Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him Part 27

As we conferred together for the last time before the President left Washington for the other side, I had never seen him look more weary or careworn. It was plain to me who had watched him from day to day since the Armistice, that he felt most keenly the heavy responsibility that now lay upon him of trying to bring permanent peace to the world. He was not unmindful of the criticism that had been heaped upon him by his enemies on the Hill and throughout the country. The only thing that distressed him, however, was the feeling that a portion of the American people were of the opinion that, perhaps, in making the trip to Paris there lay back of it a desire for self-exploitation, or, perhaps, the idea of garnering certain political advantages to himself and his party. If one who held this ungenerous opinion could only have come in contact with this greatly overworked man on the night of our final talk and could understand the handsome, unselfish purpose that really lay behind his mission to France and could know personally how he dreaded the whole business, he would quickly free himself of this opinion. Discussing the object of the trip with me in his usually intimate way, he said: "Well, Tumulty, this trip will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history; but I believe in a Divine Providence. If I did not have faith, I should go crazy. If I thought that the direction of the affairs of this disordered world depended upon our finite intelligence, I should not know how to reason my way to sanity; but it is my faith that no body of men however they concert their power or their influence can defeat this great world enterprise, which after all is the enterprise of Divine mercy, peace and good will."

As he spoke these fateful words, he clearly foresaw the difficulties and dangers and possible tragedy of reaction and intrigue that would soon exert themselves in Paris, perhaps to outwit him and if possible to prevent the consummation of the idea that lay so close to his heart: that of setting up a concert of powers that would make for ever impossible a war such as we had just pa.s.sed through. Indeed, he was ready to risk everything--his own health, his own political fortunes, his place in history, and his very life itself--for the great enterprise of peace.

"This intolerable thing must never happen again," he said.

No one more than Woodrow Wilson appreciated the tragedy of disappointment that might eventually follow out of his efforts for peace, but he was willing to make any sacrifice to attain the end he had so close to his heart.

He realized better than any one the great expectations of the American people. Discussing these expectations with Mr. Creel, who was to accompany him, he said: "It is to America that the whole world turns to-day, not only with its wrongs but with its hopes and grievances. The hungry expect us to feed them, the homeless look to us for shelter, the sick of heart and body depend upon us for cure. All of these expectations have in them the quality of terrible urgency. There must be no delay. It has been so always. People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately. Yet, you know and I know that these ancient wrongs, these present unhappinesses, are not to be remedied in a day or with a wave of the hand. What I seem to see--with all my heart I hope that I am wrong--is a tragedy of disappointment."

The President and I had often discussed the personnel of the Peace Commission before its announcement, and I had taken the liberty of suggesting to the President the name of ex-Secretary of State Elihu Root.

The President appeared to be delighted with this suggestion and asked me to confer with Secretary Lansing in regard to the matter. I conferred with Mr. Lansing, to whom the suggestion, much to my surprise, met with hearty response. At this conference Mr. Lansing said that he and the President were attempting to induce some members of the Supreme Court--I think it was either Mr. Justice Day or Chief Justice White--to make the trip to Paris as one of the Commission; but that they were informed that Chief Justice White was opposed to the selection of a Supreme Court Judge to partic.i.p.ate in any conference not connected with the usual judicial work of the Supreme Court.

After this conference I left for New York, there to remain with my father who lay seriously ill, and when I returned to the White House the President informed me that he and Mr. Lansing had had a further conference with reference to the Root suggestion and that it was about concluded that it would be inadvisable to make Mr. Root a member of the Commission. The President felt that it would be unwise to take Mr. Root, fearing that the reputation which Mr. Root had gained of being rather conservative, if not reactionary, would work a prejudice toward the Peace Commission at the outset.

Mr. Taft's name was considered, but it was finally decided not to include him among the commissions to accompany the President.

The personnel of the Commission, as finally const.i.tuted, has been much criticized, but the President had what were for him convincing reasons for each selection: he had formed a high opinion of Col. E. M. House's ability to judge clearly and dispa.s.sionately men and events; Mr. Robert Lansing as Secretary of State was a natural choice; Mr. Henry White, a Republican unembittered by partisanship, had had a life-long and honourable experience in diplomacy; General Tasker Bliss was eminently qualified to advise in military matters, and was quite divorced from the politics of either party. The President believed that these gentlemen would cooperate with him loyally in a difficult task.

I quote from Mr. Creel:

The truly important body--and this the President realized from the first--was the group of experts that went along with the Commission, the pick of the country's most famous specialists in finance, history, economics, international law, colonial questions, map-making, ethnic distinctions, and all those other matters that were to come up at the Peace Conference. They const.i.tuted the President's a.r.s.enal of facts, and even on board the _George Washington_, in the very first conference, he made clear his dependence upon them. "You are in truth, my advisers," he said, "for when I ask you for information I will have no way of checking it up, and must act upon it unquestioningly. We will be deluged with claims plausibly and convincingly presented. It will be your task to establish the truth or falsity of these claims out of your specialized knowledges, so that my positions may be taken fairly and intelligently."

It was this expert advice that he depended upon and it was a well of information that never failed him. At the head of the financiers and economists were such men as Bernard Baruch, Herbert Hoover, Norman Davis, and Vance McCormick. As head of the War Industries Board, in many respects the most powerful of all the civil organizations called into being by the war, Mr. Baruch had won the respect and confidence of American business by his courage, honesty, and rare ability. At his side were such men as Frank W. Taussig, chairman of the Tariff Commission; Alex Legg, general manager of the International Harvester Company; and Charles McDowell, manager of the Fertilizer and Chemical departments of Armour & Co.--both men familiar with business conditions and customs in every country in the world; Leland Summers, an international mechanical engineer and an expert in manufacturing, chemicals, and steel; James C. Pennie, the international patent lawyer; Frederick Neilson and Chandler Anderson, authorities on international law; and various others of equal calibre.

Mr. Hoover was aided and advised by the men who were his representatives in Europe throughout the war, and Mr. McCormick, head of the War Trade Board, gathered about him in Paris all of the men who had handled trade matters for him in the various countries of the world.

Mr. Davis, representing the Treasury Department, had as his a.s.sociates Mr. Thomas W. Lament, Mr. Albert Strauss, and Jeremiah Smith of Boston.

Dr. Sidney E. Mezes, president of the College of the City of New York, went with the President at the head of a brilliant group of specialists, all of whom had been working for a year and more on the problems that would be presented at the Peace Conference. Among the more important may be mentioned: Prof. Charles H. Haskins, dean of the Graduate School of Harvard University, specialist on Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium; Dr. Isaiah Bowman, director of the American Geographical Society, general territorial specialist; Prof. Allyn A. Young, head of the Department of Economics at Cornell; George Louis Beer, formerly of Columbia, and an authority on colonial possessions; Prof. W. L.

Westermann, head of the History Department of the University of Wisconsin and specialist on Turkey; R. H. Lord, professor of History at Harvard, specialist on Russia and Poland; Roland B. Dixon, professor of Ethnography at Harvard; Prof. Clive Day, head of the Department of Economics at Yale, specialist on the Balkans; W. E.

Lunt, professor of History at Haverford College, specialist on northern Italy; Charles Seymour, professor of History at Yale, specialist on Austria-Hungary; Mark Jefferson, professor of Geography at Michigan State Normal, and Prof. James T. Shotwell, professor of History at Columbia. These groups were the President's real counsellors and advisers and there was not a day throughout the Peace Conference that he did not call upon them and depend upon them.

No man ever faced a more difficult or trying job than the President, when he embarked upon the _George Washington_ on his voyage to the other side.

The adverse verdict rendered against the President in the Congressional elections was mighty dispiriting. The growing bitterness and hostility of the Republican leaders, and the hatred of the Germans throughout the country, added more difficulties to an already trying situation. America had seemed to do everything to weaken him at a time when united strength should have been behind him. Again I quote from Mr. Creel:

On November 27th, five days before the President's departure, Mr.

Roosevelt had cried this message to Europe, plain intimation that the Republican majority in the Senate would support the Allies in any repudiation of the League of Nations and the Fourteen Points:

"Our allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people at this time. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated by them. The newly elected Congress comes far nearer than Mr. Wilson to having a right to speak the purposes of the American people at this moment. Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.

"He is President of the United States. He is a part of the treaty- making power; but he is only a part. If he acts in good faith to the American people, he will not claim on the other side of the water any representative capacity in himself to speak for the American people.

He will say frankly that his personal leadership has been repudiated and that he now has merely the divided official leadership which he shares with the Senate."

What Mr. Roosevelt did, in words as plain as his pen could marshal, was to inform the Allies that they were at liberty to disregard the President, the League of Nations, and the Fourteen Points, and that the Republican party would stand as a unit for as hard a peace as Foch chose to dictate.

As the President left his office on the night of his departure for New York, preparatory to sailing for the other side, he turned to me and said: "Well, Tumulty, have you any suggestions before I leave?" "None, my dear Governor," I replied, "except to bid you G.o.dspeed on the great journey."

Then, coming closer to me, he said: "I shall rely upon you to keep me in touch with the situation on this side of the water. I know I can trust you to give me an exact size-up of the situation here. Remember, I shall be far away and what I will want is a frank estimate from you of the state of public opinion on this side of the water. That is what I will find myself most in need of. When you think I am putting my foot in it, please say so frankly. I am afraid I shall not be able to rely upon much of the advice and suggestions I will get from the other end."

Before the President left he had discussed with me the character of the Peace Conference, and after his departure I kept him apprised by cable of opinion in this country. Appendix "A", which contains this cabled correspondence shows how he welcomed information and suggestion.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

The Secretary thinks the President would like to read this letter.

(Ma.n.u.script: Thank you, what's his game?

W. W.

Dear Tumulty

I have not sufficient confidence in the man.

W. W.)

Dear Tumulty,

There is absolutely nothing new in Root's speech and I do not see any necessity to answer it. Certainly I would not be willing to have so conspicuous a representative of the Administration as Mr. Colby take any notice of it. Let me say again that I am not willing that answers to Republican speakers or writers should emanate from the White House or the Administration.

The President.

C.L.S.

Some characteristic White House memoranda]

As my duty held me in Washington, I am dependent upon others, especially Mr. Creel and Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, a member of the President's official family, for a connected narrative of events in Europe.

Speaking of his att.i.tude in the trials that confronted the President on the other side, Mr. Baker said:

No one who really saw the President in action in Paris, saw what he did in those grilling months of struggle, fired at in front, sniped at from behind--and no one who saw what he had to do after he came home from Europe in meeting the great new problems which grew out of the war--will for a moment belittle the immensity of his task, or underrate his extraordinary endurance, energy, and courage.

More than once, there in Paris, going up in the evening to see the President, I found him utterly worn out, exhausted, often one side of his face twitching with nervousness. No soldier ever went into battle with more enthusiasm, more aspiration, more devotion to a sacred cause than the President had when he came to Paris; but day after day in those months we saw him growing grayer and grayer, grimmer and grimmer, with the fighting lines deepening in his face.

Here was a man 63 years old--a man always delicate in health. When he came to the White House in 1913, he was far from being well. His digestion was poor and he had a serious and painful case of neuritis in his shoulder. It was even the opinion of so great a physician as Dr. Weir Mitch.e.l.l, of Philadelphia, that he could probably not complete his term and retain his health. And yet such was the iron self-discipline of the man and such was the daily watchful care of Doctor Grayson, that instead of gradually going down under the tremendous tasks of the Presidency in the most crowded moments of our national history, he steadily gained strength and working capacity, until in those months in Paris he literally worked everybody at the Peace Conference to a stand-still.

It is so easy and cheap to judge people, even presidents, without knowing the problems they have to face. So much of the President's aloofness at Paris, so much of his unwillingness to expend energy upon unnecessary business, unnecessary conferences, unnecessary visiting-- especially the visitors--was due directly to the determination to husband and expend his too limited energies upon tasks that seemed to him essential.

As I say, he worked everybody at the Peace Conference to a standstill.

He worked not only the American delegates, but the way he drove the leisurely diplomats of Europe was often shameful to see. Sometimes he would actually have two meetings going on at the same time. Once I found a meeting of the Council of the Big Four going on in his study, and a meeting of the financial and economic experts--twenty or thirty of them--in full session upstairs in the drawing room--and the President oscillating between the two.

It was he who was always the driver, the initiator, at Paris: he worked longer hours, had more appointments, granted himself less recreation, than any other man, high or low, at the Peace Conference.

For he was the central figure there. Everything headed up in him.

Practically all of the meetings of the Council of Four were held in his study in the Place des etats-Unis. This was the true capitol of the Peace Conference; here all the important questions were decided.

Everyone who came to Paris upon any mission whatsoever aimed first of all at seeing the President. Representatives of the little, downtrodden nationalities of the earth--from eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa--thought that if they could get at the President, explain their pathetic ambitions, confess their troubles to him, all would be well.

While the President was struggling in Europe, his friends in America had cause for indignation against the course adopted by the Republican obstructionists in the Senate, which course, they saw, must have a serious if not fatal effect upon developments overseas. Occurrences on both sides of the Atlantic became so closely interwoven that it is better not to separate the two narratives, and as Mr. Creel, upon whose history I have already drawn, tells the story with vigour and a true perception of the significance of events, I quote at length from him:

The early days of February, 1919, were bright with promise. The European press, seeming to accept the President's leadership as unshakable, was more amiable in its tone, the bitterness bred by the decision as to the German colonies had abated. Fiume and the Saar Basin had taken discreet places in the background with other deferred questions, and the voice of French and English and Italian liberalism was heard again. On February 14th the President reported the first draft of the League const.i.tution--a draft that expressed his principles without change--and it was confirmed amid acclaim. It was at this moment, unfortunately, that the President was compelled to return to the United States to sign certain bills, and for the information of the Senate he carried with him the Covenant as agreed upon by the Allies.

We come now to a singularly shameful chapter in American history. At the time of the President's decision to go to Paris the chief point of attack by the Republican Senators was that such a "desertion of duty"

would delay the work of government and hold back the entire programme of reconstruction. Yet when the President returned for the business of consideration and signature, the same Republican Senators united in a filibuster that permitted Congress to expire without the pa.s.sage of a single appropriation bill. This exhibition of sheer malignance, entailing an ultimate of confusion and disaster, was not only approved by the Republican press, but actually applauded.