took steps to placate his Republican critics at home. Through Taft and some Democratic sources, Wilson learned of four basic changes that most of the signers of the Round Robin seemed to desire; in exchange for his concessions to Clemenceau and the others, Wilson was able to write three of those alterations into the Covenant. Even so, Lodge told Henry White, these were not good enough.
The final Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, did not completely satisfy anyone, and certainly not Wilson. But at least it included a strong, well-defined League of Nations. Throughout the talks the President had put so much emphasis on the League because, in part, he believed that eventually it could correct any other mistakes embodied in the peace settlement. He had succeeded in committing the European and other leaders to this great experiment in international democracy; now he had to persuade his own countrymen.
On July 10, 1919, just one day after his return from France, President Wilson drove to Capitol Hill to present the completed Treaty of Versailles to the Senate. In his address Wilson reviewed the causes of America’s entry into the war, the diplomatic commitments that the Allies had made to one another before America joined them, and the compromises that he had been forced to make in Paris. The treaty was not perfect, he conceded, but it did give international sanction to American principles of individual liberty, free trade, and the peaceful resolution of disputes.
The proposed League of Nations formed the core of Wilson’s address. If the League was to fulfill its promise of bringing disarmament and peace, the President urged, then America must join it. The weaker nations trusted the good intentions of the United States, which after the Spanish-American War had honored its pledge to evacuate Cuba and begin giving self-rule to the Philippines. Leadership of the League, and thus of the world, was being offered America. “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”
Wilson answered his own question with a stirring peroration: “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who has led us in this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.”
Wilson’s eloquence reverberated through a press and public that already were bestirring themselves to debate the treaty. Thanks in part to the work of ex-President Taft and the League to Enforce Peace, public opinion in general was favorable to the idea of a League of Nations. Such diverse papers as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Des Moines Register applauded Wilson’s League as a “broadening out of the Monroe Doctrine” to cover the entire world. Only an “international despot or an international pariah” could object to the League concept of collective security, the New York World opined. The Baltimore Sun unconsciously paraphrased James Madison’s language in Federalist 51, saying that the League of Nations would not “make nature angelic” but would be a large stride toward that goal. The Register put it more succinctly: “The alternative of the league of nations is an armed America.”
In April, the Literary Digest, in an effort to gauge public sentiment, asked newspaper editors across the country whether they favored the proposed League. Of the 1,377 editors who replied to the poll, 718 answered yes, 181 no, and 478 indicated conditional agreement. If these papers represented the views of their readers, then Democrats overwhelmingly supported the League, and even the vast majority of Republicans favored some international organization. A breakdown of the replies by region shows that the South was solidly behind the League, while conditional supporters were concentrated in the Northeast and New England. In no area did outright opponents number even 20 percent of the responses.
But while across the country League opponents may have been few and divided, in the U.S. Senate they were powerful, concentrated, and organized. While Wilson was still in Paris, Henry Cabot Lodge and his allies had agreed to launch a public campaign against the League. With funds provided by Henry Clay Frick and by the Pennsylvania industrialist Andrew Mellon, the opponents set up their own league—the League for the Preservation of American Independence—which ran advertising and sponsored meetings nationwide. William Randolph Hearst was also persuaded to throw his vast chain of newspapers into the fight against Wilson’s proposal. Meanwhile, the New York Sun declared that “greater even than the Monroe Doctrine is the Washington Doctrine,” which warned America against entangling “our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, honor or caprice.”
Lodge himself entertained hopes that the efforts of the League critics would eventually turn the public against Wilson’s plan, to the advantage of the Republicans in the next presidential election. Indeed, the senator made a conspicuous contribution to the public campaign by engaging Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell in a much-publicized debate of the League’s merits before a capacity crowd in Boston’s Symphony Hall.
The real debate, however, was to occur in the Senate. The Founding Fathers had feared both a runaway majority and an overweening chief executive, so they had fragmented power throughout the structure of American government—and Lodge never for a moment lost sight of the fact that the Constitution gave the upper chamber the ultimate power of decision to accept or reject a treaty. “The only people who have votes on the treaty are here in the Senate,” he reassured a friend. A consummate dealer in the transactions of legislative politics, Lodge relied from the first on defeating Wilson and the treaty through a legislative strategy.
Lodge’s first task was to ensure that the Republicans controlled the Senate. The election of 1918 had given the GOP a majority of two in the upper house, but Lodge had to keep in line Idaho’s William E. Borah and several old Bull Moosers who had become “irreconcilable” opponents of the treaty. While the majority of Senate Republicans agreed that some sort of league was desirable, although not necessarily the one presented by Wilson, Borah and his allies seemed willing to bolt the party rather than vote for any international organization that might infringe upon American sovereignty. Before Wilson’s return, Lodge had met with Borah and struck a deal. The irreconcilables would cooperate with the other Republicans in organizing the Senate and amending the treaty, and then would be free to vote against the pact in the final roll call. In return, Lodge would give Borah ample opportunity to promote his arguments for isolationism. Thus Borah could be sure that, even if the treaty did pass, it would be thoroughly “Republicanized.”
The Lodge-Borah arrangement worked. The Republicans took control of the Senate, elevating Lodge to the post of majority leader—and, more important, to the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, to which Wilson now had to submit the treaty. Lodge proceeded to stack the committee with irreconcilables, and with less ideological skeptics like Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio. In particular, the new chairman denied a seat to Frank Kellogg of Minnesota, one of the foremost Senate spokesmen for the Taft wing of the party, when Kellogg refused to cooperate with Lodge’s plans.
Lodge acted in large part out of partisan considerations: if Wilson and the Democrats were allowed to take credit for creating an international organization that outlawed war, Lodge feared, they could reap a harvest of votes in the next election and undermine for years to come the tenuous Republican majority across the country. Personal factors were also at work—the two men in fact loathed each other. “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel toward Wilson,” Lodge had written Theodore Roosevelt long before the League fight. Even Jefferson was a better man than Wilson, the senator wrote another friend; “he could not have been worse.” Soon Lodge was calling the President “the most sinister figure that ever crossed the country’s path.” His venom arose in part from his indignation that Wilson should be regarded as the foremost intellectual in American politics—this Princeton man with his popular writings, as compared with his own classical education at Harvard. Wilson, for his part, simply viewed Lodge with cold contempt.
At the core of the hostility, however, lay genuine differences of outlook and principle. For nearly three decades, Lodge had been a leading spokesman for an aggressive, unilateralist foreign policy backed by a stronger military establishment. In the 1880s and 1890s, he had led Theodore Roosevelt and a few other young Republicans in calling for a naval buildup and the acquisition of colonies overseas. He had supported, as matters of paramount national interest, the war with Spain, the annexation of the Philippines, the building of the Panama Canal, and most of the interventions in Latin America carried out by Roosevelt and Taft. In 1919, Lodge hoped for a peace settlement that would strengthen America’s international influence vis-à-vis the European powers, and also in the Western Hemisphere. Wilson’s “idealistic” internationalism left Lodge cold, and he viewed the idea of collective security that was at the heart of Wilson’s League as a distinct threat to American freedom of action.
The President and the senator, therefore, were engaged in a battle over two conflicting foreign policy strategies. Wilson’s concept had its intellectual origins largely in his personal moral values; Lodge’s sprang mainly from traditional power considerations. The President placed his faith in the collegial good sense of an international parliament that he had taken great pains to craft; the senator proposed to rely on the nationalist economic and military policies that he had promoted for decades.
When the debate was cast in these terms, Lodge was able to rally some support in the Senate and in the country, yet seemingly not enough to block the treaty. In order to defeat Wilson, Lodge had to win and keep the backing of senators who opposed the treaty for a variety of other reasons, some of them not very admirable. Indeed, the struggle over the League of Nations aroused some of the basest prejudice and hate-mongering in American politics. James Reed of Missouri declared that “dark” peoples would outnumber whites three to one in the League assembly, while Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois alleged that the Catholic majority in the League would make it a tool of the Vatican. Other senators engaged in the traditional sport of twisting the lion’s tail, claiming that the British would use the League to send American boys to suppress freedom-fighters in Ireland.
With these and other legislators, Lodge acted as a traditional power broker, agreeing to tolerate or support their objections to the treaty in return for their supporting his. Slowly Lodge worked to knit the treaty opponents into a coherent group that would act together to amend or kill Wilson’s proposal. Hiram Johnson of California came over when Lodge agreed to support Johnson’s objection to Canada, Australia, and other British dominions having an independent vote in the League. At the same time, Lodge conducted delicate negotiations with Senator Porter McCumber, one of the mildest reservationists on the treaty, to find some common ground for an amendment to Article 10—Wilson’s Covenant.
The League’s opponents needed time to organize their coalition in the Senate and to convey their message to the general public. Lodge used parliamentary maneuvers to secure that time, first by tying up the Foreign Relations Committee with a two-week, word-for-word reading of the entire 268-page treaty, and then by inviting every conceivable opponent of the pact to testify at length against it. Lodge’s delaying tactics, however, did not redound exclusively to his side’s advantage. Wilson was also able to use the extra time to round up votes, for he too was pursuing a legislative strategy.
Soon after the President returned from Europe, several of his advisors suggested that he immediately tour the country to arouse further public support for the League. Other political insiders, however, most notably Herman Kohlsaat and Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, calculated that Wilson could do more good by staying in Washington to deal directly with the Senate. He heeded the advice of the latter; for six weeks he talked with senators individually and in small groups, wrote private letters to wavering Republicans, and submitted evidence—although not as much as Lodge requested—to the Foreign Relations Committee. One historian concludes that Wilson’s “approach to senators was flexible, not dogmatic and doctrinaire, not rigid and unbending.” The President answered questions and expounded on the League Covenant, but he also listened to the senators’ reservations and weighed their advice. Both Democrats and Republicans informed him that, despite the compromises that Wilson had made in Paris, the treaty would not gain the support of two-thirds of the Senate as it stood. Finding himself in a “perplexed and somewhat distressing situation,” the President nonetheless resolved to compromise once more in order to achieve his main goal of leading the United States into the League.
The key to Wilson’s strategy of conciliation lay with a small group of Republican senators, led by Kellogg, who had proposed a set of four moderate revisions to the treaty. If Wilson and Kellogg could rally a large enough coalition around those reservations, which were mainly interpretive in nature, they could beat Lodge at his own game. The contest settled into a battle of parliamentary tactics. Wilson persuaded Kellogg to submit his interpretive reservations as a separate resolution, requiring a two-thirds majority for passage, to be considered at the same time as the treaty itself. As Wilson explained the plan to his supporters, a coalition strong enough to pass Kellogg’s resolution would be strong enough to pass the treaty. By accepting Kellogg’s compromise, Wilson hoped to maneuver the Republican moderates into voting for the League.
Lodge recognized at once that Wilson’s tactics threatened his own efforts at coalition-building. The senator insisted that reservations to the treaty had to be submitted as amendments to the text itself, to be approved or rejected by a simple majority vote. Lodge could rally a potential majority behind his grab-bag of amendments, but not a two-thirds majority. The parliamentary arithmetic was plain: if Wilson won on the procedural question of what form reservations should take, the moderate Republicans would probably rally around Kellogg’s resolution as the best possible compromise and the treaty would pass substantially as Wilson wanted it.
The real climax of the legislative battle, therefore, came on August 20 when Democratic Senator Key Pittman moved that reservations to the treaty be passed in a contemporaneous resolution. Lodge met the challenge head-on, appealing to his fellow Republicans to stand together as a majority and thus retain control over consideration of the treaty. Faced with the prospect of dividing their party to the ultimate advantage of a Democratic President, most of the moderate Republicans sided with Lodge and the irreconcilables on the procedural question. Pittman was forced to delay his motion for a week while Wilson’s allies sought in vain to rally the mild reservationists back to their side. Finally, on August 27, the President conceded defeat in his tactical struggle with Lodge.
So Lodge had won—in the Senate. He had won because he had carried out one of the most brilliant feats of transactional leadership in the Senate’s history. He had controlled both his Senate majority and his committee with consummate skill. When a senator threatened to drift off the reservation, Lodge spared no pains to persuade the right man to get in touch with the right politicians who could bring the man back into the fold. Day after day he brokered and traded with both the reservationists and the anti-League extremists in his own party. He played the game like a chess master, arraying his men, calculating his tactics, exploiting time, coldly analyzing his foe’s moves, keeping his queen and his king—his committee chairmanship and his majority leadership—intact and in command.
Wilson too played a strong game in the Senate, mustering all his presidential and personal influence, using face-to-face persuasion, pulling back when need be, always holding his Senate Democrats in line. But the Senate was Lodge’s chessboard, not his. It was Lodge’s two-thirds rule for ratifying treaties, Lodge’s majority rule for amending treaties, not his.
Wilson’s strength lay in a much wider field, the national electorate. Lodge, to be sure, had not neglected this field: several hundred thousand copies of his key Senate speech were sent to his Senate friends for grassroots distribution; anti-League propaganda organs were busy; Lodge turned to Irish and other ethnic groups for support. But Wilson would transcend all this. By appealing to the nation he could transform the very ground on which the battle was being fought—and transform global politics in the process.
On the same day that he conceded Senate defeat to Lodge, the President announced his intention of appealing to the country.
On the evening of September 3, the presidential special rolled out of Washington’s Union Station. The engine drew only seven cars: quarters for the servants, reporters, Secret Service men, and the train crew that accompanied Wilson; a dining car; and, last in line, the President’s blue-painted private coach, the Mayflower. As they sat together in the lounge of the final car, Wilson’s three chosen companions for the journey—his wife Edith, his devoted secretary Joseph Tumulty, and the uneasy doctor Cary Grayson—eyed the President anxiously.
Wilson had never seemed to recover fully from his bout of influenza in Paris. For weeks he had suffered daily from mind-numbing headaches. The strain of his constant negotiations with the Senate showed in every line on his face, every irritable word and clipped gesture. Grayson, familiar with Wilson’s history of periodic physical breakdowns under stress, was vehemently opposed to the trip. But the President was determined to make his appeal to the country, to circumvent by force of eloquence and will the constitutional impasse that threatened to nullify his diplomatic craftsmanship. He believed that American leaders, like British parliamentarians, should “take their case to the people.”
When the train arrived next morning in Columbus, Ohio, the President seemed to brighten somewhat. The cheering crowds, though not as large or as reverential as those in Europe, were plainly a tonic to him. He opened his first speech of the tour with words of relief: “I have long chafed at confinement in Washington and I have wanted to report to you and other citizens of the United States.”
Public speaking as the enunciation of moral principles in clear ringing terms was Wilson’s first love, his greatest political asset. As the audiences responded to his verbal magic, some of Wilson’s frustration at the near-checkmate in the Senate began to ease away. He reached out to touch the issue closest to the hearts of his listeners. If the treaty could be passed, he declared with a beat of his hands, then “men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again!” He also reached upward, to the high ideals that were the staple of his political philosophy. “America was not founded to make money,” he told businessmen in St. Louis, “it was founded to lead the world on the way to liberty.”
The swing around the country was not destined to be a triumphant march of idealism, however. The President’s visits triggered opposition as well as applause. In Missouri, a minister countered Wilson by denouncing the League as a Wall Street plot. A Milwaukee socialist labeled the President’s plan a “capitalist scheme” to bring “more wars and more armaments.”
Lodge, meanwhile, was not idle. Although he remained firmly committed to his legislative strategy, he did dispatch several of his allies from among the irreconcilables to counter Wilson in the battle for public opinion. Hiram Johnson arrived in the Midwest shortly after Wilson left and brought an anti-League rally to its feet with charges that England hoped to use the international pact to send a hundred thousand American soldiers to fight in Constantinople. James Reed stumped New England, where doubts about the League and suspicions of Britain were most concentrated. Reed played to the hilt his assigned role of twisting the lion’s tail; “the bloody footprints of John Bull,” he exclaimed in speech after speech on the treaty, were “all over the dastardly document.” But it was back in Washington that Lodge landed the most telling blow, against both the League and against Wilson personally. The senator summoned William Bullitt, still smarting over what he regarded as Wilson’s betrayal of the peace mission to Russia, to testify about Secretary of State Lansing’s true attitude toward the treaty. Bullitt told the Foreign Relations Committee that Lansing had been less than candid in publicly stating his support for the treaty, that privately the Secretary believed the League was “entirely useless” and should “unquestionably be defeated.” When quizzed by the press, Lansing refused to deny that he had made such remarks to Bullitt.
The rising echoes of opposition that pursued Wilson denied him the release he had sought in the speaking tour. As the special moved westward, the President telescoped his schedule of speeches, canceled the days that had been set aside for rest, harangued crowds at every whistle-stop from the rear platform of his train. His headaches and nausea grew worse. Grayson feared that Wilson was trying to kill himself.
As the strain mounted, Wilson strove to answer the attacks on the treaty point by point. The people were being “deliberately misled,” he charged in Oakland, especially about the plan for collective security. In Reno and elsewhere, he laid out the rationale behind Article 10, the League Covenant that he himself had composed.
“Article 10 is the heart of the enterprise. Article 10 is the test of the honor and courage and endurance of the world. Article 10 says that every member of the League, and that means every fighting power in the world … solemnly engages to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other members of the League. If you do that, you have absolutely stopped ambitious and aggressive war….”
The pressure on Wilson drove him again and again to an emotional prophecy: “I have it in my heart that if we do not do this great thing now, every woman ought to weep because of the child in her arms. If she has a boy at her breast, she may be sure that when he comes to manhood this terrible task will have to be done once more. Everywhere we go, the train, when it stops, is surrounded with little children, and I look at them almost with tears in my eyes, because I feel my mission is to save them. These glad youngsters with flags in their hands—I pray God that they may never have to carry that flag upon the battlefield.”
The campaigner was fighting his heart out on his own battlefield. On September 25, as the train was pulling out of Pueblo, Colorado, the first premonitory stroke hit the President, temporarily leaving his whole left side numb and practically useless. Wilson pleaded for a chance to continue the journey, to show Lodge and the others that he was not a quitter, but Grayson rallied Tumulty and Edith to dissuade him. The train sped back to Washington, where Wilson suffered an even more massive stroke on the night of October 1. For the next weeks he wavered on the edge of death. By crusading for the League, Wilson had indeed nearly thrown his own life away—yet he had not succeeded in changing a single vote in the Senate.
Wilson lay imprisoned in his White House sickroom for more than two months after his strokes. His left side was paralyzed, his speech blurred, his vision drastically reduced. Cutting the President off from visitors, Grayson and Mrs. Wilson concealed from the country the seriousness of his condition. With the help of Tumulty and the White House staff, they handled the routine business of the government until Wilson insisted he was well enough to work. He was barely able to receive Senator Hitchcock, the Democratic floor leader, for a few brief consultations as the final vote on the treaty drew near.
The debate over the treaty culminated on November 19, when the Senate finally voted on the package of fourteen amendments Lodge had assembled. Among them was the reservation Lodge himself had composed to delete Article 10, the League’s collective security pact: “The United States assumes no obligation to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country or to interfere in controversies between nations,” except when Congress, in each individual case, agreed to do so. Wilson had always opposed Lodge’s attack on Article 10. From his sickbed, just two days before the final vote, he told Hitchcock that it was “a nullification of the Treaty and utterly impossible,” the moral equivalent of South Carolina’s nullifying ordinances of the 1830s. “That cuts the heart out of the Treaty; I could not stand for those changes for a moment.” By letter Wilson instructed the Senate Democrats to vote against the treaty as amended by Lodge.
In the Senate, three factions squared off for the showdown. The Democrats and the irreconcilables voted down Lodge’s reservations by 39 to 55; then the Republican moderates joined the irreconcilables to defeat Wilson’s unamended treaty by 38 to 53. On the surface it was a straight party vote. Only four Democrats supported Lodge’s final bill, and only one Republican backed Wilson’s. In fact, however, it had taken Lodge months of adroit maneuvering to bring about this ultimate result. The Treaty of Versailles was dead, and it was Wilson’s Democrats who were forced to administer the final blow.
For decades scholars have asked why Wilson allowed the treaty to go down in defeat, why he did not just swallow hard and accept the Lodge reservations as one more necessary concession. One doctor who has done an exhaustive analysis of Wilson’s medical and emotional history maintains that the massive stroke he suffered in the fall of 1919 was the decisive factor in the situation. “It is almost certain,” writes Edwin A. Weinstein, “that had Wilson not been so afflicted, his political skills and his facility with language would have bridged the gap” between the Democrats and the Republican reservationists. Weinstein notes that Wilson’s judgment was clouded by “cerebral dysfunction” in the wake of the stroke, and that his access to information necessary for rational political calculation was being severely limited by his wife and physician. As recently as February 1919, Wilson had shown himself to be an able compromiser; the change, Weinstein concludes, must have stemmed from the President’s physical collapse.
This analysis assumes that the Republican moderates were still amenable to compromise as the final vote approached. In fact, however, Wilson had already tried to conciliate the reservationists but had lost their support by the end of August; hence the swing around the country. Moreover, Wilson did make one more stab at compromise from his sickbed. His instructions to the Senate Democrats focused on the key Lodge reservation to Article 10. One could conclude that the other reservations were negotiable as long as the attack on the League’s covenant of collective security was deleted. Lodge, however, had by November woven too tight a legislative coalition for Wilson to sunder. None of the reservationists dared to desert Lodge’s amendment lest they see their own pet changes also struck down. Thus Wilson’s famous remark to Hitchcock, that it was up to Lodge to make a move toward compromise, was reasoned political analysis rather than the petulance of a sick man.
The peculiarities of Wilson’s character were well known during his lifetime and have been subjected to endless analysis since. That Wilson’s self-esteem was damaged in his childhood, with important consequences for his adult behavior, has been commonly accepted by scholars. It still is legitimate to ask, however, whether Wilson was as much the prisoner of those psychological problems as some authors have made him out to be. Time and again in his political career, Wilson in fact was able to transcend his personal limitations. Certainly in the process of drafting and defending the Treaty of Versailles the President made repeated, skillful concessions in order to preserve the essence of his vision of a world parliament for peace. Even when paralyzed and nearly blind, he was able to lead the fight for the League from his darkened sickroom.
Wilson’s mistakes in the League fight—if mistakes they were—seemed to stem more from intellectual strategy than from mental illness. Throughout his life, Wilson held as his leadership ideal the minister, the teacher, the orator. In politics he sought to practice the arts of persuasion and inspiration, to some neglect of the structural, transactional aspects of party politics. He seemed, to both friend and foe, to care little for the gritty tasks of government beyond his own agenda for reform. Also, Wilson’s focus on inspirational leadership caused him to miss opportunities for tactical alliances—such as with the League to Enforce Peace—that could have promoted the very causes he espoused. One scholar detects in Wilson the self-styled transforming leader an “egocentricity,” a “desire for glory,” that marred his political career. Wilson could write eloquently about Cabinet government, but too often his unwillingness to share credit for accomplishments prevented him from exercising true collective leadership.
In the battle for the treaty, however, policy and not personality was the crucial factor. Wilson finally would compromise no further because the League—with a binding American commitment to it—was the irreducible core of his program. He seemed willing to accept almost anything else as long as he could preserve his plan for collective security, but that was precisely the one thing Lodge was unwilling to grant him. If the League fight is compared to the famed graduate-school controversy at Princeton, in which Wilson became locked in a bitter personal quarrel with Dean Andrew West, we then see a dramatic and ironic reversal of Wilson’s role. In the dispute at Princeton, Wilson was unwilling to accept any of the compromises West offered, whereas in the treaty fight it was Wilson who made concession after concession, only to be rebuffed by the Republicans.
Ultimately, Wilson’s League was not killed by him, by the Senate Democrats who voted as Wilson instructed them, by the irreconcilables, or even by Lodge. It was thwarted by a political system that chopped up Wilson’s idealism, diluted public sentiment for his cause, atomized his efforts for reform. Lodge, it is true, manipulated that system brilliantly, but he had only inherited it. In the struggle over the Treaty of Versailles, the American system of checks and balances worked as the Founding Fathers intended that it should. The President was unable to bring about a radical alteration in American foreign policy through a simple vote of the Senate. Wilson, however, was not about to give up trying. Already, as his tour of the country had presaged, he was looking for another political lever with which to move the nation.
Defeated in the Senate, where a two-thirds vote was required from a body he considered both unrepresentative and oligarchical, and with his direct appeal to the people cut short by illness, Woodrow Wilson looked now to one last alternative—to the presidential electoral college, where an approximate majority of the people would render the final verdict. Early in January 1920 he wrote the Democratic party leadership that he did not accept the action of the Senate as the decision of the nation. “If there is any doubt as to what the people of the country think on this vital matter, the clear and single way out is to submit it for determination at the next election to the voters of the Nation, to give the next election the form of a great and solemn referendum….”
For Wilson, “going to the country” was far more an expression of personal conviction and philosophy than a mere political tactic. His faith in representative democracy, in majority rule, in the ultimate wisdom of the people went to the very core of his being. His ultimate value—individual liberty—could be secure only in a democratic system. While still a Princeton undergraduate he had written that “representative government,” at its highest development, was that form “which best enables a free people to govern themselves.” He admired parliamentary systems—especially the British—where leaders could appeal directly to the people for decision and support. He favored not the “disintegrate ministry” of a checks-and-balances system but strong executive leadership directly linked to the people through political parties. He even proposed that the Constitution be amended so that members of Congress might join the Cabinet without surrendering their seats in House or Senate. He believed that Presidents should if necessary appeal to the voters over the heads of the legislators, as he had done in 1918, and even appeal to peoples of foreign countries over the heads of their leaders, as he had done in Europe as a world leader. By the same token, he felt that leaders who had lost the confidence of the people should resign instantly, as he had planned to do if he had lost to Hughes in 1916.
And now he would stake all on a colossal throw of the electoral dice. Doubters abounded even in his official family. How could treaty ratification be made the single issue in an election involving many questions? Lansing asked in his private diary. How could the people render a decision on several grades of League reservations, “interpretive, slightly modifying, radical, and nullifying?” The whole idea of obtaining a popular judgment by election or referendum was “absurd and utterly unworkable.”
1920 was hardly shaping up as a year for isolating and testing even a transcendent issue like the League. The end of the war seemed to bring not peace but heightened social tensions. It was a time of race riots—in Chicago, Gary, Omaha, even Washington itself; of radical and revolutionary unrest in the streets of New York and other metropolises; of a rash of labor disputes; of a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; of food shortages and price rises; of thousands of ex-servicemen searching for jobs; of “red hunts,” by Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, culminating in the arrest of several thousand suspected radicals in New York on New Year’s Day, 1920. The world prospect seemed much worse. “Europe is in the throes of great changes,” wrote socialist Seymour Stedman, “class wars, nationalistic wars, revolutions, repudiation of debts, starvation, revenge, subjugation, outbursts of the oppressed, strikes, the fall of kings and cabinets; and Asia is shaking as she stretches to arise.” Everywhere recession, radicalism, repression, revolt seemed to herald a new age of the Four Horsemen.
And who would carry the League issue to the country? As Wilson looked over the field of Democratic presidential aspirants, he could see little to inspire hope. Palmer he had had to restrain, urging him, “Do not let the country see red.” The trouble was, the country already had. Then there was McAdoo, the President’s son-in-law, brilliant but not a veteran of the hustings. Out in the hinterland, one could dimly perceive the figure of James Cox, an Ohio newspaper editor, and even of William Jennings Bryan. Impossible! Who but the President himself could go to the people, could fight for vindication? They had never failed him when he was the nominee.
The idea of Woodrow Wilson as a third-term candidate seemed incredible, shocking, even to persons in Wilson’s entourage—indeed, most of all to them, for they saw him close up, while the public hardly knew of his condition. Months after his stroke, Wilson could walk only by using a cane and someone’s helping arm, and by dragging his left leg forward. Still unable to work more than a few hours a day, he looked gaunt and old, his white hair thin and wispy above the cavernous face, his voice often weak and faltering, his left arm still dangling at his side. Mrs. Wilson no longer isolated him, and he was meeting with his aides and Cabinet, but only irregularly. Visitors were still shocked by the inert, reclining figure; they remembered the man who had always leaned forward as though tensed for a footrace. But the President was slowly learning to walk again—and if he could walk, why could he not run?
In the spring of 1920, the Republicans appeared to be as united and resolute as the Democrats seemed divided and leaderless. The Grand Old Party could blame all the ills of the nation, if not of Europe, on the Wilson Democracy. It could benefit from the tides of postwar reaction and race and ethnic hostility sweeping the nation. It had a simple goal—to eradicate Wilsonism root and branch. It could boast of a galaxy of leaders—seasoned national campaigners like Taft and Hughes, Senate gladiators like Lodge and Hiram Johnson, favorite sons like Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts and reform governor Frank Lowden of Illinois, Old Guard politicos in Senate and House, even a military hero, the TR protégé and Rough Rider General Leonard Wood, who had been kept out of the fighting in France, it was said, precisely because Wilson still hated Roosevelt men.
The GOP was divided, however, between its old presidential wing and its congressional leadership entrenched in the committee system on Capitol Hill—between the moderately liberal, internationalist party headed or symbolized by Abraham Lincoln, TR, Taft, and Hughes, and the more conservative, “unilateralist” party headed by Lodge and his fellow reservationists. Each party was bottomed in its own voting constituency, entrenched in its own governmental structures, inspired by its own memories, principles, and heroes. While the Democracy also embraced two leadership structures, its congressional party had been overshadowed by Wilson’s driving presidential leadership. The presidential parties usually dominated presidential elections—but 1920 loomed as an exceptional year in which the militant, anti-League congressional Republicans might hold unprecedented influence over the Republican nomination.
Already some party leaders were counseling compromise between the Taft-Hughes leadership and the Senate Old Guard, but most of the potential nominees seemed to be lined up with one side or the other. Could a compromise candidate be found who was not a cipher? Some wondered if Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding would fill the bill. The Ohio senator had always been a party man—as a most partisan editor of the Marion Star, as an Ohio politico and officeholder, and as a conciliator who yet in 1912 had stuck with the party nominee, Taft, against the usurper back from Africa. Elected to the Senate in 1914, in Ohio’s first experience with the statewide direct primary and the direct election of senators, he had served a term distinguished mainly by his ability to win friends in all Republican factions.
But it was—it would always be—too easy to caricature Harding, as a mere glad-hander, an easygoing, fun-loving, poker-playing politician, a small-town man with a small-town mind and outlook. Although brought up in a severe and pious home—or perhaps because of it—he had a reputation as an occasional cutup, hard drinker, womanizer. He had no convictions, it was said, no set of principles, no quality of leadership. His mind, somebody would quip, was like stellar space—a huge void filled with a few wandering clichés. At least he had the becoming virtue of modesty. He did not, he wrote a friend, “possess the elements of leadership or the widespread acquaintances” essential to the “ideal leadership of our Party in 1920.”
Such was the basis of the legends that would sprout about Harding—that he did not want to be nominated for President, that he made no effort for the nomination, that he was the pawn of corporate interests seeking power, that he was a country yokel, a dumbbell, a spread-eagle orator who liked to “bloviate,” doze in his office, or relax around the poker table with his Ohio cronies.
In fact Harding had convinced himself by the summer of 1920 that he wanted to be President, that he would at least be better than the other hopefuls, and that he must work for it. While his friend Harry Daugherty made the rounds asking otherwise committed delegates to make Harding their second or third choice at the convention, he campaigned in several states. Harding was barely able to stave off an invasion by Leonard Wood in the Ohio primary, however, and he was shellacked in Indiana. By the time the first ballot was held at the broiling June convention in Chicago, Harding was far behind the front-runners, Wood, Lowden, and Johnson.
What happened in Chicago that June was simple in essence and complex in mechanics. The three front-runners deadlocked in ballot after ballot, while the steaming delegates, sometimes politicking in temperatures over 100 degrees, grew more and more weary and impatient. Late in the week, a group of senators who considered themselves the real leaders of the party gathered at the Blackstone Hotel to see if they could resolve the stalemate. It looked like a Senate cabal—Reed Smoot of Utah was there, and James Watson of Indiana, Medill McCormick of Illinois, Henry Cabot Lodge and former senators Crane and Weeks of Massachusetts. But this was no cabal, with an agreed-on strategy. All through the evening politicians drifted in and out of the smoke-filled Blackstone suite, pouring themselves drinks, sending up small trial balloons, bickering and dickering. Someone said that the room seemed like the Senate in miniature, with Lodge sitting back in his chair and biting off brief comments, while the others indulged in what one senator, stalking off, called a “footless conversation.”
The senators continued to ruffle through possible dark horses “like a deck of soiled cards,” in Francis Russell’s words, but however many times “the political cards were shuffled and dealt and discarded, somehow the Harding card always remained.” Senators who knew Harding had little respect for his intellect, his convictions, or his qualities of leadership. But he came from a pivotal and symbolically important state, he was the right age at fifty-five, he looked like a President, and above all he was a party man who would follow the Republican senators’ lead on policy, especially on the League. He seemed perfectly to fill the party slot. Still, the few stalwarts remaining in the Blackstone suite came to no final conclusion—essentially they agreed to give Harding a run for his money for a few ballots the next day, and if the Ohioan did not click with the delegates, to try some other compromise possibility.
That evening Harding was not sitting in a hotel room awaiting the call to greatness. He was roaming the Blackstone corridors, unshaven, unkempt, liquored up a bit, buttonholing any man he could meet. Gradually word leaked out to reporters—and to Harding—that he was the group’s trial horse. Next day, many of the senators in the “cabal” stuck to their earlier commitments over several ballots. But the delegates, eager to go home, knew that Harding now more than ever was “available.” Slowly they edged toward him, as Daugherty scurried around the convention floor calling in those second-chance promises, while the fading front-runners desperately tried to patch together a stop-Harding coalition. No one would run as his rival’s running mate. On the tenth ballot the man from Marion went over the top amid a burst of enthusiasm and relief.
Already a legend was sprouting—that a cabal of determined, like-minded senators had gathered at the Blackstone with the single determination to make an obscure colleague their President, and their patsy. Weeks before the convention Daugherty, in a euphoric moment, had predicted to two reporters, in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, that “about eleven minutes after two o’clock on Friday morning of the convention, when fifteen or twenty men, bleary-eyed and perspiring profusely from the heat, are sitting around a table … at that decisive time the friends of Senator Harding can suggest him and can afford to abide by the result.” He might suggest Harding himself, Daugherty added brightly. And now the prophecy was resurrected, even though Daugherty had not attended the smoke-filled proceedings and the cabal had been far more a cloudiness than a conspiracy.
The truth was simpler and more significant—that the anti-League, conservative Republicans at the convention had wrested control from the old presidential leadership; that its leaders—primarily senators but including also national party leaders and local party bosses—had rummaged through their “soiled cards” and found their man; and that the actions of the first-cadre leaders in smoke-filled rooms had largely turned on their estimates of how hundreds of second- and third-cadre leaders on the floor of the stink-filled convention would react. Ultimately, Harding was the delegates’ choice—a party choice. And if anyone doubted the capacity of the rank-and-file delegates to work their will, they showed their power by brushing aside establishment candidates for Vice-President and nominating that law-and-order man from Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, as Harding’s running mate.
So, as the whole national party rallied behind Harding in its common hatred of Wilsonism, the Ohio senator sallied forth in his front-porch campaign as a party man, in the McKinley tradition. And it was as a party man that he harmonized the wings of his party, stuck to the party platform, and equated Republicanism with Americanism. The League continued to be the overriding issue. Every time Harding made a strong anti-League statement, he heard from internationalists like Herbert Hoover. When he softened his stand, Johnson and Borah descended on him like furies. Teetering back and forth, concealing his position behind clouds of platitudes, Harding skillfully held his party together until election day.
The Democrats too sought a candidate who could unite the party—and also exploit the Wilson heritage without being overburdened by it. For thirty-eight ballots McAdoo, Cox, and Palmer waged a stand-off battle at the party’s convention in San Francisco, until Palmer pulled out, Cox picked up a majority of his delegates, and the Ohio Democrat won by acclamation on the forty-fourth ballot. Refusing to desert their leader languishing in the White House, the party paid fulsome tribute to Wilson in their platform, endorsed his League, and reaffirmed Wilson’s New Freedom. But they would not renominate the President, who waited at the White House through ballot after ballot, hoping that the party might still turn to him. When word came to the President of Cox’s nomination Wilson burst into a stream of profanities and obscenities, according to his valet. The President was hardly mollified by the choice for Vice-President of young Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had something of a reputation in Washington for being independent and a bit bumptious, but the delegates liked him for his youth and vigor—especially after his spirited seconding speech for Al Smith for President, during which FDR said that the Democrats’ choice would not be made in a hotel room at two in the morning—and above all they loved him for his last name.
So Cox and Roosevelt, backed by a dispirited party, sallied forth on their quest like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and with about as much objective chance of success. Almost quixotically—at least in the minds of hardened Democratic politicos—they resolved that they would campaign for Wilson’s League. The two men visited the White House.
“Mr. President,” Cox said, “I have always admired the fight you made for the League.”
“Mr. Cox,” said Wilson, “that fight can still be won.”
After a few moments Cox went on: “Mr. President, we are going to be a million per cent with you and your Administration, and that means the League of Nations.”
“I am very grateful,” the President said in a faltering voice. “I am very grateful.”
Cox and Roosevelt lived up to their promise, campaigning vigorously throughout the nation. Cox backslid only slightly on the League, saying that he would accept a reservation to Article 10 stating that the United States would not send its armed forces into action unless authorized by Congress in each case. But it was too late for compromise. Harding swept all the states outside the South, many of the far-northern states by two-to-one and three-to-one majorities. The omen of 1916 had been realized: the Democrats had been forced back on their shrunken base. And so had the omen of 1918: the Republicans now commanded top-heavy majorities in both House and Senate.
The President’s life had settled down to a routine by the late fall of 1920. Each day he struggled to take a few steps, saw as many visitors as he could, perhaps took a drive. One of his pleasures was almost daily movies in a White House parlor. One day Ray Stannard Baker joined the President, Mrs. Wilson, and one or two others for a film on the President’s first trip to Europe.
The projector clattered and whirred, and suddenly, Baker remembered, “we were in another world; a resplendent world, full of wonderful and glorious events”—President Wilson sailing into Brest amid beflagged ships and soldiers marshaled upon the quay, “smiling upon the bridge, very erect, very tall, lifting his hat to shouting crowds.” The film ground on: Wilson driving down the Champs-Elysées, Wilson crossing the Channel escorted by warships, Wilson riding down from Buckingham Palace with the King of England, “behind noble horses flanked by outriders flying pennants”—always amid bands and flags and shouting crowds.
The film sputtered and ended. The little company sat silent in the darkness for a moment. Then Wilson was helped to his feet. He turned slowly and shuffled out of the room, without a word.