American Experiment (234 page)

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.