Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements Part 9

_Adoption of the Lodge reservations, November 16, 1919._

_Final defeat of the treaty in the Senate, March 20, 1920._

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Edmonston_ February 15, 1921: Mr. Wilson's latest photograph--made at a meeting of the Cabinet]

TWO PICTURES

By Joseph P. Tumulty

_Two pictures are in my mind. First, the Hall of Representatives crowded from floor to gallery with expectant throngs. Presently it is announced that the President of the United States will address Congress. There steps out to the Speaker's desk a straight, vigorous, slender man, active and alert. He is sixty years of age, but he looks not more than forty-five, so lithe of limb, so alert of bearing, so virile. It is Woodrow Wilson reading his great war message. The other picture is only three and a half years later.

There is a parade of Veterans of the Great War. They are to be reviewed by the President on the east terrace of the White House.

In a chair sits a man, your President, broken in health, but still alert in mind. His hair is white, his shoulders bowed, his figure bent. He is sixty-three years old, but he looks older. It is Woodrow Wilson. Presently, in the procession there appears an ambulance laden with wounded soldiers, the maimed, the halt and the blind. As they pa.s.s they salute, slowly reverently. The President's right hand goes up in answering salute. I glanced at him. There were tears in his eyes. The wounded is greeting the wounded; those in the ambulance, he in the chair, are alike, casualties of the Great War._

_From address by Joseph P. Tumulty_ _Thursday, Oct. 28, 1920_

When the armistice was signed one of the most eminent of living British statesmen gave it as his opinion that the war had lasted two years too long, and that the task of salvaging an enduring peace from the wreck had become well-nigh insuperable. It will always be one of the fascinating riddles of history to guess what the result would have been if Mr. Wilson's final proposals for mediation had been accepted. The United States would not have entered the war, and a less violent readjustment of the internal affairs of Europe would probably have resulted. There would have been no Bolshevist revolution in Russia and no economic collapse of Europe. Nor is it certain that most of the really enduring benefits of the Treaty of Versailles could not have been as well obtained by negotiation as they were finally obtained through a military victory which cost a price that still staggers humanity.

Be that as it may, the German Government, now fighting to maintain the dynasty and the Junker domination, took the issue out of Mr. Wilson's hands. Ten days after his "peace without victory" address the German autocracy put into effect its cherished programme of ruthless submarine warfare. The only possible answer on the part of the United States was the dismissal of Count von Bernstorff the German Amba.s.sador, and from that time war between the United States and Germany was only a matter of days. But Mr. Wilson had achieved the great purpose that he had formulated two years before. He had been balked in his efforts at mediation, but he had united the American people on the issues of the conflict. He had demonstrated to them that their Government had exerted every honorable means to avoid war and that its hands were clean. There was no uncertainty in their own minds that the responsibility for the war rested solely on Germany, and Mr. Wilson now purposed to write the terms of peace with the sword.

_A Call to a Crusade_

Mr. Wilson's War Address on the night of April 2, 1917, was the most dramatic event that the National Capitol had ever known. In the presence of both branches of Congress, of the Supreme Court, of the Cabinet and of the Diplomatic Corps, Mr. Wilson summoned the American people not to a war but to a crusade in words that instantaneously captivated the imagination of the Nation:

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. G.o.d helping her, she can do no other.

This was not Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual aristocrat, who was speaking, but Woodrow Wilson, the fervent democrat, proclaiming a new declaration of independence to the embattled peoples.

No sooner had Congress declared war than Mr. Wilson proceeded to mobilize all the resources of the Nation and throw them into the conflict. This war was different from any other war in which the United States had ever engaged, not only by reason of its magnitude but by reason of the necessity for coordinating American military plans with the military plans of the Allies. The Allies were not quite agreed as to what they desired of the United States, aside from unlimited financial a.s.sistance, and the solution of the general problem depended more or less on the trend of events.

The test of any war policy is its success, and it is a waste of time to enter into a vindication of the manner in which the Wilson Administration made war, or to trouble about the accusations of waste and extravagance, as if war were an economic process which could be carried on prudently and frugally. The historian is not likely to devote serious attention to the partisan accusations relating to Mr.

Wilson's conduct of the war, but he will find it interesting to record the manner in which the President brought his historical knowledge to bear in shaping the war policies of the country.

The voluntary system and the draft system had both been discredited in the Civil War, so Mr. Wilson demanded a Selective-Service Act under which the country could raise 10,000,000 troops, if 10,000,000 troops were needed, without deranging its essential industries. It had taken Mr. Lincoln three years to find a General whom he could intrust with the command of the Union armies. Mr. Wilson picked his Commander in Chief before he went to war and then gave to Gen. Pers.h.i.+ng the same kind of ungrudging support that Mr. Lincoln gave to Gen. Grant. The Civil War had been financed by greenbacks and bond issues peddled by bankers. Mr. Wilson called on the American people to finance their own war, and they unhesitatingly responded. In the war with Spain the commissary system had broken down completely owing to the antiquated methods that were employed. No other army in time of war was ever so well fed or so well cared for as that of the United States in the conflict with Germany.

_Wilson as a War President_

Mistakes there were in plenty, both in methods and in the choice of men, and errors of judgment and the shortcomings that always result from a lack of experience, but the impartial verdict of history must be that when everything is set forth on the debit side of the balance sheet which can be set forth Mr. Wilson remains the most vigorous of all the war Presidents. Yet it is also true that history will concern itself far less with Mr. Wilson as a war President than with Mr. Wilson as a peace-making President. It is around him as a peace-making President that all the pa.s.sions and prejudices and disappointments of the world still rage.

Mr. Wilson in his "peace without victory" address to the Senate previous to the entrance of the United States into the war had sketched a general plan of a cooperative peace. "I am proposing, as it were," he said, "that the nations with one accord should adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world." He returned to the subject again in his War Address, in which he defined the principles for which the United States was to fight and the principles on which an enduring peace could be made. The time came when it was necessary to be still more specific.

In the winter of 1918 the morale of the Allies was at its lowest ebb.

Russia had pa.s.sed into the hands of the Bolsheviki and was preparing to make a separate peace with Germany. There was widespread discontent in Italy, and everywhere in Europe soldiers and civilians were asking one another what they were really fighting for. On January 8 Mr. Wilson went before Congress and delivered the address which contained the Fourteen Points of peace, a message which was greeted both in the United States and in Europe as a veritable Magna Charta of the nations.

Mr. Wilson had again become the spokesman of the aspirations of mankind, and from the moment that this address was delivered the thrones of the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs ceased to be stable.

Ten months later they were to crumble and collapse. Before the armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, Mr. Wilson had overthrown the doctrine of Divine right in Europe. The Hapsburgs ran away. The Kaiser was compelled to abdicate and take refuge in exile, justifying his flight by the explanation that Wilson would not make peace with Germany while a Hohenzollern was on the throne. This was the climax of Mr.

Wilson's power and influence and, strangely enough, it was the dawn of his own day of disaster.

For nearly six years Mr. Wilson had manipulated the Government of the United States with a skill that was almost uncanny. He had turned himself from a minority President into a majority President. He had so deftly outmanoeuvred all his opponents in Congress and out of Congress that they had nothing with which to console themselves except their intensive hatred of the man and all that pertained to him. Then at the very summit of his career he made his first fatal blunder.

Every President in the off-year election urges the election of a Congress of his own party. That is part of the routine of politics, and during the campaign of 1918 Mr. Wilson's advisers urged him to follow the precedent. What they forgot and he forgot was that it was no time for partisan precedents, and he allowed his distrust of the Republican leaders in Congress to sweep him into an inexcusable error that he, of all men, should have avoided. The Sixty-fifth Congress was anything but popular. The Western farmers were aggrieved because the price of wheat had been regulated and the price of cotton had not. The East was greatly dissatisfied with the war taxes, which it regarded as an unfair discrimination, and it remembered Mr. Kitchin's boast that the North wanted the war and the North would have to pay for it. There was general complaint from business interests against the Southern Democratic control of the legislative department, and all this sentiment instantly crystallized when the President asked for another Democratic Congress. Republicans who were loyally supporting the Administration in all its war activities were justly incensed that a party issue had been raised. A Republican Congress was elected and by inference the President sustained a personal defeat.

Misfortunes did not come singly in Mr. Wilson's case. Following the mistake of appealing for the election of a Democratic Congress he made an equally serious mistake in the selection of his Peace Commission.

To anybody who knows Mr. Wilson, who knows Mr. Lloyd George, who knows Mr. Clemenceau, nothing could be sillier than the chapters of Keynes and Dillon in which they undertake to picture the President's unfitness to cope with the European masters of diplomacy. Mr. Wilson for years had been playing with European masters of diplomacy as a cat plays with a mouse. To a.s.sume that Mr. Wilson was ever deceived by the transparent tactics of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Clemenceau is to a.s.sume the impossible. It would be as easy to conceive of his being tricked and bamboozled by the United States Senate.

_The Peace Commission_

Mr. Wilson needed strong Republican representation on the Peace Commission not to reinforce him in his struggles with his adversaries at Paris but to divide with him the responsibility for a treaty of peace that was doomed in advance to be a disappointment. Although the popular sentiment of Europe was almost pa.s.sionate in its advocacy of President Wilson's peace program, all the special interests that were seeking to capitalize the peace for their own advantage or profit were actively at work and were beginning to swing all the influence that they could command on their various Governments. It was inevitable from the outset that Mr. Wilson could never get the peace that he had expected. The treaty was bound to be a series of compromises that would satisfy n.o.body, and when Mr. Wilson a.s.sumed all the responsibility for it in advance he a.s.sumed a responsibility that no stateman who had ever lived could carry alone. Had he taken Mr. Root or Mr. Taft or both of them with him the terms of the Treaty of Versailles might have been no different, but the Senate would have been robbed of the partisan grievance on which it organized the defeat of ratification.

Day after day during the conference Mr. Wilson fought the fight for a peace that represented the liberal thought of the world. Day after day the odds against him lengthened. The contest finally resolved itself into a question of whether he should take what he could get or whether he should withdraw from the conference and throw the doors open to chaos. The President made the only decision that he had a moral right to make. He took what he could get, nor are the statesmen with whom he was a.s.sociated altogether to blame because he did not get more. They too had to contend against forces over which they had no control. They were not free agents either, and Mr. s.m.u.ts has summed up the case in two sentences:

It was not the statesmen that failed so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them. The hope, the aspiration, for a new world order of peace and right and justice, however deeply and universally felt, was still only feeble and ineffective in comparison with the dominant national pa.s.sions which found their expression in the peace treaty.

All the pa.s.sions and hatreds bred of four years of merciless warfare, all the insatiable fury for revenge, all the racial ambitions that had been twisted and perverted by centuries of devious diplomacy--these were all gathered around the council table, clamorous in their demand to dictate the terms.

Mr. Wilson surrendered more than he dreamed he was surrendering, but it is not difficult to follow his line of reasoning. The League of Nations was to be a continuing court of equity, sitting in judgment on the peace itself, revising its terms when revision became necessary and possible, slowly readjusting the provisions of the treaty to a calmer and saner state of public mind. Get peace first. Establish the League, and the League would rectify the inevitable mistakes of the treaty.

It is a curious commentary on human nature that when the treaty was completed and the storm of wrath broke, all the rage, all the resentment, all the odium should have fallen on the one man who had struggled week in and week out against the forces of reaction and revenge and had written into the treaty all that it contains which makes for the international advancement of the race.

_Why The Treaty Was Beaten_

Into that record must also go the impressive fact that the Treaty of Versailles was rejected by the United States Senate, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Henry Cabot Lodge, not because of its acknowledged defects and shortcomings, not because it breathed the spirit of a Carthaginian peace in its punitive clauses, but because of its most enlightened provision, the covenant of the League of Nations, which is the one hope of a war-racked world.

When people speak of the tragedy of Mr. Wilson's career they have in mind only the temporary aspects of it--the universal dissatisfaction with the treaty of peace, his physical collapse, his defeat in the Senate and the verdict at the polls in November. They forget that the end of the chapter is not yet written. The League of Nations is a fact, whatever the att.i.tude of the United States may be toward it, and it will live unless the peoples of the earth prove their political incapacity to use it for the promotion of their own welfare. The principle of self-determination will remain as long as men believe in the right of self-government and are willing to die for it. It was Woodrow Wilson who wrote that principle into the law of nations, even though he failed to obtain a universal application of it. Tacitus said of the Catti tribesmen, "Others go to battle; these go to war," and Mr.

Wilson went to war in behalf of the democratic theory of government extended to all the affairs of the nations. That war is not yet won, and the Commander in Chief is crippled by the wounds that he received on the field of action. But the responsibility for the future does not rest with him. It rests with the self-governing peoples for whom he has blazed the trail. All the complicated issues of this t.i.tanic struggle finally reduce themselves to these prophetic words of Maximilian Harden: "Only one conqueror's work will endure--Wilson's thought."

Woodrow Wilson on this morning of the fourth of March can say, in the words of Paul the Apostle to Timothy:

"_For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand._

"_I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith._"

Copyright 1921, New York _World_.

_The Covenant of the League of Nations_

ADOPTED BY THE PLENARY SESSION OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE