The Illusion of Victory (67 page)

Some people have accused Lodge of trying to talk the treaty and the league to death. In fact, the senator had a well-thought-out, conservative
philosophy, rooted in the Constitution. He was determined not to allow Wilson to stampede the country into a hasty approval of the treaty. Lodge acknowledged to several correspondents that if a vote were taken immediately, the treaty and the league would probably win. Only the small liberal minority disapproved the harsh treatment of Germany. The league at first glance seemed a noble idea, part of the idealism that Wilson had invoked to lead the United States into the war.

But Lodge did not think the Senate should vote on something so important based on a hasty first glance. He believed “the most momentous decision that this country has ever been called upon to make” should be based not on “the passions of the moment” but on the “calm second thought” of the American people. That was one among several reasons why the Constitution gave the Senate the right and obligation to advise and consent on any treaty a president made. Elihu Root echoed this view when he said the Senate should not succumb to “ignorant popular sentiment.”
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Senator Lodge and Senator Philander Knox now made major speeches, attacking the treaty and the league. Lodge, as majority leader of the Senate and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was restrained. The Republican senators were divided into four groups: irreconcilables such as Norris and Borah; mild reservationists such as the men Wilson was wooing; strong reservationists, who wanted major amendments to the covenant; and a handful who sided with William Howard Taft and his League to Enforce Peace, who favored ratification of Wilson’s version of the covenant. Lodge was trying to hold his party together, and his speech tried to offend none of these people. Essentially he argued that the covenant was too open-ended. It was committing the American people to international obligations—in particular to fighting wars—they might on second thought not want to fulfill.

Lodge took a firm stand against this vague internationalism.“I can never be anything but an American,” he said.“I must think of the United States first in an arrangement like this.” But he did not mean America should withdraw into isolationism. Far from it. He was “thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails the best hopes of mankind fail with it.”
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Philander Knox was far more scathing. The former secretary of state more than matched Norris in his contempt for the treaty. Knox was the first senator to criticize the vengeful treatment of Germany from the conservative side. He called it “not the treaty but the truce of Versailles.” the senator did not think the treaty was tough enough. The terms goaded Germany to evade them and begin planning for another war but did little to prevent it from getting away with a resurrection. For this Knox blamed Wilson and his Fourteen Points. The senator dismissed the League of Nations as simply an alliance of the victors, which would soon fall apart. He ended by calling for outright rejection of this “hard and cruel peace.” With those words, Knox joined the irreconcilables—not good news for Wilson. The senator’s standing as a foreign policy spokesman equaled and may even have exceeded Henry Cabot Lodge’s status in this wordy arena.
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For those outside the rather exclusive foreign policy club, the debate began to acquire a strange unreality. The covenant of the league and the treaty were published as a 268-page book. But that was hardly the same thing as educating public opinion on the subject. The document was written in legalistic, diplomacy-speak prose that was virtually impenetrable, as the
Peoria (Illinois) Transcript
remarked: “Nobody is competent to discuss the Treaty of Versailles until he has read it and nobody who would take the time to read it would be competent to discuss it.” Presumably because the reader’s brain would be dead.
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Lack of comprehension did not prevent the public passions aroused by the war and the bungled peace conference from flaring violently. The Irish led the way with a ferocious attack on Wilson and the treaty. The Celtic-dominated Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution condemning “the so called Covenant of the League of Nations claim to commit this republic to recognize . . . the title of England to own and rule Ireland.” the Friends of Irish Freedom established an Irish National Bureau in Washington, D.C., which lobbied senators and issued a stream of denunciations of the treaty. Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana went to the White House and implored Wilson to make a statement, declaring that the first order of American business in the League of Nations would be a motion on behalf of Ireland’s freedom. Former president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, offered similar advice. Wilson, by this time a confirmed Irish-hater, did nothing.
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In New York, Wilson’s old enemy, Jeremiah O’Leary, was one of the leading antitreaty voices. O’Leary had been seized in his West Coast hide-away and dragged back to New York for trial in October 1918. He contracted influenza, and the government was forced to postpone his trial until January 1919, when Wilson’s coldness toward Irish independence had largely dissipated Gotham’s enthusiasm for the war. Conducting his own defense, O’Leary portrayed himself as a martyr to Wilsonian vengeance and the pro-British New York press. He even subpoenaed Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the
New York Times
, and subjected him to a ferocious grilling about his supposed British sympathies. Acquitted of all charges, O’Leary went to work organizing an Irish-American speaker’s bureau to assail Wilson and the treaty.
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Italian-Americans, still angry over Fiume, were also making themselves heard. Their newspapers printed a statement Wilson had made in 1902, when he was a conservative Democrat, deploring the immigration “of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy.” The countries of southern Europe, he said, were “disburdening themselves of the more hapless elements of their population.” the Chinese, Wilson had added,“were more to be desired as workmen if not as citizens.” In New York, a young maverick Republican, Fiorello LaGuardia, who had won some modest fame as a pilot in France, switched from supporting the league to damning it in every speech. Soon he was calling for the election of Republican candidates everywhere to show the world that the president was “discredited at home.”
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The rest of the Republican Party was quick to take advantage of this mass disaffection. Senator Lodge issued a statement to his Italian constituents in Massachusetts, comparing their desire for Fiume to the value the Americans had placed on the port of New Orleans in the early 1800s. State legislators with large Italian constituencies passed resolutions calling on Wilson to do or say something to soothe these outraged hyphenates. Senator Lawrence Y. Sherman of Illinois made Italy’s grievance a personal crusade, orating endlessly on Fiume.
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The German-Americans also entered the fray. For the first half of 1919, they had maintained a wary silence. The number of German-language newspapers had dropped from 537 to 278, and their leaders were afraid of triggering a new outburst of hostility from the 100 percent Americans of the National Security League and other patriotic watchdogs. When the peace conference began, their newspapers called on German-Americans to “stand by the president” in his struggle to win a
peace based on the Fourteen Points. They slowly grew disillusioned when Wilson did nothing to lift the food blockade. When they saw the results of Wilson’s personal diplomacy in the final treaty, the German Americans were stunned and outraged. Although they did not hold mass meetings to condemn it, they united, as one historian wrote, “in sullen opposition” to Wilson’s handiwork.
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The alienation of the three largest ethnic blocs in the country encouraged Senator Lodge and his Republican confreres. They allowed the Irish, the Italians, and other hyphenates to air grievances against the treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and gloated over the headlines these witnesses created. Indians and Egyptians also sent spokesmen who condemned English imperialism. A committee of American blacks called for a statement of worldwide racial equality, hoping it might eventually apply to the United States.

The committee also asked members of the American delegation to testify. The first and most damaging witness was Secretary of State Lansing. His problem was how to say something positive about the treaty without revealing how much he detested it. After his first day of laconic testimony, in which he sometimes merely answered yes or no to questions, this troubled man informed his diary that he could have avoided criticism by “a statement of the facts”—but that would have “opened the floodgates of invective against the president.” By facts, Lansing probably meant how little he or any other member of the delegation except Colonel House had been consulted by Wilson.
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Senator Lodge and his allies nonetheless got the drift of Lansing’s evasions. Lodge concluded that the secretary of state knew virtually nothing about how the treaty had been negotiated, which led the senator to conclude that Wilson was “one of the most sinister figures that ever crossed the history of a great country.” there was obviously no moderation in Lodge’s detestation of the president.
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No one knew that Lansing had returned to the United States determined to resign because of the way Wilson had treated him in Paris. But a strange tortured “loyalty,” not to Wilson but to the Democratic Party, kept him on the job. The secretary knew his resignation would reveal the breach
between him and Wilson at the worst possible time. Lansing was also well aware that if the treaty failed to win ratification, the Democrats’ chances of winning the White House in 1920 would sink to nonexistent.

When asked if he thought the Shantung settlement violated the Fourteen Points, Lansing had said yes. This led Lodge to demand from Wilson all the correspondence within the American delegation about this controversial deal. The president dragged his political feet while he and Tumulty decided what not to send. Perhaps the most damaging thing that stayed in the file was a letter from General Bliss, in which he had scathingly denounced the transaction and Japan’s growing desire to dominate Asia.

Finally came a climax of sorts—Wilson agreed to meet in the White House with the Foreign Relations Committee. The three-hour and twenty-five-minute session, which the
New York Times
called “epoch making,” was occasionally brusque to the point of overt hostility, but Wilson kept his temper and answered tough questions with little or no hesitation. He betrayed his inner anxiety only once, when he was asked when he had first learned about the secret treaties that had so complicated the situation in Paris. Wilson replied that he and Secretary of State Lansing had not known about them until they arrived in Europe to begin the peace conference.

Wilson defenders claim this stonewalling is proof of his cumulative brain damage. But his evasiveness is virtually a replica of a big lie Wilson had told ten years earlier in a dispute with Princeton’s trustees before he became a politician. At that time, he claimed never to have seen or read a document which he had signed and approved—and which undermined his claim that his opponents had failed to consult him on a crucial aspect of their quarrel. The brain-damage theorists constantly downplay Wilson’s almost obsessive need to win a public controversy.

Admitting that he had known about the secret treaties long before he went to Paris would have raised questions about Wilson’s statesmanship—particularly his unilateral dismissal of these agreements in the Fourteen Points. If he had known about them, he should have negotiated with the Allies before he issued the Fourteen Points. But Wilson had yielded to his image of himself as a mystic world savior and decided negotiation was unnecessary. He had foolishly assumed Lloyd George and Clemenceau would humbly beg his pardon and jettison the treaties.

The exact opposite had happened, of course. The lie in the session with the senators is another indication of the destructive inner war raging in Wilson’s mind and body over the intimations of political disaster gathering around him. He got no help from insiders such as the now totally disillusioned Walter Lippmann. In the
New Republic
, Lippmann castigated the president as a liar:“Only a dunce could have been ignorant of the secret treaties.” this was not mere rhetorical exaggeration. The treaties had been published in the newspapers when the Bolsheviks revealed them in November 1917 and had been distributed by the antiwar
New York Evening Post
in pamphlet form.
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Wilson’s external war with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee soon focused on Article 10 of the covenant, to which Senator Lodge and his allies objected because it seemingly obliged the United States to fight foreign wars at the behest of the League of Nations. Wilson tried to finesse the argument by claiming it was a moral, not a legal, obligation, but he complicated the matter by loftily insisting that a moral obligation was more binding than a legal one. Thoughtful men such as Elihu Root were unimpressed. In a letter to Lodge, Root called Wilson’s distinction “curious and childlike casuistry.” He also said it was “demoralizing and dishonest.”
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Wilson took an intransigent stand on the question of attaching any serious reservations to the treaty. He claimed this would require renegotiation with the Allies and might endanger the peace. Virtually no one agreed with him on this contention. Democratic as well as Republican senators declared that a majority of their ranks wanted reservations. Wilson remained immovable.

One reason for his obstinacy, now visible to historians, lay behind the scenes throughout this long hot summer. Even before he returned home, Wilson and Tumulty had begun planning a speaking tour that would throw his enemies on the defensive. Colonel House, the alter ego of negotiated compromise, was no longer in the equation. Tumulty, the pugnacious Irish-American who had masterminded Wilson’s first political triumph in New Jersey, was now in charge. He was by no means alone in urging such a tour. Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo liked the idea, as did Assistant Secretary of State Frank Polk and J.P. Morgan banker Thomas Lamont, Wilson’s chief economic adviser in Paris. Wilson’s conversations with individual senators and the Foreign Relations Committee had convinced him that his enemies “wanted not only to defeat the league but to discredit and overthrow” him. He would answer them with his favorite weapon: oratory. He would humble these arrogant Republicans
by arousing the American people to join him in a magnificent crusade that would crown his presidency.
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